"All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik"

“All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik. Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time. That’s all I ever wanted. Except I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock ‘n’ roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me. And I decided then and there that that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that’s the trouble.”

Janis Joplin

whatever happens...

Life is too damn short and fucked up to go through it silently loving someone and never telling them how you feel. Fuck the consequences, fuck the implications of the actions, to hell with it all… whatever happens as a result is better than the nothingness that is inevitable with silence

- janis joplin

"other than having to talk to someone who doesn't seem to understand what you're saying...

...consequently the words come out little stranger than you meant them.."

There’s a glass on the table, they say it’s gonna ease all my pain,
And there’s a glass on the table, they say it’s gonna ease all my pain
But I drink it down, an’ the next day I feel the same

Gimme whiskey, gimme bourbon, give me gin
Oh, gimme whiskey, give me bourbon, gimme gin
‘Cause it don’t matter what I’m drinkin’, Lord, as long as it drown this sorrow I’m in

"I'm just trying to figure out how I'm gonna live my life now that I don't have a future that I can see... or feel."

"Just because it'll never be the same again, doesn't mean it won't get better." 

– Kris Kristofferson

-Sylvia Plath

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

— Anaïs Nin

“Now if you’re sad and you’re feeling blue
Go out and buy a brand new pair of shoes”

"Maggie M’Gill" - The Doors

“And you can’t feel alone if it’s all you’ve ever known.”

— A Song About an Anglerfish, Hank Green

"The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of his entire self. He searches his soul, inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it….But the soul has to be made monstrous. Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.” 

- Arthur Rimbaud

“I can’t stand the rain against my window bringing back sweet memories. I can’t stand the rain against my window because he’s not here for me..”

"I Can’t Stand the Rain" - Janis Joplin

You, you say one thing, he says another and everybody changes back again!

he exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain

In the beginning of March, Robert got a temp job as an usher for the newly opened Fillmore East. He reported for duty in an orange jumpsuit. He was looking forward to seeing Tim Buckley. But when he came home he was more excited by someone else. "I saw someone who's going to be really big," he said. It was Janis Joplin.

....

We didn't have the money to go to concerts, but before Robert left the Fillmore he got me a pass to see the Doors. I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison. Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. 

He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert.

 "Just Kids" by Patti Smith.

Copyright © 2010 by Patti Smith.

Published  January 19, 2010 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Seems like only yesterday I left my mind behind down in the gypsy cafe with a friend of a friend of mine