Wisdom

...and I'm glad that you're gone,

got that feeling so strong,

yes I'm glad that you're gone,

but I wish that you'd come home...

--Tom Waits

If witchdoctors interpret losing-of-teeth dreams as signs of prosperity, perhaps actually getting teeth pulled is a sign of good things to come. Out with the rotten, in with the void of the unknown, freedom perhaps. I'm glad that my wisdom is gone, because it caused nothing but pain. Now I'm just like a woman, with a grin like a little girl.

Scorpius

no one else can kill me like you do

--Neil Young

Joie de Vivre

Of course romance isn't dead, because it's a "fictitious narrative in prose of which the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life." She wasn't completely wrong; she was just stumbling through early-twenty-something joie de vivre. No, the girl couldn't help it.

Good Feeling

...won't you stay with me just a little longer?

it always seems like you're leaving

when I need you here just a little longer...

--the violent femmes

She wears her feather in her long-ish dirty blonde hair and thinks about Betty Paige as she glances in her rearview mirror. The strangers on their barstools compliment her with words like "flapper" and she smiles because she knows she's just like a woman with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls, but pulls a permanent marker from her purse and edits them all: though a flapper can be "a young girl turned to vice," she can also be a "remembrancer."

Nostalgia tastes so bittersweet.

Change

oh my darlin' I will never change partners again!

While "change" denotes the "succession of  one thing in place of another, the word can also refer to a "round in dancing." Perhaps the tradition of Inaugural Balls makes a bit more sense in this context.

Shave Bush

[taken outside cuny hunter, spring 2003]

yes we can; and yes we did!

Ball and Chain

...my head is telling me to make a change

but my heart is telling me i love ya

but you're strange...

--"Abandoned Love"

Auld Lang Syne