commute fiction: entry two:(first fiction entry re-worked. study in style, gender reversal.)Sunday morning, 10 AM, wrote a song - a vindictive mountain dirge - while Bridget ran errands.
I grasped the moment, not that the "moment" was Bridget's abscence. We had plenty of time apart. Songwriting was healthfully regurgitative. It was a form of absolvement from a painful experience. I was in the midst of a painful experience; painful enough to chuck up one monotonal lament anyway.
I'm not a jerk but I certainly can come across that way. I'm not even sure why. It's embarassing really; makes me always on edge. Being this way is like owning an obnoxious dog. I'd lock myself in the car when I go out if I could. Worse, like a puppy I can't get over the stupid desire to be liked by everyone, which doesn't mesh well with my involuntary ability to piss people off. That's why when my band mate, Missy, called upset with me for upsetting her boyfriend and his friends, I was upset myself - but only for a moment surprised. Apparently Missy's boyfriend thought I was acting like an asshole at
Sleazefest. When Missy told me this, I immediately lashed out at her and put the blame on everybody else. Hell, I made a conscious effort to be liked by these people. They had not even offered up a decent invite, only telling me about the show an hour before we left. Missy wanted me to go, I don't doubt that, but not Rick. Even if I was the victim (which I was), wasn't there always some truth behind the accusation? Missy knew me pretty well. She wouldn't have been upset if she didn't find it believable. That was why mostly I was upset with Missy (for believing it) and of course, with myself. In any case, I got off a string of emails to all guilty parties. After that little Yahoo! barrage and a loud phone call to Missy on my way to work, I re-directed my anger to the dirge.
In the end, I felt like thanking everybody. I didn't write songs too often by then and I knew that this writer's block was a direct result of complacency which not withstanding my songwriting lull had an attractive apologia: 1)plentiful sex, 2)quality food, 3)sound sleep, 4)health insurance... I had other means of creativity anyway. Not long before, I heard of the
Five Obstructions. This perked me up. I fiddled with my old works. I had no problem using past works as building blocks for new ones. It's not like I had critics pointing out my self-derivation. I didn't even live in the same town where anyone would recognize the old material. The spin-offs didn't sound like the originals anyway. The rest of the band was in to it too. Of course it was not the same as writing a brand new song which was something, for all practical purposes, that I could only do at the hurling end of an emotional fit. I had plenty of that in my youth and now I was glad to have that sort of thing in rarified supply even while I placed high value on new songs.
