Happy Birthday Frances!

And the wind cries Mary ...

The following experience was written one night
while contemplating the meaning of Jimi Hendrix's song,
The Wind Cries Mary.
In this case, life imitated art right before my eyes.

The song is amazing. Somehow it's about falling out of love and then realizing you have a whole new frightful world to set foot in. It's about breaking down a wall and encountering a new prison to escape from. There is a sense of hesitation, a nagging tear in the heart like there's nothing so scary as facing this room alone.

"Don't be silly " the bird chirps in a muffled voice outside my window. "We seek order just as much as we don't . . . .

. . . I just took a step away from the computer and 25 minutes or so has elapsed. There was a girl and a guy arguing outside my window and I tuned in at the exact moment when she was being pulled by her hair, screaming on the sidewalk floor. I'll remind you it's almost 2am!

She looked like the scene from fight club when the narrator is being pulled by the hair around a parking garage and it is being captured, scene by scene, on security cameras. Yet, there's no one around but one man in his boxers--vulnerable and deranged--and a camera. The pulling and the struggling between the two (between the one) seems so real. Their torture is self-inflicted just as much as it is conceived outside of themselves.

(click here and find the scene at about 1:44 minutes into the clip)

And that's what these two misfits were (one in the same, of the same flesh). Now I can say that they were misfits because I too have been a misfit once or twice in my life. And I feel a little guilty for describing this duo's painful romp around the small corner of a city block for 25-minutes-or-so in the early part of the morning, a simple taste of comedy, sexual frustration, drama, childhood pain erupting through adult veins, weakness, and strength.

But c'mon it was a scene. A familiar scene of dysfunction that rips through most people's lives. It was like watching TV. Like watching a movie through and through. They each played familiar roles, and they played them well.

Something in this duo's cry, which they each decided to make public, was akin to the pain we've all felt as abuser's and also as victims. Eventually, after much back and forth, hollering and begging, they gathered up the pieces of the broken night. Before they started for home, they shared an embrace, some tender kisses, sobs, and muffled "i love you's".

And when this climactic romantic point ended, and it ended just as quickly as it came, she followed his stagger about 20 feet behind him and his little weanie dog on its leash. Something tells me that one day, the wind will cry.

Jimi Hendrix
The Wind Cries Mary:

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footsteps dressed in red.
And the wind whispers Mary.

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterdays life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife.
And the wind, it cries mary.

The traffic lights, they turn, uh, blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags down stream
cause the life that lived is,
is dead.
And the wind screams Mary.

Uh-will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last.
And the wind cries Mary.

(Original post created on 2/29/08).