Elsewhere in Dreams

I’ve never had a muse. I’ve always wondered what it might be like to have one.

There’s so much to the creative process I don’t understand. Why two people’s art can look and sound so different, yet be distinctly theirs. Why when you seek to imitate it you feel like a forger and your art like a forgery, no matter how remarkable the result.

I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written and the number of poems I’ve pulled out of my head. I don’t think I’d want to. They come and go in phases and shifts. I could never count on a living as a musician: I simply can’t turn it on like a tap. I can sit at the piano and write fifty different phrases and attach fifty different lyrics to those phrase but they won’t satisfy me. Thirty minutes or two days later I sit down and the first thing I play is magic.

There are so few chords and combinations of notes, really. There are only so many ways to put them together before you run out and have to start recycling.

Sometimes you can want desperately to write about something but find yourself unable to write about it and instead spend a half hour writing about something else when you should be sleeping.

Playing old songs is a challenge. I can never remember exactly how they go. Maybe I’m making them up as I go, again, and I have no way of knowing. Only the few I record I know for certain. The rest are possibly recent.

Isn’t it strange how music can reach out and tweak something inside you that logic and facts and science can never explain, much less themselves touch? I played a song the other day that made me feel sad in a way I haven’t felt for a long time now. It made me feel something. This amazes me.

Thinking back, my former art was a shallow imitation of feeling, a tissue-thin façade less tangible than those things I professed to know and write about. If you had to hear them, I am sorry. If you felt a remarkable kinship for me then, even more so. I should be forgiven, I think, for those songs and the words to those songs. We all should, who wrote like that. We were children. If we had a grasp of irony far in excess of our years, we squandered it on songs we thought were about love. We were obsessed with love and being in love and writing about love and being in love. When you are in the desert you write songs about water. We are adults now and instead of obsessing some of us have moved on and are actually loving and being in love. That’s a much harder thing to write about. There’s almost no way to do it properly.

If I’m being too subtle in my lyrics, I don’t apologise. If you can mine seventeen different meanings or none at all, I couldn’t care less. These songs are for me, not for you. These things are the most intensely selfish things I will ever produce, the most tuned to myself. They can’t help but be. They’re my intellectual and emotional children. That you hear them, some of them, is a raw vulnerability I can’t help but shy away from. This is the singer/songwriter curse, of course. These are not songs written by a group of people in a room. They’re not statements about politics or revolution or technological disorientation. They’re songs that bubble to the surface in privacy, when alone.

I have become too verbose.

My wife just got back from a Premiere Fitness evaluation. This is something they make you do ostensibly for insurance reasons, which is a load of crock, because you’re allowed to use the gym even without the fitness test/evaluation. This is probably because they have a huge backlog of fitness tests to do, but still. It’s a load of crap.

Now, I have to say the gym is nice. The equipment is new, there’s a nice variety of stuff, and you know, it’s a gym. We do our thing.

But my wife was just pressured for 15 minutes or so after the fitness test to buy a bunch of sessions with a personal trainer. Which is really neat: After a gruelling fitness test where you feel terrible about yourself because you’re basically made out of dough, they give you all the stats about exactly how much dough you’re made of, and then proceed to try to sell you an oven.

Guess what: I know how this works. I know how to up-sell. I know where your bread is buttered. It’s selling the extras. It’s like extended warranties at Future Shop. We can barely afford to go the gym as it is, but we’re doing it because we want to feel better about ourselves. We’re not trying to run a triathlon.

We may be out of shape, but we’re not idiots.

Bear with me here, this is going to depend on widespread infrastructure and future technology.

Wind power isn’t a viable always-on solution because wind isn’t always on. Step outside your house right now: It might be windy, or it might not be windy. Even places like parts of Texas which have almost constant prevailing winds, the wind sometimes dies down. When it does, we burn coal to keep the lights on.

So in order to use wind power as an always-on power generation system, we’d need a remarkably large array of batteries to store power for when the wind dies down.

Of course, batteries are expensive. No-one wants to buy as many batteries as it would take to store the amount of power needed for, say, an entire day without wind.

What if there were an existing infrastructure solution to this problem, though? What if there were literally millions of batteries out there just waiting to get plugged into the grid?

Maybe there will be someday soon: Electric cars. They’re basically filled with batteries. Think about it: You drive your car for 15 minutes to and from work at times with low power usage (because people are driving to work instead of using power) and the rest of the time it sits in a parking lot or a driveway.

Instead of just sitting there, it could be plugged into the power grid all night powering up when demand is lowest. Then when demand is highest during daylight hours, it could feed back into the grid if the grid needed it.

We’d still need other generation facilities, yes, because wind might die down for two days and we’d be cursed with having no power and no cars to drive, but for most of the “wind is dying down for two hours”, the blips that are the real concern, electric cars would solve the problem admirably.

Watching the rapid decline of XKCD.

Laura told me that all my songs sounded the same, so I wrote something a little musically and thematically different just to prove that I could. But don’t worry, it’s not as grisly as it sounds. It’s what we call a, you know, metaphor.

General, I will feed you to the dogs
if you dare come round here anymore.
Didn’t you see them straining at the leash?
Maybe you should have a second thought.

Before you’re just a ghost,
disjointed sack of bones,
another sad reminder
we’re still free.

Office, they will rip you limb from limb
if you dare come round here anymore.
Didn’t you see them circling the yard?
Maybe you should take a second look.

Before you’re just a ghone,
disjointed sack of bones,
another truncheon lost
another sad reminder
we’re still free.

President, they will trail you through the fog
until they finally find your foul trail.
And when you ask for the mercy you deserve
trust me, we will all give it to you.

Before you’re just a ghost,
poignant sack of bones,
another leader lost,
another sad reminder
we’re still free.

I wake up in the morning and I am running and I won’t stop until I fall asleep again. I slough the covers and run to the washroom and take a shower and brush my teeth and throw my hair into something like a style and before I know it I am making breakfast. Flipping eggs and frying bacon and spreading butter on freshly popped toast and scarfing it down all the while hating myself for craving the calories. I have counted them and the number hangs in front of my eyes it hovers in the air it won’t leave me along as my legs begin to itch and I want to move again I want to be on the go I want to be running.

I break through the door like I have just attained the speed of sound like I am passing through a vapour barrier like I am a gleaming metal machine screaming through the thinnest air. When my feet hit the pavement I am no longer human I am instead something that cannot be stopped like a mess of chrome and wire and electronic impulses. I suck air into my lungs I flex I streak forward I scream I make the muscles stretch and creak until I am again human and burning and panting and sweating and I am finally at work.

He calls and we have a conversation full of action verbs and short nouns that pop when you say them that sound like firecrackers going off. When I hang up the phone my legs are itching again and I can barely contain myself as I launch myself into the fray into the mass of people all running all the time. I am the finest I am the best I am their finest and also their proudest child. I am everywhere at once making things happen never running out of energy taking short liquid bursts from a plastic bottle I will crumple into a sharp ball and toss perfectly into a trash can ten feet away to the applause of my coworkers my superiors my subordinates my admirers. A plastic bottle and then another and then another and then another and some sort of energy bar that looks and tastes like sugary cardboard.

Ten hours lapses into night and I am running back home again I am passing the same storefronts the same people nodding hello the same streets the opposite way. I break through the door as if it isn’t there and I am home. I call him and we say things that people say to each other we talk for a half hour and finally run out of things to say and hang up the phone abruptly as if we have both realized the words are superfluous anyhow and we will not see each other’s faces for another month and this fact depresses us both. When we finally meet for one of our brief dalliances rendezvous flings romances we will run out of things to talk about and chaste ways to touch each other and fill the rest of the time with what we won’t talk about later except at angles and in ways that neither of us will acknowledge.

I begin a whirlwind dinner marathon the calorie count once again going into the positives but just barely just enough to keep me alive and running. I feel my stomach where I keep feeling my stomach every day my stomach and it is the same size the same bit of baby fat and I hate it. I keep taking down the mirror and covering them with towels accidentally so I don’t have to see my naked ugliness the ugly nakedness I know is there anyways the naked ugliness I can see when I close my eyes when I am not running when that calorie count goes too far into the positive. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know I know I know this is not healthy that this is not right and that I am obsessing and that I will one day feel my kidneys heart marrow skin vision shot through with rot and falling and failing and that I will die. In the meantime all I can see is the road ahead the road that I am running down that is running me down that is gradually coming to an end. It is my private vice my hidden disease that I can look the picture of health yet barely eat anything yet keep running running running running.

He doesn’t know my parents don’t know my sister doesn’t know no-one knows except me and my mirror and my legs and my shoes and my scantily clad cupboards and fridge. Before bed I distract myself by running out in the cool night air beneath a sky strewn with stars pounding pavement until I can no longer remember why I hated myself despised something what was I was thinking it no longer matters.

I fall into bed like it is Easter Island and I am made of stone and in my dream I am running away from something and not sure what it is though I am successful I am perfect I am all the things I want to be it is something something past something I cannot remember something that is chasing me and running me down as I feel my skin marrow kidneys synapses heart liver muscles shot through with rigor mortis and I can no longer move and I am staring it in the face it knows me and I know it yet when I wake up I can no longer remember what it was.

I wake to the sound of waves on a beach or static or thunder or something and I slough off the dream like sheets.

Central Park hostel. Did you know know
in the basement there’s an old piano?
You can figure out love in its notes,
while you’re making it up as you go.

Cuban cigars out on the roof.
American whisky, eighty proof.
But you’re in your own world running loose,
and you’re making it up as you go.

Everyone seem to know how it should all work out,
but it’s all lies. They’re making it up as they go.

Thirty-three hours on the road
with vehicles turning into ghosts
on missions that only you can know,
you are making them up as they go.

Everyone seems to know where it should all end up,
but it’s all lies. They’re making it up as they go.

Twisted into shape you are a mute
whirlwind of form drinking from the sun,
still equinox you are no longer longer,
all things being equal.

Eyes inward you are unable to inspect
your irresistible fractal curls,
the mesmeric mercuric minutae that
draw me, eyes inward.

That you are that you are is
testimony and testament, the
unfurling world in jasper and gold:
the prologue and the plot running
through it.

It was a dream, a time and half a time:
that original sin in the tension between the poles.

My internal electronics sparking across the gap,
ephemeral imagined notes and the cascading
columns of maths conspiring to
havoc.

But it was just a dream, a time and half a time,
that original sin, that clumsy stumbling
away from it.

Is there a time when you wake up like a person breaking through the surface of an ocean and drawing a deep breath?

Air is life and your throat is a umbilical cord connecting you to it. But other things are life as well. They require you have such a percent of a harmful material.

Do you shudder at the thought of what you were? Of course, of course you do. Go back? Never. But why are you left bruised by the memory as if jealous of yourself being so… free, or complicated, or something. Why are you not happier to have pushed through your own skin to emerge something new?

I have done that. I am still shaking it off like a passing thunder shower. There is a place in my head that has clouded over and needs to clear.

And like that, it’s gone.