Futile Horn

07.04.2003 - 2:57 am (I think I've written this entry before but...)

It's foggy out tonight. It would be foggy every time I woke up early in Ireland, but I can't recall the last time it was foggy here.

I go back to work tomorrow. Last weekend was kinda fun, but I am glad it is just for the summer. One of the things that worries me about life is that I feel I could never be happy doing any one thing for more than a year or two at a time.

It's interesting that I picked that time frame, because if I do end up going back to school for classics, I'll have been studying it again for about a year and half. If the statement above is accurate, but the time I start I will want to quit. Because I learn fairly quickly, I would feel cheated if I didn't get to explore a variety of interests. I imagine other people are get motivation to stick from the fact they've families to provide for or that they can't think of anything better to do. Well, I've no family and I'm pretty good at thinking of things I'd rather be doing. I like challenges, I like new situations, I like proving people wrong. If I had any social dexterity, I might be able to get away with the kind of life I'd envision. As it is, I feel I face a unique form impending of doom.

I'm tired and I would go to bed, but I work till 5 am tomorrow, so I figure I should keep myself awake for a little longer. I'm almost too tired to think, so I'm not sure what to do. I am angry with myself for not having a new song in about a month. It hasn't quite been from a lack of trying. My guitar is a little cleaner, I think my voice is a little stronger, but at the end of the day, new material is the only thing that satisfies me -- almost to a fault: it can even be bad so long as it is new. I have pages and pages of new words, a bit of a melody, and something of a hook, no single entity has managed to come together yet. It makes me feel worthless and dumb.

I stumbled upon some old stories I'd written. I was a short story writer once. Exactly once. I sold a story for a pretty good sum of money (as far as short stories go) to a university literary publication. That was extremely cool for a few days. When it wore off I kept writing and produced a lot of stuff I either hated or didn't really know how to press on with. Writer's markets were intimidating, faceless, and strange. I yearned for rejection, because rejection was at least a form of acknowledgment. The work was hard, and the people I turned to for help didn't know how to help.

In a corner of my head, it was very romantic. A cigarette, a mug of black coffee and a hummus plate on a mosaic cafe table. A typed draft, and a small pile of stapled computer paper littered with pencil paragraphs cushioned by a mass of marginal notes in my small, near indecipherable print. I've since quit smoking, I can no longer stomach black coffee, and I consider fiction writing an exquisite form of torture, but I can't help being happy thinking back on it.

Plus we all want to have written a novel. Mine had about 30 pages when it was fatally run over by a week in Seattle. It involved the devil, an unfortunate rash, and variations on some of my more vivid nightmares. I've no idea what I was thinking, but every now and again, I'm make changes in my head.

Maybe a new short story is what I need. Something not very realistic, full of brilliant stupidities, some gratuitous sex, and a health dose of dry wit. The damage inflicted to those in the immediate vicinity would be somewhat minimal. I should give it a try.

I don't know why I thought my kettle would whistle. It does not.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn