Smoke Screens

I've been thinking about ex-boyfriends lately. Well, actually, a particular one. The worst boyfriend I ever had. Maybe it's because I've been walking a lot lately and these things tend to come up on long stretches of road. Also, maybe it's because I am doing some serious autopsy work on when my songwriting block began, and it just so happens to coinside with this particular relationship.

People always ask me if Graham is a musician and my answer is often the inevitable: THANK THE SWEET STARS, NO! I've dated enough musicians to beat the fantasy of artistically inspired romance into the ground (So much so that it shows up in Australia, beyond recognition). Artists are prickly creatures. We grew up most often as outcasts, geeks, or social inepts. This gave us plenty of time to be alone, so that we could adequately develop our DEPTH. Sometimes it works when two people who are artist types get together, but most often we're too busy feeling seperate and different to know how to relate to another person also feeling seperate and different. My worst boyfriend was (and still is) a perfoming songwriter. He was the last explosive finale to a string of attempts at my fantasy of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes kind of cosmic poetry fulfilling relationships. I seemed to have been blind to the fact that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes' marriage dissolved and ended with suicide--hers. How friggn' romantic is that? It should have been a WARNING, not a symbol.

O. was the gem that started off declaring that ours ws the true love finally found after so much time, and ended 10 months later with a "When I said I loved you, it was as a FRIEND. What did you think I meant?" This was after numerous cheatings and one final one, which began his relationship that still continues to this day (God love her for that).

It didn't help that he ended an 8 year relationship in order to persue me. It didn't help that we were in the same music scene. It didn't help that I didn't feel strong enough to not take the "other woman" role that powerful people in the scene were casting me as. He went out drinking with people I thought were my friends, didn't stop their bad mouthing of me, and then he would call me to pick him up late at night. And get this: I was GLAD to get him. Oh, the good ol' days!

I'm sure he thinks of me fondly.

Musicians are passive agressive creatures. We say we are fine, but then we write heart-wrenching songs about how much we are not fine. I spent the beginnings of my career built on break up songs. In the end, I think this relationship gave me too much material, so I was the one who broke under its weight.

All this is to say that I recently made the relaization that the block in songwriting is really a SYMPTOM and not really the PROBLEM. The big hurts often mask themeselves in the things we only THINK we need to worry about. Bad love, creative freakouts are the smoke screen for the things that matter most to us, the real FIRES that burn inside. That doesn't mean that O. doesn't still remain the worst boyfriend I ever EVER had. It just means that the parts of that relationship that still effect me today, are mine alone to look at, to dig through, to find what keeps me from--what else?--my heart's desire.