Progress

I woke up early this morning with a full day planned. I was going to go out to Half Moon Bay to exercise, meet my mom at the Beach for lunch then off to Berkeley in time for my afternoon class. Unfortunately, I awoke to discover I had lost my keys (both house and car ) the night before and was forced to cancel all of my plans. Instead I napped on and off for a few hours and started a new book. I've been reading a lot of diaries lately. Right now I am re reading Pepy's Diary and am starting to make some headway in Goethe's Italian Journey. This morning I started Red Dust, a book I read years ago while living in Ithaca about a Chinese man who flees Beijing in 1981 to travel across China on foot. Anyway, I was reading and I got inspired to write some new songs for my new band. Now, I'm not sure why but I always figured I would be good at writing lyrics. As it turns out I am not. Not at all. I discovered that in writing lyrics I either come off as a nauseating , tearful sentimentalist or a prick. Now the sentimental thing was kind of expected. I mean I think that most people's first stab at writing even the slightest romantic song leaves them sounding like a High School sophomore jilted on prom night. The prick thing, on the other hand, really caught me off guard. I have been listening to a lot of Muddy Waters and Fats Domino lately and as I started to write I envisioned myself easily slipping into my new persona as a sauntering bad ass, oozing confidence and bristling with raw sexuality. As it turns out, getting that tone right is really really hard. It is much easier (and in my case apparently inevitable) to come off as, at best, a conceited dick and, at worst, a straight up misogynist. Now I can be a dick don't get me wrong but I am emphatically not a misogynist so this whole exercise left me feeling really uncomfortable and a little dirty. The only line I didn't completely cross out was

"Your my Junior Monopoly girl.
Your too easy to play for real.
So I had to make a drinking game out of you."

See what I'm dealing with? Apparently that is the most charming I am capable of being on the page.

Anyway, trying to create was turning my stomach and raising all kinds of uncomfortable questions so I decided to give up . Instead, I went to get a slice of pizza. Lucky for me I live down the street from what I think is the best Pizza in San Francisco , Irving 24 Hour Pizza (it is not on Irving. It is on Geary and it closes at two). On the way I discovered that someone had taken a shit on my doorstep just feet away from where the kid was shot two weeks ago.

At the bus stop outside of the pizza place a Chinese boy was standing with his father. The father would point at a car as they would go by and the kid would identify its make. The dad would point and the kid would, for example, say "Toyota". Sometimes the dad would point at a passing pedestrian, "Shopping cart" the kid would say or "Wheelchair".



Postscript: I found my keys. They were cleverly hiding on my desk.