The Bee Sting: Protection Spell

Today, as words seem to keep evading me, my heartfelt thanks to the wonderful writers and artists mentioned below, for keeping me halfway sane. A special hats off to Stephen King, my greatest muse; today, his words are delivered by the mighty redhead, Seth Green.

”Richie Tozier is my name, and doing Voices is my game.”

Now how about those Voices:

Stealers Wheel: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am.

Noga Erez: They say love would kill us all – can you shoot while dancing? Can you dance while you shoot? Pity, pity, pity, oh you’re so pretty.

Roxy Music: Love is the drug and I need to score.

Livingston & Malneck & Kahn with Woody Allen: I’m thru with love and all you motherfuckers.

Jenny Wilson: But you go on insult-insulting me.

Lana Del Rey: My man is a bad man, but I can’t deny the way he holds my hand. And he grabs me, he has me by my heart – Likes to watch me in the glass room bathroom Chateau Marmont, slipping on my red dress, putting on my make-up, glass film perfume cognac lilac. Fumes, says it feels like heaven to him. - You are my one true love. You are my one true love.

I will love you till the end of time, I would wait a million years.

Don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry, sometimes love’s not enough when the road gets tough, I don’t know why. Keep making me laugh, let’s go get high, the road is long, we carry on, try to have fun in the meantime. Come and take a walk on the wild side, let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain. You like your girls insane.

Walt Whitman & Lana Del Rey: I sing the body electric.

Cooley & Blackwell: You give me fever - Fever all through the night.

Paul Simon: If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long-lost pal. I can call you Betty, and Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al.

Marvin Gaye: Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you babe.

Arlen & Koehler: Can’t go on, everything I had is gone: stormy weather, since my man and I ain’t together, keeps raining all the time.

Sam Phillips: Now that I’ve worn out, I’ve worn out the world. I’m on my knees with fascination looking through the night. And moon’s never seen me before, but I’m reflecting light.

Stevie Nicks: Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night and wouldn’t you love to love her? Takes to the sky like a bird in flight and who will be her lover? All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by the wind. Would you stay if she promised you heaven?

I turned around and the water was closing all around like a glove, like the love that had finally, finally found me. Then I knew, in a crystalline knowledge of you. Drove me through the mountain, through the crystal-like clear water fountain, drove me like a magnet to the sea.

Every hour of fear I spend my body tries to cry. Living through each empty night a deadly calm inside. - I’d like to leave you with something warm but never have I been a blue calm sea, I have always been a storm.

When we had just met, but were not yet lovers, I was taking one of my walks by the lake. Heavy storm clouds kept hanging low in the sky, my clothes stuck to my body because the air was so still, and I did remember the weather forecast predicting electric storms throughout the county. I was listening to Beyoncé’s self-titled album on my headphones. I had walked a long time already, and the album was rolling its second, or more likely its third, run, when the skies suddenly opened, right around Haunted, and I realized I was right in the center of the electric storm. A thunder roared immediately after lightning, and I remembered how in Poltergeist the kids were trying to count the distance, not getting too far, because the center was right above their house and there was no space in between for the “Mississippi”.

In seconds, I was soaked through, and while for a few moments the rush of water felt wonderful to my hot skin, it didn’t take me long to start jogging, then running, almost blindly, for cover. I had never been caught amidst such a ferocious electric storm, never before in my life, and as I rushed to the near-by bus stop, sat down, and lifted my feet up on the wooden bench, trying to remember what the electric storm rules were, I was genuinely scared for my life. The thunder was everywhere, the lightning blasted here and there, and I was sure, just for a little while, that this was it, this was how I was going to go. I had lived in a place as a young adult where people got struck by a lightning left and right during the summer, and the paper mentioned deaths every now and then when the storms were in season. All those morons who thought they’d try and defy the conditions. That getting struck by lightning was what happened to some other people, or to Giovanni Ribisi on the X-Files. Not to them. Not to me.

Tomorrow’s paper will be about me, I thought, shivering and frantic with fright. Sunday Walker Bested by Electric Storm. Woman Electrocuted Alive – The Police Found Smoking Trainers at Bus Stop. Imminent Storm Becomes the Mother of All Storms: Takes a Death Toll. That kind of thing. The world was dark, almost black. No cars came by, no other stupid a-holes trying to take a stroll in a raging storm. Somewhere between the powerwalking and the sudden wild-boaring of the nature I had apparently cut off Bey, because there were no other sounds but the sploshing and splashing and hammering and drilling of the pouring rain, and the horrible, blinding flashes of lightning, and the deafening thunder, like a hellion loose on the cloud bank.

I sat there, holding my knees, soaked, scared to death, wide-eyed, shrunk into the tiniest version of myself I had ever experienced. But you know what else I was thinking? Besides the horror and the dying and the mayhem?

This is what I thought:

I can’t go now. I’m not ready. If I go now, I’ll never get to tell the guy I may be in love with him. The emotion will die with me. No one will ever know. That is just unacceptable. I can’t go now. I’m not ready. If I go now, I’ll never get to tell the guy I may be in love with him. No one will ever know. That is just unacceptable.

We are all just Love’s bitches, aren’t we?

Obviously, I survived the wrath of the Sunday Storm. And I didn’t learn my lesson, either. It took me two more months to declare my feelings, and by then he had already declared his, many times, to me.

Now, it’s years later, but now too many years. Just enough so, that the Woody Allen Chemical Principle of Getting on Each Other’s Nerves has not only kicked in, but is on in full force. So, while we are not talking, this transcribed soundtrack of what I was listening to today will serve as an equivalent of when I was sitting on the bench at the bus stop, waiting to meet my maker, with nothing but wet trainers and a useless vintage umbrella and a copy of Beyoncé’s album on me, because it was still that time in life when I had my portable CD-player in use.