KT Tunstall | 2000 Miles (live)

They say you are what you eat in which case I am a bizarre combination of potatoes, peanut butter, chicken cordon bleu, hamburger helper, Cajun meatloaf, Oreos, smoked oysters, extra sharp Cheddar, ham hocks and beans, cornflakes, eggs benedict, bouillabaisse, brie, bratwurst, and whatever else is expedient at any moment I am hungry and have neither the ambition to cook nor time and enthusiasm. I truly do not want to be what I eat. And I have always been suspicious of that whimsical designation of ‘they’. I have met enough of them. I could say that I am what I breathe, but that would be Marlboro’s and whatever pot I can find.. Again, just like eating, breathing is an expediency that I tolerate merely because, when you think about it, it is more a reflex than a choice..

Ralph, when I could still afford to see him and before he retired, would ask me about my dreams. I would never talk about them and that was the cool thing about Ralph that when I would just shake my head and snicker a bit, and call him an asshole, is that he would just smile and never push the issue. I guess he was satisfied that he made me think about them, even if I would not talk about them, but the truth is that I remembered the nightmares more than I remembered any dreams, which I always separated, you know, A dream being where you want to be and a nightmare is where you have been or a place you do not want to go to. Sometimes those sessions with Ralph would piss me off so much that I would immediately head to the store and get a couple of cans of sardines in mustard sauce and a couple of packs of cigarettes, some Ritz crackers and some cheap beer, thus ensuring nightmares. Ralph would piss me off… but he would also stock me up with free Prozac from samples he would get, he knew I was on a tight budget. I think he also knew that Prozac and sardines produce great nightmares and that wrestling with nightmares beats titling at windmills. I miss Ralph

So I cannot be what I eat, that is mostly crap, and I cannot be what I breathe, that being mostly toxic,, and what I dream is nonexistent and the nightmares have become merely friends I drink with, chumps that never buy a round, so I am stuck with what I write and they, there they are again, say that you should write what you know

Lately… that is nothing. No, that is incorrect. It is a bunch of scrawls in tablets and notepads. Sentence fragments…mostly, but occasionally whole paragraphs. But I do have something. That I haven't written.... that slaps me in the face every Christmas. Maybe I will get to it this year. It is a story 27 years old. I've breathed it, ate it, dreamt it.... it is what I know. Maybe tomorrow.