April 29, 2015

"All the time it felt like I was being eaten alive by parasites living under my skin. I couldn't leave my house for several years."

"Sometimes it got so bad I couldn't walk and I'd have to crawl across the floor. My legs would cramp up, just like I was having a polio spasm."

That's from Joni Mitchell's memoir, quoted in a new Daily Mail piece about how Joni Mitchell is not in a coma. She's "alert" and "responsive" we're told.

I was moved to post on this topic after my dear husband responded to the previous post — "Since Hillary never gave us 'closure' by braining the big boy with a frying pan..." — with: "the bed's too big/the frying pan's too wide." For all I know he responded to the post before that — "Scott Walker enters the Republican presidential race with far stronger ties to the party’s biggest fund-raisers..." — with: "He's a walker in the rain/He's a dancer in the dark." And perhaps some earlier post about the same-sex marriage arguments with: "We don't need no piece of paper/From the city hall/Keeping us tied and true/My old man/Keeping away my blues...."

We're thinking about Joni and wishing her well.

76 comments:

Bob Ellison said...

Joni Mitchell is one of the greatest singer/songwriters North America has produced. "That Song About the Midway".

I hope she gets better.

tim in vermont said...

Best of luck to Joni.

I did learn about a new disease today:

Morgellons is not recognized as a unique disorder, and currently has no list of symptoms or differential diagnosis that is generally accepted by the medical community. People usually self-diagnose based on media reports and information from the Internet

Carol said...

Wow, great cheekbones, still.

Anonymous said...

Since you brought up My Old Man, 'Blue' is my favorite album by Joni Mitchell. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Etienne said...

She was way too poetic for me. At the time I was more in tune with Buck Owens, and normal chord progressions.

But good health is at the top of my list of wants.

Widmerpool said...

Yes - Blue - the best.

Virgil Hilts said...

I would never disagree with Bob Ellison on anything relating to music and I have and like all of Joni's earlier albums, but I am curious -- what are the best 5 songs she did after 1977?

Widmerpool said...

A Case of You

traditionalguy said...

And Morgellons seems to follow intense marijuana addiction. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Greg Hlatky said...

Morgellon's - like irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivity and other syndromes of unknown origin or cause - is overwhelming reported by women.

rhhardin said...

Mitchell was one of the three folk singers that I liked because they sang without much vibrato, though in third place behind Joan Baez and Judy Collins.

Lyle Sanford, RMT said...

fear is like a wilderland,
stepping stones or sinking sands

Bob Ellison said...

Virgil Hilts, point taken. But I'd put the break-point at 1976.

johnnymcguirk said...

Chelsea Clinton was named after a Joni Mitchell song.

Bob Ellison said...

Yes, jhonnymcguirk, but Hillary and Bill said Chelsea was named after a Judy Collins song (Collins covered "Chelsea Morning".

Then there's this derivation.

And of course Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Everest several years after Hillary Rodham was born.

Bill was named after the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon, "I'm Just a Bill".

Richard Lawrence Cohen said...

There's a 1966 video from the Canadian TV show, "Let's Sing Out," of J.M. singing "Urge for Going," and standing next to her is Jimmy Driftwood, an old-style folksinger in a cowboy hat and horn-rimmed glasses, and he's staring in such shock you can read his mind: "Oh, shit, it's over for guys like me."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLu2-gG68S0

There's an earlier video from the same show, where she's still Joan Robertson.

Roughcoat said...

Morgellon's isn't real.

Mitchell is batshit squirrels-in-the attic nuts.

And not in a pleasant or interesting way, either.

Roughcoat said...

Her music and her voice have have the same effect as a slow suck on an ether mask.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...


Of course, if Joni's political views became manifest and actualized everywhere, the world would regress toward the Dark Ages.

So there's that to consider, too, before we give her sainthood.

tim in vermont said...

At the time I was more in tune with Buck Owens, and normal chord progressions

Yeah, Joni tuned her guitar to an open tuning, meaning that you could play a bar chord just by laying your finger across all the strings at a single fret then she developed her other chords from that. It was kind of hard to play like Buck Owens, who admitted he was more of a grinner than a picker, from that tuning.

tim in vermont said...

I think mental illness tends to gravitate around media trends, one era it's all alien abductions, another era its Allah has called me to jihad, or "chemtrails," don't get my cleaning lady started... or "Morgellons." You have to admit it's a great name for a fictional disease, any writer would have been proud to have come up with it.

YoungHegelian said...

@tim,

I think mental illness tends to gravitate around media trends

Yes, very much so. We don't have women going into "hysterics" like they did in Freud's Vienna. Also, male sexual fetishes are much the same, with a notable example being that men in Freud's time would collect women's handkerchiefs as fetishistic articles, like men do now with shoes or panties.

Fritz said...

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Of course, if Joni's political views became manifest and actualized everywhere, the world would regress toward the Dark Ages.

So there's that to consider, too, before we give her sainthood.


True for most saints as well.

Anonymous said...

We don't have women going into "hysterics" like they did in Freud's Vienna.

**********

No. Now we just call it "feminism".

buwaya said...

Maybe I risk sounding like Laslo, but -
I suspect that at some point many of these psychosomatic illnesses may be cured by something as simple as a gut bacteria transplant.
I suspect some such reason for the epidemic of mania we are seeing here and now, among wealthy women and girls, which is not evident in the third world. Similarly the epidemic of deadly allergies.
Its either demons and the coming apocalypse, or some physical reason, and I think physical is more likely.

Quaestor said...

Bob Ellison wrote: Hillary and Bill said Chelsea was named after a Judy Collins song... "Chelsea Morning".

Chelsea, eh? Seems like a Clinton family tradition is shaping up.I wonder if Chelsea will name her firstborn Cheapside.

YoungHegelian said...

@buwaya,

Its either demons and the coming apocalypse, or some physical reason, and I think physical is more likely.

You're perfectly welcome to bet all your chips on "physical", if you'd like. If I were you, however, I'd save some chips to put on "demons and the coming apocalypse" just as a hedge.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Fritz said...
True for most saints as well.


All, probably

David said...

Who knows if the illness is "real."

It's real to her, that's for sure.

tim in vermont said...

which is not evident in the third world.

When you can't afford nonsense, you don't get nonsense.

David said...

In other (and to my mind more important) news . . .

Calvin Peete has died.

RIP, Diamond Man.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

And from 'The Lyrics of Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame'


Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

sinz52 said...

buwaya sez: "I suspect some such reason for the epidemic of mania we are seeing here and now, among wealthy women and girls, which is not evident in the third world. "

Of course it's in the third world. Only there, the women believe they're possessed by demons or that someone put a spell on them.

There was a case on the TV show "Untold Stories of the ER" where an African woman in terrible pain was convinced that someone had put a spell on her.

ER medicine is a practical business. If they need to, they get a consult. In this case, they got a consult--from a shaman.

http://tinyurl.com/m7mmc2n

Carol said...

irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivity and other syndromes of unknown origin or cause

Sjogren's, Overactive Bladder, Restless Leg, etc. You want a diagnosis, you got it. Because there's a med for that!

jr565 said...

Did she ever write a song about Morgellons?

johnnymcguirk said...

Ha ha. Went to link Bob Ellison provided at 3:16 which quotes Chelsea saying she was really named after a Leonard Cohen song which Bill liked. It was supposedly written about Janis Joplin and the opening stanza is:
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were talking so brave and so sweet,
Giving me head on the unmade bed,
While the limousines wait in the street

jr565 said...

My mom loves Joni Mitchell. I'm only really partial to one album, Blue. But I'll admit, its a really good record.

madAsHell said...

And Morgellons seems to follow intense marijuana addiction. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Keith Richard's book says that cocaine will do just about the same thing. Apparently, this was the demise of the Mama's and the Papa's John Phillips. Coke bugs!!

YoungHegelian said...

At the risk of being a downer, when someone has been smoking since age nine & is now seventy-one, I can only imagine that the rent is now coming due in a big way.

Maybe she's one of the lucky ones who smokes like a chimney until she's 92 & dies from something else, but the odds are really against that.

Quaestor said...

It's too bad for Joni Mitchell and thousands of others that Ekbom's syndrome isn't as well-known as "Morgellons disease".

Unfortunately we do not see with our eyes, nor do we hear with our ears, nor taste with our tongues. Whatever we perceive we perceive with our brains, so if the brain is fucked up the perceptions are fucked up as well. Trying to talk an hysteria suffer out of her delusions is worse than useless. In the case of "Morgellons" severe paranoia is often complicating factor. It's gotten so bad that now the "Morgellons victims" have become a part of the conspiracy community, along with the chem-trail freaks, the abductees, the Area 51 lurkers, the 911 truthers, and dozens of other 'zoids and zombies. What Joni Mitchell needs isn't sympathy, sympathy only makes things worse, what she needs large regular doses of risperidone and possibly a straight jacket.

Oprah Winfrey will have much to answer for if there's ever a Judgement Day, not only did she introduce the Worst President Evah to the national stage, she's the Typhoid Mary of Mogellons disease.

Quaestor said...

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!


A million dead every year from malaria and tens of millions debilitated. Maybe all that pruritus is sublimated guilt.

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bobber Fleck said...

There are songs that periodically rattle around in my head for a day or two. Thanks to this thread "Help me" will be with me for a few days. That is a good thing...

Last week it was the Moody Blues "The story in your eyes" and Judy Collins "Someday soon".

Be said...

Back at the music store, they employed an elderly man who was a paranoid schizophrenic, and who walked with the inimitable "Thorazine Shuffle."

Apparently, he was a Yalie, specialized in Composition, and, from what I'd heard, anyway, a pretty damned virtuosic keyboardist.

He also had perfect pitch, so they'd let him tune the autoharps up in the instrument department, from time to time.

Anyway: Mr. Gil made an impression. When, one Holiday Meal over catered Chinese, he mentioned casually that Joni Mitchell had the Purest Voice he ever heard, I listened.

(Is "Court and Spark" my favorite? Or "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter?")

eddie willers said...

I view Blue, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Hejira as I do Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Mature, Masterpiece, Culmination.

Quaestor said...

Made in Wisconsin!

I used to have a big electric horse clipper made in Racine. I wonder if they changed over to hair clippers after the adult bookstore business took over the vibrator trade?

Roughcoat said...

Bobber Fleck,

Turn in your Man Card. Now.

cassandra lite said...

I'm stuck on, "All romantics meet the same fate someday/cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café."

She wrote that about the time she shed her romanticism.

cassandra lite said...

Widmerpool said...

"A Case of You"

In 1973, living in Paris as a young man, hoping to emulate Hemingway, I met a beautiful young woman with an even more beautiful voice. I accompanied her on guitar in the streets and subway, then nightclubs, first in Paris, then across the continent. What a time. In any event, of our 30-song repertoire, the one that *always* either brought down the house or got paper money thrown into the guitar case was "Case of You."

To this day I can't hear without thinking of that Moveable Feast.

Bad Lieutenant said...

Bu 4:38

True, if they were forced to eat a spoonful of shit like the Khmer Rouge did their victims (or was that Mao's idea), their first world problems would doubtless melt away.

Michael K said...

There is some evidence that it is real and is tick borne like Lyme Disease, which was also called psychosomatic at first.

The comment about gut bacteria is more serious than the commenter may have realized.

Ken B said...

Morgellons isn't real. It's deluded people who scratch obsessively.

Joni M is Canadian, not American. Alas.

Lewis Wetzel said...

I've heard that at least some morgellon's victims engage in a practice known as "matchboxing." They feel a need to show people that they aren't nuts, so they will collect little bits of plastic that they swear they dug out of their skin and keep them in a box (hence the term "matchboxing").
Sometimes the collection is pitiable and just convinces people they are mad. Tufts of fiber from clothing, pocket lint, bits of plastic toys, guitar picks . . .

Emil Blatz said...

Swank digs in Bel Air.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Per the Great MacGruber, the players have stayed the same even as the game has changed.

Guildofcannonballs said...

http://youtu.be/mYXyibQoGoQ


Laslo Spatula said...

Has no one ever noticed that any woman who sleeps with Neil Young goes crazy, gets sick, or has children with birth defects?

Sorry to piss on your sixties.

I am Laslo.

Laslo Spatula said...

I have an older acquaintance who swears he gave a blow-job to David Crosby in the late Eighties.

He said the semen tasted like old hot dogs and Death.

I am Laslo.

Laslo Spatula said...

I had a friend who, as a child, had Graham Nash sleep over with his mother.

In the morning though -- inevitably -- Nash was in bed with him.

My friend then would make these great finger-paintings of a wall of giant dark spiders descending on a gazelle, which his mother would put on the refrigerator.

My friend could run fast, but I guess not fast enough.

I am Laslo..

Laslo Spatula said...

Stephen Stills. Twelve-year-old niece. Love the one you're with.

Gonna kill that motherfucker.

I am Laslo.

Laslo Spatula said...

Don't get me going on the Monkees.

I am Laslo.

Jaske said...

I am a Monkee, or not a 60's Braby.

Paddy O said...

What's a polio spasm? I've never heard of that.

Google threw me back at this interview (and also the Althousepost).

My mom has had polio since she was 3, and it's not something I've heard before, so I'm curious if that's a thing. Polio has different effects on people, so maybe it's just one of those phrases that were used back when it was still around.

Anonymous said...

Ya know, Laslo, you are becoming so forced so unfunny, so tiresome, so out-of-it, that commenters will soon be asking you if you are really the next Clem Kadiddlehopper.

el polacko said...

the only person i've know with so-called 'morgellons disease' was also the most insane person i'd ever met. his stories of things being pulled from his skin became increasingly absurd with each passing day. this was some years ago which must have been before 'matchboxing' became part of the'disease' because he could never come up with a single bit of evidence to back up his bizarre claims.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Q: Which Monkee was the "smart one"?
A: None. None of them were smart.

Q: Which Monkee was the "soulful one"?
A: None. None of them were soulful.

Q: Which Monkee was the "cute one"?
A: Davey Jones.

Howard said...

Michael K: Based on my research and self experimentation, the gut bacteria thing is about the shift away from inulin (a few million years of evolution) as the primary carbohydrate source. Not sure White Croc is right about the Morgellons link. Fermented Sunchoke

tim in vermont said...

Twisted - Joni Micthell

My analyst told me, I was right out of my head, but I said doctor, I think it's you...


L Day said...

Nobody mentioned "Mingus". I enjoyed that album.

Robert Cook said...

"Keith Richard's book says that cocaine will do just about the same thing. Apparently, this was the demise of the Mama's and the Papa's John Phillips. Coke bugs!!"

The first page from Philip K. Dick's A SCANNER DARKLY, Dick's autobiographical science fiction novel based on people he knew in the street/drug culture of the early 70s:

"Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact he had bugs all over him. A month later, he had bugs in his lungs.

"Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were. They now filled his house."

Skyler said...

All I've got to say is that if it weren't for parking lots, no one would be able to get out of their cars to see paradise once they arrive.

Skyler said...

Paddy O. asked, "What's a polio spasm? I've never heard of that."

Yeah, I thought the whole effect of polio is that you are unable to move your muscles, so there should not be a spasm.

Joni Mitchell was never very bright.

Robert Cook said...

"What's a polio spasm? I've never heard of that."

"Yeah, I thought the whole effect of polio is that you are unable to move your muscles, so there should not be a spasm.

"Joni Mitchell was never very bright."


Google made its bones on searches for information, people; it still offers this service.

Skyler said...

Well, my ignorance of polio doesn't change that Joni Mitchell isn't very bright.

jr565 said...

If morgellons is a byproduct of pot usage it doesn't exactly provide a reason why pot should be legalized.

jr565 said...

Maybe morgellons sufferers can sue their local dealer for millions for causing their morgellons. Or the local pot dispensary. Or the pot farmers.