Anthologies of Awesome

1.      Sometimes I love thick and lovely harmonic feedback.

Sometimes I love the glissando and hollow banded sound of a dobro.

Most Americana has some real high lonesome to it. It’s hard to describe what exactly that term means. I believe it bears familial resemblance to Celtic melodies. There’s a lot of non-rationalized semi tonalities and glided notes. The sound is hard to duplicate, but it’s so much a part of the American sonic pallete that most people, even those ignorant of technical music trivia, can note its absence.

2.      I wonder sometimes about music as a cultural language. Most popularly central Asian music follows a sort of 24 note semitonic scale. Southwest Asian music has a similar set.

Most American music falls into a mostly straight rational pentatonic scale with easily recognizable complications of the 9th. The 9th has no rational basis in scale. It isn’t even part of any seventh chords within the matrix of progressions Westerners recognize as music.

Maybe that’s why they call it high lonesome.

I have an old Global electric that belonged to my grandpa. He came from Texas with salt, pepper, and a rifle. He homesteaded thousand of acres around Lewis and Yellowjacket.

There was a time I went down to their old place with my Strat and a scandalous red motorcycle. My Grandpa picked up the Strat and pulled a couple notes out of it with busted up hands. He told me he used to have a Harley Davidson and a steel guitar. Played it with a slide.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about death, at least metaphorical possibilities of death.

3.     The Viking smiths used to beat on iron they mined from beat and heated to chase out the evil spirits that burned as embers on the future steel.

There are no evil iron spirits, but there are impurities that have to be beaten out of metal if you work it in less than a liquid state. They were wrong about the spirits, but the model was a working one.

And I wonder how much the ideas of a world after this one are true. I’m writing a story about a man who lost his wife to cancer. It is, of course, mostly about geology.

I remember a profound sadness watching my former wife try and try again to die.

My girlfriend has been hanging out lately with her old high school friends.

She isn’t much younger than me, but in her senior year, I was already on my second tour. That tour was part of Operation Enduring Freedom and the bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

I tell her, sometimes, about my dreams.

There is some possibility I may finish a semi-crappy short story before May for submission. It has been consuming a lot of my time. In thought, mostly.

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the nature of people. I can think of my own arc from new car owning, social climbing suburbanite (though in a thoroughly unconventional vector) with Passionately Held Beliefs to a bike riding, cheap ass, don’t give a shit hippie. Not hippie as far as drum circles or bullshit karmic beliefs, just a hippie in an economic sense.

My transition was a strange one, fueled by rage, really. How rage can thrust someone into a state of Zen detachment  would be an interesting premise for another story. I think rage is exhausting, but like any other strenuous activity, it eventually builds up your ability to maintain that level of exertion. If you get used to anger, it’s easy to maintain. And the more aggressively angry you are, barring some sort of impeding change in condition, it probably works like wind sprints. Or Something. Not for me anymore. Maybe I blew out an angry ACL or something. That metaphor is getting shaky.

I remember I used to be funny. Like, holy shit funny. I don’t know what happened. I think the rage would manifest in rants that people thought were hilarious. Now I can barely make a joke. It’s a restful pause in which I find myself. A pool of calm and happiness on some trail of a thousand tears. Or something. I wish some Apaches would attack my lazy, languid ass to shake me out of this stasis. And another metaphor is weakened and killed.

I never try to write with metaphor, at least for serious writerly sort of crap. I think it’s a waste, really. And then I have people tell me how amazing all the metaphor was in something I wrote and I have not the heart to tell them I have no earthly clue what the fuck they’re talking about. So I just sort of take it. Then sometimes people get it.

My sister’s drunk ass redneck boyfriend (who I obviously like) tried to tell me once about the depth he found in that Dirt Rag story. He sort of nailed it by not knowing to look any deeper. “You know,” he glassily imparted, “the story was about bike rides and toads and shit, but I got more than that, man.”

Ok, I said.

“I got a…woman.”

Well, I said, one third of the story was centered around a female character.

And he got it. He got the whole thing, really. Enough of the whole thing, anyway. He got the majority of the whole thing, or at least a third. That’s better than most.

I noticed today on my statcounter that this neglected piece of shit blog is down in the teens, visitor-wise. And it’s my own fault.

This laziness is a motherfucker.

The world as a dynamic resting place of dead life is not entirely accurate. The earth has very, very little life bearing volume. The lithosphere, just the very top sheen of floating, congealed mantle, has a layer of life thinner than the sheen of algae in a fish tank by scale.

The rocks we see, the hardened and brittle torn rocks, are not at all the earth. That’s like saying the split and dead ends of your hair constitute your person. They don’t even matter.

And when you live in an area where the visible parts of the earth are exposed to the eye, and where the geological story is such that two miles of the piling on stratigraphic collumn, a sort of hourglass, is plainly within sight, your hanlding of life is a little stunted. Or possibly improved. It is impossible to say.

But I can say that if you come from a place where the rocks are covered by the quickened green things and where the visible earth cycles in days or weeks or months, even years, you’ll have a wholly divorced take on life from what me and the desert people have.

I was talking to my girlfriend about Hemmingway and one of his more homoerotic stories. She believes that he must have at least participated in the actions he writes about to write it that convincingly. I take it differently. A writer who is worth a shit should be able to write convincingly a gay character, a female (assuming you are male) character, a character of another race, or any other person you are not.

And she told me you can only write what you know. And I said something to the effect that writing is only an art when you are not writing what you know.

And for some reason it made me think of Dali and Picasso and the continents rent a’twain. And so forth.

And then I thought of two short stories I wrote that centered on female characters. And I want badly to find them and publish them here or somewhere else and see if I was able to do what I thought I did. If I was able to write a female character into being.

Writing has been so difficult for me, lately. I don’t know why, but it’s been nearly impossible. The last few posts on here I have liked greatly, but they’re sporadic and probably not speaking to anybody the way I think they are. And so it goes, I guess.

Willie Nelson just whined onto my headphones and reminded me of a noble truth I had forgotten.

This is not that truth, but a valid thought:

The Earth is not the rocks we see and is, by any measure, a remarkably different creature than what any person previous to the invention of seismology conceived.
Who would have thought the earth was a drop of (mostly) molten iron
and other heavier metals? No one can write a story of the Earth, but they could write some damn good stories.

So, by that measure, a person could write a damn good story about a female (or whatever is most different from you) character while having absolutely no knowledge of the actual construction or motivation of actual females.

I’m in an electric hillbilly band as the lead guitar/harmonica/bottleneck guy.

All that to say I like this picture of me. It makes me look way cooler than I am.