inhale, exhale

[ontology]

You know those stories that musicians sometimes tell you at concerts, about how they wrote and composed this or that song fifteen or twenty minutes before they performed it on stage or recorded it? Well, um, that kind of happened today. It was interesting. Now, It wasn't so much writing a new song whole cloth as writing new lyrics to a traditional song and taking it from sing-song children's church song to something with a little actual depth inside the same repetitive field-spiritual sort of format. And I'd had bits of it in my head for a while. But I kind of made up the set list in the car on the way to church, and added another song in the middle of the performance before mine (my father's friend Jim), and then everything went astonishingly well, considering. Except for the rather discouraging and depressing fact that almost no-one was even listening to me and most of them were talking fairly loudly. (And when there are only about eight people in the room, having most of them talk loudly through your performance tends to make one feel a bit... well, not terrifically valued, anyway.) I kind of had to curb my rising frustration before it boiled over into actual fury, which mostly meant concentrating more on the music than on the people not listening to it. And it did feel nice, to be sitting up on a stage, albeit a very little one, and hearing one's voice stretching out through the sound system and filling up a room, albeit also a very little room.

After my set I lay down and went to sleep on a pew, at least half by accident.

Last night was not of the good. I lay in bed for hours not sleeping and not knowing why I couldn't fall asleep, seeing as I was so exhausted that my eyes were stinging. By the time I was woken in the early morning to go to the church, I may have attained about four hours of sleep. So, you know, things have been... weird. (Am going to sleep any minute now. Honest. If I shut my eyes right now, I probably would.)

Morning was mixed; I was cross and physically miserable (and hideously unwell-feeling in the early morning; don't even know if I had some tiny bug that goes away with standing up for more than two minutes or if I was so sleepy that it actually caused a more than usually bizarre sort of nausea), and we didn't get nearly the crowd we'd hoped, and oh how I wanted to go home and sleep. But... I found some parts of the celebration/service fulfilling. I'd rather not have another go at it, though...