Catharsis?

Met up with my old friend, former housemate, and the co-writer and producer of my short film 'In Uniform'. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. He's in London too these days. If you watched the BBC's annual Telethon 'Children In Need', then you would have seen him. He was wearing the six foot, Pudsey Bear costume (the mascot of the charity) in the London studio from where the show was hosted. He's a remarkably intelligent chap, a far more naturally poetic fellow than I have ever (or will ever) be.

I have a gig tommorrow at The Spice Of Life off Charing Cross Road in central London. Just an open mic' night, but it will be fun to play. I'm preparing my mini-opera for performance. Believe me, its going to blow a lot of people and doubters away. I just need to tighten up the lyrics a little and get the structure really polished. I've had a lot of ideas too about vocal harmonies for it too. Every now and again, I'll be on a bus, or a train, or in the shower and I'll hear a bass part in it or a drum fill. I'm quite simply full of ideas at the moment, big and small.

I've been seeing Angels recently for the first time. No, I'm not mad. I bullshit you not. And they don't have feathers and they can't (in the physical sense fly), I've just been seeing them in people who happen to cross my path. I started writing a story about this yesterday, I got 2000 words into it and then hit a brick wall. Not writers block, but I found myself attempting to amalgamate recent experiences of mine and discovered that it was going to have to be a much longer story. I seem to find this a lot with my short story writing at the moment. I start off, and then discover that there's no direction home. Much like my behaviour in public, I write too much and I talk too much.

Still though, its good to be buzzing creatively speaking at the moment.

Aside from that though, I seem to have hit the rocks in terms of my romantic aspirations. An old flame, who I'd recently become involved with again has turned to smoke and dissolved said flame. Sad. I seem to be breaking off with a lot of people at the moment. Though I think in this case, there was a mutual agreement on both sides for various reasons. For me, I couldn't see the way forward into the future. She'd have been a fantastic mother to many children for me, but I couldn't place her in the glamorous fantasies that I envisage for my future. Though that said, an image of her walking into a club two years ago with dyed red hair, a red dress and heels is still burned into the back of my retina. That was when (as now though with someone else) she was in a relationship, and we had become involved. There was a connection between us that had completely knocked my senses for six.

Frankly, when she walked into the club, and I couldn't take it - I had been in some turmoil at that time, I had seen a lot of death around me, and had been watching, desperately, many close friendships and friends dissolve like flesh into acid - so in my heavily anaethesised state I cracked. That night was pretty hellish for me. The people around me were concerned, but I'd vowed to her to keep everything a secret from the others...and so I was being dishonest with some of my closest friends, including my drummer who as a friend I loved beyond all others.

The next day, I awoke in my room, with a desperate need to get the away, out, off to somewhere else. I packed up my home studio, my guitars and headed to an empty house in the north where I knew that I could be alone. I had to borrow money to pay for the petrol there, and all that I can remember saying to myself on the 3 hour drive there was "get the hell out of there". I recited it like a mantra, I didn't even play music and hoped to find some comfort in the reassuring chug of my car's engine and the sound of the wind breaking against the windshield.

When I arrived to where I was going. I sat down. Made a hot, simple meal and drank two bottles of wine in silence. I scribled some lyrics down, and lay back feeling a great sense of release washing over me, it was sensual, like the touch of gently breaking sea water over naked feet.

The next day I recorded a venomous song. I did a fantastic job of producing it, a real technical master-piece, but as a piece of music it was like a car crash. The verse was a frenetic strum into which I threw all the fire left in my badly broken ego, I also chucked in VERY LOUD and ANGRY fills with great precision. It was a very complex piece of music. The chorus threw in an upbeat break from the violence of the verse. The lyrics were the most bitter that I've ever written, but such often is the creative product of a cathartic process.

Once I returned to the South, I thought about throwing the song at the band and letting them here the demo. I chose not too, I thought that it was pretty transparent. There was no sophisticated coding in my words, it was very transparent.

So, that was that. I wrote more here. But I don't want to post that now. I will at some-point. Its a good ending to this particular story. Its very truthful. It involves feedingback guitars and bleeding fingers.

I'll be blogging again soon.

Tom.