Old Notes II

As we slide into leafy glory of Midwestern fall — the Autumnal Equinox, my least favorite day of the year lurking dead ahead — thoughts turn nostalgic for the dying summer and by extension all those long-dead summers that tail behind.

The older we get, the longer our 4D tail back through the years to our first. As different as we become over time, there is a continuity that defines us.

This post, as did the last one, has notes from 40+ years ago — still a goodly fraction more than half my span (thus far), so these are definitely from my callow youth.

What differs in this post is that these are notes from my “songs” notebook, from when I had aspirations about being a (rock) musician. Somewhere in the intersection of George Winston, Bob James, and Rick Wakeman.

There weren’t too many pages from the “stories” notebook left because I’ve already documented some of them in various Friday Notes posts. I may have used a few of the song notes along the way, but there are a lot more pages left in this one. But most of these are short one-liners, so they should fit in one post.

To set the tone, these are the notebooks in question:

They date back to the early 1980s. Earlier, I thought they went as far back as high school or college, but as I’ve gone through them, it’s clear they just after college (while I was still in L.A.). That makes all the stickers a little more embarrassing, but I’ve always been young at heart. I still like stickers.

What follows are hook lines or bits of lyric that popped into my mind. Or whatever. I’m not entirely sure. I looked through them briefly last night watching the Twins get their asses kicked by the Angels (2-12) but haven’t really looked at them since I wrote them. What I can say is that I was pretty naïve in college (and often trivial and pretentious).

But I can’t stand to throw away my little reductions in entropy that I’ve carried with me for over four decades. In scrawling them on my internet wall, I can at least let go of the physical copies.

Without further ado…

Lonely-eyed ladies; Walkin’ down the street.

Lonely-eyed ladies; Some I’d like to meet.

And probably a verse line using “lovely, lonely-eyed ladies”. But I’m not sure this isn’t a lyric I heard in some song.

Of all the loves I’ve ever lost; I lost you the worst.

I think this is about my high school girl friend. As so often happens to young love, it doesn’t survive the next stage (college — different ones — in this case). It all seemed terribly important at the time, but now it seems so long ago. In retrospect, we were very different people.

I saw you in a passing face.

A line I’m sure has been used many times. A painful lesson in life is just how unique one isn’t.

I make all the moves like an actor in a play; But it don’t mean a thing.

Again, an oft-repeated sentiment in one way or another.

Redheaded Girl

I want you to come home to; From the battlefield.

The battlefield of life.

Oh, ouch. 😂🤣😂🤣😂 That “hippie chick” I mentioned last post And come to think of it, maybe the line above was about her, not my HS girlfriend.

I’ve been feeling so dead; Something’s wrong with my head; I can’t get oh-ver you.

It kinda scans, but, oh, the “poetry” of heartbroken youth.

Wild wolf down from the hills; Chased by the fire.

Wild wolf in a wilder world; Runnin’ from animals more deadly than you.

That … doesn’t suck, I think. It actually gives me some feels. I can kinda hear the music in my head on this one.

My head knows; But my heart controls; That’s what I am; A mortal man. Ain’t nothin’ but a mortal man.

I don’t know how you do it; To be in such control.

Huh. That one seems like it could go somewhere. The trick, of course, is coming up with the rest of the song.

You’ve brought me in reach of love.

Oh, dear, back to that. I was very romantic and love-oriented until life beat it out of me. But then, weren’t we all?

When I get home; Been working all day. No matter how I feel; I pick up my guitar and play:

E – E – A – A7 – E

I play:

G – Eminor – G

When my guitar’s in hand; The music takes me away. The time just flies on by; When I pick up my guitar and play:

That seems to have some potential. The idea was to actually sing the chords. And I think I was channeling a little Bruce Springsteen here in the first line.

Dance Music Band

I have no clue. That’s all that’s on the page. A wish? An idea? A memory? A note to self? Beats me.

There’s a curse on me; I just can’t shake it. There’s a spell on me; I just can’t break it. If I don’t get you back; I just can’t make it.

Through the light of years, it sounds a little “Every Breath You Take” stalker-y (not as bad as Sting’s song, though, so maybe it would have flown at least back then).

I always thought love was the more important thing.

Say goodbye to the things that were.

More pining. The second line is a Post-it note added to the page. The connection between them is lost to history. As I recall, and based on how I still operate, some pages were probably just germs of ideas that I thought I might develop later. But after so much time, whatever context inspired the note is long gone.

300 miles between us; You’re not something I can hold on to.

The infamous redhead lived in Las Vegas; I lived in Los Angeles. We met during the summer I worked and lived in Vegas. Being a slow learner, I’ve had to learn several times that long-distance relationships are really tough.

Out beyond Pluto; It’s so cold you forget to live.

Out beyond Pluto; In the deep, deep freeze; Our falling stars turn to memories.

Out beyond Pluto; It’s so cold; I’m trying to get my mind to unfold.

I dunno. Typing it made me laugh, so maybe it has some grit.

The little things are shaping up.

Yeah, and? It’s a nice enough line, but as I said, the problem is the rest of the song. It all gives me a lot of respect for songwriters (not to mention writers in general). On some level, I don’t quite understand how they do it. The ideas seem easy to me; it’s the fleshing out that seems difficult (and boring).

I suppose I could train an Ai on my writing and other writing I like and then feed it a detailed prompt for the story and then iterate that to shape it, but…

Well, I’m still struggling trying to get Windows 11 working, and it’s not going as well as I’d like. An update killed the connection to my Bluetooth soundbar, and nothing I tried would restore it. I finally resorted to asking Copilot, Microsoft’s Ai thingy.

Other encounters with Ai thingies have already demonstrated how impressive their comprehension of your question or prompt is. Copilot is no exception — it’s a bit eerie to realize it’s not a person. And its output was clear and understandable (without being actually helpful in this case).

Just to see what happened, I told it how much I was disliking Windows 11 and especially was unhappy the recent update had killed my soundbar connection. And while I’ve heard about Ai’s obsequious fawning behavior, I wasn’t prepared for quite how hollow, artificial, fake, revolting, disgusting, and skin-crawling it is. Holy shit. You do not have sympathy for me, you can’t. It’s literally not in you.

And why am I even referring to the cursèd thing as “you”.

I finally fixed the problem on my own, and part of the problem was the Microsoft, in Windows 11, shows my soundbar under Audio Devices and not Bluetooth Devices along with my keyboard and mouse. Once I found the thing, all I had to do was click [Connect]. But go figure why I could not get the soundbar to pair. Copilot mentioned a “known problem”.

But I digress. As it turns out, these pages have so little on them I might get through them in one post, so let’s get back to it:

It’s a high-tech society; But I don’t wanna ????

I cannot tell what the last word is. I think it is “be”. And I think I can imagine a bit more to it:

It’s a high-tech society; But I don’t wanna be…

Inna high-tech society; It just doesn’t work for me.

Made me laugh to come across this lyric after just ranting about Copilot. Unplanned, I swear.

You were a good girl; good-bye.

The house is so empty now.

I know exactly what this refers to. Sad story on this one. A roommate and I shared a puppy. She brought it home one night, and I knew immediately that I’d end up taking care it. Which was fine; I love dogs. But the roommate wasn’t cognizant of how they operate. She was playing with it in the backyard one time, left the gate open, and it ran out, chased a bus, and impacted with the bus tire.

In one of those weird cases of synchronicity, I happened (unexpectedly) to come home just after it happened. Roommate was in shock (emotionally, not medically). We took the pup to the vet right away, but it died there. The vet let us take the body, and we took it out to the desert and buried it under a Joshua tree. Still breaks my heart a bit after all these years.

That pup was named Samantha (by me) mostly after Samantha Stevens from Bewitched but also after a friend of a friend. I just like the name. My black lab Sam(antha) was named after the puppy.

Popcorn is really neat; Popcorn is what I eat.

A jaunty tune, but it sounds a bit like something Marines would sing while jogging. In fact, it might be with some other noun than popcorn. I do love popcorn. Very possibly my favorite snacking food and capable of so much variety.

Women walk streets of fear; And men tread uneasy.

In the city we made; In the city of (night?)

Wanted a better word than “night”.

So hard to do the things you must; To remind you who you are.

I do the best I can; I’m just a mortal man.

My head knows; But my heart controls; I’m just a mortal man.

Dated. 6/16/82. I obviously liked that hook about “mortal man”. This is its second appearance.

Let me be an island; For you; A place where you; Can be another you.

Ah, love songs. As old as time and yet timeless.

Brown paper rock and roll; Generic brand love.

7/1/82. It has some potential maybe.

The last few entries seem to me more recorded thought seeds than song lyrics.

Background concept: Penal institution that sends baddies back in time, but men to one era, women to a later time. The women live in the city the men build.

When I first looked at the note, I thought the idea might be to separate the men and women entirely — they can live out their full lives but have no chance to make children.

I’m almost certainly here channeling the Pliocene Saga by Julian May, a series of books I rather enjoyed. In her story, baddies are all sent to one time, the benign Pliocene era. Only it turns out that era is inhabited by aliens. A cool aspect, the Mediterranean basin hasn’t flooded in that era. Until later in the series, when the rock bridge at Gibralter collapses.

For whatever it’s worth, that is one of many excellent science fiction stories from before when Star Wars and Star Trek infected everything that would make incredible films. The flooding of the Mediterranean would be quite a spectacle.

As regards the death penalty, I don’t believe the question of deterrent is involved (and studies show it seems not relevant to criminals who commit capital crimes). It can be framed as a matter of eliminating those who transgress heavily against society.

Or as I sometimes put it back then, “taking out the garbage”. In exactly the same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombings are deemed unnecessary by many (we might have opted to blow up a mostly uninhabited nearby island as a demonstration), the death penalty would be unnecessary if we had a viable way to deal with those who can’t or won’t act as members of society.

We certainly seem to be fumbling the ball as it is.

I am a child of violence. I will use that violence to fight violence. So it goes to show; Violence begats violence. But violence burns itself out; Evil is its own enemy in the end.

This note came from earlier in the notebook, and I put it aside because it didn’t seem like a song lyric. It’s not even true — as far as I know, I am not, in any way, a “child of violence”. I think I might have been channeling, like, every revenge story ever told.

And I’m no longer sure about those last lines. These days, it’s hard to see much accountability towards or for the evil being done. Which is dour note to end on, but there it is.

§ §

But that’s the end of the notebook, and out to the trash it goes. A significant and important reduction in the Marley’s Ghost boxes and chains I’ve been dragging around.

Stay sane, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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