I Want to Write a Song John Cale Will Cover

It was late but we were not sleepy. We'd watched two episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return”. We had written and published a couple of new stories. I put in my twenty minutes on the stationary bike with Terry Barensten. Then my partner was tooling around listening to a bit of this and a bit of that on YouTube.

Jonathon Richman chatting about some of his early songs recorded with his band, The Modern Lovers. Good stuff.

My partner, he breathes music. He groks it at a molecular level. My first birthday gift from him was a 3 terabyte hard drive with his complete collection of music.

An oft-repeated question around this place is “Do you know this one?”

And that night, no, I did not know that one. Even though I love Jonathan Richman and have seen him numerous times over the years, I didn’t know “Pablo Picasso” (now I do). Fun fact: that song, “Pablo Picasso” has been covered by John Cale and David Bowie. Which made me happy for Jonathan. He seems like a sweet, fun man with zero pretensions about his brilliant abilities as a songwriter. I bet it was a real kick for him to hear that John Cale wanted to cover his song.

A kick I, alas, shall never experience.

Yes, it’s a little silly for a sixty-five-year-old woman who’s never written a song in her life to wish for something so completely unrealistic. But I do. And that’s just one of a slightly embarrassing list of impossible things I wish I could do. The closest I’ve come to this one was to have seen John and some of his band hanging out at one of my favorite diners after their show at the Beacon Theater. When I went back to our table and burbled excitedly about John Cale being in the house several of my (much younger) friends looked at me blankly. Who’s John Cale? Ouch.

Where was I? Oh, right. Completely impossible things I want to do.

You know, things like spending a full year in Iceland, up in the north away from Reykjavik and all those lights. I would love to experience the full range from midnight sun to noonday darkness. Our wee week of driving the Ring Road only made me hungry for more. That one night when we to see the Aurora Borealis just happened to also be the night of a full moon. Not good enough.

Oh, wait. Here’s a real winner. Having had a taste of “owning” the stage a couple of times in my life and being washed over with the adulation — yes, I said it, adulation — of several hundred people I wish I had the ambition to write, produce, and perform my own one-woman show.

There’s a full litany of reasons that won’t happen but chief among them is the fact — based on experience — that unless I’m up there simply sharing my experience, strength, and hope I stumble over the words and get nervous and then race through the best parts of whatever story I’ve written. I had that happen over and over after bringing new stories to the open mic down at Bluestockings Bookstore on Rivington. For real. I believe I have been invited to be a featured reader there and several other places seven or eight times. Every time was agony.

So. Impossible.

Next.

Does it count if I’ve already done something but now think I just don’t have the nerve to do it again? I shaved my head completely bald when I was 42 years old and by the end of that year, I’d moved to New York City.

I’m sure it was just a coincidence.

I’ve gotten very comfortable having hair to hide behind again. I don’t know what it would take for me to go full-on, to-the-skin bald again. Am I still this bad-ass?

Bad-ass enough to make one more major all-out move in my life?

Yeah. Not so sure. Wouldn't rule it out, though.

There are many things that are 100% out of the question, completely impossible, never going to happen in a million years that I still wish I could do.

Curiously enough, I’m ok with that.

No one gets to the end of the line without regrets. All the things I shouldn’t have done or said and all the things I did wrong and all the people I hurt and, yes, all the things I didn’t get around to doing for — it has to be said — some really dumb reasons.

But John Cale will never know what he missed out on.

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