Changing the World with Whatever Comes to Mind

As I write this post, it is the perfect Tuesday. Tuesdays are some of my favorite days of the week. February 22, 2022. 2/22/22 on a Tuesday. Twos aren’t always perfect, but this one is. I also happen to be starting this post, being the second main post for this site. No, it won’t get posted on this day, I’ll have to put it down and come back to it in a day or two and edit a bit. I may throw words around but that doesn’t mean I won’t pick those words first.

Today’s thoughts are focused mostly on my current novel project, as today is the day I turn it in for novel workshop, to be discussed next Tuesday. I’m hearing the lyrics in language, the sounds as they mound and compound and connect instead of rejecting the flow of my mind.

The novel has been going well. I’m sitting on 118 pages (the first 90 pages of which have gone to workshop, so as not to make the others stop reading in the middle of a section). I’m continuously surprised when I think about how far it has come just since early December last year. In that time, I’ve gone from 50 or so solid, edited pages, with a vibrant idea of what was left, to 118 pages, even better, more picked through, and more finely tuned. It’s started to find harmony.

Side note: the word harmony happens to be one of the nicest sounds in the English language, in my opinion. It’s also quite a beautiful name. So is Melody. I once knew a Melody, who played tambourine and sometimes sang tenor with a band I was in around 2010. She reminded me of a red-headed Stevie Nicks, especially when we played “Landslide.”

Back to the novel, the past couple of weeks alone have seen a pretty significant background storyline reworking, not even the B plot, more like the E or the F plot. But now, those characters are more realistic, they’re more vivid in the mind’s eye, and it all helps build the world of the novel. It’s been incredible.

Something else that’s incredible, and which I have been fixated on lately, is that the Beatles’ music and lyrics are helping push me along with the writing. The way their words flow, even when the meanings don’t. At times, they chose the music over the meaning. Rightly so, I say. I’m learning when to know which choice is right to get across the idea or the feeling that I want to present.

“Across the Universe” has become a sort of a mantra for me.

Years ago, I gave one of my best friends my old Yamaha keyboard. I’d never really put time into learning the keys anyway. Something about making one hand do rhythm and the other hand do lead, just had a hard time clicking in my head. As I rediscover my love of playing music and learning songs by ear, I find myself—not in times of trouble, Paul—but with the need to learn the keys. I listened to “Let it Be,” and I taught myself the rhythm of pressing the keys and chords, just on the edge of my desk, without knowing which ones exactly are pressed. I found my brain clicking more with this activity once I thought about it more like the way I did when I learned the drums. There’s a rhythm to playing the keys, even when there’s lead notes being played.

There’s rhythm everywhere. All across the universe.

By the second listen of “Let it Be,” I had it down pat. Now I just need to save a little money and get a decent, cheap, used keyboard, probably something $100 or less. Maybe a stand to put it on and a new stool. I tossed my old, favorite stool out the last time I left Tennessee. Then the next step will be to teach myself the keys or ask a friend to help—when I was younger, so much younger than today—and then one day I’ll be able to play them and sing at the same time, which if you read my last post, you’ll know that’s something that I’ve often struggled with the most in my music life.

Nearing the end of today, I realize another reason why, all of the sudden, the idea of playing the keyboard has become easier to understand: I now think of it not just in the same way as when I learned drums, but also in a similar way as typing on my keyboard as I do right now—thought it’s not quite the same thing, of course, there are certain differences, but the point is, I find the flow.

Now, I sit at the end of the edits for this post, just tacking on the final thought, which is this: yesterday—I don’t quite need a place to hide away—this newfound flow state has driven me to begin two new stories, likely flash pieces, as well as informed me of one more aspect of my aesthetic for my art. These pieces are quite rhythmic, filled with assonance and alliteration and beats and even a refrain. They’re songs in the form of prose, similar to what I hear every time I listen to the Beatles, going all the way back to childhood when I first realized they were telling stories in their music. As I began these new flash fiction pieces, I felt as if a piece of myself has come back from an adventure I never knew it had been on, a magical mystery tour, so to speak. Finding more volumes to my voice and ways for my writing to convey those welcoming words and sometimes nonsensical sentences, it’s all been good fun.

I find rhythm everywhere. All across the universe.