the crooked place

Here is a fine photo of me changing my clothes by the side of the road, on tour with Glass Eye. I always liked this picture because it is an accurate representation of my total lack of bodily modesty. What IS modesty anyway? Isn't it just Shame? Isn't it just Shame at being Female? What a Crock

I got a new comment today on this blog, which forced me to visit my own blog. Actually, I have THREE blogs, did you know that? OF COURSE NOT, because the reason I have three is to separate the different aspects of my life. I used to have just ONE blog, that integrated all the aspects of my life; but I had to split them up because SOME PEOPLE just don’t want to HEAR ABOUT my PINKO FEMINAZI political views (not you guys!)

My other blog is my “professional” blog that I maintain as a FOOD WRITER. In it I write about FOOD FOOD FOOD and about cadging as much FREE FOOD as possible, which, if you have a history of being a starving artist, as I have, does become second nature. HA HA I must say I think all the other FANCYPANTS, LADYLIKE food writers view me as a low-class beast because, you know, only POOR PEOPLE wax rhapsodic about FREE FOOD.

The name of that blog is Hungersauce, and you can go read it if you want, but it is not as G*R*E*A*T as this blog.

Which is what I was going to write about: HOW GREAT THIS BLOG IS!  I just re-read my two posts (U.T) and (Then What Happened) and even though I have not posted here regularly AT ALL, this is by far the BEST BLOG of MINE. I think I like me and the way I write about my real feelings or perhaps I should call them My Real Feelings™.

So now I will be handing out the prizes for thinking of songs that could be used to torture people with. I was also going to write some more about DEVELOPMENTS. But now all of a sudden I have to go VOTE and its not like I am going to miss out on that, because Pinko Feminazis have got to REPRESENT, amirite?

Brian Beattie

Then I got the Swine Flu. Okay, not IMMEDIATELY, but I felt like hurling having diarrhea volcanic heartburn crap for three whole weeks, just barely getting essential tasks done, and now I forget all the interesting things I was going to write about MY UNBEARABLE TRAUMA. Like for instance I went over to Brian’s house (Brian Beattie) and discussed my Unbearable Trauma with him, and he said something helpful. (DO I REMEMBER what he SAID????  NOOOOOOOOOOO.  (that is a John Belushi “No”.)  I mean, I did at first and dwelt on it for days, and I am sure it helped, I just can’t remember what he said NOW. I am hoping I jotted it DOWN somewhere.)

One thing though: there was this one day where I said to myself: “What? I don’t feel anything about this topic. I am SO OVER IT! GAH!”

But you see, that is how I felt BEFORE I had my cake-delivery meltdown. I am pretty sure that when I DON’T feel ANYTHING about this topic, the UNBEARABLE TRAUMA topic, well I am pretty sure that that is called A STATE OF DENIAL.

DENIAL is a funny thing: I seem to be unusually good at it. It is the first stage of grief, I have read; my Mother died 5 1/2 years ago, and I am pretty sure I am still in DENIAL about it, as I have NOT yet experienced any of the other stages. I was talking to a friend about it, and I said, “Either I am still in DENIAL, or I am a really advanced spiritual genius, because, you know, she just doesn’t SEEM dead.”

Heh.

(I am, at this point, hoping for the Really Advanced Spiritual Genius Option, because I do NOT relish the idea of HAVING to go through all the other stages of Grief. I mean REALLY! Sounds like a total nightmare, especially after all this TIME!)

As you can see, once upon a time I was TOTALLY YOUNG! I think I am 22 in this picture.

But ANYWAY: I know I have not yet worked through my U.T., but I have been slowly progressing. I decided that I should measure my wound cleaning by this metric: AM I WRITING SONGS? That is how I will know that I am recovering. Have I written any?

NO!

BUT…..I have had ideas. Ideas for songs, that I have not yet written. Believe me, that is a Big Improvement!

Here is my first idea: I was thinking about HOW MAD I AM!!!  HOW ANGRY I AM!!  And I was having an Imaginary Conversation in my Head (I always do that. Do You?) SPLAINING just how EPIC my ANGER is, and I said (in my head) “My anger is Not As the Anger of the Others!! My Anger, it never sees the light of day, but it BURNS!!  It Rages like an INFERNO inside me, patiently and slowly (BUT EPIC!)  My ANGER is like the COAL MINE THAT BURNS UNDERGROUND….. THAT ONE IN Pennsylvania…You know….THE one that they expect to keep burning for Hundreds and Hundreds of Years and they keep having to MOVE THE TOWN!!!!”  Eleventy One!!!”

Then I thought, Hey, that is a GOOD IDEA for a SONG!  So I am going to write a song about that burning underground coal mine, and no one will know what I am talking about, except YOU, my 7 FOR REAL Kathy McCarty Fans who read this Blog!  And when you hear the record you will be all like, “Wow it is so obvious that this song is about Kathy’s EPIC RAGE!! And nobody Gets it BUT ME!

But of course first I have to WRITE it.

(A Note: One day long ago on tour somewhere, I think it was on the HUGE tour, A fan came over to me and engaged me in Conversation, and he wanted to talk to me about my lyrics, and he said he really understood them, and I was thinking, “yeah I’m SO SURE,” and then he started talking to me about how “Invention” in about Oppenheimer inventing the Bomb, and like I WAS STUNNED, because HEY he really DID get my lyrics!!  I mean, it isn’t THAT obscure in the lyric of “Invention”, but it was too obscure for, I don’t know, the Other Members of Glass Eye, or any Rock Critic in America, and that one fan was the only person to ever come up to me and start talking about it. Hey, Dude, if you are reading this blog, I Do REMEMBER YOU!)

This is my Cocker Spaniel Skip-Bo when he was, I dunno, A MONTH OLD.

(I actually DID write an annoying song called “Where’s My Pup?” about my dog Skip-Bo, that had a REALLY ANNOYING SQUEEZE-LIKE melody. I couldn’t decide if I liked the melody or not, because it was SOMEWHAT interesting, and then I decided it was just an exercise. I could probably make a whole record of short, annoying songs mostly about my dogs and daily activities. It could be used by the US government to Torture prisoners! Except, No, I wouldn’t let them use my annoying songs to TORTURE people with!! I think TORTURE is so wrong that I wouldn’t even torture DICK CHENEY, and you KNOW I really really WANT TO. Just to teach him a lesson. You know. About how torturing people is WRONG.

Speaking of, you know they DO use certain songs to torture prisoners. How would you like to be a recording artist whose song had earned THAT distinction? I think I would just DIE!!! Can you Imagine? I wonder if they use “Copacabana“. I bet they use “Don’t Worry Be Happy“. Maybe “Music Box Dancer”. Oh oh oh Maybe “The Pina Colada Song!” Or “Margaritaville“? “Popsicle Toes?”)

In comments, if you tell me a song you THINK they should use to Torture Prisoners, and I AGREE with you, I will send you a PRESENT!

Behold the G*R*E*A*T*N*E*S*S

Back when I was In Elementary School I went through this little phase where I signed my name KATHY MCCARTY THE GREAT (inspired, I am sure, by the Russian Royalty figures Catherine the Great and Peter the Great….why didn’t the others call themselves The Great? I guess ALEXANDER THE GREAT did.) It is always fun when I pick up one of my ten billion books, such as HARRIET THE SPY, and I find on the flyleaf “This Book Belongs To KATHY MCCARTY THE G*R*E*A*T!”

It was probably around this time that I began putting stars between letters to signify  I really mean it. (Of course this could just mean I haven’t matured very much since then.)

My Fourth Grade Diary

I figured is I was going to title a post “My Unbearable Trauma” I should at the very least sign it “Kathy McCarty The G*R*E*A*T” to, you know, to keep the theme of GRANDIOSITY going.

ANYWAY: So what happened to me the other day was, I helped a friend bake a cake to donate to some worthy cause. I did it to help my friend, I wasn’t really clear on the cause, except I knew it was some Good Cause that deserved a cake. I ended up delivering the cake, because it was on my way home. So there I was, bopping along, feeling really fine, delivering the cake. A Very Fancy Chocolate Cake. The lady that I delivered it to was REALLY NICE, and she kept lookin’ at me….and then she said: “Are you Kathy McCarty?”

Wailing on my AX

I don’t get recognized very often, but it does happen, and I said, “Yes. Anyway here’s the cake…” but instead of escaping, we continued to converse for a while, and it turned out the cake was for the Ann Richard’s School for Girls Leadership (not the right name, but it’s close). And this nice lady said, “You know, we have women come and speak to the girls sometimes, do you think you might like to?”

And I don’t know what happened to me at this point. It was like my entire world, my psyche, underwent a horrifying contraction, a spasm,  A VERY PAINFUL SPASM! I almost couldn’t keep my EYEBALLS FOCUSED, seriously, my brain couldn’t even comprehend what she was asking, it was so horribly discordant with my world-view, It HONESTLY was like she was TALKING GIBBERISH.

LIKE SHE WAS TALKING GIBBERISH.

SERIOUSLY. I don’t know how to emphasize this enough, the extent to which this question BROKE MY MIND.

I managed to stammer out, “UHHHHHHHHHH……….Wouldn’t you rather have someone……SUCCESSFUL?”

And I started fighting back my tears. Literally, choking back SOBS that were aching to break forth. I made my face into a mask (I am good in emergencies) and I am afraid to say, sort of argued with her about how incredibly Inappropriate it was to ask Me.

The Lady was rather taken aback (Of course she was!) as I explained to her that, essentially, can’t you see that I, uh, didn’t make it? She said, “Oh but Dead Dog’s Eyeball is a great record, and you won awards for it, and sure, a musician’s life has it’s ups and downs….” and I broke in (and I am NOT proud of this)  ”I HAVE NEVER MADE ONE THIN DIME IN MY ENTIRE CAREER DEAD DOG’S EYEBALL BANKRUPTED ME I HAVE ALWAYS WORKED HORRIBLE HORRIBLE JOBS TO PAY TO PLAY ARG ARG ARG EMOTIONAL VOMIT SPEWING FORTH LIKE A GEYSER.” (But calmly and with a frozen face.) And in my mind I was thinking something along the lines of, “What would I have to TELL these little girls? I mean, SURELY you don’t want someone like ME to talk to them, because, you see, I failed, and the only sorts of things I could say are things like, “Follow your dreams and work really hard, and YOU TOO can end up a 50 year old WAITRESS. You know how they tell you you can be anything you want to be if you work really hard at it? Well…that is not always true.”

Even I wouldn’t want to tell little girls depressing shit like that, it just happens, sadly, to be my experience. Which sort of disqualifies me from being any sort in Inspirational Speaker. You know?

I MEAN WOULDN’T YOU RATHER ASK SOMEONE ELSE?

So I beat it out of there, pausing to sob uncontrollably in my car. And while I was driving. And I thought:

“WHERE IN THE FUCK IS THIS COMING FROM?!?!?!?!?” Because I had just been, as I said earlier, bopping along and feeling happy in my life, being positive and accomplishing things and undergoing spiritual growth et cetera. And I really was blissfully aware that I had a HUGE MOTHERFUCKING VOLCANO OF AGONIZING TRAUMA within me. APPARENTLY, right below the surface, if you just happen to have the Magic Key to unlock it from it’s VAULT! That it had been in for like OVER A DECADE or something. Wow!

So I went home and continued to have a massive FREAK-OUT for the rest of the day, talking it through with Dave, by which I mean choking out broken syllables with my sob-wracked vocal cords between my quivering lips in my continually streaming face, with occasional angry yelling and fist pounding for EMPHASIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So.

So I have come to the Conclusion that I need to get a Better Perspective on all this. For starters, even if only to make myself FEEL BETTER, I need to re-evaluate my idea of “Success”. Because according to the definition I currently have, I am not one. Because I never achieved even my most modest dream of eking out a working-class living via my ARTFORM. I think I would have felt pretty successful if you know, I had been able to quit waiting tables; if I could ever have called my time my own, even for a few years. That would have felt good, I would have felt successful. As reasonable as that is, I think I have to lower my standards of success even further, or just change them radically, so that it stops hurting me. A good starting point might be: Did my work ever make anyone ELSE feel better? Because I KNOW it did.

Glass Eye

Just writing that is making me cry again, so I had better end TODAY’S INSTALLMENT of the ONGOING….for lack of a better word……WOUND CLEANING! There, that made me laugh. But the Idea I had is,  I should write about this on my website, this process of fixing my insides so that I am not carrying this around anymore. Who knows, if I can manage to work through it and change myself, maybe I will be able to write songs again.I mean, it has only been A DECADE…that is probably long enough to register it with the Universe that I AM ANGRY about BEING INSUFFICIENTLY APPRECIATED.

Ya Think?

(comments that are insufficiently appreciative of my Greatness will be spammed. Also you will not get a present.)

Okay, so I came back on my blog today because I have things to WRITE on it. And in looking over my last post, I realize that I never did send anyone a present.

This painting by ME would be a nice present!

The present I had in mind was to send a a music file (is that called an MP3 still?) of a rare recording that folks don’t have (or at least that MOST folks don’t have.) I thought I would BE ABLE TO just send it to the email addresses of my 7 commenters. But but but It doesn’t seem to work like that! When I click on people’s names, it doesn’t send me to their website or pull up their email address or anything.

What the Hey?

Why can’t I find this information? Maybe I should try again. ANYWAY: If you are one of my commenters, send me your email address, except for Gregg Osborn, because I have his. And THEN I will send you a present.

PS: Heh heh I figured it out. Hope you liked your Presents!!!

Hey No really 

I am playing THIS SUNDAY at the Continental Club at 8:30 June 14th !!!!  The  Theme of the show is MORTALITY!!!  I never play anymore, so anytime I DO play I think it is fair to state that: This may be your only chance to ever hear me play music for the rest of your life!!  Because it is true.

I still look JUST LIKE THIS!! Except of course fatter and older

Note the DORK posture. I think DORK posture must be INBORN or something, because it is clear that I am a total geek. Nice legs though!

PS If you red this leave a comment and I will send you a present/

It Will Be Just Like This!!!! Eleventy-one1111!!!

I have been invited to play at the Jon Dee and Friend Show, upstairs at the Continental Club, this Sunday Night !!!