Carry On, Carrion Birds

The dog got way too shaggy and had to be shorn. I had my first idea for a post that had to be scrapped. But I'm going to take the scrap and fashion it into some kind of po-mo mobile to dangle overhead. I'm going to pick at its carcass, as it rots by the road and the wind carries the stink of self-indulgent obnoxiousness to your unsuspecting noses.

It was a sort of too-ambitious concept piece about an encounter with personified versions of MYBOOK and MYBAND, the sort of untapped potential that we imagine to be locked up or otherwise stunted, held back. Like I would interview these walking talking embodiments of my unwritten novel and my unformed band. So I was going to call it "The Undone Sessions" and I was then going to ask you if you knew YERBOOK and YERBAND and what they looked like. Maybe too insubstantial but I thought it was enough to go on.

Where I think I took the real wrong turn, though, was when I decided I wanted to use the subtitle "Interview Without the Vampire" because the whole thing would be 'set' in a dream and there wouuld be this sort of creature that sucks out the will or confidence or drive to do these things you want to do and ... from there the thing got way too out of control.

I did like the beginning, though. It went like this:

"Let's pretend I had a dream. And in the dream I'm sleeping. And dreaming. Let's pretend I had a dream and in the dream I'm sleeping and dreaming about being at an R.E.M. show. I like R.E.M. but I'm not like a huge fan or anything, but maybe sort of subconsciously I am because there I am at the R.E.M. show and I'm DEEP INTO R.E.M. They've been playing for about 90 minutes and I'm transfixed, not really moving, but it's hard to focus. Stipe and the other guys keep bouncing around in my vision. And I have a boner. Not quite sure why. So Stipe gets finished doing some weird dance - it looks like he's hugging himself or maybe trying to curtail some involuntary muscle spasms, and he sits down at this piano and he starts to play "Nightswimming" from Automatic for the People. And I really like that song: "The fear of getting caught / Of recklessness and water /They cannot see me naked /These things, they go away /Replaced by everyday."

BUT THEN I'm awake (in the dream) and the vampire is there,"attached to my mouth by its mouth." Yikes. Just a whole different vibe here. Uneven. And I'm tangled up in the amount of time it takes to explain all the details I've made necessary when I began down this path. So the thing is kind of sagging from its own weight at this point. And I can't decide if I want to be funny or "literary" or how to combine the two. And so the vampire thing starts out trying to be creepy and ends up trying to be silly. The colors clash. This is what that section said right before being euthanised:

"I had just never woken up in flagrante disgusto like this before. Anyway, I wasn't able to make all of it out but it said it was some kind of toothless vampire that fed on the sufferers of any number of related and Seuss-ly mellifluous afflictions - moxie pox, gumption consumption, stuff like that. So anyway, in the dream I'm still awake and the vampire can't exactly go back to "work" so I offered him some Powerade and Cheez-Its(all I had) and he sort of thought about it for a minute and then turned it down and then he asked me if I played World of Warcraft and I said no I didn't and then after a few more excruciating minutes he finally took off."

And by now I've invested too much time in the thing but I still haven't gotten to or even thought of a "plausible" way to get to these interviews with MYBOOK and MYBAND, so there was just no way. Or if there is, I can't see it from here, what with the glaze of failure coating my eyes.

Anyhow, I'll be posting something less pretentious real soon. But I did mean for this one to open out. So please do tell me about YERBOOK and YERBAND if that isn't completely idiotic.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT.