Obama won. Yes he did. All my buddies over there on Daily Kos and HuffPo may rue the day they voted for a pragmatic Chicago pol for president and will keep drinking the Lieberman=The Anti-Christ kool-aid. (If they were so uneducated as to believe in Christ, let alone an anti-Christ. I’ll stop before the atheists among you–and trust me, you are in the majority here–get all hot and bothered by my latent fire and brimstone.)

By the way, I hear that kool aid is so refreshing. Like getting back on cigarettes after a relationship with a triathlete. (No, not talking from experience here, Tech Support Guy.)

So, Obama won and the world is safe for democracy again and I’m just a little bit BORED OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH MYSELF? THIS IS JUST LIKE QUITTING SMOKING, BTW. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH MY HANDS!

Obviously, hair cut time, right? New look, new color, new me.

Except there’s nothing new going on up there except the end of a really pathetic clumping of hair at the back of my neck.

NOTHING NEW IS GOING ON, PEOPLE.

I know what you’re expecting to read next. It goes something like, “Kill me now.”

But I’d like to try a little something new today. How about, “I like my nice middle aged lady hair?” Wow. You weren’t expecting that, were you? I really do. What’s more, I’m holding onto this Anne Bancroft fantasy. Yes, hot rollers will be involved. And perhaps even fake eye lashes. But so far, I’m resisting the charms of my neighbor named Benjamin. (He’s six, after all. But his hair is very Dustin Hoffman, 1967.)

It’s the end of the election that lasted two years. I hated all the time I didn’t love it. It was the worst boyfriend I ever had and the best. I’m completely destroyed without it and supremely free. This is the first day of the rest of my life.

So what to do now?

Well, at least I have a new radio guy on the side. I’m cheating on everyone. His name is Matt Riley and right now he’s sitting in for Jay Trachtenberg. (This may be meaningless to those of you beyond the airwaves of KUT, but with the internets, KUT reaches everyone, so tune in people. If we’re going to keep on having newspapers even though they won’t be printed, we’ll still have radio even though I’ll be the only person with one on top of her fridge once my mom and grandmother are gone.)

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the return of yet another familiar stranger, one who hasn’t been seen in these parts for months if not years. It’s time to go back to the days when Prematurely Grey was young. The salad days. Let’s welcome back our old friend, SOTD.

Ten Years Gone. Led Zepplin.

Get the fucking Led out, people. That’s what we have to do in the post-election universe. Screw Joementum and angry Kossacks. Screw the Washington Establishment and private schools and tickets to the inauguration. Fuck it all.

It’s time to get the Led out. Period. Paragraph.

I applied for a job last week and I immediately went dark here at PG. How can anyone possibly give me a job if they read the crap that goes through my brain 24 hours a day? The paranoia kicks in immediately. (I’m pretty sure I would have aided the Nazis, given this level of spinelessness over a blog read by eight Dear Readers.)

Well, Morning Fucking Joe has a job, even though he doesn’t know better than to not repeat Jay Carney’s Rahn Emmanuel story word for fucking word. Rahm Emmanuel has a fucking job, even though he repeatedly stabbed a table in front of everyone he worked with. Fuck, even Sarah Palin has a job. If she has a job, there’s got to be a job out there for me.

The laptop’s back on the dining room table. (Sorry, TSG!) The sun is shining. KUT is blasting. Prematurely Grey is in the motherfucking house.

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.

He said, “Just one second, ” and handed me the phone. He mouthed, “John Aielli.”

“Liz, this is John Aielli.”

There was the voice, my morning companion, coming out of Chris’ phone. It was ten at night. For me, John Aielli exists between 9:00 and 1:00. Sometimes he peeks out a little past one, when there’s a funddrive, to tell us how things went in the final push to meet the hour’s goal, after the cows. Apparently, John Aielli can speak at all hours of the day.

Perhaps you’re wondering, “Why was John Aielli calling Lize at ten o’clock last night?” Perhaps you sense a little lack of context, a gap in the story, perhaps related to the narrator’s recent reticence. You may have noticed a drop in activity, some sort of forty days in the wilderness.

Yes, I’ve been thinking of changing the name from Prematurely Grey to Permanently Quiet.

It’s not as though I’ve been sitting here in front of my computer, not having anything to say, over the time of quiet. I’ve been to volleyball tournaments and dance recitals, packed field trip lunches and purchased swim team swim suits. I’ve helped the hobbled dog get up and down, brought her bowl to her, kept her company, read her mind. I’ve become lize@bside.com and tried to help the person in charge of marketing, even though I feel like the middle-aged intern whose every word needs to be edited because she’s a PR novice.

At the same time, I bought some serious shoes (pictures soon, I promise) and realized that the greying of the hair and the booking of rock bands didn’t work together in my imagination. Yes, I am working on the booking of rock bands. I am planning kick-ass shows.

The big opening show for the Bside Roadshow is this Sunday night. I haven’t written my giant group email, telling everyone I know to come out and see “Before the Music Dies” and Guy Forsyth and his secret (even from us) guests. I’m trying to tell people about it when I see them, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about it. Not one word.

On Friday, I took screeners of Before the Music Dies over to KUT. It was around two. I’d written John email, telling him I was going to do it. I had four copies–John was top of the list, followed by Jeff McCord, Jay Trachtenburg, and Michael Brown.

Friday was the first day of summer vacation. The pool hadn’t opened. The girls and I had been to Hobby Lobby (Mazie’s reward for a year on Top Honor Roll). It was hot. At least there was a parking spot right outside the Communications building. Campus was deserted.

I walked into the KUT lobby. There was a woman sitting behind the desk with a Wendy’s bag. I asked about getting the DVDs to the dj’s. She was just sitting there. She didn’t know a thing. I poked my head into the big room where they set up the phone bank.

The room was completely full. Full of the entire KUT staff, listening to Stuart Vanderwilt, the manager, talk. I saw Jeff McCord across the room, near the front. I pulled a Bugs Bunny disappearance from the door as soon as I saw what was going on.

I sat in the dark lobby with the girls, scribbling handwritten notes and taping them (with new tape from Hobby Lobby, so there’s the silver lining to that task) to the DVDs. I wrote John’s first. I’d just finished it when he walked from the hall toward the door of the conference room.

“John, I’m Lize Burr. Here’s the DVD I emailed you about.”

I guess we both took the other one by surprise. John looked at me like a crazed fan (good call), took the DVD, and walked into the meeting. A couple minutes later, we heard Stuart announce John’s name and the room bursting into applause. I finished Jeff’s note. I was getting ready to head to the office, to find a mailbox or inbox to put it in when the meeting ended and Jeff walked to the elevator, right in front of us.

“Jeff, I’m Lize Burr. I’m here to give you this screener for a documentary we’re showing next Sunday at Republic Square Park.” He was wearing a purple t-shirt that had some sort of Native American something on it. He’s very tall and a little craggy.

It took a couple of minutes, but he remembered hearing about the movie at SXSW. He knew about the fake pop song section. I asked him to watch it over the three day weekend. He clued in on the date being a week from Sunday and Guy Forsyth playing. He asked me to email him this week. He got in the elevator. We left and went about our sweaty day.

But you want to know about the conversation, what it was John Aielli and I spoke about. What made him call Chris’ cell phone. (Chris’ card was already in the DVD jacket, so I didn’t put mine in. Which is good because I don’t look at or answer my cell phone at ten at night.)

He was watching the movie. He was watching the movie and something made him think. Something made him stop and think and pause the movie and call me to talk about what he was thinking about. Then he told me a couple of stories. And I answered back with related stories. And he said, “Well, we could talk all night. Here’s what you gotta do: you have to give me all the information abou the show.” I suggested emailing it to him at work. He said, “Exactly.”

Why am I not telling you the stories? Why am I holding out? The same reason I don’t write up certain conversations I’ve had with you, Dear Reader. I don’t want any of my friends to think that I’ll expose too much about them or our friendship in this blog. I’m the one with the mother who wrote about me in novels and stories and letters. I’m the person whose life is the basis of blurbs on the back of a book. I’m the person who can’t write fiction because she isn’t clever enough to completely make things up and knows that she can’t base anything on anyone she’s ever known for fear of hurting their feelings, even though the stories and situations are great and they’d be well worth retelling, strung along in some truly fictional way. So, this time, this is the story.

And if I go back to Questlove, forgive me. He’s helping me learn to become a music-promoting, blog-writing, superpower-using force for good.

You may have noticed that the previous entry was listed under “my god, what have i done?” If you read it, you might see how playing the song might have been a lot more effective. I’ll figure out how to link to songs later, so you can just listen. Maybe it’s time I turn into a DJ and let myself play God. But today my fate was in John A’s hands. And his plan was to get me both to pledge and to believe in the power of writing about listening again.
If anybody out there still doubts my faith in the radio, well, you’re simply not paying attention.

Leading up to SXSW Interactive, I had become more than a little agitated about the state of the blogosphere. It was starting to eat me alive and I knew that one of us was going to have to go. I’d outlined my plan to my friend Prentiss (pay attention here, reader; he’ll keep popping up over these next eight posts) at our daughters’ volleyball practice earlier that week. It went something along these lines: people have to shut up. Especially women who are angry at other women because they haven’t made identical decisions that might possibly bolster the toothpicks their self-worth is structured upon.

Prentiss asked me what I thought of BlogHer. And I said I didn’t know about BlogHer. And it was then I learned of BlogHer and the upcoming invasion of Austin by “The Queens of Cyber Space.”

Longtime readers will realize that this prelude to SXSW took place during my earlier consideration of jealousy, in particular, of how jealousy gets in the way of almost any discussion about opting out. Gets in the way yet manages to remain unseen. And how my jealousy of writers and bloggers who are already being read by people like me makes me think that my writing is completely pointless because these other people are already doing it. The way thinking about it makes me feel right now.

Once I checked out BlogHer and the Chronicle articles and other reasonably reasonable mother/women/feminist sites on the web, I started to feel that dreaded little warm spot inside that always leads down one of my spiritual alleys. This one was: You are not alone. You will find an audience. Other people will value your path of intelligence, moderation, and constant scrutiny of your hair for signs of the Second Coming. Maybe, if you go listen to them, SOMEDAY YOU WILL HAVE READERS TOO.

The BlogHer panel was Saturday morning. At the exact same time as my brother-in-law’s movie.

Point, BlogHer.

But maybe I could go to one of the other panels about blogging on Saturday afternoon. Maybe I could catch something that would rub off on me and I could become a famous enough blogger this year that people would ask me to sit on a panel next year and I wouldn’t have to feel so completely horrible about all the decisions I made.

That’s when Chris told me he had a migraine and had to get home.

I had parked the Saab pretty much across the street. The Saab had become my ride because the air conditioning was out. Chris got the Passat. But the Passat was full of stuff for the trade show and was parked someplace else. It was over 85 degrees, Chris felt like he was going to throw up, and we got in the Saab.

Well, the air conditioning was also out in the house, somebody had to pick up the computer Bside was renting for the trade show booth, the computer wasn’t ready when that somebody got the the computer store in a hot Saab, so she had to wait around for 35 minutes, the sitter took Mazie to her sleepover but forgot her bag (which was at the sitter’s house, where they’d walked on the first 90 degree day of 2006), the air conditioning repair guy, my friend Allen from the cold day the heat went out back in December (remember that one?), arrived just as I got back with the iMac (which would turn out not to have wireless–impossible, you say–but that’s really getting ahead to Sunday and why I didn’t get to the panel I wanted to go to because I was the person who could go buy a router and cables at Office Max), and Chris started rallying just as the wiring problem with the A/C had been identified, and he ate some of the ham and cheese brioche I’d managed to pick up en route to picking up Mazie from her morning’s sleepover.

While this was happening, I imagined the men and women in the convention center discussing how blogging is transforming social interaction on the net.

I was aware, in the moment, of the irony that my life, the thing that forces me to write as perhaps the only way to keep from losing my mind, my life of driving around Austin in a frenzy, praying that some song will come on the radio to keep me from going over the edge, the source of this blog that has started to take on some personal significance I wish that it did not have, my subject, was in fact keeping me from being in a room of people I thought of as my virtual tribe.

I imagined the BlogHer women, the mommy bloggers, the hip mamas, all talking and laughing and linking to each others blogs while I was trying to figure out how it was that the computer that was ready on Friday at 5 was not ready on Saturday at 3. Trying to figure out who could let in the A/C guy if I was stuck watching an operating system being installed. Trying to figure out what we would do if Chris didn’t get better. Trying to figure out where Mazie’s bag was. Trying to figure out what to wear to a party full of people who’d spent the day in the freezing convention center.

I was not going to make it to the ball. I was going to stay in my life even when the circus came to town and I’d been practicing my juggling all year long. I seem to be destined to keep practicing and never quite make it to the audition. And how would anything get done if I just ran away and joined the circus?

I had all sorts of plans, big plans, to write something meaningful. Not just meaningful, but funny too. However, I spent all my meaningful and funny time reading up on “The West Wing” on Television Without Pity. It’s a seriously leaky toilet.

I could blame the fact that I had to go to the grocery store, which always makes me feel depressed.  Instead of thinking, “Great, I’ve got some groceries, some peanut butter, to last a couple of days,” my brain wanders in this general direction: “If only I had been writing instead of buying this crap and trying to figure out what we’re going to eat for dinner three days from now, when who knows what I’ll really want, this might have been a good day.”

Basically, Eyeore buys all our food.

Which might explain the clover.