Personal

Sometimes i think of the title for a song and just need to write “that” song. Writing towards a title is harder than writing from a line or a chord progression, because you have nothing and still need to go in a certain direction. For a long time i wanted to write a song called “As If,” because i felt like it was a great title. When i finally managed to cobble together something that ended its choruses in those words i wasn’t impressed: the song just didn’t live up to the name i had imagined for it.

Earlier this summer i got sunburnt very badly on the bottoms of my arms, and it annoyed me to death. While spending several uncomfortable days waiting for my skin to heal, i thought that i might like to write a song called “Burn.” I never did anything about it, but i suppose the word was floating somewhere in the back of my mind ready to be included in any son in progress.

Last night i wrote “Burn.” The lines started coming to me and i opened up blogger and started to write, figuring it was more trustworthy then my email program, and that it would be on the page today for me to practice. I finished it in under five minutes; it just flowed out like water through a dam. I pressed “post & publish.”

And i’ll never see those words again. Sure, i managed to reconstruct the bare bones of what i was writing, but several turns of phrase were lost forever to the infinite wasteland of the internet. I went through my cache, checking every file written to in the 20 minutes surrounding the disaster, but found nothing.

Impermanence frightens me. Maybe i need to become a more deliberate and organized person, but there’s always that chance that disaster will strike as you hit the save button. And every time it does i lose a piece of my life’s story. Hopefully this one’ll go through.