Broken trucks and broken hearts

[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here's another post in her: Bag Lady's Guide to What's Left of the Planet...]

By Carmen Delzell

This time alone living in the luxury of Martha’s house has helped me relax enough to see myself and my circumstances a little more clearly.

I’m sick of Mexico. Sick of living in fear, of poverty, of the (mostly) assholes I know there and most of all sick of loneliness.

So tonight I’ve decided to head out into the night with my digital recorder and start doing a story on loneliness. You know, loneliness is probably the hardest thing to admit and for sure the hardest thing to bear.

I was inspired last weekend by a singer songwriter named Steve, who is sadly, dead.

#1 Bar Noise at a place called Buttons.

So here I am again alone in a bar waiting for this Dave Millsap to come on stage and sing the songs of Steve Bruton whose life was loosely depicted in Crazy Heart, the movie with Jeff Bridges.

I actually cried when I saw his beat up old truck drive down one of these breath-taking New Mexico highways because God Damn It that’s me driving up from the Matehuala Desert towards Saltillo, Coahuila in my beat-up Jeep and whatever it is that’s sent me down those lonely Mexican and New Mexican roads, I’m pretty sure it has something to do with movies like this.

The difference is that I’m a woman and don’t play the guitar or paint or anything except live and write about being alienated and sad and, yes, lonely. More…

Sleep Food Gas

[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here's another post in her: Bag Lady's Guide to What's Left of the Planet...]

By Carmen Delzell

Just imagine, if you can being an old (and you know I don’t feel all that old) woman with less than a hundred dollars to her name driving north on Hwy 57 between San Luis Potosi and Matehuala as the sun goes down.

A motel costs 400 pesos. So does a tank of gas.

Children stand by the side of the road holding out live rattle snakes for sale or a wild eagle dangled by its feet.

It’s getting dark.

The empty light comes on the dash board. There are no gas stations anywhere.

Food is out of the question till you get to the border; and when you do get there it’ll be another six hours to your friend’s house where you can sleep for a couple of nights.

Moving Away

[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here's another post in her: Bag Lady's Guide to What's Left of the Planet...]

By Carmen Delzell (Written in 1988 just before I became homeless.)

I never intended to live the way I have.

I thought—in that hazy hopeful time right after graduation and before my foolish marriage that I could be a bohemian, a colorful avant-garde part of the late 1960s and then (I’m not sure when I thought it would actually be) I expected to have a house, go to graduate school and eventually teach at some small liberal arts college somewhere.

I guess I got a lot of these notions from biographies and magazine articles that fell into my hands from my mother’s casual (and probably mundane) choice of reading material.

She herself had fancied a similar life and she too found the shock of turning middle aged without it too much to bear.

She died.

I’m hoping I won’t have to.

Certainly not yet and hopefully not ever. More…

HV017- No Place Like Home

Hearing Voices from NPR®
017 No Place Like Home: Shifts in Time and Towns
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-07-08 (Originally: 2008-06-25)

“No Place Like Home” (52:00 mp3):

Play audio:

The places we live and the people who live there; a desert, a city, two small towns, and another country:

Scott Carrier has a cultural history of the Great Salt Lake’s “West Desert,” a land of polygymists, bombing ranges, and toxic waste incinerators. There’s chlorine gas in the air, anthrax stored underground, and people who call the place home.

Sarah Vowell’s childhood move from rural Oklahoma to small-town Montana was, for her, a change from the middle ages to a modern metropolis.

And two Stories from the Heart of the Land: NYC native Natalie Edwards hates grass, bugs, dirt, and trees, but attempts a walk thru Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; and Carmen Delzell tells why she moved to and has stayed in Mexico.

HV002- Visiting Hours

Hearing Voices from NPR®:
002 Visiting Hours— In Hospital
Host— Ceil Muller of KQED Public Radio
Airs week of— 2009-03-11 (Originally: 2008-03-12)

Visiting Hours (52:00 mp3):

Play audio:

“The Kiss and the Dying” is host Ceil Muller’s (of KQED) etiquette list for those who may be dying, and for the soon-to-be survivors.

“Fire and Ice Cream” is from Brent Runyan’s book “The Burn Journals,” and Jay Allison’s Life Stories radio series. Brent’s nurse in the burn unit asks the 14-year-old out for ice cream… and a date?

In “Our Father” Brian Brophy documents his dad’s passing, with recordings of his family, the chaplain, the hospital and hospice staff, and the wake.

Carmen Delzell helps heal her “Grandmother’s Hip.”

And Nancy Updike watches patients pass the time with TV in “Channeling Health.”

Music by Pete Fountain, Brave Old World, Peter Ostroushko, Jimmy Smith, and Rotterdam Ska Jazz Foundation.

Mother Theresa’s House

[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here's the first of what we hope will be a series of posts & pix she's calling the Bag Lady's Guide to What's Left of the Planet. This one's from India…]

Today I took my regular rickshaw to Mother Theresa’s house to see if there was anything I could do to help or just see the poorest of the poor. I was expecting to be horrified by all the suffering but it wasn’t really as bad as I had expected. When I say it wasn’t as bad I mean it wasn’t as bad as the miserable beggars I see everyday on the streets of Delhi and Jaipur. At least at Mother Theresa the people I sat with were clean, comfortable and most of all smiling.

Years ago when I was at Mother Theresa in Calcutta a traveler girl told me that the ladies loved to be touched and hugged and patted. So I did that and I sang to them and I started to dance my version of Bollywood style  movements waving my arms and undulating my hips. They were delighted… all of them old ladies or very brain damaged young women. More…

Ritual Magic

This weeks HV Podcast— Sampling the “Ritual Magic” of a voodoo Santera, soaks in a spirit bath, the producer prays for sex, adventure, and central heat. By producer Carmen Delzell, “Ritual Magic” (4:39 mp3):

Play audio:

HV040- Spirit World

HV040- Spirit World
Hearing Voices from NPR®:
040 Spirit World— Angels on the Line
Host— Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airdates— 12/03/2008 – 12/10/2008

Spirit World (53:00 mp3):

Play audio:

Paranormal sound-portraits (photo: © Rachael Anne Ryals):

A preacher/prank-caller conjures “Alice of the Spirits” (6:07 & 8:07).

Carmen Delzell samples the “Ritual Magic” (4:09) of a voodoo Santera, soaks in a spirit bath; she prays for sex, adventure, and central heat.

Ceil Muller visits the town of “Cassadega” (2:16) Florida, known as “The Psychic Center of the World.”

And host Larry Massett spends “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (25:04).