Elvis has left the building.

Eddie Money--"Wanna Be A Rock 'N Roll Star" (mp3)

After a baseball player hits a home run, everyone on his team touches him, in hopes of getting some small piece of his mojo and being like him in their next at-bats.

If you don't remember Steve Forbert, a musician who came up in the late 70's, from his hit "Romeo's Tune," let me tell you a little bit of the circumstances of his rise to semi-stardom. Forbert was simultaneously dubbed "the new Dylan" and "the new Springsteen" by various critics. A gifted lyricist, Forbert was capable of the kind of wordplay that Dylan (and Springsteen) had demonstrated. But he also had the youthful exuberance and charisma of the young versions of both, and probably because he couldn't afford a touring band, was traveling around playing his songs with just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica around his neck. Hence, the additional comparison.

One irony: when Forbert's first album came out, it was only three years since Springsteen had graced the covers of both Time and Newsweek, whatever that might mean, since Springsteen had been compared to Dylan when he burst on the scene. Of course, Springsteen had also been dubbed the "future of rock and roll."

It may be no accident that Forbert went electric and white-boy soul as soon as possible. But, dammit, he still had those sax solos, those horns. Just like Bruce.

Last week, a friend of mine sent me video from his Iphone that he had shot at a concert in Colorado. It was proof, he claimed, that he had found "the next Stevie Ray Vaughn." This is a mock-serious search that three of us have been engaged in for many years, my one friend being especially susceptible to the blues player who has complete command of the fretboard and can shred with the same authority as Stevie Ray. This has led him even to go see a 14-year-old kid in concert who was rumored to have Vaughn's chops. I burned him a CD this summer by a woman whom I dubbed, again with some humor, "the next British female Stevie Ray Vaughn."

It took my friend's wife, no particular aficionado of music, to point out that, wait a second, this kid may be fast and technically-skilled, but he wasn't the next anything. He didn't have any soul. He was just a kid. Only Ralph Macchio could be a bluesman at that age. My friend conceded that fact, in fact, has conceded it over and over during the search, but he remains more serious about his search than the rest of us.

Through a variety of phone texts that we exchanged, he and I had this exchange:

ME: I think the world only needs one.
HIM: One what?
ME: One Stevie Ray Vaughn.
HIM: We're just looking for a #2. Wouldn't there ever be another Boss?
ME: I hope not.

Just for the record, I'm not looking for the next Woody Guthrie, the next Elvis, the next Dylan, the next Janis Joplin, the next Jimi Hendrix, the next Springsteen, the next Jerry Garcia or anyone else. I don't need the new Beatles or the reconstituted Lynryd Skynyrd. I'm not interested in the reunion of Buffalo Springfield or the "half-Who." I don't care who's getting back together, who still has one original member and calls themselves the Beach Boys. I saw the Beach Boys in 1974. It was a reunion tour then. I'm not kidding.

I don't seek a president who is the reincarnation of JFK; I'm certainly not pining for the next Ronald Reagan. As I stated in a post earlier this week, I don't think that J.D. Salinger is the next J.D. Salinger. I don't think that there is another The Catcher In The Rye sitting there among his unpublished writing.

Elvis, my friends, has left the building. We shall not see his like again. The circumstances which allowed him to emerge, to create himself, to destroy himself, no longer exist, at least not in the same ways. We do not need the "new" or the "next" of anyone. But we like to enjoy the possibility that it could happen.

I think we're probably after two things here. The first is that we can't help but to enjoy familiarity, and we'd like to extend that comfort as long as possible. If Radiohead would put out variations of The Bends for the rest of their career, or if some unknown band would pick up that mantle, some of us would be very satisfied. While we might criticize R.E.M. for having too many songs that sound the same, the reality is that if we like that sound, we aren't going to complain too much.

The other thing we're after, is our own pasts, or pasts that existed before us. If only the Beatles could have reunited, then maybe we could also recapture a bit of ourselves as we were when they were around. Or what we heard it was like, because we were too young. Or, next best thing, if "the new Beatles" come along, then we can bask in that phenomenon. As it happens. Ourselves.

But, you know, nostalgia ultimately equals sadness. Much as we might want to repeat the past, eventually we realize that those bits of the past that we are able to recapture make us sad. Admittedly, it can be a kind of sweet sadness. What would really be sad, though, is if there were no record of our musical pasts. Luckily, we have ample Elvis, Beatles, Dead, Stevie Ray and the rest to nourish us whenever we need it, which allows us to move forward to the new. At least it should.

For better or for worse, Steve Forbert never became the next anything. He's still, 33 years down the road, the current Steve Forbert. And hasn't played any casinos or cruise ships that I know of.

Unique Garden Planters and Displays

Good morning!!

I've got garden planters on the brain today, mainly because I've neglected to plant any of the empty ones I have sitting at home in the last two weekends! Grrrr, shame on me! Soooo I've distracted myself from the guilt by putting together this post with lots of funky, eclectic, creative garden planters to inspire you (and me too for that matter)!  Hehe!  Oh, and a quick note on the image above - isn't that awesome!?  It's certainly not practical or easy to replicate but it's great to look at and can spur a lot of creative ideas about re-purposing objects into garden planters! There are lots of unique ways to display plants in this post and I'm sure you'll be inspired to think outside the box the next time you plan a gardening project!

Other posts you may like:
Garden Inspiration Part I
Garden Inspiration Part II
Stoneface Creations Garden Planters
Garden Update
Outdoor Dining & Parties Part I
Outdoor Dining & Parties Part II
Dreamy Outdoor Spaces Part I
Dreamy Outdoor Spaces Part II
Sunrooms, Bungalows and Patios Oh Sigh!




I love this, what a gorgeous design element for people to admire as they walk up these steps! I wonder where in the world this is, hmmm.



Awesome planter!

I am really loving these chairs turned planters! What a great item for porch decor!

Painted car tires! Wow, what a great way to reuse non-biodegradable waste by incorporating it into your garden as a planter... the paint does wonders!

Photo (c) Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features

I've wanted to make one of these adorable little mini garden planters for a long time! As you can see it entails the use of rocks, one (or more) miniature garden elements such and, most importantly, plants to create the look of a miniature garden that will thrive over time and be a great point of interest in any indoor or outdoor setting! Of course, in my version there will be many succulents and perhaps a cactus or two....... :)

A mini garden cottage, how sweeeeeet!

Isn't this cool?  A moss covered planter... check out The Weekend Gardener for step-by-step instructions on how to make your own and many other interesting do-it-yourself garden projects!

I saw this cute idea a while back and I've wanted to make my own colander planter ever since! My mom has a small copper colander in her backyard that's home to Echeveria succulents and it is doing very well! Try it... experiment with colanders from Goodwill or Salvation Army and get creative with a bold coat of spray paint... I like turquoise, red or yellow!

I wish this incredible courtyard in Cordoba, Spain full of fuchsia bougainvillea and wall mounted cobalt blue garden pots was mine! How dreamy, I would never leave!......

(All images sourced via Google images, Pinterest, Sunset Magazine, or where otherwise noted in the image file name.)

It Happens.

Pillar of Davidson - Live (mp3)
Message In a Bottle (cover) - 30 Seconds to Mars (mp3)

The rough estimate is something like this: One in every six men were sexually abused as children.

For some, the abuse is an ongoing endless nightmare from a trusted mentor, loved one, relative. For others, it is a lightning flash nightmare that happens so briefly in the history of their lives that it’s almost easier to convince yourself it never happened.

The subject has become slightly less verboten of late.

The scandal of the Catholic church started to open this door. Lately, a handful of celebrities have emerged to admit their own history of victimization. Sugar Ray Leonard, Tyler Perry, CNN anchor Don Lemon -- all African-American, but more of a coincidence than anything of statistical relevance -- have all come out recently to share their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of another older man.

Tyler Perry joined 199 other men who stood together on an episode of Oprah last fall in the hopes of making it clear that the problem is all too frequent and too easily swept under rugs.

I don’t remember how old I was when I finally told my mother I’d been sexually abused. Maybe 28. Maybe 30. I think I’d already become a father. We were in a hospital cafeteria, I think waiting for my father in ICU. But I couldn’t tell you the year or the season.

What I do recall was the feeling in my body. That this horrible volcano of truth was about to come out of me and rock her world in ways that would be altogether different from the way it rocked my own.

I’d told probably a dozen people by that point, including my wife only a few months into our relationship, but telling my mom was the toughest of all, and there wasn’t a close second.

The experience of being sexually abused is not a story anyone is excited to tell to anyone -- much less a parent who had no way of knowing, no way of preventing, no way of protecting. It’s a story that was bound to leave my mother conflicted with haunting thoughts of her own and, therefore, a story that for the longest time I thought best never to share.

I was hardly a defenseless toddler when it happened. I was 16. But in matters of sex and intimacy, I might as well have been 9, because I was completely inexperienced and naive beyond belief.

It happened at a summer church camp where I was a first-time counselor. I was as much an odd bird then as now, but far less comfortable in my skin. The other counselors, some of whom were classmates of mine, all came from two other churches in town. They were mostly the cool and attractive kids, and I was just me, desperate to fit in, over-eager to please, eager to be some flashlight device shining The Light of Jesus on kids.

Translation: I was easy pickins.

The most charismatic man at camp took me under his wing. His name was David, and everyone thought he was this amazing mixture of cool and warm. He carried himself with such ease and grace, yet he also was able to make you feel like he genuinely cared about every person who crossed his path. The first few times we spoke, it was daylight. They were Jesus talks. About my faith and my life. And we’d be walking down a sidewalk, passing all these kids, and all of them treated David like a rock star.

Then one night he asked me to walk the grounds with him after lights out, when the counselors were a little more free, and we talked more. I felt special that he’d singled me out for this honor. I remember him sitting on a stairwell. It was on the outside of a building, but covered and lighted, and I stood leaning back with my arm extended and hand on the rail, swaying back and forth while we talked about the miseries of teenage-dom.

I remember him concluding our talk by hugging me. I remember thinking of that hug over the years, realizing that I had, with the allowance of a simple hug, invited him like some vampire into some other realm of my existence.

All the counselors slept in a single room, on sleeping bags on the floor. And this is the part that is the most surreal. We got back from that walk, and everyone was asleep, and I went to my sleeping bag. I was on the verge of sleep when he crawled next to me. Was it an hour? Twenty minutes? Half the night? I have no idea. I only know we were in a very dark room with perhaps eight, 10 other teenagers sleeping all around me.

Did any of them wake up? Did they just not say anything? Why didn’t I scream? Why didn’t I fight? Did it go on all night, or just a few hours? How many Bible verses could I recite from memory, over and over, in the hopes of pretending I was somewhere else, pretending this wasn’t happening?

The next morning was a fog, as were the mornings after that. The rest of camp became two sharply-divided stories. The first story was daylight, a time when I zombie-walked past people, trying to figure out what was happening while not giving away my fears, my experiences, my attempts to somehow connect all of it to my faith. In the daylight, there were several days when I truly thought it might not have happened, that it might actually be some weird recurring dream. And I was freaked out by how easily I could separate what was happening to me from the daily act of living.

Every day, this man would stand up in front of hundreds of children and talk about the love of Jesus, and his words held sway. He was, I truly believed, girding the faith of a lot of kids, possibly even getting them to rededicating themselves to their faith. Surely he wasn’t doing these things to me. Surely it was a dream.

Night, however, was a time of paralytic fear, where I felt almost like a prisoner incapable of realizing the only bars and restraints were ones I permitted, were ones in my own innocent and frightened mind. I’m pretty sure it happened four nights. Maybe three. Maybe five.

The fact that I can’t remember details is, oddly, what makes me all the more accepting of the reality. If I remembered everything, I’d somehow worry that I’d crafted the entire tale.

The story has an oddly almost-happy ending.

The last day of camp, as everyone was packing and preparing to return home, David dragged me away to a place I suspect he had scouted and picked for just this moment. David asked if he could drive me home, and we could stay here and help clean up the camp before heading back. It was clear what he was asking, and I remember my entire body almost convulsing with fear.

Although I had allowed it to go on for several nights, somehow in this instant I found the courage to say no, to push him away, to find some deep and intense resolution to stand ground. Had David gotten truly violent, I would not have succeeded in walking away that day, but he didn’t, because he was ultimately a coward. And I managed to get this sense that I'd ended the experience with some miniscule sense of control and power.

I’m not writing this pushing for a book deal, nor am I writing it to create in my friends or acquaintances who read BOTG a sense of awkwardness or guilt. Most of the folks who read this and know me have known me long enough now to, I think, get beyond that kind of reaction, at least eventually.

I’m writing this because a lot of semi-famous and brave people have recently added their names to the long list of men who were, at some point in their lives, taken advantage of. I’m writing this because surely for every man who carries these experiences with him into adulthood, at least two women can match him.

In college, I told four female friends about my abuse, and three of the four had been raped or molested, and they told me their stories in return, and I remember feeling so humbled by their experience.

A hundred million bottles, lost upon the shore...
A hundred million castaways, looking for a home...

I just finished the disturbing book ROOM this week. At one point in the book (SPOILER ALERT) the abducted woman at the book’s center is being interviewed on national television, and she says: “I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible.”

This was precisely the feeling (except my experience was by comparison a drop in the wasabi bucket). You don’t want people thinking you feel special or unique in your suffering. You don’t want sympathy when a tsunami can wipe out entire areas of Japan.

Over the years, I’ve tried providing my information to key people in the hopes this man could be tracked down. I’ve never worried about wanting punishment for his crimes against me, but I occasionally still worry about others he might have abused because I didn’t step up and report or accuse. My Google searches and my reports to several web sites and my sharing information with several people in law enforcement led almost nowhere. Too little, too late, too bad, so sad.

Oh yeah, and David was black. Which added, you know, a whole ‘nother layer of confusion and challenge to the experience.

Anyway, I can’t stop him. He could be arrested or dead by now for all I know, or he could still be working in a religious setting with children, still seeking out the vulnerable and lost sheep.

But at least I can write out some of the basics. At least I can add my name to the long and disturbing list of men who carry this with them. At least I can, hopefully, serve as an example to others who go through it that you can lead a fairly normal adult life, that it’s possible to heal and recover and carry on.

Sure, you have moments when it’s there. Certain things trigger the experience in one way or another. For example, everytime I hear “Pillar of Davidson,” for some reason I think back on it, even though the song wasn’t out until I was in college.

Funny how you can spend two months trying to write this, and you can take 1,700 words, and you still can’t get it organized, you still can’t get it all to come together. Maybe because all of that would be a great excuse to continue delaying the act of getting it out there.

So I’m not delaying anymore.

I was sexually molested as a teenager. I survived. The experience and the memory is as messy and disorganized as this attempt at explaining it.

But it happened. And it happens every day to boys all over this country, all over the world. And we really ought to start figuring out a way to make it less shameful for the victims to come out and admit it, even if I don’t have the first clue where to start on doing that.

Garden Inspiration Part II

Good Morning!

As I sit here sipping my coffee and pondering new blog post ideas I long to be home under the covers vegetating in front of the tv, haha! How about you? This weekend was relaxing, though not nearly long enough... I have some exciting posts planned for this week, in the meantime enjoy some more garden inspiration!

Other posts you may like:
Garden Inspiration Part I
Stoneface Creations Garden Planters
Garden Update
Outdoor Dining & Parties Part I
Outdoor Dining & Parties Part II
Dreamy Outdoor Spaces Part I
Dreamy Outdoor Spaces Part II
Sunrooms, Bungalows and Patios Oh Sigh!

Aren't these tree canopies beautiful?  What an amazing art - manipulating the tree branches so that they grow intertwined.... fantastic!

This is so cool!!!  What an amazing idea and gorgeous piece of art/point of interest for any garden, a garden bed - literally! 

This rose bush above is sooooo pretty!  ...Oh, and the owl garden topiary art below is AWESOME!  I want one in my yard!!!

(All images sourced via Google images, Pinterest or where otherwise noted in the image file name.)