You probably haven’t heard Everbody Ona Move either. So, go to the iTunes Store and buy it. Go buy it now. It’ll cost 99 cents. Come on–I have NEVER told you to go buy something here on Prematurely Grey. If I’m telling you to buy it, you should buy it.

“This track is love 45/This track is love amplified/This track combats genocide.”

It’s by Michael Frant and Spearhead and is the first song that’s made me dance about the Middle East since Rock the Casbah. It has a little bit of a Double Dutch Bus/Tom Tom Club feeling, which is like saying a country song reminds me of Johnny Cash.

It’s funny: KUT has made some changes to their schedule. Eklektikos is shorter (ends at 11), Jay comes in at noon, and David Brown has a weekly show on Texas music on Fridays at lunch time. Of course, part of me is protesting, but only a very little part. John’s vacation this summer wasn’t nearly as painful for me as it was last year. Part of that has to do with how busy I’ve become and my need to stop making listening to the radio the primary achievement of the day. It’s part of the adjustment to working with other people again and having to accomodate their schedules. KUT became my companion when I stopped working in 2003. Or, more accurately, KUT kept me sane during a time of tremendous change and profound aloneness. I wasn’t lonely when I listened to the radio.

Now KUT’s made changes, not me. My changes seem to have happened without any serious forethought. Right now, I’m trying to decide how permanent I want these changes to be. Are there are other changes to make? What I know for sure is that my life barely resembles the one I started living when the girls went back to school in 2003 and I didn’t. The life where John Aielli’s musical choices, like playing Ravel’s Bolero everyday for a month, could be the primary thing I thought about. Now I’m lucky that I managed to get Thea in the car at just the right time, given the things I’m supposed to do on any give day between 7:45 and 2:45, let alone the ones that come post-pickup. Everybody Ona Move.

“Jesse James” came on early in the show. It’s on Bruce Springsteen’s new album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. His version is pretty fun, upbeat, a little bit raucous. Kind of the opposite of the previous version in my head: me and my classmates in second or third grade music class. A bunch of little, mostly super-privileged, girls in navy blue uniforms singing our hearts out about America’s outlaw hero. Except everything that we sang at that school sounded like a dirge. Basically, we were truly old school, as in borderline medieval in nearly all song cholce and arrangement. It was like we were being trained to become the reincarnations of Elizabeth I. We were in the bleak midwinter even when sumer was a’ cumin’ in.

“Jesse James” was on the agenda for our training in American folksongs. I guess this section was intended to put us in touch with the people we would someday rule. It also carried out the school’s initiation into True Liberalism . Hard as it may be to believe, this Upper East Side girls school was something of a bulwark for radicals, or radicals of a certain economic bracket. So, we learned all the lessons taught good radical schoolgirls of 1932. It was like we were in a time machine and we landed in a production of “The Cradle Will Rock.”

For me, the mixed message of “Jesse James” was always hard to handle. I knew he was a bandit and a hero. I knew he killed people and that we were supposed to be sad he’d been killed. I knew this song was confusing. It may have been fun to sing (relatively, compared to, “I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal/Sixteen miles on the Erie Canal”), but it didn’t make any sense. Plus, we did sing it in our tiny little voices at the school-approved oarsmen -stroking-along-the-Thames rhythm that we used for every song (except this crazy speeded up one about fireflies that drove us all moth-to-light crazy), so it never really seemed like fun. And, of course, it’s an American folk song, so it’s derived from some Scotch-Irish tune that we were all singing back in the day in Merrie Olde Englande.

Truth is, I didn’t know it was a fun song until I heard Bruce singing it this morning. His version makes you want to sing along, and not just because you don’t know if you’re headed for a month of Scottish naval songs. (I’m not kidding here, people–actually, we liked those because they were rousing–and we’d be better able to command the troops once we knew all the words.) “Jesse James” may be about the fun of making a hero out of an outlaw, a crazy Confederate Missourian, crime-spree loving, Pinkerton-foiling brother who even Teddy Roosevelt called “the American Robin Hood.” Hey, there’s another little lesson in how to handle the English monarchy. No wonder we sang that song.

I will tell you this: I’ve been inspired during the 40 days. Inspired to be a poet or a promoter or a producer or a prophet. Inspired to make up stories about people I knew and to make peace with people I don’t. I’ve watched singers, listened to experts, deferred to circumstances, knowing that something would come back, that I would find the time, that the underwater sensation of a life without writing might actually come close enough to drowning that I would speed to the top and break through, nearly painful breathes filling me up with ideas and words and Mr. Rogers things to talk about.

Well, being underwater can get murky. Plus, the people I’m trying to write for don’t really need a writer; they need a shaper, a handler, a strategist. They need someone who knows how to take language and make people want something. My interest in language is to make you see something or hear something or feel something, something other than want. The words are there to fulfill the want, not to fuel it.

So, in my hour of darkness, where do I turn? How do I return to writing? Well, you already know. I return with a song.

Then, KUT, 2:15, a guy sitting in for Jay Trachtenberg (whom I need to call) plays Seu Jorge’s version of “Changes” from the studio sessions Life Aquatic album that Chris is crazy for. Straight to the heart of the matter. I pretty much hated Bowie’s version by the time I was 16 because it was a song that people in my tiny little class sang in the classroom at the top of their lungs and I was ready to jump out the window onto the FDR every time they did it becauses I hated them. I hated them for lots of songs, apparently.

But when I’m feeling low, nothing hits me like music from high school. And when it comes in Portuguese via my favorite movie of the past couple of years, I can forgive its past association with stressed out teenage girls.

What was kind of funny and kind of great is that the substitute followed it up with the original version of “Suffragette City.” Another all-time favorite of the Bowie chanting crowd. The release of screaming “Wham bam thank you ma’m” in the middle of the most exclusive girls school in New York, the one that kind of acted like it truly was the best one because it really was (sorry Gwyneth), was pretty great. I can’t blame the chanters for choosing that one.

I was more of a B-52s girl at school. The three people I still have regular contact with from that Lost-like group of 45 were with me on this one. The four of us would find each other in our junior year homeroom and play “Planet Claire” and “Rock Lobster.” Somehow, I seem to remember that we were alone. I have no idea how that would have been possible, but that’s how I remember it.

Covers, Seu Jorge again, substitute DJs (always a problem), songs I thought I hated, they’re all mixed up in the drive from HEB home. My back still hurts and I can’t help but think that I should be writing about something more important than why I hated David Bowie. I’m still feeling uprooted and overwhelmed. I want to quit before I start and pretend that I never had all the ideas and inspiration and hope that I did. I was ready to quit and then this song came on and I felt that feeling, the one I write about over and over.

But over the past couple days, the dark side of Rocket Dogs has reappeared–their rapid and painful deterioration. This deterioration takes the form of a deep molding of the inner sole to my perhaps overly developed big toe ball (that sounds completely lewd–hey baby, have you ever seen a big toe ball like THIS?). Yoga is great and all, but it has indeed fucked with my feet. The deep molding is followed by the unpredictable and complete collapse of support of this super-joint, most likely caused by the fact that there’s nothing but two inches of air between the inner sole and the bottom of the shoe. And right now, I’d be willing to bet about half an inch of air is missing.

The effect of the big toe collapse is the sensation of walking in a very bizarre orthotic combined with pain in the mid-foot ball (or should that be mid-ball of the foot) when the clogs have been removed, leading one to put the clogs back on until getting into bed. Suddenly, the logic of foot binding has become perfectly clear, doesn’t it?

Pair two was the red Danskos. Now, everyone loves their Dansko clogs. They’re the clogs to have. They come in cute colors, have that full back option, some have the strap (which is what I really want). But, truth be told, I hate Danskos. They are so fucking low to the ground. I feel like I’m walking around in a hole when I wear them. Maybe not the same hole I’m walking around in my Rocket Dogs, but a hole nonetheless. The hole that keeps me from being taller.

I wear the Danskos kind of like slippers, but only when I can’t handle my high heel clogs. Such as moments when my foot is in total pain from wearing them or the rocks trapped inside the heel are making so much noise that I can no longer handle wearing them (see Old Navy black corduroy clogs, slightly squared toe, worn continuously from 2003 through 2004 when High Heel Rocket Dogs were not in production–where are they–did I actually GET RID OF THEM–SHIT?). I brought the Danskos to Montana last March and wore them in the house after skiing.

Bottom line: You can put the New Yorker in clogs, but you can’t take the New Yorker out of the clogs while she’s wearing them. In some twisted way, I have turned my completely un-New York number one choice in shoe into a New Yorker thing–it’s high heel clogs for me. Oh yeah, those high heel clogs are so sexy, the way I wear them, looking just like one of those ho’ Bratz whose feet come off. No sexy little tottering wood Nordstrom clogs here. I go for the Japanese school girl style. If Gene Simmons wore clogs, I bet he’d like mine.

It’s on again. Sweet Virginia. Exile on Main Street. My favorite Stones album. Period. Paragraph.

I’ve been have a shitty time of the creative life, lately, as the complete absence of any writing might suggest. But maybe, just maybe, the two clog day was a blessing in disguise. The blessing of dog shit reducing me to thinking about my clog obsession and shit scraping. I’ve been scraping all sorts of shit since mid-December. I’ve let life (or the life I want to live) pass me by.

Yesterday, I ended up in the crazy clogs–brand spanking new pink Marimekkos, wood bottoms, purchased instead of sexy shoes in San Francisco the day of the bridal shower before the television show. Yesterday, the people in the house seemed genuinely shocked by them. I felt like a nurse on acid. I put on the cool slouchy brown suede, crepe soled bots for pick up, because it’s hard enough to be a nurse on acid when you’re alone in your house, so forget about not being the center of weirdness attention at pick up time if you’re wearing pink Finnish clogs. BUT I did put them back on to make dinner. They’re a little tight and a little insane, but my feet didn’t hurt. Now I’m wearing the red fake-clogs-for-active-types, to try to be cool again. They’re the worst when I step in shit–stars all over the bottom and a girl doing a karate kick. But at least they don’t rattle when I walk around and so far I haven’t noticed any shooting pain.

BTW, John is lost in South Pole songs right now, so there’s really little fear that what I hear right now will influence what I write about 11 days ago. So there’s that.

Here are the issues (oh wait, I have to set the timer. First I have to decide on a reasonable amount of time–I feel like I only have 5 minutes, that 10 would cut things short, that 15 is more than I can spare–how about 12 minutes? 12 minutes it is–be right back.) (Amazingly enough, it is 12 minutes of 10, so twelve is a magic number here.)

Issue #1: The idea of the subconscious song. OK, this is another one of those mother issues. You’re rolling your eyes, I know. Maybe I should change the name of the blog to Lize’s Mother Issues. Yuck. Well, my mother is a great believer that the song that’s in your head is a message from your subconscious. I have tended to dismiss this theory based on the fact that my mother believes that everything in the universe is pretty much a message from your subconscious. I guess I’ve just substituted God for the subconscious, or made my subconscious into my God. Either way, I’ve shied away from this theory because it treads too closely to my mother’s vision of the universe. However, she does seem to be pretty much on the mark with most of her cosmology, so I’ve got to give it a chance.

Bottom line: after the Road to Nowhere episode, I came to some sort of epiphany about SOTD. Took a little time to get the whole picture (or make up the whole picture–take your pick–I’m trying to leave more room for you agnostics and beloved atheists out there), but “You can’t resist it, when it happens to you” going through your head over and over couldn’t be more clear.

Issue #2: The iTunes issue. I have a real problem with thinking that God operates through iTunes. In fact, I cannot believe that God would ever consider acting through iTunes. So, SOTDs that come through iTunes are the ones that I choose. Ruth wrote an incredible comment on this problem of who makes SOTD, me or God, that has been both comforting and revelatory. She brings up the possibility of co-creating with God. More later–I’m on a timer here.

Issue #3: The live performance. I tend to prefer original studio recordings. Recorded live performances are not my thing. I cast them into the Chris pile–B-sides, alternative versions, live performances–they’re all kind of anti-radio, hence anti-God in my mind. OK, Chris is not anti-God. Let me say this again. Chris is not anti-God. Chris does not find God/experience God the way I do. That is true. But just because he likes live recordings doesn’t mean he hates God.

The irony here, which I will claim over the next several posts is in fact not ironic but evidence of the complexity of divinity, is that there are already live performances on the SOTD list. (Time’s up–fuck the timer, I’m not stopping–this is my world and the timer just lives here.) Clearly, I am not so biased against recorded performances that I exclude them categorically. The obvious entree into my listening pleasure is if I’ve heard it on the radio. “You Can’t Resist It” is the most extreme example of this tendency. I hate the studio version. I can say this with complete honesty. I’ve listened to it a few times since it came on that Saturday morning and I still can’t stand it. I just listened to it again. It sucks. Which brings me to the last issue I’ll address in this post.

Issue #4: All the music that we can’s listen to because it’s still on a CD that’s in one of the boxes of CDs that were supposed to be housed in our custom-designed, super-sweet, cherry red, no I can’t bring myself to call it a media cabinet, replacement for the twin towers of CD shelving that we lived with for four ugly years. This is clearly a sore spot. It’s a sore spot between Chris and me because I am unfair. I am an unfair woman who blames him for the cursed blessings of new technology. Every single one of them. Chris is to blame for every problem I have with Microsoft, our phones (don’t get me started), the wires, the boxes of cables that we have to store in our garage, Blogger, setting the clock in my car. You name it, it’s his fault.

Now this is a heavy load to bear, the decline of Western civilization due to the increased frequency of technological innovation and its subsequent requirements that all your best laid plans be scrapped and new equipment be purchased, wired/cabled/jimmied in, and your wife educated in the use of this new technology when she really should be making dinner, coming up with some sort of plan of attack for Christmas, or writing a treatise that will open the door to a new spiritual path for those who didn’t really give a shit about religion in the first place.

Let’s bring it back to the song. “Live in Texas,” with the good version of “You Can’t Resist It” is in one of the boxes full of CDs that are hidden somewhere in this house. I can’t even remember where I’ve squirreled them. their existence makes me so mad. If (and this is a rather large assumption) I could find the CD, which has crossed my mind more than once since that Saturday two Saturdays ago, I could listen to the song in the way God intended it to be heard. The great fiddle and cello solos, the a cappella ending, and all would be right with the world. However, if I were to find the CD, I would probably end up inserting into my CD drive in my computer rather than put it in the DVD/CD player in the stereo in the aforementioned sweet cabinet of power. I certainly would not burn it and then put it on the AudioTron. No, the AudioTron seems to have gone the way of the CR-1A 2 Head Cassette Deck–still in the tower, but never turned on. But I wonder if “Live in Texas” might be on that AudioTron already–there’s a chance it might be. I’ll be right back.

We’ll never know. I just went over there and tried to turn it on by pushing a button. Nothing. Then I picked upour insanely complicated remote. “Atron” is one of the selections off “Main.” Selected Atron and tried to power it up. Nothing. So even if “Live in Texas” is on the AudioTron, it doesn’t matter, It’s as if that sweet early period of digitized music has evaporated.

Now, if I were to find the CD and put in in my computer and not just play it over Living Room Airtunes, but import it and have it in my Library on iTunes, Chris would still not have it. As I don’t have the David Bowie and Seu Jorge that he played the other morning and which would be great at this very moment (Bush is giving a speech and I can’t handle listening to Big Brother just now). No, we don’t share music anymore. It’s his Library versus my Library. Generally, his Library wins. But I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any Van Halen on there anyway, so who gives a shit?

Amanda my step-sister wrote me that she’d read everything but thought I could cut the last sentence (which last sentence I haven’t had the heart to figure out). Now I’m all freaked out about what to write as a last sentence. Should I include one of my codas, or are they all lame? Now you readers have become not only part of the selection process, you seem to have entered the self-editing business as well. Oh, now I know what I should write.

Issue #5: see previous paragraph.

My heart sank. Had I missed him discussing the emails he’d received, perhaps mentioning me by name? I’d been upstairs reading. I didn’t realize the time, but I also didn’t want to listen. It had all been too much and I’d written the email and I needed a breather. I had been obsessively checking my email to see if he’d responded the way he did when I wrote him about Neil Young and “Hurricane” back when the second hurricane was coming. No news.

I turned on the radio.

I think I’ve explained before that I listen to KGSR on the kitchen radio in the early morning. I like Kevin Connor and listening to local people talk about Austin stuff. It keeps me current, especially since I can’t stand the Statesman. But at 9:00, I turn KUT on the stereo. It’s become something of a ritual over the past month. And as you can imagine, a bit of a burden over the past month, as I’ve allowed myself to get swallowed up in SOTD.

Whatever song was playing ended and here was John A., talking about, you guessed it, trees. Chris had told me that he’d been talking about the crazy split tree on Burnet and 42nd (been there, done that), not the Chinese pistache. So John A. had moved on, left the pistache for the tree closer to my house but miles from my mind. Oh well.

“I got a lot of email yesterday about the list of banned plants–the Chinese pistache and the other ones you shouldn’t plant. And I got one letter I’d like to read to you. It’s from Elizabeth Burr.”

And then he read my email on air. I stood outside the purple bathroom door (where Chris happened to be, unable to hear). He skipped the part about “Take a Chance on Me,” but that was just a sentence that seemed to suggest that I might be a wacko stalker who writes about what he plays.

The rest of the morning was, cliched as it sounds, foggy. I was bowled over. I wrote something. I sent it off. It was read on KUT. Just three sentences, but I’ve never heard anyone read something I wrote before. Let alone, like I have to explain it here, to have John Aielli read my thoughts on the tree and banned plants and a song (a SOTD, even though he didn’t know it) and Austin and the war.

So, he ended the show with REM “Everybody Hurts” and, yes, I cried, and, yes, I thought it was Song of the Day because I was so overwhelmed and moved and exposed, just like the song. “Hold on,” Michael Stipe was telling me. “Hold on,” John was telling me. Don’t let go, even though you feel like you’re floating off somewhere and that if you keep doing this, you might end up singing in the Friday afternoon traffic on the Bay Bridge.

Transcendence was right there.

And then I picked up the girls.

Actually, I picked up Emma and her friend Sophie, because Mazie had already headed to the park with her friend Lauren. We went to meet them there. Perfect afternoon. Finally, the perfect afternoon. Playdates at the park, staggered, so we could conduct the Friday Afternoon Piano Lesson Relay. Got snacks and piano books, took them back to the park. Got Mazie in the car for the first leg. Made it ON TIME!

But wait, we were early.

The lesson time had been switched. Fifteen minutes later, don’t you remember. I knew there was something going on, but I was too busy transcending and crying to take the time to call Carol and ask her when the lesson was.

You can stay or come back, or even come back a little later.

Emma and Sophie were with the neighborhood rough and tumble association, being watched by trustworthy mothers, but I couldn’t leave them there for half an hour.

Mazie and I drove back to the park–you know–back along 45th Street to the park.

We drove back to Carol’s at 4:15. Leg 2.

I got back to the park to find Emma and Sophie on top of a dumpster full of gravel, along with eight other kids, fully outfitted with sticks or rocks, in case the dumpster were to come under attack from the toddlers playing on the new playscape under the extraordinarily watchful eyes of the young parents who find the sudden appearance of elementary school kids at the park extremely distressing (I know–I used to be one of them). I’m pretty sure Sophie doesn’t spend a lot of time playing with ten year old boys wielding sticks without the responsible adult actually watching, so I stuck around. They were having such a great time that we stayed until we had to get Emma to Carol’s, so we couldn’t drop Sophie off first.

That was too bad, because Carol’s standard poodle “Jumpin’” Gypsy “greeted Sophie with a bonk in her allergic to (and perhaps a little bit phobic around) dogs left eye. I had attempted to give instructions to Emma to stay on the other side of the gate with Sophie, but I was in the middle of Leg 3, and as anyone who’s read SOTD #18 (”And the Cradle Will Rock’) knows, I’ve lost it by the middle of Leg 3. No longer verbal due to intense weaving in and out of seriously heavy machinery’s handiwork and proximity. I had not only allowed Sophie to play on a dirty dumpster with the risk taking prodigies of my neighborhood, I’d made her come into contact with a dog. We’d taken Sophie to the park because she can’t come over to our house just for the very reason that she has no business being around dogs. It was finally not the hottest day of the year, and volleyball was over, and the was equality between Emma and Mazie, so the revolution would be avoided for one more day. But Sophie took it in the eye from Gypsy.

We got Sophie away from Gypsy and Mazie away from Carol and returned Sophie home (where the Christmas decorations are up–Simon Legree, take note). And Mazie and I got home, right around 5:15. End of Leg 3.

But on this day, this day when people heard my name on KUT, heard John Aielli say, on my behalf, “I am a writer,” Leg 3 was not enough. This was the first four legged Friday. I stiil had to go back to Carol’s and get Emma. Chris was stuck in traffic downtown somewhere; he couldn’t save me from Leg 4. Mazie wanted to stay home, but she didn’t want to be alone. We’ve all been there, but I had to go get Emma. What’s it gonna be Mazie? Oh you have to go to the bathroom? Well, you can watch TV until I get home. I’ve gotta go, Mazie. No, I can’t wait, No, Daddy can’t pick up Emma. I’ll be back soon, Mazie.

So I walked out the door and left my eight year old child alone.

Leg 4. Uncharted territory. It was getting dark and the machinery was parked. From KISS FM (by Mazie’s demand on the way back from Sophie’s) to KGSR.

I wish I were better at describing sound. I wish I knew how to write about rhythms and instrumentation and repetition in a way that you could know what the song was before I told you the name of the song. Then you’d know how I felt when I heard the drums–dah da da/ dah da da–and the funny accordian triplets. But you know what the song was already, because it’s at the top of this post.

We’re on the road to nowhere.

I just googled the lyrics and read them. They’re profound. They’re perfect. They sum up last Friday:
well we know where we’re going, but we dont know where we’ve been
and we know what we’re knowing, but we can’t say what we’ve seen
and we’re not little children, and we know what we want
and the future is certain, give us time to work it out

But last Friday, driving Leg 4, I didn’t hear anything connected to my 24 hours of transcendence. All I could do was laugh. The SOTD had changed. My weepy REM moment was crushed by the peppy nihilism of David Byrne.

My life was saved by rock and roll.
I had no control over SOTD except to accept it.
Turns out, I was on the road to nowhere.
Thank god.

So, the answer to one of my questions has arrived: every day does not have to have a Song of the Day.

So, I was trying to catch up with all the posts that I’d missed during the wedding/traveling/LA/traveling week. It was going pretty well. I’d managed to get through the “Take a Chance on Me” post, which, it turns out, was something of a watershed in that I wrote it even though I was afraid to write it. That seems stupid and far from the point of writing about “Breathe Me,” but it’s not. Stay with me here.

Edie, of the perfectly phrased sentences, had sent me email early in the week asking if I’d stopped writing because John A. had stopped playing music in order to spend more time discussing a particularly beautiful tree. She put it far better. On Tuesday, I called her and suggested a walk over to the hallowed tree, a pilgrimage of sorts. But Emma stayed home on Wednesday (stomach ache–now I seem to have it), so the walk was a no-go. (By the way, I think that’s why there was no SOTD on Wednesday–not a day for self-absorbtion.) I worked on catching up and tried to give John and his Chinese pistache (what a crappy name for a tree) the benefit of the doubt.

Thursday morning came and I was writing about the song I couldn’t remember (#22–not much of an entry) when John read the list of banned plants from the native gardening expert. The space-time continuum was again breached (as it will be right now–he’s playing Judy Collins’s version of Cat’s in the Cradle–oh my God–I didn’t know how I could loathe Judy Collins and John’s affection for her any more than I already did, but here it is: proof that I am not about to turn my musical soul over to some Kult of Eklektikos. I still have free will and I will use it right now to TURN OFF THE FUCKING RADIO FOR A FEW MINUTES) when I wrote in the post that I was going to get in the car and go see the tree.

Here’s what you should know: I’ve been thinking about writing about this event since it started, since I wrote that I was going to get in the car. It turned into a story, perhaps a climax of the opening chapter in Song of the Day. But when I was imagining finally catching up enough to sit down and write it, JUDY COLLINS WAS NOT SINGING. I would not be forced to write about Judy Collins singing. It was going to be spiritual and personal and funny and unexpected and meaningful. It was not going to be full of my musical intolerance. OH NO–now he’s talking about Harry Chapin, whose birthday is apparently today (filling you in space-time wise–it’s Pearl Harbor Day–maybe this is my musical Pearl Harbor–please don’t play Harry Chapin.

OK, as always, the song, the song.

I got in the car and drove over to Camp Mabry. Somewhere on 35th Street, “Breathe Me” came on. If you don’t know it, it’s the song from the final scene/montage in “Six Feet Under.” Spoiler alert (I’ve always wanted to write that!): if you haven’t watched the final episode of “Six Feet Under” and want to reserve the possibility of seeing it without my poor description ruining it for you, skip the next paragraph.

As I was driving to the tree, to put my curiosity to rest, I was listening to the song that played while Claire drove off to New York to seek her future. As an artist. She flashes through a series of events–deaths, funerals, weddings, more deaths, until she finally sees her own death. The first death is her mother’s. John played this song over and over through the endlessly hot September.

I had just written this account/vision of my own mother’s funeral. I had just risked writing about something that someone might not like. That someone is the very same someone who has written plenty of things about and to me that I have not appreciated in the least. I think you can see where I’m going here.

Yes, I started to cry while driving around in the car listening to the radio.

But that is not why “Breathe Me” became SOTD. It was already SOTD–the crying was just a response to how intense all this writing and seeking and listening had suddenly become. SOTD is just what it is. That’s my answer. Why? Because it is.

I’ve been thinking that somehow I could bottle up my experiences of transcendence and share them with my friends who are not having transcendental moments at what seems like every stop light. I thought that if I could write them up in a funny enough way, they might not mind the little dose of spiritual seeking they were getting. The spoonful of sugar approach.

What happened is that I went on transcendence overload and short circuited.

However, what it forced me to do, what actually worked with SOTD, was write. I had started to write and to outline and to make a plan and to rewrite a little and to make time to write and to blow things off for writing and to hope that someone might want to read it. I was so freaked out, so aware that I was crossing the line that I’ve been observing for over a year, contemplating what it kept me safe from and what kept me from being able to go over it, so aware that I might just say anything–fuck, I was writing about running my mother’s funeral my way–DO I NEED ANY FURTHER EVIDENCE?–that I got home and wrote John A. an email about going to see the tree.

A long email.

And I sent it.

Why would a person spoil the perfectly good opportunity to write about music with talking about God? Why would she need to talk about God so much, or think about God so much, or always be on the lookout for some type of proof that there is some kind of God out there in the radio or God in there as the listener opens her ears or God in between as the process of sound takes place?

Why all this talk about violins on television?

I was really sad because I thought that the SOTD was fake. The thought that the device I had finally come up with to make me write was actually a complete figment of my imagination, no more worthwhile than Chicken Soup for the Woman Trapped in Her Car with Nothing But the Radio to Keep Her From Insanity. Maybe I was making up everything. Everything. Maybe there was no God but the one I make up.

So, as a life long seeker and lover of all things numinous, religious, ritualistic, spiritual, I was feeling a little down.

Plus, nothing on the radio could be trusted. The radio could not be trusted. It was just the instrument I was using to delude myself. There would be no Song of the Day, clearly.

I have a lot of friends who don’t believe in God at all. At all. They just don’t. And I don’t have a problem with it. The ones I have a problem with are the ones who aren’t really my friends who seem to believe, beyond a doubt, that Christianity is just plain right. I don’t have many friends who fall in this category. I have another bunch of friends who have said that Christianity is not for them and that they’ll follow alternative paths to learn about and become closer to God. I have a lot of these friends. And there are a few who are trying to hang with Christianity, to take the good and leave the rest. I’ve been trying to work that angle, or tell myself I’m working that angle, for a long time. But everybody knows that it’s pretty much a decoy.

I believe in the possiblity of everything. I am convinced that the experience of the numinous is real and true, not self delusion. I am pretty much at the point where I believe it’s all about experience rather than interpretation. I still go to church because I find the experience of being there with a bunch of other people moving. I am moved by their willingness to come together in the hope that being together is meaningful.

It was a beautiful sad day. Mazie and I went to pick up Emma at her friend Henri’s, up off 2222, on the way out of town to the lake, You can see downtown from the back of the house and Emma’s ready to move in. It takes 15 minutes to get there on the long and winding road.

It was a little past five and I didn’t know what to listen to. Listening seemed like a pathetic empty thing, like saying the Nicene Creed has become for me. I’d taken Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief to L.A. with me and had started to reread it after a year and a half of mulling it over. It was still as incredible. Everything I thought and felt about Christianity laid out in a short little book written by someone I’d known and trusted and pretty much revered since I was in high school.

Jodi Denberg was through the 501 Blues (maybe it was something I liked, so I stayed on the station) and doing his little patter. As we came down the hill from Henri’s, it was the beginning of “Give Me Love (Give Me Life).” We had to wait at the light to turn right onto 2222. I started to cry. I guess there’s been a lot of crying in the car these days, but that might be the price of looking for God on the car radio.

So here was the “spiritual” Beatle, the one I’d always loved because he gave me the sitar, who’d already been the SOTD, singing for me at sundown on my way through that day’s drive through motherhood. Who was I not to think it was a sign? How could I not hear George?

And then, instead of some commercial or promo, came “Here Comes the Sun.” A live version. The one from the concert for Bangladesh. The only recording that I remember us having on both LP and 8-track.

While it was playing, I wondered which one really was SOTD. Could “Here Comes the Sun” win over “Give Me Love?” Was there a way to know which one meant more that day?

Jodi came on and told us that George Harrison had passed away four years earlier, on November 29th, 2001. And one year later, on November 29, 2002, the Concert for George was held in his memory. And he played “Handle With Care,” the Traveling Wilburys song, performed by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison. We were going up the hill to Balcones and I was wondering if I could make a Traveling Wilburys song SOTD; would Chris’s hatred for Jeff Lynne mean that I couldn’t let it be SOTD? What was Chris’s role in all of this anyway? Was I writing SOTD for him, so he’d talk about music with me?

I thought of how it would feel to play a song you’d played with someone who had died, a song that felt like his return to light heartedness after a life of serious searching, the sound of five people having a great time together. I thought of how Tom Petty must have been feeling. I chose Tom because I love him. By focusing on Tom, I could ignore Jeff Lynne and Chris’s critical voice trying to make me stop feeling a feeling.

When I decided to write about music, I wanted to try to get over my self-doubt as a person with credible opinions about music. I was ready to put myself out on a limb and declare that my lack of cool or super aficianado status didn’t negate my thoughts. It was time to claim my seat. If I started not including songs because they might make me seem uncool, well, the entire idea of this thing was just to write about what I like, not what I think will make me seem cool.

The fact that this blog quickly devolved into another search for meaning exercise just frustrates me more. I wanted to write to entertain myself and my friends, to maybe come up with a clever way to work on my chops, maybe even an avenue to publishing some funny story about a middle aged woman who’s obsessed with the radio. The idea was that I’d get going with the blog post and then move into the other, serious writing where I could put all the theology and symbolism and mysticism I wanted. SOTD was to be quick and funny. And here it had turned into some sort of modern day Kierkegaard as far as I was concerned.

If I rejected “Handle With Care,” I should just close up shop. But I wanted to write about “Take a Chance on Me” and “Oh! You Pretty Things.” I wanted to write this stuff. I was looking forward to writing it. I kept thinking about it and trying to figure out when I’d find the time. I wasn’t finished with SOTD, even though it seemed like I was about to admit that there was no God and that I was just so fragile that I hang my life on a song.

By the time we were crossing over MoPac on the Hancock bridge, I knew that all three songs were SOTD. There was not only no way to pick between them, there was no need. According to Christianity, God is father, son and holy spirit. According to Hinduism, there’s Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Who am I to say that there can’t be three songs one day? Who am I to say there has to be a song every day? Who am I to say there is no such thing as SOTD?

Don’t shoot the messenger.

I had to go to the store to get some stuff to put in the sparkling fridge. “People Who Died” came on. I thought of Ruth immediately. She put this song on a CD she made for me last year. It’s the centerpiece of the mix. It’s a song that was popular when we were in high school, this sort of tough New York kids anthem.

At the moment I heard it, I thought “Song of the Day.” But then the immediate plague of doubts: can something be SOTD only because I want to write about it for Ruth? Who am I to do that? Obviously, the psycho-spiritual angle had gotten a little too psycho. But that’s what happened last week.

At that moment, doubt came rushing in. And we all know where doubt leads. Despair. I allowed myself to follow in the Fairie Queene’s footsteps. I allowed the theological struggles of Christianity to get inside my head and fuck around with SOTD. I was just a pawn.

I started to wonder very seriously about what kind of person confuses songs on the radio with messages from God.

And that was a good thing.