After I left Orlando, the vast majority of the friendships that I had developed there slowly began to fade away. It was sad to see this happen, of course, but it wasn't particularly surprising. Maintaining meaningful relationships with people who are far away is not an easy task. However, there was one female human (who shall herein be referred to as Special K) for whom the trend was reversed entirely: We were not particularly close friends during the program, but something clicked on the very last day that I was there, and so I made an effort to get to know her better in the subsequent months.
Special K, as the nickname would suggest, has since become a very important person in my life. A good number of my songs are about her, and at one point I was even so bold as to purchase a plane ticket to go visit her. Alas, not all was wonderful in the world: over time I began to realize that the friendship was largely one-sided. Many of our conversations took the form of "Hey, can I call you back a little later?" followed by several days of me wondering why I had even bothered. As deeply as I cared about Special K, it simply became too painful to be left to my own devices, wondering whether or not my affections were truly mutual. Having always preferred to let problems sort themselves out rather than resorting to direct confrontation, I was tempted to simply do nothing about the ever-increasing doubts regarding this friendship. A few weeks back, I pushed myself to do something different: I deleted her number from my phone.
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While working on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, I happened to find a long quarter-inch instrument cable tucked away under a pile of crud in the lighting booth. Since instrument cables are of absolutely no use in the world of theatrical lighting, I reasoned that it did not belong to the theater but to some nincompoop who had left it there. Since it was located under a pile of crud, I reasoned further that the aforementioned nincompoop had forgotten about its existence. From these two conclusions, I determined that the cable now belonged to me.
The problem was that the cable did not work. One of the ends was crooked and loose, giving the appearance that some rotund humanoid had stepped on it vigorously. Although I am quite confident in the ways of wiring and repairing theatrical cables, I am sadly deficient in knowledge relating to instrument cables. I suspected that the non-functionality of the cable was caused by a loose or severed connection, but I had no idea what tools would even be necessary to fix such a problem. And so the cable lay in a heap for several weeks, collecting metaphorical dust. I didn't want to pay to have the cable repaired, but I didn't want to throw it away either. Eventually it dawned on me that even if I completely ruined the cable by trying to repair it myself, I would at the very least learn a thing or two in the process. As the item had not been paid for and was utterly useless in its current state, I had everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying to fix it. On the night before Hurricane Irene hit, armed only with a Leatherman and a roll of electrical tape, I decided to try to repair the cable.
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When I deleted Special K's number from my phone, I knew that this inherently emotion-charged decision would eventually find itself becoming the subject of a song. After all, the other important moments in my relationship with this woman had already found themselves similarly immortalized: "Never Before", the fifth chapter of Formation and Evolution, is about my last night in Orlando and the weeks that followed, and Coming Back for You is about my trip to visit Special K. Without putting any serious thought into the matter, I started jotting down potential lyrics on a piece of paper in my room. Sometimes I would put together complete verses with vocal melodies, other times I would just scribble down a sentence or two and hope for the best.
I'm not really sure why I decided to do this, as this style of songwriting is completely alien to me. In the past, I have always started with the guitar melodies, with vocals only added if and when they seemed appropriate. This is even true for pieces that I know will be about a very specific topic. The concept behind the aforementioned "Formation and Evolution" was planned out well before I began writing anything, but even so, I never collected scraps of lyrics on the off chance that they would be used later. I just focused on the guitar and let the vocals develop naturally. So while the scrapbook writing style may work wonders for Anthony Kiedis, it never made sense to me. This unfinished song about Special K, tentatively titled "The Silent Ultimatum", was no exception: after a while I completely forgot about the lyric sheet. Looking back, everything I had written seemed totally forced and melodramatic.
Last week, I was noodling around with a Steve Vai-inspired melody when, without any authority from my neural command center, I opened my mouth and sang "How far away do you think I am?". Clearly this song was going to be about Special K, whether I wanted it to be or not. Within a few hours, I had crafted all of the lyrics for the not-yet-recorded "One Last Lullaby", only one line of which is any way similar to the garbage that I had poured onto my bedside notepad. Writing lyrics in a way that was so obviously unfamiliar was an interesting experiment, and it certainly had the potential to open up new avenues of self-expression, but in the end it failed completely.
The cable repair, on the other hand, turned out to be an enormous success. The wiring configuration was not in any way similar to that found in theatrical lighting cables, but after a bit of tinkering, I was able to disassemble the casing and jury-rig a secure connection with the electrical tape. Heart pounding from sheer nerd excitement, I reassembled the casing and plugged the cable into my amp. It worked! Nothing exploded! And best of all, by some weird miracle, my amp was actually buzzing less than when it was hooked up with the cable I had been using before.
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Three recent efforts to push myself outside my comfort zone reached their conclusion during Week 9. I learned that my tried-and-true non-method of lyricwriting is, in fact, the best method for me. I successfully repaired a piece of equipment that I knew nothing about. Last, and certainly not least, one final pleasant surprise: Special K called.
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Week 9 total: 28 hours
Grand total: 213.5 hours
Required pace: 173 hours (+40.5)
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