On Making Something From Nothing Or How Nothing Is Always Already Something: Sleep Deprived Ramblings For People Who Like To Laugh At Whiplash

I have half a mind to post a blank page here today.

Half a mind to ask you to contemplate the awesomeness 

of emptiness, the way it sparks with potential.

No one has found a way for beginnings to come without 

endings, that's the bad news.

The good news is that every end means a new beginning, 

which means the time is ripe to create.

And that's just what we're doing 

in This Blue Heaven right now. 

It's a germination period.

An underground growth period.

The ground only looks barren.

The page only looks blank.

It's about to bust out some rhymes,  yo.

Cuz that's how we ro'.  

I'm writing lyrics.

I'm learning to write lyrics 

that might could torpedo 

a heart or two.

I didn't make that line up.

A number of years ago someone said that to me 

about music -- it was like a torpedo to her heart -- 

and it changed the way I thought about 

a lot of things, forever.

I hope these songs will torpedo a heart.  

Or two.  

I stole a line from someone's great-grandmother 

and used it in a chorus.

But man was it a good line.  

I could have said it.

I even might have said it if given enough time.  

GP and KP are writing music for these lyrics.

Music with thrust.  

Torpedos are no good sitting inert in a warehouse.

They need someone to sit down with them.

Some people need to sit down with things.

I hope there aren't so many metaphors mixing and

bumping into each other in the new lyrics 

as in this blog entry.

I'll have to check.

Blank pages have no mistakes in them yet.

So there's that, too.

But we must weigh the risk, however 

high, against how hard we may rock.

Okay I stole that line, too.

I love everyone I ever really loved 

when I sit down to write.

I love you is always a quotation.

You did not say it first and neither did I.

That line is rightfully Jeanette Winterson's.

But man is it a good line.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Case in point.

But the juxtapositions, the juxtapositions can be new!

And so can the moon if we give it a little shade.

A little chance to go underground.

Leave the sky to the sly, mysterious stars.

Poe's phrase, man, doesn't it turn good?

I heard it first last night.

Night ends where dawn begins.

Or is it the other way around?

It's all the same f*cking day, man.

Janis Joplin.

It's all good news.

Let the metaphors be bumper cars.

Just buckle up and let 'em.

And valleys and fields and it crowns kings in every movement

My grandfather was a butcher in a small Iowa town with a big train station. This was long before he started working for the Gummy Bear factory and started bringing us 5lb bags of gummy stuff at holidays. Anyway, back in the days when hobos rode the rails, sometimes one would come around the butcher shop to see if my grandpa had any scraps of meat. My grandpa is one of the most accepting and friendly people I know, and would of course give them what he had and chat a little. He told me that there was a celebration every year to crown a Hobo King, and the time it was held in this small Iowa town, he gave them meat for their hobo stew. I can just imagine my grandpa taking a break behind the meat locker, smoking a cigarette in the humid Iowa heat and passing a bottle back and forth with a man who smelled like railroad and all of America at once. I can hear their voices, the crickets, and the liquor sloshing in the bottle. Maybe they stepped into the locker to cool off among the monolith-like hunks of meat that hung from the ceiling. I remember them from when I was very little. 

I don't know how to justify or explain writing a blog entry about this, it was just on my mind. I feel sad I missed out on this time. Rail riders and barnstormers.... Slow dancing.... I'm nostalgic for an older generation's past.

Hell, I feel sad that soon the phrase "mixed tape" will be obsolete.

Insight into my soul:

This just made me incredibly beamingly happy.

Today I am grateful for

1.  Lisa Hannigan's new album, Sea Sew

2.  Orange-flavored Tootsie Rolls

3.  The sky is so big that we all fit under the same one.  (And even if it's rainin' here, some other patch not so far away has a sun, a flock of pelicans, a Milky Way, a 95% full waxing gibbous moon.)

4.  This ring I got in California just in case I forget about #3.

More on inner v. outer

We are discreet sheep: we wait to see how the drove is going, then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express: and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. 

- Mark Twain