Love You, Hate You

Okay, so I'm trying to give my verbal ceativity a kick in the butt. It's not necessarily about writing functioning lyrics, more about writing something with some validity. Channeling, if you like. No, not like Dionne Warwick and her psychic friends network! I'm talking about honest expression here.

Art (pretentiousness alert, pretentiousness alert!) isn't something that comes easy when you're essentially in a happy place. It's usually born of angst, hate and persecution. Okay, so picture this: last night I spent an hour or so scrubbing the decking on our back patio to try and clean the years of dirt and algae off it...

...okay, that was it! I just wanted it noted SOMEWHERE that I tried to clean that bloody decking. That way when someone says "it doesn't look like anyone's ever cleaned it" I can point them to this blog and say, "See... see... 7th August 2008!"

I tell you, come The Revolution, that decking's going to be the first up against the wall.

Right, I just went completely random. Sorry. It's been one of those weeks. Back to the point...

...which is that there have been times in my life where I've been truly, gloriously unhappy. Downright miserable, if you must know. Fabulous, eh? A wealth of angst just waiting there to be pilfered. This isn't one of those times, though, which makes it hard to write stuff about 'now' that isn't all fluffy bunnies and Flossy the Sheep. So, I thought to myself that what I really needed to do was to think back to a time of abject misery (oh, the joy of songwriting), immerse myself in it, freely associate about was going on at the time and basically just write something down on paper (or screen, as the case may be).

Here's my first attempt. It's not lyrics. It's not a poem. It's just an emotional blurp. While some people enscribe their art on expensive heavyweight paper (or on TP if that's the only thing handy), I typed this directly into Microsoft Outlook. Classy, eh?

So, the background to this is (and I'm sharing here, dammit, so be nice)... the background to this is that after a string of failed relationships (boo-hoo) I got myself involved with this guy with whom I felt the need to make it work, no matter what. The problem was that less than a year in, I realised that he was an arsehole and that I didn't even like him, let alone love him. Even so, my compulsion to 'do the right thing' led me to stick with it until the bitter end. And yes, it was bitter but, thankfully, it ended. That was two years I'll never get back. Hey, look, I'm channeling already. Ride the ride... here goes!

Why don't you make me hate you more
Why won't you cheat, why won't you lie
You keep me stuck here every day
Confined to this righteous path

Til death do us part is a funny thing
I never thought I'd crave the end
So much I'd sit and watch the tracks
Waiting for the train to come

Maybe I should be the one
Show you who you let inside
Play the part so you're the one
Who breaks these perfect chains of love

Eh? Eh?

Y'know the sucky thing is that when I do stuff like this it drags me back to that time and, frankly, it bums me out. Really.