Unfinished fragments, regretted wholes — I can’t count the number of times I’ve written something in this little box, only to have it wind up in the Saved Drafts graveyard, or perhaps the mausoleum of private entries next door. Sometimes I think too much and write a whole lot more; sometimes I write a little bit of nothing, and even that feels like excess. I don’t take forever to put something on this page because I spend a lot of time writing it, I take forever to not put that something on this page because I spend too much time writing it. Franz Kafka, sometime before he died (that is, before he ever had the chance to become famous), wrote in his journal that the only effective way to write is through “a complete opening out of the body and the soul,” uninterrupted and unhealthy and usually happening while the writer ought to be asleep. And while nothing I have written in my blog could ever compare to what he might have written in his,1 I feel as though the only way I ever find the give-a-damn to finish a piece outside the influence of deadlines and paychecks is to do it all in one sitting. Sometimes you need to feel like you have to write something in order to see it through.
I don’t feel like I have to write anything right now. Tellingly, the above paragraph is stolen from an entry I began writing about a month ago, only to shove its incomplete body down a long tube where it will remain untouched for approximately the next year and a half. Which is quite a shame, because it was a pretty good and timely piece; it had to do with the strange and harrowing confluence of events that centered around a single weekend in September, wherein 1) the remains of a young woman named Annie was found in one of the graduate buildings of the university where I study, 2) one of the people I’ve been closest to in this life was struck suddenly by an unlit car that sent her broken limbs flying through fifteen feet of dark, rainy sky, and 3) I developed an appreciation for dub music that briefly possessed me. This confluence meant a terrible lot of things to me, far beyond the pale of any reasonable coincidence, and something I really felt like putting to paper. I think you’ll like it, once it’s finally resurrected and finished — if you stick around that long, of course.
A year and a half is a long time, for anyone not dead. Every year and a half of my life, since the age of 15,2 has felt like an individual little life, although each one of them gets a little smaller as a unit every time. By the end of each time I feel like my context, as a human-being, has changed very thoroughly, most often in ways I failed to anticipate — the context changes, and those changes make their mark on me, but what really lies at my center has remained roughly unchanged. Somebody I once met and spent a lot of time with for a while told me, one Year And A Half later, something to that effect. His insight stung momentarily though he meant no offense by it, and reassured me that this was in fact a very good thing; I thought about it for a couple minutes and saw it his way, and so it was. Which is all a very long-winded way of me saying that I guess I actually don’t know where I will be in another Year And A Half, or whether or not I will then be finishing a journal entry I left incomplete here a month ago. So my previous paragraph may have ended with a lie; I apologize for that rather than delete it, because I like the way I arrived at this apology, as people sometimes do. But I hate lying almost as much as I hate being lied to, even when I’m writing and I know that a few smart, carefully placed lies can make good literature become great literature.
This is all bullshit, and it’s not what I came here to write. I just thought that this would be a good time to present to you
A BRIEF PROEM ON ROCK
Which is a bit of a misnomer because the music I make is not definitively “rock,” although rock it indeed does.3 My music does more than it is, when it comes to rock, while also containing many rock ingredients and flavors. And I’m bringing it up because I want to clarify something: in my last real entry (which means I haven’t really updated in 4 months; fuck), I briefly promoted a show I was organizing wherein my band was headlining. To avoid temporal confusion, I now stress that this is not the same show I will begin talking about in the next couple installments of The Story that lies at the heart of this website. To clarify, that show happened in the summer of 2007; the one I promoted here in the summer of 2009 happened in the summer of 2009, as planned.4 I could say more, but in the interest of keeping this proem brief (as advertised), I’ll stop here.
Sometimes it can’t hurt to explain things a little.
Speaking of that same last real entry, in it I mentioned that I would be writing for a very large publication soon. That did indeed happen, and here is some evidence. There was also a second concert review that, because of a deadline misunderstanding, I had to write in two hours, and I guess it’s pretty decent considering that. More little bits and pieces like these should be surfacing soon, both in this same publication and elsewhere. I wish my current schedule permitted me to branch out and do a little more, but I also enjoy sleeping nowadays.
That’s really all I have to say, and in the interest of having something new on this website again, I’m going to go ahead and hit the “Publish” button very soon. Which I feel bad about, because this really wasn’t very interesting. But I promise to come back and write something Real very soon, and in the meantime, I want to bring attention to the fact that last.fm is my favorite Internet technodoodad service right now, so if you have one go ahead and use it to verb-friend me. And if you don’t have one, you can at least check out what I’ve been hearing lately…Other than the very odd, bleating harmonies that appear to be happening between two (possibly Middle Eastern) men somewhere not far outside my window. I think this is getting “Published” now so that I can plug my laptop back into my speakers and choose to hear something else.
More soon!
(plan d getting money.)
- A LiveJournal, I’d wager. [↩]
- 15ish, to be more accurate. [↩]
- And this isn’t really a “proem,” in its traditional sense, either. [↩]
- Thanks if you came! [↩]