Concrete Blonde

But aren't they all?



I have, through the mastery that is iTunes, discovered yet again that the songs JOEY and TOMORROW, WENDY should be on everyone's top 10 list.

I've been playing them like I played them when I was a teenager, which is to say how I play everything that strikes one of my personal chords.

Overandoverandoverandoverandoverandover.

I sang these two songs my entire 25 minute drive into work this morning. By the time I got to my office I could barely speak. It felt great.

Yesterday when I got to my exit off the freeway, I looked up, because I saw hundreds of birds flying. There were HUNDREDS of black birds flying from a line of trees west towards the 5 freeway.

It reminded me of this one time in Ohio when I was so desperate, I was so lost, and I would drive home these lonely country roads, home to a house I wasn't comfortable in (my parents') driving home from a job I despised (entering medical claims for an insurance broker) and I saw these birds that would fly in circles and circles and circles over the cornfields. They were crows, so it was murderous.

And I wanted away so badly.
I wanted away so badly that I was crazy with it.

One time, after a particularly "not anything in particular" day, I saw the birds and had to pull over. I was about 5 minutes from my parents' house, but I couldn't go on.

I pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of a country road, next to a pig farm that stank, and I cried until my heart broke, put itself back together, broke again, and then healed.

About three months later, I packed up everything that I couldn't live without, it fit comfortably into a Ford Escort, and I drove West.

I have never lived there again.