Boys, I send my love. At the moment I'm too awash for wrapping life in fictive lies. So let's lay the state. A fair friend of the Senate, named Alex, once assured me... that we must make things. No matter what, no matter how quickly they pass or how not. Be in the business of making. Make things that didn't exist and that's enough.
Hail to that. Let me share a tale of misunderstanding. An old home boy has proved me wrong. He married a good woman in a rapid shuffle and then sailed out to the orient. All in a breeze far quicker than I could absorb. The boy slaved under the singularly consuming Japanese work ethic. In order to salvage the working soul that beat within, he wrote a novel for children. I read much of it and judged him like the armchair aesthete I'd become.
As time passed me by, I languished in my private hell parallel to this author. We met again, by chance, on a snowy weekday in the town library. We discussed his book, and maybe it was his appeal to me-- he readily admitted he'd never read an English "adult"novel. Under this auspice,we traded book recommendations. I gave old bismark battleships and he graced me contemporary young adult transgender literature. Now we revel in our meetings and trade stories like old hens. Hell, I'm going to his hole tomorrow.
Yet I am the thin reed and he the stout oak. He's presented his novel to a triple dozen literary agents and only rejections return-- his tome is 190,000 words long and the profitable ideal lies at 100,000-120,000 words. Literature is like an actuary service, where every profitability margin is percentage based. Hedging risk against word counts and verb/noun ratios. This old fellow has commenced the planning of his second novel. Hail to he. It's a discipline and he's crafting himself. We expect a fully formed human end product, and baulk at the sausage making process. The old boy will needs be an author or death to him. I love him for that-- Sweat and bleed baby.
Recently, I just built songs. I drink and cobble songs. Shitty affairs tied to immediacy and pretensions. I play them around a dark industrial-failed city. Tomorrow I hold a whole court alone, one that I am not ready to preside. Peddle away shoe-man. I tentatively sent my first song effort to our Nero. And I love him for his response-- "hey, did you have a break up recently?" Hehehe. Street corner saint. When I find something worth pride I'll send it here. Sweat until then. Beer soaked rail workers love anything new, especially.
When I told one weathered man that I wrote the song I played him, he nearly threw a stroke. He slapped the table, stood up and hollered. As though the fact that anybody could make anything in this shithole was reason worth waking another day. I thought he might cry. Truly, he stammered.
Tonight I sang jazz standards at a club full of weekday alcoholics. The band leader woman may have gone to elementary school with me-- we traded whiskey shots for a liver's time. I was a step off tune tonight, but instead of noticing, people just cheered. The woman looked like she's shrugging a meth addiction, her 55 year old night-daddy sat in the corner and nodded to approve me taking his girl. We danced and her green dyed hair spun. Her words dripped of sputtering-mental disease, but I loved her. For a few free hours we'd be each others' heaven. But sauced on whiskey, I slipped out the kitchen door to swerve-drive my brother-friend back to his old-lady.
Love's a flash-pan, but friends an investment. So it goes.