Autumn Leaves

My memories are leaves
Red and yellow, orange and brown
That lie upon the autumn ground
My grandeur and despair

I reminisce through these
Piled so deeply in my mind
Hide the truth and keep me blind
As I wander unaware

I fear a chilling breeze
That will blow the leaves away
And force my soul to stay
With the corpses buried there

Frankie Valinda Ghee

Caught in Traffic

or Thoughts on the Big Picture

By Frankie Valinda Ghee

It was twenty minutes into the worse traffic jam Naomi had ever seen, and today was the worse day for it.  Naomi was bringing her boyfriend Trent to her niece’s birthday party.  It was going to be the perfect setting to introduce him to her always judgmental and over protective family.  They would all be there, her parents and her sister Jessica with her perfect husband and her three perfect children. They were, no doubt, ready with passive aggressive, condescending remarks.  “Oh, so this is your current fling?  I hope this one has more staying power than the last one.” Naomi could already hear the jibes in her head.  Trent was in for a long day, but there was no help for it.  Anyway, there was no way Trent’s day would turn out to be any more stressful than the day Naomi was already having.

Naomi’s day had begun perfectly…awake on time, good hair, perfectly fitted outfit.  Then she opened the calendar app on her computer and realized that today was February 12.  Of course she knew the date.  It was her niece’s birthday.  What Naomi had failed to grasp until just that moment was the personal significance of the date.  With that realization everything changed.  She made an unscheduled trip to the bathroom and after a bit of nervous fumbling, found what she was looking for underneath a bag of cotton balls in the second drawer beneath the sink.

Now, Naomi was running scared and late.  She couldn’t take it for one more second.  She had to say it out loud or her head would explode.

*

It was twenty minutes into the worse traffic jam Peyton had ever seen, and she’d never felt so trapped.  There was no winning in her situation.  Her mother had done such a good job of hiding her drinking and over medicating from everyone who mattered that Peyton had been forced to play along.  Last night, things had gotten way out of hand.  Mom brought Gary home with her.  Gary was exactly the deviant pervert type that both her parents had been warning her about since she was old enough to understand sentences.  Now, her mother was asking her to treat the man like family.  There was no more room for ignoring or pretending.

This morning, Peyton confronted her mother about the drinking and about Gary.  Mom responded by immediately storming into Peyton’s room, throwing random articles of clothing into a suitcase, and dumping Peyton on her father’s doorstep with absolutely no explanation except, “You deal with her!”

Dad’s response was angry and preoccupied. It was completely out of character. He did not question her or comfort her.

“You will be coming with me, and you will be polite, and you will be appreciative,” he had barked. “This is a very important day for Naomi and me.  I have been planning this day for weeks.  You will simply have to save the details of whatever silly fight you had with your mother, until we get back home.  Am I clear?”

Am I clear?

Peyton would simply have to make him understand.  If she held it in one more second, she would implode.

*

It was twenty minutes into the worse traffic jam Trent had ever seen, and it was the worse day for it.  Trent had been practicing all week what he would say to break the ice with Naomi’s family.  Now he would have to explain why they were late, and why his sullen, teenage daughter was with them.

Trent knew how important it was for him to show himself in a positive light.  This party was a test.  If he passed it, his plans for the evening would go without a hitch.  If he failed the test, it might mean the end for him and this woman who was the best thing in his life.

Well, Naomi was the second best thing, second only to his daughter Peyton.  Peyton was in fact the true love of Trent’s life, but today, he had treated her like unwelcome baggage.  He had been more worried about his plans and his future than about Peyton and whatever obviously huge thing she was going through.  If Naomi knew how he treated his own daughter, she might think twice about introducing him to her family.

Trent turned around in his seat and tried to make eye contact with his daughter.  She had her hands up to her face and was crying into them.  He needed to explain his bad behavior to her and to Naomi.  If he waited one more second, he might lose everything.

*

The temperature inside and outside the car suddenly jumped thirty degrees.  It was now or never.  Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

At the same moment the engines of every motorized thing on earth (including the engine of Naomi’s gold Avalon) seized, the three passengers inhaled together and exhaled the word “I’m.”

Naomi’s next word was going to be “pregnant.”

Peyton was going to say “scared.”

Trent was planning a longer thought, “going to ask Naomi to marry me.”

They all said, “I’m…” and then a blinding flash of blue flame reduced the car, the bridge, the city and the planet to a few floating particles of dust.

When you looked at the really big picture, that tiny bit of shine was less than the skin of one grape, and its inhabitants of no more concern to those hovering gods than an appetizer to a forgettable meal.  There was no regret only a noise…like a small belch and then on to the next course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxaQWKFW3Ag  True Colors by Cyndi Lauper (cover)

Wow! It’s hard to believe that two years have gone by since I quit my day job to follow another dream.  I spent that first summer learning how to play songs on the guitar and writing novels and short stories and such.

This is me pretty early in my street music career.  Summer of 2014.  I think I’ve come a long way.  At least I know a lot more songs.

It’s fun to go back and listen to older posts.  Now when I sing true colors, I play it quite a bit slower.

It’s also fun to watch the images floating by on my guitar.  Thanks Dwayne for sticking with me through on this adventure!

songs.

The best part of this video is the car trying desperately to start in the background.  Talk about live.

I hope I am still singing around Spokane many years down the road.  I’m loving my journey.

I hope this finds you loving yours.

Frankie

Forever Spring

Sometimes, things are scary simply because they happen in the dark hours when the mind is weak, and they lose their potency as the sun takes back the sky.  But events that are truly horrifying remain so because they happen in the reasonable light of day, when one has to believe or question her own sanity.  When things move, and patterns shift in the dark, we can calm ourselves with a million believable explanations; an insect flew by; I wasn’t fully awake; it was a dream.  Daylight terrors tolerate no such illusions.

It was during the early afternoon, on a Wednesday in April when I had my first of several encounters with something foreign.  It was simply alien.  It was like seeing cold or hearing sticky.  It made absolutely no sense, and so, I stood dumbfounded.

If I was like you, untouched and hearing this story for the first time, I would think me a liar or at least  seriously disturbed.  However, there has never been any doubt in my mind that on that Wednesday in April (if only for that one last time), I was completely sane.

My husband Mark was working full time as an attendant in an art gallery, and I was working as a substitute school teacher.  I’d spent the morning hoping for a call in to work, but now, I was certain to have the rest of the afternoon off.   I remember, it was just after 1:00pm, and I was planning a long walk in the sunshine just as soon as I finished my household chores.   I was unloading the few remaining clean dishes from the dishwasher and replacing them in the appropriate cupboards and drawers.  I was on the last handful of spoons and butter knives when all at once, I saw, heard, smelled and felt that mind shattering something.

The silverware crashed to the floor and scattered.   The metal spoons and knives skated across the tile floor with blurring speed to hide underneath the table and in corners by the oven and underneath the refrigerator.

The transition from being alone in the house to being surrounded was sudden and complete.  My heartbeat and all my other bodily functions ceased.  So without breathing or thinking, I was smelling and tasting a thing so vile that trying now to recreate the sensation, brings on a wave of intense nausea.  I felt it on my skin in waves of something grotesque like worm infested sludge.  I felt it in every pore.  It was on my hands and in my mouth.  Maybe, I could have squeezed it between my fingers.  I gagged and seemed to swallow it.

For those seconds, I could see it.  I had to see it.  It was all I could see.  It was a moving mass of colors, but not colors as I’d known them.  It was the thought behind colors.  I saw aching purples, sickened oranges and claustrophobic greens.  I saw a red so malicious and a yellow so sadistic that, if I’d had any control, I would have run screaming out into the sunshine and fresh air.  I wouldn’t have stopped, but for me, at that moment, and at the moments since when I have been visited, there was no outside; there was no sunshine, and there was absolutely no hope for any kind of escape.  All of my senses were forced wide open and crammed with this presence.  I perceived it without mask and with inhuman clarity.  Everything else was gone.  I was submersed in it.

The vision alone was enough to haunt me, but the sounds were debilitating.  I didn’t so much hear them as feel them in my ears.  The thing was manipulating my eardrum and the bones of my ear to control not only the level of sound, but my perception of it.  I was being screamed at and whispered to in a liquid language so monstrous that my ability to understand it somehow proved I was evil too, but I couldn’t not understand it.  There have never been messages more clear.  My comprehension was complete, but I will never repeat what I heard.  I don’t want to try.

My eyes were jammed with sights, my ears packed tight with sounds, and my skin was undulating with sickening, tiny tentacles and textures both slickly smooth and painfully abrasive.  I was caught, stuck and drowning in it.  I wanted to be afraid, and on some level, the level that it would allow, I was afraid, but the thing wanted other emotions from me, so it played me like a musical toy.  It controlled my level of fear, and I did not go into shock.  I did not pass out, because it wanted me alert.  I was bombarded with such a subtle blast of negative moods that fear alone would have been a pleasure.

I was, in those captive moments, so pervasively tainted that I experienced the emotions of this thing as if they were my own.  It got beyond my physical self, beyond even my nervous system and memory and pressed itself into the tiniest fibers of my soul.  I didn’t feel its bitterness, I was bitter; I was angry; I was hateful, and cruel, and selfish; I was jealous and vindictive and homicidal; I was proud, self-centered, and violently ashamed.

The thing was laughing at me, and so, I laughed at myself.  It was all over me, all through me.  I was it, and it was me.

And then…it was gone.  I was let go, and I fell to the floor like so much warm silverware.  I cried for almost an hour knowing absolutely that it was coming back.

I understood that this thing would come on sunny days, at times when I was alone.  It would take me, and play me, and leave me in a heap to face the rest of my life.

I dragged myself into the bedroom and got undressed.  I examined myself for physical signs of the encounter even while I knew I would find nothing.

The experience began to fade quickly after that, and by the time my husband got home, I only felt a bit off, maybe a little sick.  I didn’t say anything.  There was nothing Mark could do.  This thing was just for me, all mine.

I dreamt all that long night of clean rivers and sunshine, budding flowers and new grass.  I dreamed of spring at its most glorious.  I thought, “Maybe I’m okay,” and that has been my only true insanity since this all began. I tried to convince myself that I was safe.  I told myself that even if something wicked had touched me, it had gone and left me unchanged.

It was Saturday morning, just three days later, when it happened again.  Incredibly, the second time was more distorting than the first.  I was in the back yard getting ready to pull some weeds from my garden, when suddenly, I was encapsulated and completely out of control.

When it was over, I got in the car and drove to the gallery where Mark was working.  I dragged him away from a man he was talking to.  Once we were alone in the car, and I could make my words sound less like screaming, I told him everything to the best of my ability, and to the best of his ability…Mark believed me.  That almost helped.  His reassuring words and his  arms around me did help.  But then, I got a wave of something humiliating and shameful and pulled away.

Since then, the visitations have continued.  At first it was once or twice a week, and then as many as four.  It became more and more difficult for me to focus on anything from my normal life.   Mentally, I was weakening, but my body was growing stronger.  My skin cleared up, and my hair grew thicker and slightly less gray.  I lost most of what I used to call  “my old lady belly” and somehow, without my even trying to, I gained muscle.  I’m forty-three years old, and this is the best I’ve looked in almost twenty years.

The apparent benefits of the visits make me feel worse than I would feel if I’d been left with boils or scars.  Bruises and scabs would show the world that what is happening is not my fault, that in no way did I bring this on myself.  It would show that I definitely want to be free of the wickedness stalking me.

As it is now, each day I look into the mirror and see staring back a woman who is healed and healthy.  I have to wonder.  Maybe it is my fault.  I think of suicide, but I’m afraid it won’t help. The thing would find me in my afterlife, and there, I would spend eternity without hope.

I have felt myself changing.  I am more easily brought to anger. I have grown impatient, and I don’t enjoy the things that used to bring me simple pleasure.  Much worse, I hear myself saying cruel and sarcastic things to Mark, things that hurt him.  I say them without thinking, and sometimes I catch myself smiling at the wrong time.  The thing is changing me, and I don’t know how to stop it.

I’ve come to believe that if there is a hope for me, I must hold onto as much of myself as I can until winter comes.  It will be dark and cold then, and maybe this thing that hatched in the spring will die with all the other warm weather pests.

It always comes in the light, in the daytime, when I am alone, so if I keep busy and stay around people, maybe it won’t come back.   I bought dark curtains for all the windows.  I shower and eat in the dark, and I only go outside in daylight when Mark comes with me.

Mark is worried about me; everyone is worried about me, but I have a feeling that if that thing comes back again before winter, I’ll be lost.

My visitor has a plan.  It wants me healthy and alone, so one day, it can take me for more than a few seconds.  It will fill my pores and twist my emotions, whisper at me and scream at me until I can’t remember it ever not being there.  It will show me the horrors and press against me, intoxicating me with its putrid smells, and forcing me to taste what I will become.  It will paralyze me with hatred and drown me in disgust and shame.   It will infest and grow inside me.  Time will stop.  It will be spring…

forever.

So this is the definition of live.. No mics, no amps, all acoustic even the sneezing and hacking in the background. Man, I love my job.

Please stay tune d for more live music and joy

If you want to donate to the cause, please do

this is what living a dream looks like!

THE ROSE is one of my long time favorites. I bet none of my sisters can listen to this without harmonizing😎😎

FVG

oh my gosh! What a cool afternoon. I saw former students, colleagues and current friends. I met new people, got lots of ego boosts and earned a bit of cash.

To get an idea of how much fun I had, watch the action on my guitar

thanks to all who visited my booth

The-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-musicians….

the-estate-sale-has-been-postponed

still-on-for-garland-street-fair

http//www-kxly-comcommunityspokane14th-annual-garland-street-fair-set-for-august/

Hope to see you there  3:30ish-7:00ish if all goes as planned

Well this is one of those good news bad news situations.  The estate sale that was scheduled for 8/8/2015 has been postponed for reasons beyond my control, So I wont be performing there tomorrow.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is that now, you wont have to decide which of my Spokane performances to attend that day.  Please come by and see me at the  Garland District Street Fair.  I’ll be starting close to 3pm and playing until they make me stop which might be as late as 7pm.  I will be playing my guitar and singing away somewhere near The REVOLVER and SPOKANE ANIMAL CLINIC

So while you wont be able to see the famous garage from “ONCE I WAS THE WIND,” I will still be looking forward to singing a song especially for you.

http://www.kxly.com/community/spokane/14th-annual-garland-street-fair-set-for-august-8/34471782

I See Myself in You

I see myself in you

We are the same

I see that we are complicated

Judgmental and kind

I am proud of you

Because we are of the same universe

We are on the same team

If you win even if by sacrificing

My chance for victory

We win

I see myself in you

We are the same

I see that we are vain and childish

We are full of life and we are joyful

We are vengeful and clever

Forgiving and naïve

We are not cut from the same cloth

We are each but threads in that cloth

Which cannot be torn

I see myself in you

Because I am you

Frankie Valinda Ghee

This is more from the estate sale this morning in Spokane.  Did you see me?

This was a great idea!  Think of me for your next garage sale or event.