Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Dashboard Confessional - As Lovers Go

Even though I feel like I could have written more this week, I have kept pace with my writing goal for the month. If I keep going just like this, I'll have at least 15 writing days on my calendar by September 30. This extra effort hasn't just yielded me a check on my to-do list, it resulted in two music-inspired creative non-fiction pieces this week! Obviously I only chose one, but I thought I'd share news of my bounty.

This week's is a little long, so you'll find it under the cut.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Metallica - Enter Sandman (Live With San Francisco Symphony Orchestra)

My consciousness crested on a wave of power chords, soaring violins, and icy air whipping by and throwing my hair against my face until it itched. Every inch of my skin felt alive—present. The heat was on full blast in the truck. My feet felt like I’d put them too close to a campfire, but the warmth reached a perfect blend with the night air right around my shoulders. Weeds, illuminated by silvery moonlight, blurred by my window as I smiled up at the constellations.

Brian turned down the music and looked over at me with a sly grin.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I—don’t know?”

His left hand drifted to a dial on the far side of the dash, turned it, and suddenly the headlights disappeared. For a moment, nothing else existed. The entirety of our future—school in the morning, college, marriage, our next fight—vaporized, leaving only that moment so full and heavy with moonlight, the growl of the old diesel engine, and the dim black-and-white view of Wormansville Road stretching out  in front of us as far as we could see. The burned-out shell of an abandoned farmhouse looked on at us from the side of the road. We couldn’t see lights in any direction—the big square headlights on the F-250 had been the only ones for miles.

Panic rose in my chest. I felt like I had just accelerated toward disaster.

“Amazing, huh?”

“No!” I gripped the upholstery, rooting the heels of my hands on the bench seat. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Aw, come on.” I couldn’t see his eyes. Part of me wished I had it in me to be more rebellious, more carefree, more of a risk-taker.

Before the turn onto Municipal he switched the headlights back on. Through my relief I could feel we were getting closer to home—a little farther away from being alone without a past or a future, just the two of us hurtling through the dark.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Sweeney Todd - Not While I'm Around

And for this week, we take a little foray into the musical theatre. For context, I was imagining the song as performed by Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Sanders in the Tim Burton movie.

It's a little long(ish), so I'm sticking it behind the cut.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer #1

This one is a little more rough-draft-y than some others (especially my piece about the Atlantic City boardwalk). It more closely resembles the raw writing in my notebook in style/sentence structure, which is sometimes useful to share. In any case, enjoy!

Few people understand why I love getting to the office early, at least an hour before nearly anyone else. Maybe precious few love waking up early, stepping off the bus while the sunlight still has its morning colors, sitting surrounded by empty desks, but that just leaves it pristine for the rest of us.

In the middle of all this emptiness, though, still missing the morning coffee I’ve temporarily abandoned to kick a caffeine habit, the space starts to absorb my productivity. Minutes pass as if falling through a sieve. If I don’t fill the air with something substantial it will create a vacuum that carries me all the way until 9:00.

Luckily, no one is there to form opinions on my music selection.

John Darnielle’s voice, anything but universally likable, sends an electric charge through my chest straight down to my bellybutton. I find myself mouthing the lyrics, drumming on my desk, dying to feel his words vibrating in my throat but settling for triggering a chain reaction in my synapses. Somehow his words just cover me in the English language, make me delight in my native tongue, just the same as staring out the bathroom window early in the morning in my old college apartment made me amazed at my own ability to perceive color. Rusting tin roofs, red painted wood on the side of a garage, green Victorian house next door, everything peeling and faded under the big open sky.

When I close my eyes, tilt my head back, open my mouth just a little during the chorus I realize how much I should listen for the door, for footsteps out in the lobby that might signal prying eyes. Because soon, very soon, this will end. The door will slam one, two, three times, and the workday will begin in earnest, human energy flowing all around me.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Street Musicians, Video Games, and Wandering Thoughts

This week's creative non-fiction is really meta-writing, a window into a sleepy morning trying to write but continually getting distracted.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Jay Sean - Down

Despite quitting caffeine this week, I still managed to write!  While survival without my morning coffee has been painful at best, I'm hoping this little detox will do well for my health.  Anyway, without further ado, the song of the week:

I’m trying to write about the Atlantic City boardwalk , with its air hung low and heavy and thick. My body slows under its salty residue, vaporized pieces of the sea adhere to my pores. Fish and garbage and funnel cake battle for airspace overhead and the smell falls on me like someone just threw a blanket over my head in a hot attic.

Throngs of people push past one another, most of them drunk or high and just young enough to be lost in their own sea of miniskirts and stilettos. Pop music struggles to be heard, struggles for relevance in the cacophony, ends up sounding caricatured like that person in the group who just never feels heard. Except no one quite expects Jay Sean to struggle for the floor, creating a backdrop that gets lonelier and lonelier against the din, the carnival lights, the ambulance that has pushed past the revelers to collect a man who has overdosed beneath a dark and decaying pavilion.

I’m trying to write this in my head like the one person in the corner actually listening to Jay Sean, ready to nod and say “oh yeah, I got you, ‘baby don’t worry / you are my only / even if the sky is falling down.’ I was listening.” I’m writing this in my head because I’m waiting in line for the bumper cars, half-listening to my friends and everyone else’s, such a flood of conversation.

Dropped in the middle of all this humanity—the humidity, the thin and hopeful pop music, the flashing lights and bells and carnies trying to sell a seat on a barstool with a water gun—yes, this crush of humanity, I wonder how it’s escaped everyone. I want to open my eyes wide because maybe this is the end of the world. This place seems like the last sad, bombastic, completely bizarre outpost of humanity, as if beyond the light pollution orb of this noisy pier is just nothing—everything ending.

Yet everyone is going on like this is just another fun party, no impending apocalypse except maybe for that drunk girl writhing on the ground. Suddenly the haze feels too heavy, like I can’t stand, and I feel desperately lonely for a quiet night inside, far away from this carnival where everyone comes to overdose, to pay another human being to push them in a cart, to take a group picture with the casino lights smiling in the background.

Everyone still keeps talking, eagerly awaiting our turn to hand over those paper tickets for a ride, haphazardly crashing into one another as the floor and ceiling throw off sparks out of time with the music—another party.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should've Come Over

As in: maybe I’m too young / to keep good love from going wrong.  Too young to hold on / too old to just break free and run.

I thought I'd start off the tradition with something appropriately dramatic.

To my sweetheart, the drunk:

(pardon the reference, this isn't to my sweetheart and there's no drunk)

At the end of the week I realized my problem had sprung from a lack of music.  I had experienced chronic failure to inject it into my veins, to let it explode my heart within my chest, to open my throat wide so it could come out.  I had spent the week adrift, my feet never on the ground, my soul standing with one foot outside the door.

Now here I was, stretching my voice to reach into the playlist I’d so aptly titled “Songs I Wish I Could Sing.”  Since the house was empty I could actually half do it, experimenting with range and emotion, letting my voice bounce fearlessly off all the walls.  Even as I was relaxing, releasing, digging in and supporting these songs with the strength of my body, I was wishing I could do this for someone else.  Wondering why song, like my rawest emotions, bruised itself continuously against an invisible wall every time I tried to project it in the direction of someone I loved.

Oh, but then I thought of you, too.  Imagined you at the piano with this lovely creature of a piece that was so full of heartbreak.  I wondered, having never heard you use your voice that way, if you could—or more appropriately, if you would, if you would want to.  If you had ever experienced a desire for song that verged on...could I say it?

Music is such a visceral, physical pleasure.  Everyone I’ve fantasized myself into song with should know it, but that’s where it all collides, leaning defeated against a wall inside, somehow keeping a straight face while fighting to burst free.  It engages in an interplay like lovers hidden in a tiny room, one about to cry out, the other placing an extended index finger over that sly smile, the one that says “this is ours, don’t let them hear.”

Eventually, of course, the song had to end despite itself, despite repeating lines of “it’s never over” (my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder).  As it faded away into the next song it set me down firmly on my feet, the ground feeling solid for the first time all week.