Interview with Byron; Part Two

Am I correct Byron, in assuming you were having a bit of fun at my expense in the first part of this interview?
Nope...there will be no charge.
And they said vaudeville was dead. When did you first pick up the guitar?
Let's see...I remember trying when I was about 15 months, but it was just too heavy.
I mean of course, when did you start to play the guitar?
Oh, I must have been about nineteen. Started on bass.
Bass? Really? Why the bass?
A few less strings to deal with back in those days, most only had three or four.
Hmmm. I've never heard of the three string bass. You had one?
Kinda...I broke the G string that first fall and it took almost nine months to get another one from the Sears catalogue. They had a tendency to substitute orders to we northerners...kept sending me E's. I still don't use the G string much...keep forgetting it's there.
Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
I never wrote a first one. I skipped ahead to the third one.
Why and how did you do that?
Well, all the great writers said their first couple of tunes were really bad, so I figured...why put in the time?
But wouldn't that one still be your first?
I suppose so...it was pretty awful. The fourth one was too, now that I think of it.
So you had a third first then a fifth second?
I told you I don't read music. Are you trying to embarrass me?
Sorry, I was just trying to make some sense out of it...to put it in some sort of chronological order.
Okay, so I never studied chronology either. Can we lay off the science here?
Sorry, Byron. Have you had any major influences?
A couple of times, usually around Christmas...all the visitors and stuff. I take the shots every year now.
I meant influences, not influenzas.
Oh sure. I guess the classics.
Like Bach and Beethoven?
No no no...more like Ivanhoe and Robin Hood...The Deerslayer, Kit Carson, Two Years before the Mast..that sort of thing. Had quite a collection at one time.
How on earth did they help shape your music?
I went out and got a classical guitar...more strings than the bass...but they were a lot softer.
Is this your first interview?
First one that ever got to a second part. I think you're doing a hell of a job. You're not gonna make me cry are you?

"I just don't have the fare."

Laughable as it may seem, I have been counselling a much younger man on a few of the intricacies of romance. Settle down my friends, I am well aware that I am the Poster Boy for failed marriages and relationships. But if I spoke any truth to this fellow at all it was in this sentence...
"When it comes to affairs of the heart; pain is the price of admission."
In other words, if you are going to play, you must be prepared to pay. If you do not want to feel hurt or insecure or rejected or just plain dazed and confused, stay home and lock the doors. This was intended to allay his fears very early on in a romance...when the issue of reciprocal feelings was very much shrouded in doubt.
Recently I have begun wondering how it applies to my own life, not in terms of a budding romance, but more concerning my interactions with my fellow man. You see, I don't do people all that well anymore.
To quote the film Barfly...
"It's not that I don't like people, I just seem to feel better when they're not around."
In the main, this applys to me at this stage of my life. I do feel better when they are not around. My gregarious nature still surfaces in their company, but I have little urge to seek out the company of others, with the exception of a couple of male friends that I see for maybe an hour at a time now and again.

I believe this connects to my advice to the aforementioned suitor in this way. I am no longer prepared to pay the price of admission. Frankly, I am all stocked up on pain here. Almost of it is a direct dividend of my own investment, so I do not mean to blame others, and I freely admit I have served up great portions of hurt over my lifetime. Yes, I have reaped what I have sowed, cut and dried.

The obvious answer is to forgive myself as quickly as I will forgive another. Truly a sweet deal if one can manage it. There is no question that what knowledge I have garnered since my acceptance of Christ teaches me to do just that. But I cannot. I reflect on the shambles that is my history, and know full well I have left a broad trail of misdeeds...a trail littered with broken family relationships, terribly damaged loved ones and incurable heartaches. God is surely in the forgiveness business, but this pilgrim is not, and the more I feel I cannot absolve myself as the architect of so much, the harder the forgiveness of others becomes. So I protect myself with a monastic lifestyle, thinking the less I communicate and interact with people, the less opportunity I will have to hurt and be hurt.
And it works, damn it...it works! I mostly enjoy it, and that should be wrong. It is selfish behaviour all over again. It is so much easier than trying to find and build a sense of belonging in this community, where my free thinking ways are seen as nothing less than a dangerous threat to conventional, acceptable order.
My battle this day is with that very way of free thinking. I am trying to reprogram myself...to rid myself of fantasy...to purge my brain of the patterns which inevitably lead me to a greater sense of self loathing when fantasy collides violently with reality in a stark, cold facts only, manner.
Is this Gods' plan for me? A kind of purgatory of penance for my crimes? I don't think so, but my thinking is so skewered as to be in question at all times. Perhaps my situation tells me that I am not living in faith yet...with the spirit inside and healthy, but still wandering the barren land of lost souls. A distinct possibility.
I do know I am running out of time to get it sorted out.

Interview with Byron Part I

Hi Byron. How often do you Google yourself?

Not since I was a teenager.

They didn't have google back then...

Sorry, I thought maybe you meant diddle.

No...it's a search engine.

Man...they have a motor that will find things for you now?

No it's a... Look. Never mind that. Why did you become a songwriter?

I can't tell you how many people have asked me that.

I don't want you too.

Right. Well, I became a songwriter because....can I get back to you on this one?

Sure...How many songs have you written?

I think that is a matter for the courts to decide.

Oh. Are you having some legal problems?

Not really problems. They charge me and I pay.

Who have you payed?

Mostly the really persistent ones.

Can you name names?

Sure...Peter, Janice, Helen..I like Helen a lot....

That's not what I meant.

But that's what you said.

Yes, but I meant the persons you have paid. How much time do we have? Maybe we should get on with the interview...
Are you intentionally obtuse?

Hell no. But since I turned fifty everything I eat goes straight to my hips.

See! You're doing it again.

I'm saying it's not intentional. Meals are funny that way. Once you get started, you just can't stop.

I don't really want to discuss your weight.

No kidding. I waited a half hour til you got here.

Okay, you got me there. What is your favourite song?

Stairway to Heaven.

I mean that you have written.

Are you saying I didn't write Stairway to Heaven?

Yes I mean No you didn't...

Wow. That's a real bummer...easily my biggest hit...hear it everywhere.

This conversation answers a lot of questions for me, Byron.

That's terrific! Can I ask you one?

Why not...

What else didn't I write?

Shouting "FIRE!" in an empty theatre.

If I was to shout "Fire!" in an empty theatre, is it still a crime?
If I injured myself rushing for the exit, can I still sue?

Would a real anarchist subscribe to "Anarchy" magazine?
Would they make their stand by saving the entire years' issues...unread, then using them to ignite fires in police cars at international conferences?
Where is their line in the sand exactly?

If I love my neighbour, but don't want his wife to know...am I at least on the right track?

If I trap, then relocate...a slug...but it returns two years later...am I obligated to put it down?

Doesn't $25.00 for a single haircut seem a little pricey? I mean ...for ONE hair!
Hell...my barber offers a "Cut One...Get Three Thousand Free!" special every Tuesday.

I belong to the Free Association Club of Canada. It's all I can afford.

As I get older...should I switch to Absorbine Senior?

If a duck, a chicken, a pickle and a Rabbi go into a bar...is this a can't miss joke?

Is..."I'm not very good, but I'm quick" waaaay too honest for a pickup line?

If your Alphabet vegetable soup spells out "PETA Thanks You", have things gotten a little out of hand?

I have long had a fantasy of opening a little place of my own someday.
Gonna call it "The Inconvenient Store...Closed 24 Hours."
(Yes! We carry Anarchy magazine!!)

If you can't see a psychiatrist, should you try an optometrist first?

Would you be spoiling all the fun if you helped a man hoist his petard?

Petard? Time for bed, Byron.

The Struggle for the Center

In terms of emotional well being, if you picture a pendulum at rest, that is what I consider the center. If the pendulum is swinging to its two extremities, I would characterize them as euphoria on the one side, and total depression at the opposite. The center then, is the ideal. While allowing for minor swings either way, it offers a relatively quick return to the stable inert balance in the middle, which curiously can be described as the "at rest" position.
I spent several decades drinking and taking drugs to swing the pendulum to the high side of euphoria, but the swing back resulted in me being sent well into the opposite side of depression. Today, I am not convinced that the violent motion ever stopped over those many years. When I was feeling at peace, it was inevitably when I was medicated with pot, or had just the right combination of pot and booze to have me feeling terrific about life. And as much as these moments were a reality, I was not fully relishing the moment, but focusing on the next drink or toke, thinking how much better the feeling was going to get as the intake escalated..with each boost leading to the next boost...like a series of prize concealing doors that stretched endlessly into my imagination heightening every sensory input, each conversation, every sexual encounter, even a quiet hour in a cabin before a crackling fireplace....any moment could be still be enhanced.
Those times were oh so fine and sensual and pleasurable to be sure, but something else was going on.
The brain forms its own relationship with all this intake, and develops an agenda that is far more insidious than we suppose. It cries out for more. Much more. Eventually it wants it all, until even it cannot handle the substances and has to shut itself down by way of unconsciousness. This pattern is certainly not the way it starts out, but develops over time until one bottle is not as much fun as two which is not as much fun as three and so on. What is left unsaid is there are never enough bottles/drugs/sexual adventures etc to satisfy the craving and the only real reward the mind leads you to is the oblivion of unconsciousness. And just as you enter that state of being, the pendulum of the brain and body's desires is centered...at rest. It is a false victory, but nonetheless feels like a victory.
But what of the soul? Is it at the mercy of sensual pleasures and stimulant intake too? Does it in fact obey the demands and commands of the body, including the brain? Is it content with the denial of reality that this incurs?
Of course not...
I think my soul abandoned my physical body for a very long time. It hovered about me as I dined with the demons, as if knowing its' very preservation required it to keep a distance or be lost, yet always waiting for me to show some sign of a struggle against the forces that had taken over my life. And when I took that first step, my soul was suddenly with me again and has remained constant as I have suffered the swinging pendulum.
I also believe that the soul is not ours...it belongs to a power far beyond this earth. It is the thing that gives us life here and now and hereafter. We must learn to listen to it or perish on this earth. It gives us the pure knowledge of right and wrong, and this truth directs us to a life we know is good. Call it what you will...the soul, the spirit, the core, the conscience...it is what leads us away from the beast which we still have inside our intuitive brains. And it is this very beast that seduces us with the falsehood of more is better, unconcerned over the cost or the outcome.
Feed the soul, not the beast, and you will find yourself at rest in the center more often than you ever thought possible.
Perhaps we shall speak of these things again....