Past Lives

One aspect of public journal writing I sort of hate is that it functions as an emotional snapshot. Unlike other media, this sort of art captures, or at least pretends to very well, whatever ridiculous thing you feel or think right then. I used to have a site that has long since been relegated to archive.org that is excruciating and sometimes terrifying. The current of violence in what I wrote is a little unnerving to me.

But even on this blog, I have these vast swaths of almost unreadable whining. When I read the stuff from three months or so ago, I can’t help but roll my eyes and groan a little. Honestly, the girl was not that big a deal.

The old site did have its moments. My writing was very rough, then, as I hadn’t had any sort of English class at all since middle school. It’s still rough now, but not as bad. I was crude and angry. And as I mentioned, there was a real violence to the person that writing captured. Now when I write about violence, I write about the violence itself. Back then, it was just part of everything I thought and everything I felt. The bottle of Wild Turkey a night could not have helped.

But I had my moments.

21julO5 (cont.)

I’m sitting here, answering emails, about to go to the gym, a little wine left in the glass. Blues playing slightly too loud. There’s a still silence as Otis Taylor’s ethereal ballad to a love lost but never really left behind, Rain So Hard, ends on a powerfully acoustic vamp. Lightning crashes and silence descends over the track. It’s chilling.

I remember to breathe.

Freddie King’s voice cuts through my nirvana with pain untold. Have you ever loved a woman? God, yes. He weaves a story of falling for a woman. In the first verse he talks of obsession, finally revealing her hand isn’t his to take. The second verse tells of his shame and sin. The deft work of his guitar sets up the punchline to that verse. She belongs to his very best friend. Helen of Troy on the Mississippi. Bethseba of the Delta. The truth seeps in slowly, hurts a little, but you can sense hope in his voice. You want to hear what the next verse says. How does the story end?

It’s not to be. the band ramps up as a stinging lick from his guitar ruins your hope of conclusion. This is just the guitar solo. At least that’s what it seems. The notes tell of a different story. It’s not the down-trodden pain of a broken man. It’s powerful. The notes work up the scales, fast, but agonizingly gradual. Not quite chromatic, there are no notations for the slightly bent notes he’s destroying you with. Small stinging rises, a little more than a quarter bent note. In the no man’s land between major and minor, he plays with your passions. His solo swirls up into the upper reaches of your conciousness. You want him to play more than three or four notes at a time, please. End the suspense. He rewards you.

He hits the notes high. Bending them just enough to be perfectly out of tune, then races up, notes flashing like the glint of a mirror in the desert, leading you up the path.

That’s when he surprises you, dropping down to the guttural sonic bottom of the guitar. With a run off a scale handed down by Prometheus before man even noticed the cold, he tells you how nothing else matters. It’s the scale of a crying baby. The scale of a mare dying in birth to the foal. The scale of notes pulsing inside a climaxing woman. Your heart beats a little faster at the thought of hearing something so primal. The fire licks at your scalp, playing with you and consuming you at the same time It gives you shuddering chills.

Just like a woman’s fingers running up the back of your neck.

Update: I will not be updating for a little while.   I’m planning on being busy.