Mashup

My Indie 500 puzzle was a mashup.  Thematically, it was a musical mashup.  The construction process itself was an evolving mashup.  I'd have never arrived at the final concept without working through a sequence of alternative ideas, trying grids that wouldn't work with those other ideas, and then, weeks into this process, coming to an aha moment about what the puzzle was trying to be.  So it was many weeks in the making, if you count all the false starts and unyielding territories explored. 

At the same time, it wasn't everything it wanted to be in the end, just close enough to call done, like most organic creations involving real labor.  Eventually you must deliver because of the "deadline," just as every infant must be birthed or not.  There is no keeping your living, this-close-to-breathing baby in the birth canal when you've gotten that far, though you may find yourself delivering a beautiful monster or an ugly angel.

Life has a deadline.  Comes a time when you've got to publish (who and what you are) and/or perish.  This is more obvious to me at age 52 than it was at 25. 

As synchronicity would have it, I was tirelessly pacing on the elliptical machine Saturday, feeling mashed up, when Renee Marie's sublime "Suzanne/Bolero" mashup started playing on my iPod.

There was this part:

... and just when you mean to tell her

that you have no love to give her

she puts you on her wavelength

and lets the river answer

that you've always been her lover...

I'd like to have that power in selective cases, but I don't like or want to be Suzanne.  I mean, as Leonard Cohen would have it, there are heroes in the seaweed and children in the morning leaning out for love, and this seductive woman can't put down her mirror?  That's one man-made archetype there, the vain enchantress with no maternal instinct.  A woman would not write this song, though the poetry is excellent.

I learned the song when I was ten and still know it by heart.