Time Flies...

It's the 31st of January already. I cannot believe it!

I am 15 weeks and 4 days pregnant. This is going sort of ridiculously fast. My belly is enormous. I'm having trouble breathing. My asthma is kicking my ass. I'm cranky today because it's overcast and kind of rainy. Now I love overcast/rainy days when I can watch movie after movie at home in my pajamas. But when I have to be at work, and I'm enormous, and we have artists coming up, I just want to crawl away and hide rather than be hugged and have my belly rubbed. :(
Boy does that sound bad. This should be my worst day, right? Having people be all loving and happy for me - how irritating! Heh heh. I hate it when I'm cranky and I start to really think about how good I have it. I just feel like a cranky ingrate!

Okay - Iggy is on, and that always makes me feel a little better. Any Iggy Pop fans out there? Don't you hate hearing "Lust For Life" on cruise commercials? Blech! I'm glad Mr Osterberg is making some money, but it saddens me to think about how much time has gone by since the first time I heard that song and just went "HOLY SHIT!" Yeah, I'm worth a million in prizes. I'm through sleeping on the sidewalk. No more beatin my brains with liquor and drugs. Man! I just wanted to stomp on somebody when I heard that! Heh heh. What a loving human being I am!

I remember one night I was watching Saturday Night Live. It was April of 1976. I was 10 years old and my dad had died just over a month before of a sudden illness. Patti Smith came on the tv, and she set me free. She said "Jesus Died For Somebody's Sins. But Not Mine" and then she sang Gloria. I kept waiting for a lightening bolt to come and strike her dead, but it didn't happen. She was this odd man/woman sweet/brave thing that I had never seen before. And I loved the music. I realized it was okay to be pissed off at god, because I was and I didn't know it. I realized that it might be okay to just say or write whatever came to mind, that it wouldn't automatically make you a bad person. It was unreal. I don't know that anything else could have hit me as hard as she did to get the reaction I had.

Years later (we're talking 20 years) I got my ex-husband a job working at a recording studio in the village. He calls me up one day, and tells me I have to come down there, that he has to see me and that it's very important. This had never happened, and I had no idea what he wanted. I was annoyed. But downtown I went. In the lobby was Lenny Kaye, Patti's guitarist. I began to shake. My ex was no where to be found and I sat alone pretending that Lenny wasn't sitting across the room from me. About 10 minutes later, the door opens and in walks Patti Smith. Oh My God. Idol Worship. This was seriously bad. I couldn't look at her, couldn't look up. She parks herself directly in front of me, and in this really high pitched, chipper voice, she says "hi!"

So I can't be rude, I mean, this is someone whose poetry I've loved for years, whose music has helped me grow up. I had met her husband about a year before, and was so clueless I didn't realize he was Fred SONIC Smith.

I stood up. I said "I'm sorry. What do I say to you?"

She says "Hey, whatever you want. Your man told me you have my records, my books."

I said "Patti, you are the reason I kept whatever I managed to keep together. That performance on SNL, it ripped me open, and it started a healing for me."

She smiled at me. She was the most beautiful, pure and angelic thing I'd ever met. I told her how sorry I was about her husband passing and then we held each other for about five minutes, crying. Then she gave me a kiss on the cheek, turned and walked away.

I sat stunned and silent, thinking, wow. What a beautiful experience.

But then she came back to me. She had gone into the studio to get something for me. She put it in my hand, and left.

It was a tiny book of poems called "Clouds". I had it already of course, but this was a somehow different version. And inside, she'd written my name and below it, "keep healing, love patti" and drew a heart with tears.

It's one of my treasures. It was the best thing my ex ever did for me, and it's one thing I'll always give him lots of credit for. What a beautiful experience!

That's my weird and melancholy story for today. If I didn't tell you that, I would have had to tell you I tried to watch "Sleuth" last night with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier. I didn't like it. I think I'm not smart enough!