Futile Horn

03.24.2005 - 3:13 pm (tentative title)

For no other reason than for the time being the protagonist of my novel has one of his co-workers describe his appearance as a balding W.B. Yeats, I’ve taken to reading a few of his poems. The seeming needs of my fool-driven land, Mad as the mist and snow, Did their Catullus walk that way, grown old in dancing silver-sandalled on the sea, a Druid land, a Druid tune! (Those are lines are from several poems in no particular order) I kind of like him, even though for some reason I had it in my head I wouldn’t. Grey Connemara cloth. I’ve spent some time in Connemara. There have been worse days than those.

I road tripped out to New York and back last week. God there is so much Ohio. There is more Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania is gorgeous. The plan was to do the trip without any overnights, but after driving through the snow on a nearly empty unlit highway at 3 a.m. as my eyelids began to grow heavy changed my mind.

I gave advance warning of my arrival (well, some anyway) but on my birthday it was only Eugene and Maegan and I. It was fun, but it was disappointing more people didn’t show up, the people I’ve shown up for every year. I like New York, but every time I go back I realize how little I have to do there. My mother obviously wants me to stay, and because my parents had me later in life I feel I should be spending time with them, but not only has my social life eroded away there, I’m not pursuing any of the things I want to do while I am there. My sister is still writing her thesis in New York, so that helps a bit.

It’s still weird that my grandfather isn’t around. When I was growing up, in many respects he was more of a dad to me than my father, but he was sick enough for long enough I’ve never wished him back. I can’t remember the calendar date, but he passed away on Good Friday, which is soon enough. I don’t have any, shall we say, eschatological beliefs, so there really isn’t much else to do but remember. I’m all right with that, but I wish that my most recent and therefore most vivid memories of him weren’t so often about what a torment old age and sickness can be.

I guess I’m not too good at family, and it’s easier for me to do at a distance. It’s hard to express how much happier Christmas was when I hadn’t been home for a few months. You take what you can get, I suppose.

Naturally I didn’t do too much work while I was away (I suppose that’s best but I still feel guilty about it), but I am getting back into things again. I study more than I write, but it is hard to write more than a few hours without getting a headache, and if I don’t read I run out of words to write. The time I spend writing still feels like a kind of dream, the kind where you wake up with a headache anyway. I’m trying to describe the life of a fairly eccentric human being, and I can never tell if the situations and ideas I’m relating are interesting or just annoying. The second chapter has a good bit more dialog. I like writing dialog and I’m comfortable with it, but if something else isn’t going on in the scene I feel like there’s no color. But if there is too much going on, no one is going to follow, or else no one will want to follow, so I have to spend forever thinking up minimal touches that provide lots of color without being a distraction from what’s actually important. There’s nothing fun in that at all. Stupid art, why are you so complicated? And transitions! Transitions are everything. All the brain cells I burn out making things seem related and congruous. It’s a lie of course. I’ve just pasted together pieces of prose written without a thought of each other. I think it’s a good lie though. When I come back to it after a month even I don’t realize how poorly I’d thought the thing through.

The best part about reading stuff back is that the parts I meant to be funny often come out tragic sounding, and the things I mean to be dramatic are hilarious. You get to make one story and read another. It’s like being entertained twice.

The whole process is a fraud. I’m sure I’d quit if it were otherwise.

Who knows, maybe it will be spring soon. I’d like to be spending more time outside. Longer days, fresh air.

I’ve my guitar with me now. It’s time to write a new song. Maybe a Minnesota winter one. I didn’t bring a microphone with me so I can’t record it, but the writing may be enough.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn