18
/ Cold Meat (abridged)

Question to self: Is what's most weighing down my confidence the possibility that posterity may judge my Jugenwerk as being little more than purloined Buddy Holly?

Well, ... I guess NOT; I couldn't fucking care any less about posterity. But, today, I do seem to care what the Mirrors think. So, when I tell 'em (if they don't already know), I’ll say it didn't feel all that much like a filch a few days ago. Can I help it that the song practically wrote itself whilst my consciousness was otherwise engaged? I'll tell 'em just how it was. Explain exactly what happened. How—while my every faculty, excepting my id, was straining to steady my good ol' '63 Buick Invicta rocket through a 50-mile-an-hour windtunnel that'd rolled up unexpectedly onto Cleveland’s Shoreway out of a 10-foot Lake Erie tidal wave—the tune seeped in!

Now, my being native to the Great Lakes' climes, I've pretty much got the seasonal driving aced (as all my surviving passengers will attest); but I'm brand new to the tunesmithing thing. So much so that I can’t say I even have an opinion as to whether “channeling” or, say, just hunting-and-pecking notes at the piano brings the greater predisposition for theft. Or does it even matter?

Okay, suppose it does. The song in my head kinda quacks like a Buddy Holly original. But is it, in fact, anything he wrote in his short and truly significant lifetime? Well, I gotta say, “Nope”. So my final word on the matter has to be that, quacks notwithstanding, and despite the present weather being fine for fouls (sic) ‘n all, this ditty just don't walk like no plagaristic duck!

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Anyway, so there I am in my Buick, on the Shoreway, flying along on killer wind shear thinking, “Fuck it, there’s that damn tune again ... with a ramrod. Let it the fuck in!

No. I don't know exactly where it's coming from and I don't much care. And even if I had been aware of Songwriting's Rules of the Road when I first slid behind my deluxe and delightful push-button transmission console (the only one on my block), I'd've chucked the friggin’ manual from the get-go anyway. And that’d’ve been a good thing too; cuz all of a sudden I need a little more headroom for sussing out more pressing issues. Like: will I even be able to recall the melody later? And the rhythm? I mean, the goddamn beat's drivin' the Invicta like a piling through these huge slabs of horizontal rain and ...well, ... ok, I'll remember it. But how the hell am I gonna reproduce it!?

I’m still a good fifteen minutes away from my Rickenbacker. So, I’m humming the hook trying to recount sequential events right up ‘til the actual moment of its conception. That way, I figure I'll be able to recreate the precise conditions to bring it all back in case I forget the damn thing.