2:42pm June 13, 2012

My second Lacy J. Dalton record came.

I’m on the bipap and suddenly I can write slightly better. Oxygen level is better too.

And wow this record is amazing. I’m stunned it never made it to MP3.

There’s something I really love about records. When my vision finally kicked in, one of the first things I remember is staring at records spinning. Also, before that, staring at the rainbow patterns my hair made in the sun. And other things that were more like what most people would call “background”. But the records were some of the first “foreground” things. There was a 45 with a purple label, and a 45 with an apple on it green on one side, cut open on the other.

Anyway back to Lacy J. Dalton. This album is “Hard Times”. I like it much better than her “Lacy J. Dalton” album. Each record is near perfect but skips in one tiny spot on each. Anyway. I also like records because there’s something extremely down to earth and physical about them that seemed to dwindle as technology progressed.

Difficult to start the needle without depth perception though. I really need to consider that Botox thing.

This album must have been played a lot when I was little. Because it is pretty well etched into my brain. I only understood a few of the words as a kid too. I mean understood they had meaning and what that meaning was, not specifically sound processing issues. So they were just sounds with the occasional word interspersed. It’s interesting to know what they mean now. I think this one I listened to in the car (my parents taped it for long trips) until I was about eight. But still didn’t know most of it had any meaning. And somehow the stuff where I didn’t know there was meaning, that stuff seeps into my bones more so than the word stuff.

I’m really enjoying “Girls From Santa Cruz”. It’s hard to pick favorites but I really really liked that one. The only ones I knew were words was “that Texas ranger met his match with the girls from Santa Cruz” and even those made no sense to me. Which tells me how weird my language skills were how late. Like I understood a few of the individual words but together they made no sense.

The more of these old records I get, the more connected to things I feel. It feels like my whole life has reached some kind of critical mass where I feel more connected then I do things that make me even more connected and so forth.

Oddly enough some of it seems to do with this conversation I had with a friend. There’s these two elements of me that have always been forced apart by… something. I always associated one with the ground and one with the sky, and identified more with what was on the ground. She often uses the old four element thing as symbols to describe things, so she described the ground one as earth/water and the sky one as air/fire (although she described me as “extremely watery” in general, and after learning what she meant I had to agree). And she told me they wouldn’t always be disconnected like that. And I think just that knowledge was one thing that set all this off.

I got really upset for a long time because the air/fire piece is what people see of me in online and offline activism. So it felt like nobody knew who I really was, they thought I was just this intellect and intensity. While I felt like the air/fire place was somewhere I visited, not where I lived. And I have been so happy to be able to paint because that’s the earth/water part of me, the part I always associate with the soil in redwood forests. And music has been the same way.

And I’m starting to see who I can be if all these things connect together. And it amazes me that I could be that person.

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