One of the Living

1) I can't find my phone.

2) My acid reflux has returned, I fear because I am drinking way too much Yerba Mate. (But I love it!)

3) I also love Multilieve (photo at left) an excellent natural pain-reducer, which contains Corydalis Yanhusuo, Chinese Peony and California Poppy.... (Wicked Witch of the West voice: poppies! poppies!) No, I have not been compensated with anything but free samples.

4) Currently reading Maureen Orth's too-fabulous gossip-ridden and scandalmongering book The Importance of Being Famous, which totally rocks the house! How did I ever miss this book when it came out in 2004?

Orth has completely convinced me of the guilt of Michael Jackson AND Woody Allen, sad to say; she is a tireless journalist and investigative reporter (these articles were first published in Vanity Fair). She also writes extensively about Arianna Huffington, claiming she has never totally extricated herself from new-age guru-flake John-Roger. This stuff is fantastic, I can't recommend it enough.

5) One chapter in the aforementioned volume is about Tina Turner, probably the only celebrity interviewed in the entire book who emerges as a wholly-likable person. I started reading and thought, hey (my mind works in strange ways), whatever happened to that song, One of the Living, which I remembered was written by 80s wunderkind Holly Knight. It was used in the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

And so I dug it out of the YouTube vaults and listened to it... damn, I still love that! Although it DOES bring back an unpleasant time in my life: my second divorce, just as I was starting to wonder if I could get along with anybody. During this emotionally-overwrought period, your humble narrator would sometimes attend as many as 2-3 AA meetings a day.

From one addiction to another.

Carrie Fisher once described what one does in detox/recovery: not drugs. And that is what I was doing. I was falling apart, financially destitute, with a child not even two years old and a divorce imminent, but I was ...NOT DOING DRUGS!

One nice person who commented on one of my irate Kennedy posts yesterday said "as a fellow 12-stepper" and I did not have the heart to tell this person that I no longer consider myself one. However, after you've done the TOTAL IMMERSION AA-thing (nods to Baptists in readership), you feel like you are stamped with it for life and it is somehow encoded in your DNA, just like LSD.

So, oddly, this song makes me think of AA meetings, one after the other, an endless balm of talk-talk-talk that soothed and tranquilized me in some way I can't readily or sensibly describe.

Don't wanna fight but sometimes you've got to
You're some soul survivor
There's just one thing you've got to know
You've got ten more thousand miles to go

As a bonus, we are reminded by this video that both Tina and Mel Gibson were looking especially hot back in the 80s.

Enjoy!

~*~

One of the Living - Tina Turner from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)



PS: Tina won a Grammy for this, which I didn't know, or didn't remember.