Quaint ramblings and occasional reflections of a journeying Aussie musician...

10 March 2006

Now's The Time

....scramble out of bed, try to iron a shirt....bloody iron somehow covers the collar with water...D'oh!....time for another shirt....

.....start the long walk up the hill to the tube, stopping to pick up a Time Out on the way, see what's on in town this week.....sans Walkman which has just broken down, oh well, pick up another one in town sometime soon....

....rush hour, tube is packed.....I stand physically close among these people but I am no longer one of them, as I was last year....just cruising into my day job, no worries, no angst at any kind of messed up situation. It used to be like that, but not anymore....

....sit at my desk, typing merrily away....decided to take the plunge and become a full member of the dating site I've been checking out, after seeing someone that quite caught my eye....wrote my message, laughed out loud, a little self-consciously, but had some fun with it, hopefully as always....

.....incidentally, it's a week's anniversary of my first gig on BACKING VOCALS! After a long and tedious story, turns out it really is Yes!!!Brazil (that's the name of the band)...the opportunity was there at our gig last Friday, and I had a bash, with quite mixed results, but I gave it a go....what's that thing about doing one thing a day which scares you?....it was all in Spanish and Portuguese too, by the way!....

.....met former housemate B for a coffee around the corner....talked about how our lives are going in astoudingly different directions.....showed me the photos....couldn't quite believe it, on my second coffee of the day, sitting there in that cafe on High Holborn on a spring Friday afternoon, across from her, seeing those fuzzy black and white pictures, looking at her face, knowing that that little life is growing inside her body.....

....back to desk job, ho hum, surf the net, spend too much time on my own and other people's blogs....thinking about a couple of things....like the sound of the sea on a beach off in the distance - the sound of those thoughts is always there but sometimes you forget to hear it....gotta start thinking some things through this weekend, can't put them off....

.....hour's tube ride to my one Friday student this afternoon, easy....back home to change for my gig tonight at Quags - more or less easy....it's gonna be a pull-together affair agian, as usual, but if I keep my thinking cap strapped on it'll be okay....

.....weekend at home - easy.....gotta think through some things....it'll be okay, as long as I start now....I don't own a watch, but for me the sound of the clock is always there, always ticking......

Right now, it's all great. After a whole bunch of mistakes and some unfortunate chance occurences, I finally made it here, but London, she didn't like me when I first got in, she wanted to work me out for a bit, see what I was made of.
But I righted the ship, I turned it around, I sailed out of the storm, and as far as I'm concerned now, it all really is clear weather....

So what now?

Income? No worries....Friends? Loads.....House? Great....Housemates? Top blokes....Gigs? Could always be more but I'm not complaining....Continental jaunts? Got the hang of it.....

I've done all this before.

What's the next bit? Where's the coda? When are drums and bass gonna ditch the quasi latin feel and rip into the swing like they were always going to before the tune started? Where are the hits to bring in the montuno section?....

There are a couple of plans afoot, but I gotta start checking them out NOW. And that means confronting a couple of things which led me to those mistakes before, the lead up to and including the madness between Septembers...

They're a hazy mix, that lot, more determined than you might imagine, stronger than you previously reckoned. But some days, when you take a deep breath - one of those truly inspiring ones that you can feel in your diaphragm at the bottom of your lungs and your chest fills out, one of those ones when you know you're alive - when you take a deep breath and exhale at them, or exhale them out of you, then you realise that they're not so determined, not so strong, that in fact they melt away, to your own astonishment, revealing the energy and potential beneath...

My ex-girlfriend is an opera singer, and being with her was an opera, in every possible way you can imagine! Dizzying highs, terrifying lows, and everything in between. Despite everything that happened, I still hold her in the highest regard as a truly amazing person.
And during the final climactic act of our relationship, in that crazy summer of last year, some of the most important lessons that I ever learnt from her came to the fore.
As your protagonist (a tenor, I suppose) was wallowing in his own seemingly desperate situation, the soprano would enter briefly from the wings to sing various passages of amazing truth and beauty.....
"We've all got our demons," she said, "and they might be walking behind you right there, but the thing is, you walk with them."

You walk with them.

That is, you do your utmost to beat them back, and sometimes it works, but even if you never manage to.....Radiohead, 'Optimistic' - "If you try the best you can....the best you can is good enough"....the effort put in is worth it....

Okay, enough morals this time round....whew, that second coffee is a killer!....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Which housemate??? Now I'm intrigued...
Isn't life interesting?
When are you coming to visit and meet my new friends?
Love ya