Dear Radio Dodo Listener,
A few weeks ago, my favorite DJ played your song for today: An incomparable lament, filled with hope and longing, futility and yearning: The Losing End. As a bonus, you get this original version, too! And on special today only: The Meat Puppets!
Dear Living,
I think I may have mentioned here, once, the kind of bolt you get sometimes, a sort of jolt of joy, out of nowhere; you might even be taking out the trash. It's a feeling I might call happiness, but with extra euphoria sauce and a cherry on top. In any case, one day I may write more on this frisson thing that sometimes happens. I know for certain that I have mentioned my new best friend Viv Albertine? I put 19 post-it notes into To Throw Away Unopened, and one of them was stuck on a Jenny Diski quote. Now, Jenny is a gal I am not yet very familiar with. I tried to read (I really did try!) The Golden Notebooks, and I swear to you on a stack of fifty unread books, I will try again! Anyhoo, Doris Lessing was a sort of mother/(tor)mentor to Jenny Diski, who, in whatever it was I read, was said to be a difficult woman. Jenny D., I mean, and yes, Doris L. was fabulously difficult too. And I want to know them, as role models for my own emergent (dormant? latent? consistent? continual?) difficultness.
All this horizontal & lateral introduction and introspection, just to get you to here, a little thing that Jenny Diski wrote on happiness.
PS
If you want a song for today, a 'happy' song, you can choose one from here, if you like. I don't think I want to tell you how to get happy. Although, I will give you Get Happy, side A, and side B.
Dear Everyone on the Internet,
My goodness! Have you seen this??? You probably have; and you should have told me about it! It is endlessly pleasurable to configure your sneakers; over and over. I made 6 different pairs, and didn't press 'buy' on a single pair. Don't worry, I will, in a few months. I read someplace, ages ago, that one way to unlink your addictive actions from wanton desire was to wait 30 days to see if you still felt that burning need to own a thing; a thing like this, or maybe this. You can see how sobering up a bit might prevent an impulsive person like myself from ordering such a thing deep in the lonely hours of the night.
And, to be clear, I kind of like the anticipation: Next month I will configure my pink Chuck 70's with red stitching again, and maybe, just maybe, even buy them!!!
Oh, and here is your song of the day; She's Wearing Shoes without Heels. Elvis Costello has a shoe thing, you know; this song, oh! I love this line: "Cheap white plastic shoes, that don't walk out and don't let in." And, of course, there are the Red Shoes. Can't you just imagine Declan the singing poet? Taking Elvis's Blue Suede Shoes name, and then writing the song of Red Shoes? Such a beautiful bit of instigated acausal connecting principle. Of course, he could have called himself Carl, too....