2.24.2010

I wrote an epic poem of staggering brilliance. I guess. It's actually just an email I made combined with a conversation I had, but it is stunning the ever-living shit out of people who hear or read it.

It's called blue blue water baby. It wasn't that hard to write, actually, which is why I'm unsure of how to deal with the fact that people love it. I mean, yeah ... it's good. Really good. But it took so little effort to write, it was almost conversational. Which makes me feel like a con-woman.

blue blue water baby, as I just mentioned, was originally an email, and I suppose it was in fact a difficult one to compose. But not out of technical problems, just because I had so much raw material to sort through and it was hard to choose.
Would I write about the time I saw Bigfoot from horseback? The snowstorm and its effects on the social climate in Brooklyn?
Dead Civil War soldiers? General Sherman? My upcoming album about General Sherman? People's responses to my album about General Sherman? Libertarian hippie militias?
The time I scared up a hundred wild turkeys during a solo trail ride? Hanging out in treestands getting high? Hopping trains? The Deep South, the Appalachian Mtns, punk-rock girls, Northern Gothic, the fact that I tried compulsively and repeatedly to drown myself as a child?
The way that I listen to and relate to music, and why that might be so?

While I was debating this, and reviewing the stream of my consciousness as it flowed by with all of those pretty, crazy ideas in it like flecks of gold I was panning for, I actually experienced so much stressure and press that I saw shit move that wasn't even supposed to move, much less in a way that it would be expected to move.
I was awaiting the G train in the Metropolitan-Lorimer station, and the PA system broke. An announcement about service changes turned into, ''Attention Passengers -- the Church Avenue-bound G train will be nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.''
The sound was a combination of feedback and drone. It was a much lower frequency than any feedback I'd ever heard, but higher than a drone. It didn't so much hurt my ears as make my head feel like a wad of cotton and a fishbowl. nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn, and suddenly the tiles -- the yellow tiles with the bumpy grip-tread -- started to move laterally and slide around each other, back and forth. It was very interesting. It lasted for as long as the sound, and then it stopped. Otherwise it would have perhaps been a matter of concern, and I would have had to seek help.

But ultimately, it was a very easy story to write. It ran out of me like water, and then that was that. See, it's that aquatic fixation again. Perhaps I ought to start expanding my horizon, writing about birds or something.