INTERLUDE: The Beekeeper, Tori Amos, ten years later

Today is August 20th, 2015.

I am in the middle of writing a novel, a screenplay, planning a three song EP, and auditioning for a ton of stuff. I live in Los Angeles with my man from Italy and my dog from the streets of LA (born after his mother was rescued from a dumpster.) I'm at the height of my life so far, and here's to hoping it gets better. My friends are psychics, artists, musicians, warriors, healers, writers, poets, photographers, directors, wonderfully complicated and crazy. I am- I can't say happy because it isn't like that. I am everything. I feel everything. I think everything and nothing, usually at the same time. I experience as much as I am aware. I am just beginning to be my true self... I think. Will the real Erin please stand up?

I recently had a session with a incredible psychic, Jungian analyst, astrologer, divine feminine mystic and shoe maker! I wasn't surprised when, after our brilliant session, I read that she was also a guide to Tori Amos, a woman I have always loved and listened to. I love music that has melody and beautiful voicing and pain as well as joy and so her music really resonates with me. Of course, so does Celine Dion! Hipster friends, please don't judge... and... also... conservative friends? Try not to as well. ha!

Anyway. So, right now, one of my practices is trying to remember how to have fun. DON'T LAUGH! You know, serious musicians and comedians and workaholics and poets and mystics and healers- and I am all of those things- we have a hard time relaxing. We have a hard time having fun. So I am asking the best person I can think of to guide me toward what I ACTUALLY like and enjoy and think is fun: me, little Erin, from ages, oh, say, 4 or 5 to 6, 7, 8. And the answers are surprising!

She loves yogurt parfaits and doesn't really like chocolate. ! She loves Anne of Green Gables (duh!) and doesn't love The Knick! (Although the adult me is intellectually intrigued although not emotionally drawn in.) She loves dresses and hates shorts (same as the adult me) and wants to listen to the soundtrack to French Kiss and anything by Tori Amos in the 2000s but not the 90s. She wants to return to being a vegetarian. She doesn't actually like meat, nor do I, really, just as an adult I'm rebelling against my old eating disorder and thought that would be part of it. Okay! I'm just going with it.

So, here I am, on my walk this morning, of course in the middle of a million things because I'm about to go rehearse with a potential pianist for my recording, and then have a fun audition. And I'm listening to tracks from "The Beekeeper:" "Goodbye to Pisces," "The Power of Orange Knickers," "Sleeps with Butterflies."

And I am suddenly in 2005, when the album came out with a book that accompanied it, and I was in Germany with the infamous FtG, and things were not going well and I was being gaslighted and manipulated and left in a forest in the middle of nowhere and then physically threatened in a castle just outside Dresden with physical violence if I didn't shape up. And it was dramatic and awful and he wasn't who I thought I was- and NEITHER WAS I. And I'm journaling a lot at this time, listening to Tori, and reading the book, and thinking about my unrecorded albums, my unsung songs, my novels yet to be written. And I'm riding on a train to Berlin, and the country side is going by and I'm connected not to Berlin or the man or the endless bottles of wine or miserable dinners. And I'm being promised things I don't care about- a penthouse in Dusseldorf. A Porsche. The time to write (which by the way, was not really on the table.) If only I would quit singing and quit, well, everything and just get pregnant and- you know- with that guy- it was never good enough. You know that old saying, he asks me to jump and I say how high? It wasn't enough to say how high, I was supposed to just KNOW how high to jump and IF I jumped EXACTLY to that height, he would change his desire so I would be wrong again.

Of course it never starts out that way. It starts out with jazz and poetry and art, with quotations and slow dancing.

SO today, 2015, I'm listening to this Tori Amos album I haven't visited in a long time, and I'm thinking,

Oh My God. I made it. I fucking made it. No. I really, really did. I mean, of course I'm not famous or successful as a working actor or a known author of beloved magical realism novels- yet. ;-p I may be that still or I may never be. But you know what I do have? My SELF.

My self.

My life. My love of life.

I can listen to Tori Amos and Celine Dion and Sarah Brightman and Uptown Funk and Strauss lieder all in one walk and it's all gorgeous. I can ask my 5 year old self what we really want for breakfast and have it. I can laugh off all the stupid shit I do and have done and know that a Princess Bride quote can be as profound as Goethe: "Life IS pain, Highness. Anyone that says differently is selling something."

And life IS pain and yet-

it is still a  beautiful world, right?

I mean, that's where I get caught up. Because I want to love this world and then I think of war and violence and meanness and unfairness and how dirty and concrete Los Angeles is and how selfish humans seem to be,

and I'm reading Under Tiberius (by Nick Tosches, what an incredible writer)and the whole idea that Jesus was actually a manufactured entertainment a la a modern day boy band is incredibly comforting,

and then I think of my audition today, and my favorite fairy tale, and how beautiful music is and how sweet my man today is (as well as incredible handsome and badass) and how tenderly my dog loves me, and I think,

yeah, it is a beautiful world. It certainly can be.

As you wish.

And now it's time to say Goodbye to Pisces. I gotta a rehearsal to make.