kbrown.ca

Hey, friend, how’s your day?  I hope you’re well and enjoying some of the spring we’re still having.  Because it was delivered so early this year there was talk of it being taken back after a few days, but apparently it fits well enough we’ll keep it and wear it in a little bit.  I know it’s really spring now because I finally noticed buds on the tree out front.  Couldn’t miss them actually.  I guess I’d been walking around with my head down, hadn’t looked up.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere, eh?

Had another lesson yesterday, I’m just not sure quite what it is yet.  As you know, friend, I’m not a pack rat, I don’t care for collecting odd piles of things I just might use someday.  I’ve walked with people who live like that and it makes me uncomfortable.  It speaks of a sadness to me.  Maybe that’s just me.

No, I’m not a collector, but I am a bit of an archivist.  Sometimes I surprise myself at what I’ve managed to hang on to.  So I shouldn’t be too surprised that I ran across a pile of papers last night that looked odd at first, but turned out to be stacks of old tunes that I’d collected or people had asked me to learn over the decades, as well as instrumental arrangements from late in the last century, and even a few pieces I’d written something over thirty years ago.  I was surprised I still had any of it.  Even more that some of it actually wasn’t bad.  There were also several songs from a few years ago, things I’d forgotten about completely, one or two of which I might actually re-learn just for amusement’s sake.  Mind you I don’t know what to do with the arrangements for violin, oboe, flute and cello.  I think I got the chance to hear them on real instruments exactly twice.

Oh, and lyrics for the first two songs I ever wrote.  How very strange yet typical that I could immediately hear the melody and the guitar part clearly and completely.  Interesting to notice, too, that while the classic putdown of all young writing that it’s all about ‘me’, the first one was about Amos, a guy in South Africa who had climbed six floors up on a construction site to end his life while crowd gathered below chanting ‘jump, jump, jump’, and the second was about the end of the world from nuclear destruction.

Of course, typical me, they’re barely recognizable in those terms.  The first owes more to ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ than any normal narrative structure, and the second is a whole ton of weird imagery flinging itself in all directions then returning to one person asking another what they saw when the world ended this morning.

Y’know, I guess when you start there pretty much anything is possible.

Maybe even inevitable.