Musical accompaniment: Enter Shikari - Bull (feat. Cody Frost)
I hit Publish on the last post, changed to a different song mostly at random, got half-way through it, switched tabs back and clicked on New Post. Before I switched tracks my private music streaming server told me me I'd listened to Drive by Incubus 27 times.
Ride by Twenty One Pilots said 81.
Bull currently says 2, which will shortly increment to 3.
I can't help but feel that writing about writing is taking my literary onanism to the next level, like I'm reaching into the 5th dimension to give myself a reach-around which can only result in a stickily-slippery slope leading to a poly-dimensional circle-jerk, and once I start I'm going down.
If you google "write what you know quote" you'll discover that it's attributed to Mark Twain, and that the next two pages of links will be to people raining written hate about it, which just goes to show how right Clint Mansell et al were when they re-named their band Pop Will Eat Itself.
I think I'll listen to Ich Bin Ein Auslander next.
I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but I'm on a roll now so I might as well get a grip. This hobby, which has arguably become my most important emotional/creative outlet, has been all about writing as a means for working things out. It never ceases to amaze me how often I start out writing down something which popped into my head not knowing what I'm going to say next, but by the time I'm done I know something I didn't when started; I wrote it and now I know, but I wrote it so how could I not have known from the start? No one knows how the snake came to suck down its own teil, but it's rolling down the road so I might as well grab it with both hands and hold tight, climb onboard, and see where it takes me.
When I finished the journey of insploration which became It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me... my private music streaming server told me I'd listened to Midwest Indigo by Twenty One Pilots 204 times.
Jailbreak by Enter Shikari said 139.
Bull currently says 22, and counting.
Music has always been an important part of my writing; I can't tell you what other people's processes look like, but I can count the number of times something happened and I thought "y'know, I should write about that," then did, on one hand. On any given day my brain is a bubbling stew of troubled thoughts boiling in a cauldron over a gas-burning fire fed with a frenetic stream of thoughts which are being thrown over the shoulder of a sous-chef coming down off a week-long cocaine binge toiling away with a look of desperation who gave up on trying to supervise the manic-depressive prep-cooks dual-wielding at the chopping boards after that time he scored a bad batch of acid with a delivery of fish-heads and now can't quite tell whether they're actually the dangerously underqualified ex-convicts he hired or a pack of meth-addicted squirrels packed into questionably-stained chef's whites so now he's just winging it and praying that when he counts his fingers at the end of his shift he'll still have the same seven he used to roll up the fortnight-old specials menu through which he snorted the coffee-vendor's nose-candy lined up on the maitre-d's notepad.
Calling it a "chaotic hot mess" would be a polite understatement.
I can stare into the turmoil for hours without a coherent thought, but when I filter it through the lens of Devin Townsend Project, or Metric, or Pink Floyd, or Stone Temple Pilots, or Reel Big Fish, or Fear Factory, or Blink-182, or The Cure, or Scroobius Pip, or TISM, a pattern will emerge in the china shop of my mind's eye that's clearer than a carefully polished mirror, and brighter than a teacher's pet on the first day of class.
On knees that won't bend... would have been stillborn without Oliver Tree's Me, Myself & I putting the idea of duality into my head.
Drowning in silence... would have been a whiny lament about feeling overwhelmed without Drown by BMTH reminding me of an event from my last dive-trip.
Hostage negotiations only happened because WARGASM's God of War (not to mention Mick Gordon's genius work on the Doom Eternal soundtrack) gave me a way to take the terror of an unhinged narcissist threatening my livelihood and turning it into self-righteous rage.
A lot of my ideas emerge from the texture of what I hear, and I use it to add subtext what what I say. What that looks like and how it feels depends a lot on what I'm listening to, or what word-or-sentiment-association makes me think of at the time; the soundtrack of my zeitgeist is nothing if not mercurial.
Without Midway Indigo and Jailbreak, It's not you (I'm giving up on), it's me... would have just been goth poetry.
When I realised that I was planning out a piece I was desperate to ensure people understood, I looked for people I know enjoy reading my shit, and would be good "every-man" reference-points. Boldilocks and Occam's Canadian Amy were kind enough to volunteer, and over a couple of multi-hour phone calls we went over Stop; Continue... twice, in line-by-line detail. The first time I had them tell me what they heard, then the second I told them what I was saying, and over rest of each conversation we talked about how I could make sure the two lined up as close as possible. The most surprising thing I found out wasn't how often they don't listen to the links I include, which are so pivotal to my process, but how little that actually mattered.
See, when I'm putting these things together, a lot of the tone comes from the music I was listening to when the idea popped into my head. To keep it consistent I wind up listening to the same one on repeat for as long as it takes me to push that idea out of my head through my fingers. When your mind is huge, but the conduit you have for it to flow though is small, it means listening to the same thing A Lot. Key words and phrases from the songs will get fed through my brain and out of my fingers to connect what I'm hearing with what I'm saying, and wrap the two experiences around each other. Sometimes the songs will be the a voice you hear the words in, sometimes it's far more subtle than that:
We all read different things in a story, just like everyone hears different things from a song, which is why I made a point of not using my usual "Musical accompaniment" trope in "It's not you (...) it's me...". Instead, I threw together the "Trailer" posts from my conversations with Boldilocks, an idea inspired by my reference to the Fight Club trailer way back in Sandra... I was pulling a lot of references from that, with her steering me away from the ledge at the start, then returning to that ledge alone at the end; having a "Trailer" which had no immediate bearing to what was going to happen in the Main Feature was just too cute to not use. Using music in the Trailers which didn't show up in film was an idea that was hanging my head from the 300 reference I made in Stop; Continue... because it had always stuck with me how perfect Just Like You Imagined was in the trailer for that film, but wasn't on the soundtrack. I was a way of providing the intended soundscape, but at a remove so that the text would stand on its own, and have confidence that it would work because my sample-group had been doing that anyway.
More directly, I used the Trailers to send two messages:
#1: I was going to take you on a journey, and hit you right where you live by kicking you repeatedly in the amygdala; and
#2: I was absolutely not going to leave you with a positive spin at the end. There was going to be no affirmation, no silver lining, and certainly no hope; the "good guy" gets shot in the face and dies meaninglessly in a car park.
Yeah, I know it's contrived, but it's my arty and I'll wank if I want to.
Midwest Indigo is a sad song with a bouncy tune, which I used in the first half to give it a whimsical tone whilst I bounced the narrative around. Key lines like "reaching out on my way home, you can be so cold, I'll try again" and "you make me sad and second-guess myself" speak to how inaccessible I've been over the last few years (but keep trying), and forebode the crisis-of-confidence which comes later. In the second half the repeated line "now I'm lying wide awake" provided an allusion to my long-running insomnia, the long nights I've spend sitting on my balcony writing, and just how aware I've been of the state of my mental health. When I pivot to running down that hill I used its frantic pace (163 BPM to Midwest Indigo's 116) to accentuate the elation of "inhuman success", then make 9 months of downfall feel like free-fall. When it all draws to an end your heart-rate is elevated, in direct contrast with the quiet stillness of my fog-draped balcony, and the only way you can see is down. The photo is absolutely real, taken as I was writing that section, as if the weather had decided it wanted a walk-in role; who was I to deny it?
But underneath all of that, when you're reading how I let myself get beaten down, in the background you can hear (if you're listening) Rou from Enter Shikari saying
So, yeah, question everything
Including your own beliefs
And especially your own beliefs about yourself
Inside of you, there's a revolution
Waiting to happen if you pick the lock of your cell block
And just breathe, breathe
and the repeated chant
I hope I leave hope intact
I hope I leave hope intact
Because, you see, whilst every word I wrote was true, I was lying to you, and I was wide awake when I did it, but you'd only know that if you were listening. No word I wrote broke the promise I made when I told you it was going to be miserable, full of gallows-humour, and I wouldn't be leaving you with a glimmer of hope, but underneath I had other things in mind. I didn't know I was going to finish it with a Pandora's Box reference until I'd written the final word, and my finger was hovering over the bottom right-hand corner of my keyboard. In that pause, a number of ideas connected, I saw what I was about to do, and in an action which was more Muninn than Huginn, I hit backspace four times, rewrote that word with a capital-S, and my ring-finger moved up a row to end it with a semi-colon.
I looked at the bottom of the page and breathed out "Oh Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck..."
Tab-switching back to my private music streaming server, it tells me I've listened to Midwest Indigo by Twenty One Pilots 212 times.
Jailbreak by Enter Shikari says 166.
Bull us up to 39, although by the time I'm done editing this all of those numbers will be larger.
But that's a story I'll Continue another day; there's no point being a prisoner to the past, or letting The Room in your mind be a prison cell.
Jailbreak just ticked over to 167; don't repeat these words after me, let's sing it Together...
JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK!
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