3 Women who ruined my (love) life

There are 3 women who principally have ruined any chances I have at ever truly being in love. They have set standards so impossibly high, I cannot imagine anyone living up to them. Here they are.

#1) Audrey Hepburn. I know, it's totally an obvious choice, but there is a reason why she is one of the most famous women who ever lived.

No one I know dresses like her, looks like her, talks like her (I, as most Americans, have a thing for foreign accents. I wonder what that says about us... hmm, another time.) I mean, if you've ever seen "Funny Face" "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "Sabrina" you know what I'm talking about it. (Or even "Wait Until Dark" where she's blind and these drug runners are trying to kill her. Dude. Wow. She even dresses hot when she's blind!) She, for me, simply sets the standard of film beauty. No one else will ever come close.

What makes it worse (if women didn't have enough to live up to with those eyes...) is that she was really an amazing person, by all accounts. As a child she ran messages for and danced to raise money for the underground resistance against the Nazi's. What were you doing as a kid? Selling cookies to raise money for some crap charity? Yeah. Not impressive. Fight a power hungry dictator and get back to me.

#2) Joni Mitchell The girl with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair. Joni Mitchell.

According to my friend Tim, she's a bit manish, but I don't care. Have you heard her sing? Have you heard her play? (And in some pictures, she doesn't look manish at all!)

Besides writing the best confessional singer/songwriter album of all time (Blue - if you don't own it, you're life hasn't really started.)

I could just imagine a life married to Joni, little dulcimer playing babies running around singing songs about California and the "Ladies of the Canyon" and apples and cheeses. It might just be too amazing to be true. Any woman who can write the songs that Joni wrote has to be close to being perfect. Check out this lyric from "A Case Of You":

I'm a lonely painter/ I live in a box of paints/ I'm frightened by the devil/ and I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid/ Do you remember that time you told me love is touching souls?/ Surely you touched mine because part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time.

Wow. I mean, damn! I can't imagine a woman writing a song like that to me. (I'll leave whether or not I deserve such a song for a later discussion. And no, I probably don't, but I'd still like one.)

Also, she's a hippie, and nothing's sexier than opposing your government!

#) Sarah Vowell Ok. I know what you're thinking. Her?

Yes. Her. Ok, so she's not exactly attractive in the same was as Ms. Hepburn, and can't exactly pull of the nerdy hot chick, a la Tina Fey.

Ok. Let's face facts. She's not hot, but she's sarcastic, funny, thoughtful and, um, oh yes brilliant. She's the writer of such amazingly great books as Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Take the Cannoli. She also appears on NPR's This American Life.

She gets lost in the shadow of David Sedaris sometimes, but she's there making observations about life, politics and America.

I could see myself going to art galleries and making snide comments with her. Or maybe being involved in some political campaign to wipe out hunger or AIDS or Republicans. I know very few people involved in wiping out any of these things at the moment. I mean, how many girls want to go to place like Abraham Lincoln's assassin's grave? Or how many girls do you know that own pieces of John Wilkes Boothe's hair? Or can tell you about the crazy sex cult Charles Giuteau was in before offing President Garfield?

I mean, what's not hot about that?

I know this essay leaves me open for a verbal or written onslaught of well deserved criticism. Who is this guy to think that he deserves some like Audrey Hepburn? Or with the talent of Joni Mitchell? Or someone as intelligent as Sarah Vowell?

Well, I probably don't. After all, I can't live up to standards set by Gregory Peck, Bob Dylan and William Faulker.

I don't have to live up to them. This is my essay, and that's the beauty of writing.

Dead Flowers

I can't stop listening to the Rolling Stone's song "Dead Flowers" from Sticky Fingers. I just felt the need to share that.

I was listening to Nick Drake the other night. It was a cool night for some reason (espcially for Alabama in September). I was tired and my head was resting against the window of my car. I just turned up his music up as loud as I could and just sat and listened.

There's something strange about listening to a dead man's song sung by the dead man's voice. It makes you feel strangely connected to the past in a way no other artistic medium can. He sat in his room and wrote these lyrics.

Decades later, I'm sitting in my car listening to them. Those same words, chords, melodies.

It was pretty powerful.