Back to the band....And the Hubris of Diarists.

 Johnny Naffah had taken way too many classes for Fall quarter. He had to be up by 8 am every morning & this put our newly formed band into quite a little bind. Along with varying work schedules with the school on top, he just couldn't make practice sessions. Luke asked his wife Courtney to sit in on bass one evening, we switched Puglisi to guitar.
While I had initial apprehensions about having a married couple in the band, Court took this opportunity to show us that she was a competent & talented musician in her own right. My fleeting thoughts to Fleetwood Mac quickly subsided as she plugged in a bass guitar as large as she was & plucked out a perfect staccato... This might actually sound good.
I quickly dubbed her "Criminal Courts". A band has to have a rapport to work well together. Nicknames are always important. it breaks the tension of the moment, forces someone to not take themselves too seriously.
Her bass style immeadiately reminded me of old school hard core, laying down the bones of the track so that the song could form the flesh around it. This approach to our songwriting style gave us a rhythm we previously did not have.
In Johnny's absence we quickly penned out the songs that would form the basis of the beginnings of our set list.
The sessions exist under the name "Handsome Mike & the Tagalongs" We were filling the canvas of songs like "West Ashley" & "Dead Letter Office".
There is a one off on this session that still amazes me to this day. It's a stream of consciousness poem called "Oh Romance" With Puglisi riffing over my freestyled lines. I break off into the absurd talking about masturbating a memory, I begin giggling, he plays solo's in the vein of mid 1980's Mtv metal...Even ending the song with the final refrain from "Sweet Child O' Mine" It's a fun session.
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/User/My%20Documents/Downloads/Handsome%20Mike%20And%20The%20Tagalongs/Handsome%20Mike%20And%20The%20Tagalongs/Oh%20Romance.mp3
So here we all were. Bastards in a lounge, except suddenly we weren't all bastards anymore. We had a girl in the mix.
I had a name I had been keeping under my hat for quite a few years. I have always been taken by the Victorian era & the writing that it had produced. The onset of World War I spread European slang from one continent to another, phrases picked up in trenches became the dialect of the day. Sheep gut prophylactics used to come packaged in little manila envelopes. Like a tiny letter. Anything "blue" or sexual was considered "French" at the time. Oral sex when asked for at a brothel was called a "French Kiss" & so condoms were referred to as French Letters. It was a perfect name for a spoken word band. And now it had it's perfect implication. The band who had changed it's name every week finally had it's moniker.
The last chapbook of poetry I had written while living in Charleston SC was called "Dead Letters". Most of our early songs were from this period. The chapbook was supposed to be published by Semantikon Press in 2007. I hadn't heard anything form Semantikon in years. I figured it was a perfect way to get those pieces out into the public.

It takes alot of hubris to be a diarist. A journal writer, a blogger.
It takes alot of nerve to be a writer in the first place. To only tell your side of a story. Henry Rollins, while I'm not such a big fan any longer, said it best on Black Flags' live album from 1984 "Who's got the 10 & a 1/2?"
"It takes a long time to make a story short..." He says "It takes a long time to make a story what it is..."
Henry is correct here. It does indeed take a long time to make a story short. But that might not always be the pressing issue. There's a certain type of person that needs to lay their life out in crude cuneiform to make it make sense.
There's a certain type of person that finds this exercise cathartic in a way. Most people traipse over the little mistakes in their lives hoping that noone else notices. A diarist is not that sort of being.
A diarist dissects. Always picking apart the mistakes. And always only interested in their own point of view.
There is a certain stigma attached to what I'm doing here. People might react differently around me if they know I'm going to write about it later. It's human nature, when a recordist is present people display what they would like to see presented.
I lost a girl over this blog ostensibly. I don't believe it. The reason that is.
There were a few issues between us, but there is always a few issues between anyone involved in a relationship. It comes down to a series of compromises & what you are willing to give up ultimately for the other person.
The idea that I might someday write about her proved to be too much to hear her tell it. And because I am the diarist I get to make it so.
That is all I will ever hear out of our final conversation. Self centered or not, I was saying it takes alot of nerve to do something like this.
I was flipping through an old notebook yesterday, looking for old poems that might be turned into new songs.
I found a little note I had never noticed before, inscribed at the very end of the notebook by a girl I was dating in Maine 10 years ago.
She had drawn a little picture of herself & under it she had written
"Left alone like this for you to look back on... I hope you write me right. I hope you remember that I really liked you, but I couldn't let myself love you. Forgetting the fucking, there were things in between that looked just like life... I hope you don't forget that when you write."
And just like the hubris inherent of a diarist,  I have never once written a single thing about her until just now.