Back from the Past

Well, the sun is out, which means it’s warming up, which has forced me back indoors.  But holy shit was it nice out to read–overcast, but still comfortable, with a genuinely cool breeze that was enough to feel good on my bare legs but not enough to even rustle the papers on my lap.

I cried at the end of the manuscript about early independent Nashville record labels.  It might not move anyone else to tears, but I was happy to see it all come together and to feel like I’ve been a part of something meaningful.

Sometimes, I really can’t believe this is my life.  Sistasmiff writes a beautiful post about John Hartford which reminded me of the wonderful weird things that have happened to me.  To what end, I sometimes wonder, but there you go.  It probably doesn’t mean anything at all.  It’s just some nice stuff that happened to us.

I never met John Hartford, but once, shortly after he died and right before his wife did, I sat in his office, eating chocolate cake, surrounded by dogs that still wandered around looking for him, and reading a manuscript he’d been at work on about a fiddler up in Kentucky.

Nothing came of it.  I can’t remember why.  I got a call from a lawyer years later asking if I had the manuscript, but I hadn’t taken it out of the office, let alone out of the house.

I feel lucky today. 

I think I sell myself short quite a bit.  But today I feel like I’ve got the life I deserve. 

Which is funny to me because I usually feel like an imposter, like at any minute someone’s going to knock on the door and say, “Ms. B., I’m afraid you’re going to have to move back home with your parents and leave this spot to a real grown-up.”

So, who knows?  I’m going to just go with it, this feeling of contentment, for as long as it lasts.  It’s nice.

 

—–

The Red Menace

Our darling Wayward Boy Scout reports today that “pretty much all of the anti-war protests are organized, funded, and attended by communist organizations.”

I have a Russian minor.  I’m a hippy liberal.  Why am I being left out of the organizing and how can I get in on this “funding”?

Rich communist organizations with money enough to throw at organizing war protests, throw some money my way.  I have bills to pay.  I have a hippy liberal only semi-participant in capitalism brother to support.  Show a comrade some love!

 

 

Is it sad that I feel the need to clarify that I am not a communist and have never been a communist, nor do I have enough ambition to go to anti-war protests, let alone stage them?  This whole post is a joke designed to poke fun at Exador.  With my luck, he’ll report me to the authorities and I’ll spend the rest of my life in Cuba, but not in the communist part of the island.

If Only I Can Get the Butcher to Go to the Store

I woke up this morning in a really good mood. I’m reading page proof on a project I’ve been working on for a couple of years. Normally, I don’t read page proof. I look it over, skim everything and trust that the author or other folks have caught everything, but this is a special case, a beautiful, expensive picture-heavy history of the early Nashville record labels.

I’ve tried very hard to avoid reading anything from the manuscript since I read it in its final form a while back because the important thing about reading page proof is to try to see the very stuff your brain wants to gloss over in order to make sense of what it’s processing. The more familiar you are with a text, the more your brain will read what it thinks should be there, and not what is actually on the page.

So, it’s kind of long work. I’m the kind of girl who can get through a book in a day or two and I’ve been at this all week and still have sixty more pages to go. I’m optimistic that I can get it all done today, though, if I get my butt off the computer and go sit outside where there aren’t any distractions.

And, I woke up excited to get to it. Which is nice. It’s a big book and I don’t know how many people care about Bullet Records or Bill Beasley or Jordan Stokes or Christine Kitrell or how many people can be persuaded through marketing to give a damn.

But I’m looking forward to getting back into it. That makes me excited for the book. The folks who are interested in it are going to have a treat reading it. An enormous treat that will take them a long time to plow through, but a treat nonetheless.

Update on Sunday, August 13, 2006 at 08:35AM

Folks, I have no idea what the title of the post has to do with the body of the post.  In my pre-Diet Dr Pepper mind, they had some connection, though so I’m leaving it.

It would be nice if the Butcher went to the store so I could spend the day reading, so maybe it does make some sense.