Of course, I would have to pick a post-holiday when my page is everything except for actually non-functional to have a chatty couple of hours. Don’t you love it? Anyhow, if you’re reading this anywhere near its posting time you should either be asleep, making a sandwich out of leftovers, or having heartburn from said sandwich.
Well, what are you waiting for?
I have a slim gray book with wide college ruled pages that serves as my lyric book; most of the time i know how to sing what i intend to play, but on some occasions it’s nice to know i have a tidy volume to back up my occasionally unsure memory. Heading into Freshman year i decided that my old, red, spiral-ruled book was due to be retired; i had aptly filled the entire front section of it just as classes began, and i wanted a set of fresh pages to start all of my new emotions in. I literally put my creative impulses on hold for two months while i shopped for the perfect vehicle for my words, endlessly reiterating a practice set of “Bridge,” “Other Plans,” All That’s True,” and “Deadweight” while i held out for a new place to write. Finally, on a trip to South Street, i found the book. It stayed empty for a few weeks… i had this phobia that if i started it off with something terrible that it would always be affected by what dreadful thing i set down on that first blank page. So, i kept holding out.
It was a poorly constructed dam on my feelings, and eventually they burst out onto the margins of my anthropology notes — hardly heeding my attempts to herd them in the direction of my empty gray book. Each snippet just delayed my marking it up even more, because they were just that; snippets — nothing up to snuff. Ironically, it all changed the day that i skipped Anthropology, at the urging of Megan, who was skipping out on the 9am class we both had preceding it. Somewhere in the routine of talking to her and skipping class i managed to lock myself out of my room for a couple of hours with only my bookbag to keep me company, and i wound up in our lounge staring out into a gray and rainy day. That past weekend i had been to my first college party, and i had drank my first drink and smoked for the first time, and i had this endless swirl of feelings in my stomach … feelings just starting to develop about Laurel, feelings about what i had done, and feelings about what was to come.
I intended to have my slim book with me, but life is ironic; i gave birth to my first set of college lyrics sloppily on the backside of Anthropology notes, uneven and ugly. It didn’t seem like very much of a song, by my standards, but it felt like it should go into the book — it didn’t mean very much if i just read what it had to say, but it felt just like i felt.
Eventually Kenny returned from his class and let me into the room, and i promptly retrieved the book, my key, and my Ashland guitar. He was headed down into a nap, and so i headed back into the lounge. A capo here, a string retuned there, and suddenly it happened.
The book is plenty different now. By last fall i had already become too afraid to set any fresh thoughts directly into it for fear that they might besmirch the excellent average of quality material that i had established in my unprecedented streak of decent songwriting. I began to cheat — songs began on my computer, and if they were worth saving i would copy them into the book the next day. Soon i fell behind on my copying, and by last Christmas i had a sheath of songs stuck into the back of the book when i boarded my plane for Florida, hoping to get it all caught up to me.
Now the book and i work in shifts… sometimes there are a few consecutive songs that were obviously scrawled into it as quickly as i could think up lyrics for them, and then there are carefully printed ones that have been sung scores of times before i put them into penciled words. There is a difference, though, as i found in rereading it today. The bits from Freshmen year were… different. Frank. Reactionary. Unedited. Even the quality songs that i still play appeared in virginal and unretouched version that betray my original intentions for them. And, then there are things i don’t remember writing… my accounts of my misguided cancer scare, seeing Anastasia over Christmas break, and auditioning for Hair. Things that would never make it past the most basic of neurons let alone down to my fingers and out into the book.
In fact, my life hardly ever makes it into the book anymore… oddly enough, it stopped doing that at nearly the same time i started doing this. Which makes me wonder… where is my life going to go after i get tired of copying it down into here long after it’s already happened? Makes me wonder…
This is so much cheaper than seeing a professional psychologist…
Sometimes i suspect that “normal” is always something that i don’t have, and that’s what makes it what it is.
I’ve been sick on and off for nearly two weeks now … nothing serious, just tiny colds and somewhat-sore throats, and today i’m headed into my Nth period of recovery … back to normal. But, this constant feeling of being slightly sick is the norm for some people. And, furthermore, once i am back to normal, something will be very odd about it.
In one of my (many) fits of contemplating how incredibly screwed up i am, today i thought about my mother and father; not as my dysfunctional parents, but as people. My father, for all of his eccentricities, is normal. He grew up in South Philly with three sisters and parents that got divorced after he got to know and live with them both, he played sports in school, he went to a little bit of college and toured with a band and then settled into bartending rather than be a nuclear physicist or any other thing he has the massive intelligence to do.
My mother is not normal… her parents both have diagnosable mental issues, her entire family was too busy scrabbling up out of the most menial of blue collar existences to learn how to be functional, and her father had been a POW in WWII. She was an only child, and she was not allowed to have toys. In fact, her primary Barbie had been shoplifted by her mother out of a five and dime store. Barbie has empty lipstick containers for chairs and home-fashioned outfits rather than pre-packaged clothes, and to this day my mom thinks it’s amusing to point out what Barbie could use every checkbook or soup bowl for. I never really understood whether or not my grandparents were especially poor at the time: blue collar didn’t always equate to near-poverty in the sixties, and they owned their own home for years. So, i’m just not sure. As for my mother, she barely made it out of high school, never even tried to go to college, lived a few fast years of free adulthood, and got married just shy of 25.
I was sitting at the kitchen table at home today when she casually remarked that she had been nearly five years older than i am now when she got married. We were looking at a photo of her sitting in a Peter-Pan-like rig on the ceiling of the London Victory club in her white pantsuit, ready to fly across the ceiling. That was her wedding reception; held at the nightclub where the both of them worked at the time. October 20th, 1980.
I had almost any toy i wanted as a child, and i always had money and education and a love for knowledge. A lot of people i know never had some of those things even though their parents made twice as much money as i had, my own mother included. My mother and i were on welfare for years, and i still have vivid memories of the place on Woodland Avenue where we’d pick up our check and how i could never quite see up past the counter that the teller windows were set behind. I remember paying for things at the corner store with brightly colored food-stamps and wondering why they weren’t the same color as regular money. We were not poor; in fact, with both sets of grandparents obsessively looking after the well-being of their only grandchild we were better off than most of the people on our block.
These are things i never think about anymore. Despite all of them i still somehow found my way into a private grade school, and i always had a few new GI Joes to tide me over from one set of straight A’s to the next. I had what my mother considered a normal childhood … a loving and stable parent, and enough of what i wanted and needed to sustain me. I was missing things though … things she never never had the chance to miss, so she never assumed i needed them. I never had a best friend, or a hobby that wasn’t just a child’s game, or the ability to keep anything in my life straight and organized. I don’t think my mother is normal. My father definitely is, primarily because i don’t have him. It’s as much my fault as his … i had learned to dislike him by the time he had learned to really appreciate me, and it was all downhill from there. I haven’t really spoken to him at length since his birthday — last Christmas Eve.
Regardless of my incessant common cold, right now i don’t feel normal. I’m in college, i play guitar, i have friends, and i feel like i am living some outside life looking into the lives of Lindsay, Erika, and everyone else i know and love. I feel like getting straight A’s again gets me back inside. I feel like drinking puts me inside somewhere i’ve never even been before; writing songs does too. Each thing individually and in the right circumstance is enough to carry me away from this and towards that invisible thing i am striving toward, but altogether they just imprison me. It’s as though i’m trying to fit in some of the pieces of my dad’s life that i feel can root me down … living on my own, going incommunicado with family, establishing a pattern of drinking that i can snuff out later. But, the sins of the father are doing nothing for the son except for leave me trapped with hardly anything that i’m sure about being thankful for.
So, there is my yearly thanks, in a roundabout crushing way: i’m happy that i’ve gotten this far, is what i suppose i’m saying. My stuffy nose is gone, and i am almost back to what is normal for me. Except, it doesn’t feel right at all.
Damnit, having a crush on someone is really freakin’ agonizing. I mean, it hurts in this good exciting way, but i thought i was taking a break from it. And suddenly i’m not. Bleh. Damn this blog and its apropos name.