Isn’t the Light OK?

Carla and I are lean­ing against a rock on Church Street in Burling­ton, VT, enjoy­ing the unsea­son­ably warm Novem­ber day. The scene sur­round­ing us is a per­fect cross sec­tion of hip­pie and hip­ster, col­lege kids and dropouts. Peo­ple rush in and out of cafes, book­stores and the occa­sional chain retail monstrosity.

We’re eat­ing warm, fresh ket­tle corn that we just bought from a street ven­dor. A busker is play­ing vaguely famil­iar cov­ers nearby, then starts strum­ming a B flat to E flat chord pro­gres­sion that reminds me of a Big Star song. He vamps on the chords for a minute or so, until he starts to sing:

“Won’t you let me walk you home from school?”

We stay for the whole song, after which I drop a few dol­lar bills in his case.

“That was for play­ing ‘Thir­teen,’” I tell him.

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By now in the his­tory of this lit­tle blog, can I assume any­one read­ing is famil­iar with Tom O’Dell and his won­der­fully bizarre late-night cutlery-hawking enter­prise?

If not, click the links. I’ll be here when you get back.

Caught up? Good.

One of the ben­e­fits of mov­ing in with my mother-in-law our land­lady is that we get to share her DirecTV setup. We had no cable, satel­lite or any kind of sub­scrip­tion TV ser­vice prior to the move. The tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal over-the-air TV had given us even fewer live view­ing choices — we were left with the option of watch­ing either Fox or PBS. The 600 chan­nels or so of satel­lite TV were like an amaz­ing new world.

The evening after our move, my buddy John stayed with us for a while, tak­ing in the won­drous sights com­ing from the pic­ture tube. We didn’t have a remote for the DirecTV receiver yet, but it was enough to stand in front of the box, push­ing but­tons repeat­edly, sur­vey­ing the vast waste­land of wonders.

It was then we saw the words glow­ing like a bea­con of hope from the pro­gram guide. “All is not lost,” this two-word phrase whis­pered in our ears.

Those words? “Knife Show.”

Know­ing that O’Dell’s show is called Cut­lery Cor­ner, we weren’t expect­ing to see our hero, and indeed, we did not. Instead, we expe­ri­enced some­thing far more unset­tling. A rotund, genial-looking middle-aged man spoke while gen­tly plac­ing Swiss Army-style knives and “tac­ti­cal fold­ers” on a glass turntable, usu­ally framed on both sides by tacky touristy crap — plas­tic Native Amer­i­can stereo­types, fig­urines depict­ing live­stock, etc. Every few min­utes, an awful coun­try song would play as the host stepped away to let the slowly rotat­ing knives speak for them­selves. In ret­ro­spect, an entire show of this would have been prefer­able to what came next.

When he came back, he began pep­per­ing his sales pitches with ref­er­ences to God. His spiel also betrayed a grow­ing dis­trust of the gov­ern­ment. More than once he men­tioned “our free­dom being taken away.” What had started as a harm­less bit of crap TV was trans­form­ing, before our eyes, into some kind of Branch David­ian–style mili­tia recruit­ment show. Had he more time, I have no doubt our host would have been trot­ting out “Rock­e­feller was a Satanist!”-style con­spir­acy theories.

Next, our host held up what looked like a cylin­dri­cal hair­brush. He then pro­ceeded to illus­trate the proper way to sub­due an assailant with this not-a-hairbrush. Whether the assailant was a ter­ror­ist, ACLU lawyer, or ATF agent, he did not specify.

A few weeks later, we finally caught O’Dell in his nat­ural habi­tat, 1:00 AM, some­where in the nether regions of the DirecTV sched­ule. All was right with the world once more. Say what you will about his hyped-up sales­man­ship, O’Dell has never (to my knowl­edge) attempted to incite vio­lent over­throw of the government.

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Screw the con­ven­tional blog­ging wis­dom (ie. “don’t apol­o­gize or oth­er­wise even acknowl­edge that you haven’t been post­ing”). This is not an apol­ogy, just an update of sorts. If noth­ing else, it’s for me, so I can keep tabs on just where the days have gone.

• Carla and I decided, for rea­sons emo­tional and finan­cial, to put our house on the market.
• Our cat, Glad­ice, went on to the great mouse hunt in the sky after 17 years.
• We moved in with my mother-in-law a nice older lady who kindly offered to rent half her house to us.
• I started post­ing more and more lit­tle updates to Twit­ter and Face­book, and as a result have seem­ingly had less to say on the blog proper. (If you’re read­ing this from Face­book, it might alle­vi­ate your con­fu­sion to know that Face­book is auto-importing posts from my blog as notes.)
• I started becom­ing more inter­ested in mak­ing things. Not even nec­es­sar­ily writ­ing songs – just cre­at­ing. Pen­cil sketches, guest posts on oth­ers’ blogs, ugly PSD mock­ups of fake band websites…when the time is right, I may share this stuff (or at least the stuff that’s not cur­rently pub­lic), but for now the process of mak­ing it is good enough.
• I lost some momen­tum on the song­writ­ing front, which usu­ally hap­pens when life gets in the way. But the study is now arranged and my music equip­ment set up, so that should change soon.
• And oh, the social engage­ments. Con­certs, ball­games, once-in-a-lifetime Geek sin­gu­lar­ity events, ran­dom get-togethers with friends…considering the cir­cum­stances, it’s been a good summer.

And now that I’ve caught you all up (and by “you all,” of course, I mean “me”), I may just resume blog­ging about every­thing and nothing.

I may just.

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I dis­cov­ered a few weeks ago that my inner critic sounds a lot like Jay Sher­man. And not Jay Sher­man as nor­mally seen in any episode of The Critic, but Jay Sher­man locked up in a men­tal hos­pi­tal in a crossover bit from The Simp­sons episode “Hur­ri­cane Neddy” where all he can do is repeat his catch­phrase, “It stinks! It stinks!”

Yes, Mr. Sher­man. Every­thing stinks.

When­ever I sit down to write, make music, or sketch (my lat­est inter­est), there’s Jay Sher­man in his room, yelling “It stinks! It stinks!” before I’ve even made a mark on the page.

My hope is to even­tu­ally turn my inner mono­logue into the words of the doc­tor treat­ing him, patron­iz­ingly say­ing “Yes, Mr. Sher­man. Every­thing stinks.” In other words, just don’t take The Critic seriously.

I even made this lit­tle par­ody of a moti­va­tional poster to remind me that when I hear that voice, it’s really just Jon Lovitz pre­tend­ing to be a men­tally unbal­anced film critic.

Why am I shar­ing this psy­cho­log­i­cal insight with you not long after talk­ing about get­ting out of my own head? Well, you may be able to help me in my quest to Be the Doc­tor instead of The Critic. Or maybe not. Stay tuned to future posts — this might even­tu­ally make sense.

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Tues­day night I sat in on a songwriter’s group in Brunswick, orga­nized by Jud Caswell. We did quite a bit of “object writ­ing,” ie. tak­ing an object, per­son, or sit­u­a­tion, and describ­ing it in as much sen­sory detail as pos­si­ble, with­out wor­ry­ing about rhyme, meter, or even basic prose. The idea is just to get what you see, smell, hear, touch, and taste on the page.

As a song­writer, I’ve been pretty stuck in my own head for as long as I can remem­ber. I tend to favor impres­sion­is­tic lyrics, snatches of ideas mushed together into a whole that I hope is greater than the sum of its parts. More often than not, the phrases tend to reveal some­thing big­ger than them­selves, but don’t really tell a story in the tra­di­tional sense.

I usu­ally asso­ciate that kind of “story” writ­ing with cheesy coun­try bal­lads and CCM artists singing about the love of their daugh­ter, but real­ized that some of my favorite song­writ­ers (par­tic­u­larly Ben Gib­bard from Death Cab for Cutie) also use it to great effect.

I guess I’m start­ing to learn there’s a ben­e­fit to get­ting out of my own head.

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