secretary blues

One of those nights where about the only task I can stomach in the face of an overwhelming sense of futility is transcribing old songs from their pen and paper stasis into the infinite fungibility of digital. It's secretary's work, and I guess I've spent a good piece of my life filling that role. While Jennie watches American Idol I sit and churn it out, listening to Led Zeppelin on the headphones, soundtrack of drug-addled youth, and find it about as satisfying as I find anything lately, which is not saying a hell of a lot.

I've been on a tear with it, which is why the daily song posting has been so reliable. I'm nearing the end of May 2000, not quite halfway through the second to last volume. Closing in on the end of the first project. Which ended very early in 2001. The new project starts early May of 2005, which raises the question of how to do the transition, if I'm going to stick with trying to post things on their birthdays, which does make keeping track easier. I've thought about taking it easy for four months, perhaps putting up the some dozens of songs I've written outside of this project, as many as I can find anyway (some, having never made the jump to digital, are probably lost forever, gone to the fire in one of my youthful spasms of eliminating anything of no immediate utility. I don't have much regret about this, though there are a couple things I wouldn't mind seeing again. I suppose it might be a good time to get it all into ones and zeros.

I could also start dual-posting in May, wrap up the first and start up the next over the same 8 months... Which holds a certain twisted appeal to me in my fetish for round figures and weird superstition about the number five (going from posting ten years after the fact to five). I should push back against that kind of thing, though, and then again I have a feeling even one a day is a little much for most if not all of my tiny band of beleaguered partisans. So I suppose May of 2011 it will be.

Despite everything I once again finished, in some sense of the word, the RPM Challenge I alluded to before. The "album" is a horror, an endurance exhibition of pure stubbornness. In the context of complete failure to generate instrumentals I busted out the handheld digital and recorded all 28 songs written in February - one take, a capella, zero preparation. Even God doesn't want to listen to this one. And with that I think I am truly done with that sort of thing. I feel like I wrote elsewhere, some other year, but can't track it down, that these things are mainly about encouraging people to realize that productivity can be a choice, which is not really, at this point, the lesson that I need to learn.

As well, I think no more of these notes aside, for a while.

You can read an explanation of the origin of these lyrics here