You rise to the occasion, 'cause after all what else is there to do.

Katell Keineg cleans out my insides. I play her loud, as it is an insult to play her any other way. Only some songs really need to be loud, it's true, but these songs are enough for me. Frankly, they have to be. She has done nothing since! She has produced one album, one album that I have worn thin with listening (if that could happen to compact discs, I would make it happen here), one album that I have loved more than anything. (She made another album first, but with only few redeeming tracks - notably some poetry and an amazing rendition of a Welsh hymn.)

If you could hold the frozen flow of New Hope Creek
And hide out from the one they said you might meet
If you could unlearn all the words
That you never wanted heard
If you could stall the southern wind
That's whistling in your ear
You could take what is
To what can never be

I want people to know me, to know who I am, and I want this very deeply. The girls think I'm out of my head sometimes. "What do I say when I'm out of my head?" Oh, I babble like a madwoman, that is what I say.

I want to walk a careful line. I want to forgive people who have left me, and welcome them back, without saying inadvertently that I did not miss them. For if you forgive so easily, it doesn't seem to matter much that they were gone, huh? Do you see? Who wants to seduce a whore?

And when she says 'Daddy, oh, the kudzus are back'
You make it all alright with a sweep
Of your great axe

Katell Keineg has made me who I am. Many people have made me who I am.

Soon I will mail off my application for Wales. Tomorrow, in fact, I shall send it registered mail. If it fails, it will fail, but there's nothing left for me to do and I find this somehow reassuring.

2002-10-25, little notes

before / after

archives / website / hello book / diaryland