It's Going to be an Epic Year...

...in music.

With the onslaught of another decade, we are bombarded with new music...by new artists, and old artists. I love that I am seeing some bands from my younger years on the list of bands releasing albums this year.

Ke$ha - "Animal" - if you haven't heard her songs yet, you must be living under a rock. I have to say, this is another Lady Gaga episode for me, and I hate that I love her songs. I do. Tick Tock, of course.

Lady Antebellum - "Need You Now" - I adore this band. Crossing the waves from pop and country, like so many other artists are doing now, they linger mostly in the twang side of the spectrum, so the fact that they are being played on the pop stations says a lot for them. I love their songs. She is both beautiful and has a sultry voice and he is hot and has a sexy smooth voice. Yes. Definitely a band worth listening to.

Rob Zombie - "Hellbilly Deluxe II" - Rob Zombie makes me want to dance... I love his songs, and his lyrics, too. A throwback to my high school days, this album is going to be added to my collection very shortly.

Fear Factory - "Mechanize" - I had not heard that Fear Factory had come out with another album, so I think I am slacking in keeping up with the new music. I am looking forward to hearing their new stuff.

Massive Attack - "Heligoland" - From the first time I heard their song "Angel," there has always been a dark, loving spot in my heart for Massive Attack. Their album Mezzanine is a constant on my mp3 player, and I am glad to see them gaining popularity with their new album.

Daniel Merriweather - "Love & War" - This guy has soul. His voice drifts towards Jonny Lang-ish at times, but that is in no way a bad thing. His song, Red, has become a favorite of mine.

Ludacris - "Battle of the Sexes" - I ♥ Luda. What else can I say? It's Luda!

Alan Jackson - "Freight Train" - I have adored Alan Jackson's music since the first time I heard Midnight in Montgomery. That is one of the most haunting songs I have ever heard. The fact that it is in the country genre has nothing to do with how downright beautiful the song is. Like Red on A Rose, too, is...incredible. I am ecstatic that he is still making music. I hope to hear from him for years to come.

Jakob Dylan - "Women and Country" - Are you joking me? Bob Dylan's son, the singer of the Wallflowers, came out with a new album and it's not on my radar? Be afraid...be very afraid. I will update with how it sounds because I adore his voice and I must listen.

Insane Clown Posse - "Bang! Pow! Boom! Nuclear Version" - It's ICP. Need I say more?! ♥

Natalie Merchant - "Leave Your Sleep" - former 10,000 Maniacs member Natalie Merchant has always been on my list of faves. I am excited about this album. Once again, haven't heard anything from it yet, but stay tuned.

Cypress Hill - "Rise Up" - Cypress Hill...no joke. AND! Now with Tom Morello. A fanatical fan of RATM, and partial to Cypress Hill's previous work, I was anxious to hear it when their new song came out on Kiss. Excellent. I like.

Jonny Lang - "Live at the Ryman" - speaking of (see Daniel Merriweather, above). I adore Jonny Lang. Excited about anything he comes out with. Still trying to find his rendition of the Stones' "Paint it Black." ♥

Sevendust - "Cold Day Memory" - Excellent. ♥


To be released...

Drowning Pool - "Drowning Pool" - It's Drowning Pool. YAY!

Melissa Etheridge - "Fearless Love" - I don't care what you say, she has a beautiful voice. Her song "Angels Would Fall" is one of my all time favorites, and I always welcome new music from her.

Hole - "Nobody's Daughter" - Not a fan. If anyone has heard this, please let me know if there is ANYTHING good on it. If you're going to give a thumbs up on this, you better be damn sure of what you're talking about.

Deftones - "Diamond Eyes" - ... o__O DEFTONES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ♥♥♥♥

Tonic - "Tonic" - Still another that I should have heard about already. Another throwback, I can say I still love and listen to Tonic.

Meat Loaf - "Hang Cool Teddy Bear" - Didn't know it was out. Haven't heard anything about Meat Loaf in a hot minute. Trepidation. That's a good word for how I feel about this album, as I haven't heard anything off of it yet. But! It's Meat Loaf. I must give it a try.

Danzig - "Deth Red Sabaoth" - huh? Really?!

Smashing Pumpkins - "Teargarden by Kaleidyscope - Vol. 1: Songs For a Sailor" - I once loved Smashing Pumpkins. I heard one of their older songs the other day, and finally understood why many people didn't like them. However. It IS Smashing Pumpkins after all, and I must find out what this is all about.

Soulfly - "Omen" - Why do I always associate Soulfly with Deftones? I know I should associate with Sepultura, but... There's a memory lingering on the edge of consciousness on this one. Presque vu. Definitely looking forward to hearing this one.

Stone Temple Pilots - "Stone Temple Pilots" - Scott Weiland is at it again with STP people. My heart is exploding with anticipay........shun. ♥

Ozzy Osbourne - "Scream" - ♥ I just want to hug him. LOL

Sarah McLachlan - "The Laws of Illusion" - This is what I want. I must have this. Need this. It is Sarah McLachlan. ZOMG! Can't wait!!! ♥

Chamillionaire - "Venom" - Gotta love it. After hearing Rain, I was hooked. Hands down.

Trace Adkins - "Cowboy's Back in Town" - Don't think I've heard a song yet by this (very talllll) country singer I didn't like. Muddy Water and Hillbilly Bone (with Blake Shelton) are always on my player, and I can't wait to hear what he's got up his sleeve this time.

Bad Religion - [title tba] - Just wow.

Beastie Boys - "Hot Sauce Committee Part 1" - Seriously. Who is NOT looking forward to this release???

Cake - [title tba] - seriously? Break out the...uh...shot glasses. Yeah. YEAH!

Goo Goo Dolls - "Something for the Rest of Us" - With GGD, it was hit or miss. I either loved a song by them or I really didn't. I hope this is closer to their older days, and that the 2Ks haven't messed with their sound too much.

My Chemical Romance - [title tba] - because I actually like their songs, I am resisting the urge to scream "emos of America unite!" All joking aside, I am actually looking forward to this album.

No Doubt - [title tba] - No Doubt. No shit?! Thank God. I do NOT like Gwen Stefani out on her own. For those of you who know me and my musical preferences well, you know that there are few singers or bands that I will shun completely from my library, but Gwen on her own is one of them. I hopehopehope she doesn't screw up No Doubt for me.

The Offspring - [title tba] - honestly, I cannot say I'm digging the new tunes from one of my favorite bands from my high school days. I feel like if I looked up the phrase "sell-out" in the dictionary, I would see their pic. But...we can always hope for the best.

Panic! At the Disco - [title tba] - oh yeah.

Papa Roach - "...to be Loved" - This is a Best Of album, but seeing as I adore Papa Roach, you know it will be in my library.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - [title tba] - Let me say it again. Red Hot Chili Peppers. And again. Red. Hot. Chili. Peppers. ♥

Amy Winehouse - [title tba] - I love Amy Winehouse. I do. But...I am not holding my breath for another album from her.



Did I miss anyone? Actually, I missed a lot. Check out the full(?) list here at the AOL radio blog.

♥

Don't Stop Moving

The reasons I am writing this will vary drastically, dramatically from the reasons why you were get angry with, agree with, disagree with, dismiss, or scoff at what I have to say up here on my soapbox, but regardless of how you feel about this, it's the truth: my truth. I want you to read this. Don't disregard this, whatever you feel about it.

We always hear two things when we are down. "Don't worry, things can only get better from here," and "there is always someone else who has it worse than you." For the first one, I can tell you from personal, first-hand experience that that is a bold-faced, outright lie. For the second one, there are few things truer.

My childhood....was bi-polar. Every single day of it. Beauty and ugliness, sorrow and joy, anger and exhiliration. The details are not important, or rather, for the sake of those involved, I will not go into details. From my first (real) boyfriend, things were....bi-polar. So many good memories, so many painful memories. The first one left me because I said no to a threesome with him and his best friend. The next one "took his birthday present" when I was passed out drunk at his 21st birthday party, which I spent $800 on to throw him. One guy left me in the middle of the night, then told me months later in an e-mail that he loved me, but he had to leave, and if he had said goodbye, he would never have been able to leave. Another one was physically violent. Emotional abuse. Psychological abuse. Mental abuse. Seems like I'm trying a little bit of everything. Then the accident - broken foot, knee, leg, arm, punctured lung, burn marks, glass in my skin, fractured nose, chipped teeth. Then the miscarriage.

Nothing has ever come as close to completely breaking me as the miscarriage did. I laid there on my tan leather couch and cried for days, not eating, just crying, barely sleeping....just crying. Then I got sick and even though I hadn't eaten in days I was throwing up. I write. A lot. I couldn't write. I couldn't bring myself to do anything. For all my command of language and thesaurus mind, I can find no word to encompass what I felt. Empty. Desolate. Barren. Nothing adequately describes that.

Still, I must insert a story here that I can neither identify fully with nor honestly fathom the horror and desperation of.

Beth. She was a homeless woman I met when I was working for Valero. She was such a sweet, beautiful, kind-hearted person. The kind that remains alive in our memories for our whole lives. At the age of 8, she walked into her house after school to find her mother overdosed on heroine on the kitchen floor. A few minutes later, her sister walked in. She pushed her sister into the bathroom so she would not have to see what she had seen. Having not known their father too well, maladjustment to life with their father is an understatement. To be fair, she said her father was a good man, he just did not know how to deal with two daughters. He married them off as soon as was legally convenient, and Beth found herself married to a man three times her age when she was 13.

She eventually divorced him, though she had bore three children by the time she did. Two boys and the youngest a girl. Her oldest boy died at 17 in a car accident. Serendipity, too, is not always kind. One day, after school, her daughter, who had epilepsy, died of seizure in Beth's arms. She died....convulsing and drowning in air....in her mother's arms. At the age of 8.

Beth could not get up. She started drinking and hasn't stopped since. She is 50-ish, homeless, junkie, alcoholic, in and out of abusive relationships with various homeless men and vagrants. I couldn't save her. I tried. She couldn't get up, then she got to the point where she did not want to get up. To sober up after who knows how many years of drowning away the sorrow she had not the strength to handle at the time would be devastating to her.

I don't know too many people's true life stories. As a society, we don't tell the bad things too often, not in their entirety anyway. We talk about how we got laid last weekend or high last night or drunk at so-and-so's party and had such a wild time. We talk about the things we think will make other people think we are cool, things that will make people like us because we have been trained, educated, brainwashed, developed to fear loneliness. Even when we are single, we dread the silent nights. So we fill those spaces with friends and alcohol and internet and television. The ambient emptiness would be too much to handle.

But I know some people's stories. Some are like Beth. They just don't get up. Some are strange, like they were born without the ability to feel and therefore nothing fazes them, nothing stops them, nothing floors them. Me?

I've been told two things consistently through out my life. First is that I am strange. I don't care. I am endearing. I smile as I write that, but truth be told, I do care. I won't lie and tell you the silent emptiness doesn't terrify me. But I fill that with music, writing, photography.

Music is a huge part of my life. It can drag back memories I tried to forget, wished not to forget. Make me cry. Make me want to be a pyro. Make me want to scream and punch things and throw an all out tantrum. Make me smile. Make me horny. Make me peaceful. Make me want to dance. Make me want to run. Make me want to save someone, myself, even. Make me thankful, angry, sad, alive.

I try hard not to conform to a mold that would make who I really am disappear into the clutches of what the media says we should be. But sometimes I slip. Bad. Secondly, I am told that I am strong, have to be to have gotten through everything I have.

This is not the truth. This is no where near the truth. The reality between what I am and what people often perceive me to be creates a gulf, trench....a whole universe of difference.

For those of you like me, you will read this, and your heart will break, because you don't want to know that someone else has gone through the same aching, itching desperation as you have. We can't stop. Period.

We see the probable, not the possible, but the probable end to our story if we stop. People mistake this for strength or for insensitivity, and deep down inside we know that both of these play a factor, but the largest part of our story is that we fear not moving. We fear the world and existence crumbling from underneath us, the emptiness within that festers and grows in the night like a refridgerator science project opening up and swallowing us whole, the ambient silence that deafens us when the night takes our sight and that one sense is heightened. We move forward, even if we can't run, we walk, we limp, we crawl forward, because to not move is to give up, and to give up is death.

I laid there on that couch, and if it hadn't been for my son, my beautiful, wonderful, smart, funny, God-sent son....I would have laid there until that silence and emptiness did swallow me and I ceased to exist.

But there is more to this story. Don't stop now. There are lessons to be learned, heartaches and regrets meant for pondering.

Save me. It's not a question, answer, demand, request. It's a mentality. Not necessarily of ourselves, either. Some of us are looking for someone to save because in saving them, perhaps we can save a part of ourselves we need to protect.

But we get to the point where love and protection and strength give out like bad knees beneath us and our solid ground ages and becomes as quicksad.

Stop enabling people.

We think we have to act a certain way, say certain things, agree, acquiese, to show our love for someone. Don't let my mistake be your mistake. Loving someone does not entail enabling them. We all have our vices. Our crutches. Whatever mine is, whatever yours is, whatever the stranger you will pass tomorrows is. Smoking. Drinking. Drugs. Money. Pornography. Speed. Adrenaline. Some worse than others. Whatever it is that keeps someone from dealing with what they need to deal with. We enable.

If you love someone, don't enable them. Do not fall with them, because when you are both on the ground, there will be no one to help you up. Staying out and getting too drunk to understand what you're thinking and getting high to the point of laying on the floor because that is what the other person wants is not the way to be strong for them. Letting them do this, even if you don't, because you know that they "need" this is not the way to love someone.

If you love someone, love them. Be strong for them, protect them, even when it means protecting them from themselves. Because in the end, if the whole world is dragging us down, we have no recourse, and this is not justifiable.



Crying in the shower. Scratching at the place on my chest where I can feel the sorrow.pain.depression.anger.regrets.desperation trying to engulf me and break me. Suicidal thoughts. The darkest place where no one can find you. I've been there. I moved forward. Crawling most times, not running, walking, or even limping....but crawling forward to a light that seems too far away to be possible, to be attainable....move forward.

God carried me through this. I say I crawled, but God carried me through everything. WAIT. Even if you don't factor God into your equation, don't stop moving. Quit enabling. Do it for yourself. Do it for those you love. Do it for those who love you. One day you will look back on your life and realize that you wouldn't change a thing. Because if you had, you would not have what you have now or at the point you realize that if one second, one movement of your life had been different, then you would not have your child, the love of your life, the wisdom, the strength that you will have in that moment. And in that moment, you will reclaim something you lost when you lost your innocence. You will see the beauty in the stillness, feel the lightning coursing through your veins.

Don't stop moving.

Wait

I've found if we step back away from life for a moment....take a breath and walk away from the chaos we are trained to partake in, we can find ourselves.

And if we're lucky, and blessed, we just might find someone else in the process.

I don't understand how I got so blessed to be with John Burchett, but whatever good deed I did along the way, I am thankful I did it.

It Creeps Up on You

April 10, 2010

Yesterday was an excellent day. Even knowing I would be working overtime today, which I was also looking forward to, until 1am, I had a great day.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened, which, I suppose in and of itself, is out of the ordinary. I came to work, had fun with my friends, as always, went home, spoke with John, as always, and even got to speak with him for longer than I have all week.

So why I ended up crying myself to sleep is beyond me. Wait, let me rephrase that. HOW I ended up crying myself to sleep is beyond me.

Not even that makes sense. Whatever.

Anyway. I got off the phone with John, uploaded some photos to MySpace and sent him a photo, talked a little bit to my nephew, who is just getting over a spell of suicidal tendencies, listened to some music.

I was about to go to bed, and suddenly, life hit me. Hard. Not anything new, though, just....a whole load of memories that I try to drown out by working as much as possible, spending time with my son, and if all else is gone and I am alone, drowning it in Wild Turkey.

This last effort has only been in place for about a week now. I know, consciously know, that this is not right. I have never been the type to drown my sorrows. I hardly ever drank at home before, much less alone. Drinking alone is never a good thing. Alcohol seems to drag the depths and bring screaming those things which I try so hard to not remember. Not necessarily forget, just not remember.



My mother constantly tells me that she doesn't understand how I keep going. I've heard from friends that I am a strong person. Even my ex-husband used to yell at me because he says that I would be okay with out him, that I didn't need him, that I was too independant.

I think that people misinterpret this.

I am too weak to allow myself to wallow for long, because I fear the alternative too much. I fear not being able to pick myself back up again, the nights of sorrow if I think too much on these things, the mornings that bring no more light than the midnight hours, the tears, the screams, the debilitating emptiness that ensues pondering my past.



I don't know what triggered it. But something....I ended up sitting in my chair, finishing off the Wild Turkey, listening to Adam Lambert and Daniel Merriweather and Il Divo and Evanescence and thinking about everything. I don't even know where it started, but I know where it ended.

Everything. From the guy I lost my virginity to leaving me because I would not agree to a threesome, to the next guy who ended up "taking his birthday present" while I was passed out at the birthday party I threw him for his 21st, to the guy who said he loved me but was betrothed to some girl in the middle east, to my marriage and being thrown against the wall and down the stairs, then him forgetting that he had a family and trading us in for television, to Robert, who went beyond the worst kind of mental and emotional abuse and gave me an existential crisis because he had a peculiar talent of ignoring someone so completely that they ceased to exist, to the miscarriage, laying on the couch for days, crying my eyes out until I was so sick I couldn't hold anything down and the real meaning of emptiness filled me with an oxymoron. I was literally exploding with emptiness.

And that was where it ended....where it ended last time, with me crying myself to sleep and having nightmares of days gone by, waking to the acute knowledge that there is a life that is supposed to be growing inside of me right now.



This is why I busy myself with anything and everything....because I fear the silence, the loneliness, and most of all, the emptiness.