Futile Horn

10.13.2003 - 4:12 pm ("It's 10:30; we're closed... forever!")

I was planning to stay home and watch baseball yesterday, but rain in Boston canceled the game, so I headed to the city. I was wary about riding the trains because due to reduced service it took me four transfers and a full three hours to get home on Saturday night. I was anticipating getting a ride home that night because everyone was supposed to be hanging out in the city, but everyone wussied out and I hung out by myself instead eating key lime pie and drinking beer and writing some airy song. I was sort of startled by how difficult it was to write weightless lyrics. It is hard to come up with a light assonant rhyme. Ribbons and heavens I feel was the best I came up with. I’m sure it didn’t take me any less than a half hour to put those two words together. I guess there isn’t much more difficult than the appearance of a lack of effort. In something worthwhile anyway.

It’s not too big a secret that I’ve had a long time interest in the devil as a literary figure. I’m reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which is going kind of slow partly because I only read it on the train and partly because I don’t always know what he is talking about. I’ve utterly no recollection of why I brought this subject up, but someone called the devil Mister Dicis-et-non-facis. “You say but you don’t do.” Cool, huh? Yeah, I need to try harder.

Maybe I was thinking about how the book makes crushing arguments against theology and religion, and how its attempt to accommodate scientific discovery and liberalist thinking has made its dogma shallow if not preposterous. Last night I had been thinking of writing a song called “God, Your Religion is Stupid” where I was planning to contort the “oo” sound in the word “stupid” to the point of obscenity (a full minute or more, perhaps). I even came up with a few witty rhymes on my very long walk home which I have since mercifully forgotten. But I think the point of this paragraph is that the odious fact of god in the human condition is purely irrational and any attempt to reconcile it to the world of reason is the road to embarrassment. Then I thought if that is true, think about how many lifetimes have been wasted in that pursuit. It was extremely depressing.

Life has become so onerous that I have begun hanging out on the West Side. If you know me at all, this is an egregious violation of some personal ethos.

Why is it always news when they try to separate conjoined twins? I don’t want to know about it! And I don’t want to see the pictures!

I’ve been having some troubling dreams lately. One I was sentenced to two years for dropping a radio, or some electronic box. I can’t remember the other, but it involved dying kings, collect calls that wouldn’t go through, and hails of gunfire. It was uncomfortable.

So I wrote a few verses of a doofy song about a national government founded on the principal of everyone getting laid. I sat down with the intent of writing a melody that would sound something like a national anthem. The problem is that I think I succeeded, and now I’ve a got a song that sounds like a national anthem (you’d have to believe I thought about this, but I didn’t). So now the melody and the lyrics both have too much of pretense of “stately dignity,” so they’re no humor to it at all. I could rewrite one or the other, but I think it is time to step quietly away from this ill-conceived project.

I finished reading Horace’s Roman odes yesterday. The poem that was lauded in a commentary I consulted as being perhaps the greatest in Western civilization was about how the Romans shouldn’t ransom their prisoners of war because if they were real men they would have died fighting instead of surrendering like pansies. When I was at college my professor used the words “sustained profundity” to describe these poems. They appear to be commissioned to echo the Augustan social programs, and so far my study of the odes goes, it seems to suggest they are in least in part thematically at odds with the rest of Horace’s work. It is also safe to assume he didn’t believe the emperor was a god on earth either.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn