make things = know thyself

The Dad played guitar and sang some songs for his son today. Since they were all the same melody and chords he played a medley of “the alphabet song/twinkle twinkle little star/bah bah black sheep” like he used to when the boy was a baby. Whenever he sang over the past year or so the boy didn’t like it. Dad would throw out a few words along with whatever Sesame Street episode was playing or a Willy Wonka tune and the boy would always respond with a short grunt and say, “Nokay!” At least Dad was his preferred tucker-inner at bedtime, so he didn’t take it too personally.

They were in the kitchen and the son was at the sink washing the dishes along with his therapist. He let Dad continue from start to finish of the entire medley. Maybe it was the guitar. He hadn’t been able to play that long for him in a while. The boy even walked over to the Dad while he sang and smiled. The boy watched his fingers for a chord or two and then looked him square in the eye with a huge grin across his face. It was nice. Then the needles started to dig in deep into his fingers. He started losing grip on the pick, the fretboard turned into a mysterious map he could no longer follow leading to treasures of sound that formerly came easily to him. So Dad shook his hands and put the instrument down for the day. The boy seemed sad watching Dad leave the room. The Dad was sad too. More so than he wanted to think about actually.

Dad slid the headstock of the guitar on to the rubber protected arms that held it up on the wall of the bedroom. He backed up a couple steps and held his breath looking at the box of wood and strings. An instrument that brought music out of tension, pressure, resonance and imagination. For many years it was the outlet of his free creation. Lately it was a source of immense pain and frustration.

He looked at the three guitars he had left. At one time he’d had a stable of as many as nine that he used pretty regularly. He wasn’t primarily a guitarist, but he liked the way that different instruments shaped the sound in different ways. This one gave a nice warm tone curling you up next to a fireplace on a rainy day. That one could make your ears bleed with brittle breakupitude and at the same time coo like a baby at mother’s breast. Most were all sold off now in vain attempts to pay bills or fill the kitchen with some edibles. A not so uncommon disappointment in the life of many musicians, but something that the Dad never thought would happen to him.

Since he wasn’t really able to play them all anymore it wasn’t such a big deal. That’s what he tried to tell himself that anyway. Still, every time he walked into his music room, it felt empty and lonely without them sitting in there waiting for him. His drums were still set up in there. He kept them clean and dusted them off on a fairly regular basis. He even slipped on the gloves he used to keep the sticks from falling out of his hands and allowed himself a few minutes a week to believe he was still up on stage.

Instead he typed. Albeit slowly, and with only one hand words did appear on the computer screen. Occasionally they formed sentences that made some bits sense. Sometimes they even sounded pretty good too. The sentences mortared themselves together and made paragraphs. Eventually the building grew taller until an entire page was filled. If he could focus his eyes long enough more pages took the structure even higher into building the cityscape of a story.

He wrote on the suggestion of his wife. She knew how frustrated and depressed he was. She said, “You’ve been writing your whole life. Songs, poetry and stuff like that. Why don’t you write a book or something? Use it as an outlet. Make some art!” So he did. He wrote a bit each day. He wrote for himself. It was actually kinda fun. Probably because he never really took it seriously.

He had a handful of short stories saved to a hard drive on his desk that he thought were pretty good. They weren’t Hemmingway or Burroughs, but they told the stories he wanted to tell anyway. He put inspirational quotes up next to his monitor to remind himself to have fun. To remind himself to create and to not take himself so goddamned seriously. Then he decided to start the big task. The intimidator! The self-confidence eliminator! He started to write a novel.

He had no direction and no concept of what, when, who or how. One night he had a very vivid nightmare so he started to put it down on virtual pages. Where would the story go? How should it end? Who are the people who live here? He didn’t let any of that matter. He just wrote for the sake of it. When the boys were at school and his wife was at work, he sat down at the computer for a little while each day and slapped his index finger into the white plastic squares covered in letters on his keyboard. Sometimes he got up and turned the television on after a minute or two. Sometimes he lost track of time and almost missed meeting the kids at the bus. It wasn’t supposed to go anywhere or do anything. It was just a way for him to keep being creative. “Make Things = Know Thyself” It was just for fun.

One day he bumped into an old friend who pinged him on Facebook. She liked his blog and asked if he ever thought of writing fiction. He told her about his short stories and sent some to her. She liked them. Really? She asked if he ever considered writing a novel. Well…actually… So he sent her what he had so far. Turned out she worked in the publishing industry and wanted to show the book to her partner. He said okay. Really? The partner liked it. When was it going to be finished? They were interested in publishing it. Really? Really. After a few more months of seriously attempting something this time, he found an ending he liked and finished writing the story. He emailed it off to a few other literary inclined friends he trusted to take a look at it and then sent it in to the publisher. A few weeks later he talked to an editor that the publisher thought might work well with him in the book's particular genre. Really?

The Dad went back into the kitchen and played a few games with the boy. He tried to sing again and the boy just said, “Nokay!” So the Dad stopped. He didn’t try again until later that night at tuckin time. Then the boy asked him to sing. So he did and it was the best music in the world. Really.

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