Futile Horn

06.23.2003 - 10:00 pm (may your song always be sung)

It's finally stopped raining and begun to get warm. I've spent several summers restlessly trudging about, and I'm wondering if it's going to be like that again this year. I've already taken two walks today, and all I want to do it to get out of the house. I'm not even sure there is anywhere I want to be, I just want to be going. The worst part about it is that there is nothing in my home town I want to see, so walking here is frustrating. It's like scratching that itch you know is going to be burning worse than before when you are done.

An orange blue fire that can't consume
Stretching the trial of a dusty moon
Washes my spectacls in standing stains
Twisting every fabric's pattern bland
Leaves me stirring a wakeful trance

I spent both Friday and Saturday nights wandering around lower Manhattan, one night a little drunker than the other. I wrote many many pairs of rhyming couplets. Most of them were an attempt to find the subject of the new song that has been teasing me with the potential of its existence for about a week, but sometimes a line or two would pop up for nothing other than to vent my frustration with the moment:

The tune started failing, the words are all a mess
Why are all the taverns named for their address?

or

I traced another epic while snoring on a bench
I've only seen the city Friday night and drenched

I amassed about seventy lines (I'd say I aim for about twentyfive) and then decided I had no idea how to stitch any of them together. So I went through all my old notes, and found several abandoned projects I kind of liked. I find that a lot of times that I can learn to appreciate ideas once enough time has passed so that I don't really know what it was I was writing about at the time.

Or sometimes they just suck and nothing can be done for them. In a way, it's a numbers game. Anyways I hope I can do something with that swarm of words in a month or so. It's not all bad; there must be something I can do.

I never wanted very much but by one thought I'm driven
That none of us have ever lived 'cept the writers and the written
I tried to swing the hammer round, it didn't want to ring
I tried to play the devil's song, he didn't want to sing

I don't think I really want a cup of coffee, but I'll get one because I still need to go out. Grak, I wanted to read more Latin and Greek than I did today. It'll have to wait for tomorrow I suppose.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn