It's only time after all

It's come to this: quoting my own lyrics on my own blog.

Nice work, Captain Narcissism.

"It's only time after all."

Taken from the song Revenant, this line is a prime example of my obsession with time. My other two crutches, er, I mean "lyrical obsessions" are dreams and water, not particulary unique song subjects, but not unworthy either.

Anyway, as I was lying in my typical Sunday night persistant non-vegatative state (aka "Shit, I have to go to work tomorrow") I was thinking about time. Or the lack thereof in my life right now. To wit, my weekend consisted of: Friday night: rush home from work, rush out to Oak Park for a music rehearsal, rush to our practice space, load our PA down three flights of stairs, go home.

Saturday: wake up early due to incessant dog nuzzling, jog 3 miles, drive an hour and a half out to Woodstock, Illinois, to play guitar and sing for a wedding. The wedding consisted of: unloading and setting up PA system in 90 degree heat, playing 4 songs for the 25 minute ceremony (which was very nice and tasteful), and immediately loading the PA back into my car.

After a two hour drive to Oak Park, I played guitar in the pit band for a two hour 50's music stage review (I - vi - IV - V: repeat) at the Hemingway Arts Center. I then loaded my guitar gear into an increasingly crowded car and hauled ass to our practice space to load our PA back up 3 flights of stairs in the impossibly humid night air.

While I should have gone home and slept, I decided instead to go my friend AJ's house and have a few beers. After hanging out for awhile, I got home at about 2:30 am, ate a late late dinner and passed out, only to have my blissful sleep interrupted at about 5:00 am by Gina and our friend Melissa arriving home after Melissa's bachelorette party.

On Sunday, I hung out with my uncles in our backyard, talked with our neighbors for awhile, jogged 3 miles, and went grocery shopping. It seems like this weekend, every hour was promised to something or someone that isn't writing songs.

Does that make sense? And it's frustrating. I'm pretty good at grabbing little slices of time and using them to write lyrics: riding the train, between lessons, lying awake in bed, etc. But I write best when I then have a few hours by myself in silence to piece these fragments together and make them into something more coherent. And I've been lacking those blocks of time lately.

So in considering this, I wondered if it would ever be any different... if/when BRB is on the road for large chunks of time, am I going to be disciplined enough to write in the van, in hotel rooms, in green rooms? When I come home from a tour, will I be able to dedicate four and five hours a day to writing, like I'd like to?

Or will my time always belong to other things? The only time in my life I've really been able to treat writing like the craft I believe it is, is when I was writing the Odyssey. I'd just get up, eat breakfast, and start writing... like 5 days a week.

Of course, I was only working 2 days a week, not 6. And the rest of my life was really falling apart at the point... which brings up all sorts of butt-clenchingly cliched questions about the correlation between suffering and art, which...

Which I don't really have the time to write about.

It's always time, after all.

jbg