Lost on the Way or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Process

My phone buzzed just shy of midnight on a Friday.

“Where’s my story idea?”

My stomach sank. Shit.

A week earlier, I’d sent a writing sample out to some collective in Portland. The response was positive. “Wanna write an article? I’ll give ya 1000 words. Something interesting.”

Interesting? No problem. I could do interesting.

Cut to a matter of hours later, when my enthusiasm had faded into a mix of self-loathing and sheer terror. Interesting? Fragments rattled around my head as I unpacked skids of beer and sold mickeys of vodka to down-and-outers. I was a goddamn liquor store clerk. And nothing was coming out.

Now, it was Friday, just past 2am, and I’m sitting in front of my computer, wondering what the fuck to write.

Unfortunately, this was nothing new.

My band broke up a while back.

It was almost beautiful in its banality. No one died; there were no fistfights, no drunken spectacle. We headlined a half-full room in downtown Vancouver. The promoter handed us seventy bucks and that was it. As the cliché goes, it ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Like most breakups (let’s not kid ourselves. all breakups), it had been coming for a long time; we just chose to ignore it. Ego clashes, infighting, outside influences sneaking in, and worst of all “creative differences.” Though we all started the band with the naïve belief that we could do things differently, we ended up on the same path a million other groups have walked. And that’s ok. The ‘Real World’ has a funny way of taking a shit. And we can’t all be superstars.

My band’s name is insignificant to the story and truth be told, I always hated the name. We had soldiered on for six years, sharing stages with a few bands we loved, and a lot more we hated. We paid too much for mediocre recordings that ended up languishing on a Bandcamp page in a dark corner of the internet. Our following was dismal on a mass consumption scale. We could blame our failure on lots of things; being paired with shitty bands that didn’t mesh with our style, not being able to afford good recordings, the sluggish rock ‘scene’ as a whole. But, in reality, we just weren’t that good.

The end came shortly after I got back from a month-long club tour as a roadie. Though I found myself feeling occasional pangs of disappointment that my first tour wasn’t with my own band, it was good to finally rip through the US in a van. My ears were constantly filled with music of all sorts, from the smoothest honky-tonk to gnarly punk to reverb-drenched psychedelia. And the band I was with didn’t seem to give a fuck if anyone liked them or not. I found myself saying almost every night, “this is how it should be done.”

I returned home with a renewed sense of purpose, ready, once again, to conquer the world.

…That lasted until the first rehearsal.

The others couldn’t, or didn’t want to, play the new songs. I wanted things brash, raw, improvisational, teetering right at the edge of total chaos and stepping back at the perfect moment. Those guys… well, they didn’t.

So, now what?

Well, to start, I went home and got drunk. And that continued, a lot. I’d go out and hail the virtues of hair shaking, foot-stomping rock ‘n’ roll with my friends. Bands would be formed and tours would be planned, only to fade into a shitty hangover, staying just out of reach as I peeled my face from a leather sofa on Sunday mornings.

In my naiveté, I figured everybody would feel the same way, crank up some amps, rip some feedback and let the riffs start to flow. In reality, everyone I talked to was happily ensconced in their current situation and had no interest in working with a drunken asshole that was over the hill at twenty-five.

I tried to write. Riffs came easily, only to fade away without lyrics. Fragments of words floated in and out of my brain, but in the end, there was nothing.

I sank into a funk. My outlet had left me, and I was discovering that I am a fucking terrible solo artist. Before long, I didn’t even have a functional electric guitar. I threw up my hands. What’s the point? Everybody had their space, and those spaces were all sealed, and I was just a decent drunk with a broken guitar, on the outside looking in.

Eventually, just for something to do, I started writing with no goal. Stories, rants, poems, lyrics. Unfocused and scattershot. A friend and I spent nights clacking away at keyboards, vomiting all our psychic crap onto the page over beers and crappy pizza. Then came the “1000 word” offer.

Now I’m sitting here on a Friday night.

I’m sipping a beer.

GBV’s Game of Pricks is on the stereo.

And I’m wondering what the fuck to write.

At least I’m under 1000 words.