Wake-Up Call

Sorry I've been away.

Darn easy to fall out of the habit, especially as I no longer have the luxury of posting from work — well, maybe I do, but the iron fist of our ops division makes me afraid to actually attempt it. Traffic's monitored pretty tightly, so I limit myself to the occasional comment here and there. Besides, I actually have work to do now...but I won't make excuses. Don't have to.

But now I find the place is now a bit dusty and smells like an attic, without bodies to warm the place up and lungs to circulate the air. It's like The Omega Man, only without the murderous albinos. My wife even told me I needed to start posting again — yes, she actually suggested I spend more time on the internet. After that, I'm just waiting for the Cubs to win the World Series so I'll know when Armageddon is coming.

My free time is a constant battle with laziness. The inertia of my mind (and body, frankly) is a formidable foe for my will — once things are whirling, I find I don't want to stop until I'm emptied of energy, but getting that momentum going in the first place is usually a Sisyphean struggle.

To wit: About six feet to my left is a stained glass project I haven't finished for over a year. About six inches from my right hand is a C harp I've been meaning to learn how to blow since I was in my twenties. Roughly ten or fifteen paces down the hall is a piano, of the sort I knew how to play when I was very young, but, well... Two yards from that is the treadmill I once ran on daily. Now it's once a week if I'm lucky. Fans of irony will appreciate that I haven't yet finished reading Getting Things Done for about three months now. And then there's that novel filed in my head, a sort of Southern Gothic dark fantasy I've been chewing on for a year in my spare moments, but I can't...quite...light it up. I constantly feel on the verge of breaking through, but it remains beyond my grasp for now. Discipline, as I've commented before, is not what you'd call my raison d'etre.

These periods of torpor are always punctuated by wake-up calls, like the concert described in that last link, or my friend Scott's sonnet blog, which is so good that I'm beginning to hate him, or hey, how 'bout this poem I stumbled across:

In the Middle of August

The dead heat rises for weeks,
Unwanted, unasked for, but suddenly
Like the answer to a question,
A real summer shower breaks loose
In the middle of August. So think
Of trumpets and cymbals, a young girl
In a sparkling tinsel suit leading
A parade down Fifth Avenue, all
The high school drummers in the city
Banging away at once. Think of
Bottles shattering against a warehouse,
Or a bowl of apricots spilling
From a tenth-floor window: the bright
Rat-a-tat-tat on the hot pavement,
The squeal of adults scurrying
For cover like happy children.
Down the bar, someone says it's like
The night she fell asleep standing
In the bathroom of a dank tavern
And woke up shivering in an orchard
Of lemon trees at dawn, surprised
by the sudden omnipotence of yellows.
Someone else says it's like spinning
A huge wheel and winning at roulette,
Or drawing four aces and thinking:
"It's true, it's finally happening."
Look, I'm not saying that the pretty
Girl in the fairy tale really does
Let down her golden hair for all
The poor kids in the neighborhood--
Though maybe she does. But still
I am saying that a simple cloud
Bursts over the city in mid-August
And suddenly, in your lifetime,
Everyone believes in his own luck.

--Edward Hirsch

Yeah, like that. Then suddenly there's a new angle to the novel worth considering, another glass project I want to do after I finish this one, and man, that motherfucker on Beale Street last night was blowing a mean harp. Like a UFO beaming up frightened cattle, like a bomber in a tailspin. Man, I want to give that thing another try. Where's my notebook?

Then, of course, there's Tom Waits. You can't argue with no Tom Waits. You probably either hate him or think he's a genius (I fall into the latter category), but regardless, he's going to catch your attention. He wakes you up and shakes off the dust. He is, in my estimation, one of the most important artists my country has ever produced, a man who has influenced pretty much every musician worth talking about of the last two decades or so. Half of what I know (and aspire to, and usually fail at) about good writing, I learned from listening to his albums over and over again. Man can tell you a story in a single sentence. Like this one:

Well he fell in love with a Gun Street girl
and now he's dancing in the Birmingham jail

Or this one:

Blind or crippled, sharp or dull
I'm readin' the Bible by a 40-watt bulb

Or how about:

She shook his hustle
a Greyhound bus'll
take the one that got away

Not bad.

My wife turned me on to him about, oh, five years ago when she gave me that ultimate token of love: the mix tape. She'd dubbed off some songs for me and had a whole side left over. "I'm thinking about putting in some Tom Waits. You know him?" Not really, I said. Enough to make me scared of him. She laughed and put together a mini "Best Of" compilation for me.

Now, he's like sour mash whiskey. Not everyone loves their first sip. But once he got his claws in me, it wasn't long before I'd shoved most of the rest of my CD collection back on the shelf for the next several weeks. There was too much to digest, too much to memorize. I did what I could.

We got to see him live last night, a pretty rare treat. The man doesn't tour much anymore, and when he does, he usually misses Flyover America. But he arranged a short tour of the mid-south and midwest, and we managed to score tickets. The show was part concert, part tent revival, part story hour. About half of the set list came off of his latest album, but he managed to drag out his piano for a while and give us some of the old stuff too. You can find the setlist here, if you're curious.

But if you'd like a taste, here's a little youtube action for you First, from a German documentary, Tom Singing an old blues tune that he performed last night, but has not to my knowledge recorded:



And another gospel tune from that same documentary:



Some of his darker poetry:



One of my all-time favorite songs to sing after my second whiskey:



And if you're not yet convinced he's a genius, here's Tom putting a fish in his pants:



Don't say I never gave you anything.

Now that I'm recovered from my night of dry ribs and rock & roll on Beale Street, as I sit here and listen to my wife dance on the piano in the next room, I wonder very much if I will forever remain a spectator to these joys, or if I will ever summon the ability within myself to begin distilling a few of them here and there for others to enjoy. Sometimes it feels as if I'm preparing myself for just that; other times, it seems I'll never find the juice to do anything more than watch the world go by. The harmonica will only gather dust. The novel will only remain an occasional mental occupation. I feel as if there's something I'm supposed to do, but damned if I can figure out what it is.

I don't know. But I do know that I am grateful to live in a world that has such things as these. There is life in abundance in this place, because there is yearning. That yearning, that moan in our hearts and stomachs and genitals, is what makes the world sufferable...no, more than that. A delight. Art doesn't come from abundance, nor does health or growth or happiness. It comes from longing, from hunger, from pursuit. Fuel for the forge. I yearn, too, to be more than I am. It is now a question of finding the will to listen to that yearning and follow it wherever it may lead, and just maybe someday I'll find I've actually done something along the way. Just once would be enough, I should think.

Here's to dreaming, and to seeing it through.