♥ of Glass

I "finished" my last freelance story last night at 11:30 – or at least I hit Send and dumped it in the editor's lap. I suspect he'll be sending it right back in a few days, so I am not celebrating. It's Valentine's Day, one of those holidays that I really and truly don't care about but am willing to accept that other people do. This year I meant to do something for my parents and my grandmother, but I barely let myself out of freelance jail for the past week and therefore, as usual, I am full of good intentions and nothing else.

Well, I'm only slightly full of good intentions. The rest of me has been colonized by some sort of restless dissatisfaction and sadness. I always get like this around February and March – and I always forget that I do, so each year I panic and think, How can/should/must I change my life — right now!

I happened to go to iTunes and saw a link for a new EP from Michael Stipe, for which all proceeds go to help Gulf Coast victims. It's six versions of a song called "In the Sun" by Joseph Arthur, an Ohio artist who I'd never heard of. I bought it and was immediately blindsided by its haunting, melancholy sweetness, even though it has phrases like "God's love" in it, which usually turn me off. When I heard the lines "'cause if I find / If I find my own way / How much will I find," my eyes started leaking like mad, just as they did when I watched my cousin-law-Erika's slideshow tribute to her dead brother, who I never met. Clearly I'm one lightning strike away from a thunderstorm. (Or one metaphor away from being too embarrassed to continue this blog.)

Anyway, it's a beautiful song, and you can listen to a free sample of it here (I like #4 best). It reminded me so much of my good friend Al, who's struggling to put his mom's house back together in New Orleans. That city was his whole life: he was writing his dissertation about its music, he planned to get married and have kids there and never leave. He still does, but it won't be the same life. Selfishly, I think about how I will never be able to go back to the place where my first serious stretch of growing up happened. An entire city's population, displaced and forgotten.

What's shocking is that it isn't shocking — just one of the many vile things this administration has either directly caused or allowed to happen, confident that even if it can't lie its way out of it, people will forget by the next news cycle.

Happy Valentine's Day, Al. (Here's a picture of us from last October, when I was visiting my grandmother in Pensacola and he stopped by on his way back to school from New Orleans. Hard to believe such devastation could come from that beautiful Gulf of Mexico behind us.)