Saturday, November 28, 2009, 10:43 am, d 12,611, sitting in a booth at the flea market, tweeting fragments to the twitterverse from my cell…

And looking at some old scribblings I see that I took a sociology class at CSN in June of 1974.  And its funny, I remember the Dead at the Bowl the next month, but not the class!  Interesting.  And I’m assuming this was Cal State Northridge, but actually… I don’t recall, which is odd, when after all this time I have vivid memories of crashing a single class one sunny day in 1970 at the University of Chicago, so go figure… Anyway, that’s another story.

And I mean I don’t even REMEMBER attending Northridge… ever, and yet I’ve got the notes to prove it.  Amazing, and slightly disturbing…

So I have my sociology notes and the bootleg tapes I made that afternoon at the Bowl (wonderful Sea Stones set)… but wow, do I ever miss my friends.  I wonder how they’re doing these days?

Sandy and I saw the Dead (and I don’t think she was even into the Dead), and Joanne and I saw Joni Mitchell at the Universal Amphitheater that following August.  God no wonder I lost any recollection of SO345!

I had a roommate at the time (well two actually, Rob and Danny… Rob and I had gone to school together back at Fredonia, and he was a huge fan of Joni Mitchell even then).  Rob had always been a Joni Mitchell fan, and I remember that it was because of Rob that we ended up meeting Joni Mitchell one evening at McCabe’s. 

McCabe’s had a little theater in the back that seated maybe 50 people.  God, 100 at the tops.  I don’t know for sure.  We were right up in the front row and could have put our feet up on the little stage we were that close and I hadn’t spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder to see how many people were coming in.  Joni and her friends took seats directly behind us (See? Rob got us there early!) and NONE of us was about to turn around and stare (well maybe just a casual glance back).  Rob must have been freaking out at that point because she was so close… and anything any of us would have said about about the fact would have been kind of obvious with her being within earshot of anything we said, that and I’m sure Rob was feeling completely vindicated at that point having dragged us to this Batdorf and Rodney concert with Joni Mitchell attending as well.  Rob had been going on about Batdorf and Rodney for months, and in all fairness they really were an exquisite acoustic duo if you’ve never heard them.  

Rob actually had a chance to meet Mitchell in the guitar shop after the concert.  She was wonderfully gracious about the whole thing and commented to a friend about starstruck fans.  She was wearing this amazing long, flowing, emerald green gown and was every bit as perfect and delightful as you might ever expect her to be.

Now the Joni Mitchell concert at the amphitheater that next August was much more than I had ever anticipated it would ever be.  I knew she was tremendously talented but at that time I was already such a fan of the Dead, Miles and Weather Report that I didn’t seem to find the time to listen to much anything else.  So that Joni Mitchell concert turned out to be way, way more than I had ever expected.  I really can’t describe it.  As one concert goer shouted from the audience, she sang like an angel, and the guitars and bass and what ever else they had going on there made the previous month’s Sea Stones set sound like a warm up, a kind of conceptual testing of the waters as it were.  I don’t know.  It’s silly of me to even begin to try to explain how moving and deep the sounds were, wailing sounds, whaling sounds.  Sounds that filled the whole amphitheater and pulled you from the depths of your center then sent you soaring up in a mind bending way that made you look back and reflect on what it was to be there, where it was that you sat, where you were in your life and how it had all unfolded for you in that wonderful place of sounds, words and breezes.    

I went out and bought bootlegs and albums, became an actual Joni Mitchell fan, even more so than Rob perhaps.  I couldn’t get over how wonderful she was, the depths, the subtle, painful, detached observations of her lyrics.  I was amazed that I had never noticed before.

And I had heard of lovers brought to tears by music associated with a lost relationship.  I think it was Rob that had mentioned it one day.  It seemed sad that such a thing could happen, just like any other human tragedy, or tragedy of the heart.  But I had never experienced such a thing.  It was sometime in the Spring that next year that I stopped listening to Joni Mitchell.  It was just too excruciatingly painful, running from my own livingroom in tears at the sound of that voice, at the memories.  I still won’t listen.

And with every painful thing you try to forget, it’s funny the little things you remember.  Joanne had this amazing little terrier that she would toss a ball to and it would leap into the air bouncing it off the top of its nose as it ran like crazy around the room, bouncing it manically like one of those paddle balls on the end of a rubber band… he was so absolutely perfect at it… a little hat and he could have been in a circus act… really.

And for the life of me I still can’t imagine what prompted me to take a sociology class that summer… even then something bigger must have been looming in my mind nagging me to finally “do something” with my life… But now the very idea of it… the admissions office, the registration lines, the scheduling and paying the fees, the parking, the corridors leading to that room, that room itself, Dr. Sneden… every trace of these now all gone?  Forever washed away?  Every image completely purged from memory?  That whole time was so wonderful, so tragic… no wonder these things got left behind.  And still, even now I’m not comfortable looking back at it.

2:57 And god, what DID I eat yesterday?  I’m sitting here having a heck of a time staying upright. Must have gotten into some sugar somewhere… so here I am at the flea market… and it’s a little cold for that as far as I’m concerned.

3:21 And I may have to stop tweeting soon.  I’m down to a single bar… I wonder if May sold any houses today?  Houses?  Yeah, she’s had 4 hours LOL , why not?

3:31 Yay, May just got back (my salvation).  She says someone wants to look at a 1.5M house… and she feels guilty because it’s someone else’s listing?  Huh?

There’s so much there to do, so much apparently unreleased.  I had no idea.  No wonder I’d kept those notes buried… all those years… wondering if that’s still who I still was.  And I can make it real all over again any time I look.  And I can let it go.  And I thought I’d already done that.

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