This was started as an email to a friendlast night, but that went off into the weeds somewhere and was terminated. But I liked the first part so here it is. —- One of those funny moments when lots of thoughts collide. Wait – must warn you – I’ve had several really tall long island […]
This was started as an email to a friendlast night, but that went off into the weeds somewhere and was terminated.
But I liked the first part so here it is.
—-
One of those funny moments when lots of thoughts collide.
Wait – must warn you – I’ve had several really tall long island ice teas – dinner at the restaurant where my ex-nanny works and the bartender took so long making my first drink, it was free, so I had a few more, and they were getting stronger as they went.
So anyway, I’m listening to this CD I have not listened to in years and fucking years.
‘You could be the one’ she whispered ‘listen – love is all you’ve ever
wanted, all you’ll ever need.’
Thomas Dolby – who I loved when his first album (Golden Age of Wireless) came out, but then he released ‘Blinded me with Science’ and it fucked the deal up, he got to be a huge star with this novelty song and then released a remixed version of the first album on CD which was half as good as the original, and hardly anyone who’s not my age remembers that there WAS an original, which was so damned good and has never been out on CD.
So then I looked at the vinyl original. (Yes I still own a lot of vinyl, AND a turntable, but I hardly ever listen to it because it’s a production to get it all set up). I worked in a record store when this album came out. The original with This cover , not the later one you all remember.
Nineteen Eighty Fucking Two. Twenty two fucking years ago this came out.
I was already past the worst of my illicit substance phase. That was when I listened to this so much I know every word and every drum-beat. I put it on and suddenly was back in the toyota truck I had back then, I could feel the wheel and hear the motor and smell the funky smell that truck always had, and see the lights from the graphic EQ I had mounted in the glove box.
Damn.
—-
Some things make a man feel old. Music I listened to and still think is new is now older than people who will vote in the next election.
On the other hand, it’s an interesting thing I’ve found recently about being over forty. I’m not sure when this happened exactly.
Suddenly I went from being just some guy to being hot older guy to women in the twenty-something/thirty-something range. Suddenly I seem to have teenage girls look at me different.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m feelin’ good and I’m readin’ it in. But damn, my trip to d-land last week, suddenly instead of feeling like the late-teen-early-twenty goth chicks who wouldn’t have noticed me before were smiling at me. And of course I was smiling at them, because have this philosophy that if I’m looking at a pretty girl she should know it.
Same thing with on-line friends. Suddenly, I’m getting attention from places I never got it before and girls I would have expected to ignore me (girls in some cases younger than the aforementioned vinyl) are interested in flirting with the scary old guy.
So I ask you – what’s up with that?
Not that I’m complaining. But maybe some of the hot younger chicks out there can hip me to this hot older guy thing I seem to have tapped into. Because I don’t get it.
Now back to the writing.
So I’ve been trying to work on the story I posted an excerpt from. But I got to a certain point and I’m not sure it’s working. I can’t get back to it because while I like what I’ve written, I’m not sure it moves the character along the way I want to move him, and I’m not sure the plot I have outlined is strong enough to drive the character development I’m aiming for. Because this story needs to be a character development piece, about how this man goes from one place to another in his life, and it needs to set up the later, longer story I’m still planning to write about him.
Add to that the fact that I’ve been reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Why have I never read this before? I don’t know), and that’s making me want to write like Hunter S. Thompson. I wrote a little piece inspired by him, I’ll have to post it here later. But suddenly it’s making me want to skew what I’m writing to be a bit more hallucinogenic. I have to wait for that thought to pass or mature before I can go back because I don’t want to have my work lessened by my sudden desire to be old Raoul Duke.
I actually have another story outlined based on that thought, though that writer in the original thought was Bukowski. Basically a story about a young man with pretensions to be some self-destructive writer, but he can’t quite manage to be as romantically self-destructive as he wants to be and he’s not got the talent his idol had. These two thoughts might work well together, I’ll have to ponder that.
Sometimes you have to write the demons out, when they won’t leave of their own accord. On in their own accord. Here’s where we need a Ralph Steadman drawing of demons driving away in an old blue Honda.
And that seems to be where I should stop, leaving us all with that image.