From the mouth of The TorTor

guest blog, guest blog, GUEST BLOG!! it's time for that good old thing we call a guest blog. tonight i have the musings of my good friend TorTor. Tory and i met living in the hippy commune a couple of years age. We would bond over things like kombucha tea and hatred of 7th heaven, knitting, and our love of felicity and all things angela chase. We talk about tv characters liek they are our friends: "what would felicity say." "I had an angela moment." and we love to philosophy the ways in which we can truncate the english language. Anyways tortor was the one who reminded me about that Heather Nova song, so in honor of this i give you tortor's ellucidations on "i'm alive, i'm a mess." She did it more justice than i ever could.

Now here's the thing about "London Rain" (this is going to be rambling and ragged but it comes from my heart. Which I will give, along with my shoulder, over and over, because it's what Felicity would do): it is essentially a happy song, a celebration of coming home to a home, a home that is someone, someone who is your home regardless of where they are. Now, this might not be what one would initially think upon hearing "I'm alive I'm a mess." One might think that this person is deranged, out of her wits, ooc, as it were, perhaps in a destructive relationship or one of unhealthy dependence. What I have noticed is that the song consists of a series of redundancies. The first line is one example, for it is clear that "you" is synonymous with the idea of "home," so "to come home to you" is an overemphasizing of the intensity with which our dear Miss Nova identifies her loved one as her true home. Another example might be "changes beyond my dreams," for clearly Miss Nova has lofty dreams and what are dreams really other than life changes? Again, like "I'm alive I'm a mess," "changes beyond my dreams" might initially seem to denote an instability when really it is a simple statement of inevitable fact. Our dreams, despite being of ourselves, are not containable, not completely moldable, and even while we realize them they are ever-shifting, sometimes changing without us even knowing.

Sometimes, pardon the gravitas, we even realize dreams that we were not aware we had in the first place. Same goes for "changes beyond my grasp." A change that is wholly within one's grasp is not the sort of change that one is particularly compelled to sing about or reference as noteworthy. A change beyond one's grasp is the only kind of change worth having. It is the only way you know you are moving forward rather than side to side. This isn't to belittle a nice horizontal shift, but when you're really in it, like if you're so in it right now, then the changes are totes going to be beyond your grasp, and this isn't a bad thing. The verse ends with "things I'm sinking in," once again a line that could communicate a feeling of helplessness. However, "sinking in" is not necessarily a negative thing. While changes and developments take time to sink in, so does one sink into things, situations, roles, etc. She is sinking into something new, but in a "sink your teeth into" sort of way. It might be a little scary, but at least she's going full bore. Then comes the great solace of the song, which is that there is this human presence that both gives and receives comfort. As Nina Simone and Shelley Duvall have reminded us before, the feeling of "he needs me" is one that can sometimes surpass even the importance of "he loves me." Perhaps it is that when someone loves, one can be sharing only strength, but when one admits need one is sharing a weakness, something much more difficult to reveal or fabricate.

Which takes me back to "I'm alive I'm a mess," which is another redundancy. Being alive is inevitably being a mess, but not an irresolvable mess, or even a mess that needs to be resolved in the first place. To claim to be a mess is simply to acknowledge your state of being alive, is sometimes the best way to remind yourself that you are alive at all. Miss Nova and our dear Felicity are those types who would sooner not be alive than not be a mess, who revel in and accept the inevitable messiness of life with gusto rather than complaint. To greet the day with a hearty "I'm alive I'm a mess" is more of a statement of constancy than helplessness, it is a reassuringly constant yet subtly shifting state that keeps us free from apathy and impassivity.

So that's that, I'm going to go listen to "Pass In Time" on repeat.

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So anyways in response to my feelings about possibly being too old for online communitites she responded "I think that the reason i am too old for them is that all they do is bring back sad memories of when i used to be a nice person and remind me of all the people i've lost touch with who, when I'm not under the influence of debilitating nostalgia, I realize left mylife for a reason." As we say in the mother tongue, PALABRA!!

Come back later to read about my extended metaphor of life being like a game of poker and how i suck at it.