So Mama took her milkbags out on the town tonight. And, I was wowed.

I’ve seen Shawn Mullins in concert (at the Birchmere in fact) once before, and I remember being wowed then, too. Enough that I was playing his tunes compulsively for weeks afterwards and having dirty little dreams about him. Enough time went by that I forgot the particular high I got from the show, but not that I would want to go again.

So, with my four-week-old and my two-year-going-on-sixteen-year-old at home with Dad, I packed up the diaper bag (any moms out there carry a purse anymore?) and met my sister at the show.

We both said, as we floated out of there, that after ONE WORD out of his mouth, we were spun for the whole evening. If you have never seen him live, GO. His voice is canyon deep and wide, he plays the hell out of the guitar, he’s friendly and talkative (but not annoyingly so) and his lyrics. His LYRICS.

I dub this Shawn Mullins lyrics week at Fannfare. Every post will not only have a song lyric as a title, but it will be a Shawn Mullins lyric. Maybe by the end of the week you will see what I mean. There is a particular poetry to songwriting that gets to me even more than proper poetry, and this guy has it down.

So I really went somewhere tonight. I sat, sort of on the edge of my seat, and had a thousand thoughts. I thought about parenthood (and how I could say a thousand things about that) and about marriage (another thousand things) and about Ruby and Shepherd (try to listen to Shimmer and not think about kids — yours or anyone else’s). My most lasting thought, though, was more of a daydream.

I imagined myself in a VW bus with Shawn Mullins (whoever else doesn’t matter, wanna come?) — travelling the road and singing for our suppers. I could sing backup, sure! I could not have kids, not have a husband, not have a home. I could be in Atlanta and meet Shawn at the coffee shop or the cemetery or the parking lot of the bar to write songs and smoke cigarettes and drink beer deep into the afternoon.

I thought about having no responsibilities (which is not to say that Shawn Mullins doesn’t, but his music sort of took me to that place), no one to report in to, to be a guardian for. I thought about lazy afternoons and warm air rushing through my hair as I drove to nowhere in particular and laughter and confidence and feeling full. About not being scared. About not watching your heart walk around outside your body and the freedom of that.

I wished, really hard, for those couple hours, that I was a completely different person. And, that when Shawn Mullins came out to sign CDs (he didn’t), that 15 years would be magically shaved off my age (pthth, it wasn’t), and I would be in that van tomorrow morning, with coffee on my breath, that wind in my hair, and not a care in the world.

As it is, I have a newborn at home, a toddler that challenges me every minute, and my own Shaun. With a U.

And, as much as that scares me on nights like this…as much as I think I don’t deserve it or I can’t live up to it or I can’t flippin stand it or I can’t love it enough…I am grateful for it. Because, the truth is, my husband will read this entry and he will think it’s cute. He would probably even sanction at least one van ride as long as I was home for a walk in the cemetery by the weekend.

And tonight? All it will take is a whispered “Shaun, honey?” and he will get out of our bed and do the 3AM feeding.

How cool is that?

As Shawn Mullins sings, into my blood and down to my toes, everything’s gonna be all right.

Shawn Mullins, Twin Rocks, Oregon

I saw this heartbreaking video on my local Moms’ listserv this morning, and it took my breath away. I’m not sure what to do with the feelings it brings up in me, other than to share it, and encourage you to pass it on. I can also suggest a great blog for parents committed to raising children with an anti-racist outlook.

Marvin Gaye, What’s Happening Brother?

“You can line up for yourself a spread of your favorite liquor, your favorite video game, your favorite movie and your favorite sex act, and the sum total of them won’t give you the same kind of lasting happiness you’d get from helping the cranky old lady down the street drag her garbage to the curb.”

Read more here. Seriously. Then comment or email and tell me what you think.

On second thought, call me. We’ll talk.

Thanks, Sweetney.

I finally realized what it is that’s different about Colorado. Well, aside from the beautiful mountains (gotta drive a ways to get to those from DC, and even then they’re…smaller), the lack of humidity, and no bugs.

It’s not crowded!

That’s it. I never realized how crowded it is at home! Granted, lots of the people in the DC area are ones that I love and enjoy being close to (I am coming home), but there is something to be said for wide open spaces. Big sky. And a parking lot that one can zip in and out of on a whim.

Want to go to the mall here? Just pop on over! I have to build an entire day into my schedule just to get in and out of the parking garage(s) at Tysons Corner! A trip to the post office in DC involves circling and circling and circling for a parking space (I usually opt for the 15 minute walk, honestly) and then waiting in line for 1/2 hour or more to get grunted at by customers and clerks alike. Here, everyone is smiling and cheery, and although no one is in a hurry, I still haven’t waited in line for more than 5 minutes….anywhere.

I take that back. We were at the genius bar at the Apple store for an interminable expanse of time, but I think that’s more about Apple and geniuses than it is about Colorado.

I walked into a nail place without an appointment and sat right down for a manicure over the weekend. I was in and out of the market in less than an hour having gotten everything I needed.

The furthest Shaun and I drive here? The four stories up we have to go in the parking garage at our apartment. Seriously.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to imagine myself crossing the 14th Street Bridge to get to Costco when I get home.

Come visit! You’ll love the weather, you won’t get eaten alive by mosquitoes, I think you can touch God’s toe from certain spots in Boulder, and you’ll get a great parking space.

It still amazes me after many months how a tiny half-a-pill, about the size of a clipped toenail, can set my brain right so effectively. Can just make me feel…normal. Not stressed and raging or bummed out and over-tired, just breezy and every-day.

It feels good in a different way than any other feel good. A red wine feel good is sort of a warm, gloppy feel good. A beer feel good is a raucous, laugh-loud one. A percoset feel good (uhm, my Grandma told me?) is a kick of euphoria followed by a quiet hum of aaahhhh until it wears off. And, it’s been a long time, but a marijuana feel good is really giggly, but I always thought felt like a head full of bees.

I stopped taking Effexor weeks ago, for a number of reasons. The biggest one was that I wanted to know that I could. Or maybe that my life today would support no meds for a while (for good?). I am settling into the Mommin’ thing, Ruby is more in-tune with me and will listen if I “need a minute,” and I have lots and lots of support to be a happy and functioning person.

Then, I didn’t feel good again. I started popping off at Ruby and losing sleep and thinking Shaun’s business was ruining our lives and and and… Ick! Would you want to come to dinner over here? No thanks!

So I started taking the Effexor again. I guess that moving across country (away from said network) and changing justabouteverything about my life wasn’t a great time to try that anyway, but hey…I’m no doctor.

I take like 1/8 of the regular dose of Effexor. A baby dose! And it makes a shocking difference in the course of my days.

Today as we were lunching I said to Shaun it actually is a sobering thought (and sort of a bummer!) that a psychiatric medication works so quickly and so well for me. I suppose, in a way, that means I need to accept that something was really wrong in there. I said “Do you think that means I’m just balls-to-the-wall crazy?”

He smiled and said, “No, it means your pregnancy and all the hormones and life-changes altered the way your brain worked…maybe temporarily, maybe not. It means you are balls-to-the-wall depressed. I married you because you’re crazy.”

I can’t stop thinking of Nick Drake as I think about Syd Barrett. This YouTube video shows his sister recalling the day he died. In the background of part of the video is another part of the soundtrack of my life, Northern Sky, which Shaun and I danced to at our wedding.

Everyone remembers the Janis Joplins and Jim Morrisons — are you familiar with Nick Drake? He made three albums before he died at age 26. I hope he knows that I have all of his music and that it is in regular rotation — inspiring me, relaxing me, healing me.

Don’t even get me started about Jim Croce.

Yeah, that one.

I’ve always been freaked out by the occasional shoe I see in the road. Whether in the middle of the road, or off to the side — no shoe in the road ever says “Hey, I’m having a great day!” Maybe it’s my work with the American Association of Suicidology or something, but I just shudder whenever I see one. Did someone get hit out of their shoe? Did someone’s shoe fall off as they were jumping from a car/bridge/embankment? I don’t know. I just don’t like it. I always know where my shoes are! At least the ones I left the house with. On my feet.

Well today, as if to say “The wearer of every shoe you have ever seen in the road is just fine,” the world showed me another possibility. I drove out to the airport to pick up a rental car, and took the Dulles Toll Road (expressway out of the airport) home. In front of me was a Volvo sedan, nice and new, zipping along. The man in the driver seat seemed very focused on where he was going (read: driving fast) so I was staying behind him with his lane changes.

Then it happened. Out of his driver side window flew The Shoe. From what I could tell as it was flying and then rolling towards me, it was a men’s sneaker, dark colored. He then appeared to fumble with a map (very large paper thing obstructing his view) and swerve around a bit. But, he didn’t crash, burn, get squashed, or die.

I am still puzzled as to what that was about. Was the shoe sitting on the part of the map he needed to see, and he just got frustrated with it and chucked it? Maybe he took it off his foot because it was blistering ?? and threw it out the window in exasperation. Or, he could have been balls-to-the-wall crazy and figured “I’m never going to be able to get anywhere if The Shoe People don’t stop whispering and steering me in the wrong direction. Every. Day. Be gone!”

I’m not going to think about it much more though, except when I see my next shoe. When I do, I’ll just think “Oh, it’s nothing. Just some nutty shoe-throwin’ traveller.”

How did this happen?

It’s sort of a train wreck, isn’t it? I just couldn’t stop watching. David Lee Roth! I think I would have been less surprised if he had peeled his face off and eaten his own cheek.

I feel bad for the musicians. They are all probably very talented and struggling for an audience. When David approached them, I’m sure that was quite a conversation…

Mandolin guy: “Come on, guys, it’s David Lee Roth from Van Halen!”

Bass guy: “Yeah, but he seems to have jumped the shark, dude. What’s with the puffed up chest and the finger-snappin’?”

Guitar One guy: “He sort of has a Jim Bakker meets Michael Flatley vibe these days.”

Guitar Two guy: “I’m willing to give it a chance…I mean, Bonnie Raitt has never returned our calls. I got bills, man.”

Banjo Guy: “It’s just one gig, and then maybe we can ditch him.”

Violin Guy: “Is anyone going to mention him lurching around poolside at the hotel last night trying to talk us all into a daisy chain?”

Steel Guitar guy: “Whatever. Let’s just let him in the band. Maybe we’ll get on YouTube.”

You know that moment when you realize that you are friends with someone? It’s a cool one — from third grade on up into the rest of your life. Lisa’s and mine, I think, happened last night at the Birchmere. I thought we were going to see Josh Ritter open for Hem, when in fact Hem opened for Josh Ritter. Hem was great, as always. Funny, sweet, and completely tight musically.

Josh Ritter was stoned. STONED, my friends. He was having so much fun you couldn’t help but giggle with him. And giggle we did. Since we weren’t there to see him (we were there to see Hem, doh!), we felt a little like two kids in the back of class, sniggering at someone else’s very deep and personal poetry. I couldn’t get over how baked this guy was, and when I turned to Lisa and saw that she thought the same, it was that moment. We both nodded and thought “Totally,” and we were friends.

I did feel a bit of nostalgia when I saw Drunk Girl. She usually shows up at these events (more at the Black Cat than at the Birchmere, but you see her everywhere) and she looked just like me many moons ago. Last night Drunk Girl was late twenties probably, with a couple friends (there to see him, not Hem). She was in the hallway passionately stabbing at a photo of Mary Chapin Carpenter saying “I loooove heeeer” while her friends tried to hold her up and looked nervously around for the management. She was pitching and swaying all over the place, going on about a certain song and a certain moment and a certain guy. She needed lots of water, some serious pajama time with said friends, and maybe a Quarter Pounder late the next morning. Her friends looked tired. I hoped they rode this (other?) one out and made sure she got home.

I’m my own ride home these days, and for that I am grateful.

Shaun had a brilliant moment last night. After years of mind-numbing swirls of “how can I make this happen for us?” he finally came to peace with the fact that financial success via the internet is a lot like gambling. Rather, it is gambling, and within that it’s a lot like a slot machine. One Granny in a buh-zillion hits the mega-jackpot on a slot machine, replaces her above-ground pool with an in-ground one, buys each one of her nephews a tittie bar, and retires to a McMansion just outside of town. The guy sitting next to her though, is convinced that if he just sits there for one more hour or one more bucket or one more twenty that he will be able to do the same (except for that he would keep all the tittie bars for himself — he’d just let his cousins run them).

Think about it. There really are people supporting their families (or helping) by doing what they love via the internet. Folks like Shaun and me then read about these instances and think “By damn, we can do something like that too!” Then we spend evening upon evening coming up with products to sell or things to talk about that would interest people or ways to update the ever popular amateur porn site (now, I didn’t say we were going to start one, but the thought is going to make me smile all afternoon). Shaun always jokes that when whatever we are working on goes belly up, we’ll become one of those couples who puts our stuff on the worldwide web. Otherwise, we could always apply for bartending and table-waiting jobs at Granny’s nephews’ tittie bars, but I digress.

As it is, Shaun has a completely legitimate and gangbusters business that is web-based, and has nothing to do with stuff, titties, or either one of us blathering on about our lives, opinions, titties, or stuff. He works and works and works and makes Ruby and me proud. It is work, though, and lots of it. And we get tired. And we assume (wrongly, I know) that making money via the internet is easy. Well, it isn’t unless you’re this guy. That sizzled Shaun’s taint when we read about him. I just wanted to die for not thinking of it first.

And that’s what I mean! Everyone keeps trying. Intermittently, the thought that it just might happen for you is reinforced by shit like this.

When Shaun mentioned this intermittent reinforcement thing to me, I thought “that’s brilliant! You didn’t read that somewhere? You just came up with it? Maybe you should start a blog, talk about it, and see what happens! We’ll make millions.”

Update: Turns out, Shaun read about intermittent reinforcement here (scroll down to “Clicker Trained By Our Email”) and just applied it to success on the internet. So we won’t hit it big with that original thought. I hear there’s a help wanted sign up at The Pole. There’s your big money, people. Granny’s no dummy.