Today is my mother’s birthday. It is also Pearl Harbor Day. My mother was not born on the actual Pearl Harbor Day. So there you go. Happy Birthday, Mom. – r
We are in Providence and are eating ramen after our second disappointing night of open micing (hee hee, now all I can think of is that we are cats, hunting the streets of the city for mice to eat instead of the soup). I decided that, in order to keep our expenditures down this trip, rob and I should make a pact that we have to sell 5 CDs the night before to eat out the next day. We have six cans or packages of soup with us that are the consolation prize if we do not. I wish we had thought to bring more different kinds of soup. Sigh.
Nights like this and last night can really throw me into a fabulous despair. When people walk up to us at the open mics and are psyched about the fact that we are touring, and maybe could we give them some advice, it makes me feel like we are all mystique and no meat. I know this is not the case, and we have good nights, and they are even more frequent than few and far between, but when you are getting almost nothing back from your audience, playing to empty rooms it’s like drawing more and more cash from an empty metaphysical ATM. I am in spiritual debt.
Adding to this is the absolutely disgusting weather – my least favorite of all kinds – cold, with a constant mist that leaves you damp all day and an overcast that keeps it the same color of gray over everything all day long. This is the kind of weather that makes me feel like I want to saw at my wrists with a dull plastic knife, as my friend Zeb used to say.
This also means the found object hunting (since the last time I was in Providence I had not started making the jewelry yet, getting stuff from here to add to the collection is a big deal) has been limited, and rob and I have not been able to really walk around the neighborhood and get a feel for what’s nearby (ie: goof off and look at the shops and all the things we can’t afford).
So today was mostly spent cooped up inside, practicing some things, responding to e-mails.
I am also one single line away from finishing the new song, titled “No Place is Home (The Horseman).” The single line is evading me. The single line is important and knows its importance and has learned from it’s brothers of the assembly persuasion and gone on strike just to screw with me because it knows I cannot hire replacements who will only be lesser.
Bastard line.
I spent a good portion of my should-not-have-been-waking hours recently doing some research on the Headless Horseman – yielded a few interesting tidbits:
The symbolism of the Headless Horseman being a Hessian soldier: The Hessians were German mercenaries hired by the British to help put down the American Revolution. The German princes received all the real money for their services and they were bartered for like so much cattle. It makes a kind of sense that of all spirits to become the horseman, it would be a Hessian, someone with no head of its own, no personal reason and eyes to guide him, a sort of spiritual puppet akin to the function he served in life. Hessian, though originally meant to signify the place the soldiers had come from in Germany, became slang in American and inexorably linked to the idea of the mercenary.
It’s also interesting to read the lyrics to the Bing Crosby song that was part of the Disney animated version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. One of the lines says, “You can’t reason with a headless man.” I thought that was an interesting idea, too; Being without a brain, therefore without reason. There is only instinct, a driving, overriding purpose. It is a force against which no amount of logic and rhetoric can succeed, which fits very well with my chosen metaphor of the Horseman as Time.
And there are a couple headless horseman legends, one from Texas, even. A horse thief was caught and made an example of by being decapitated, tied upright to a charcoal-colored horse, and his head tied to dangle from the saddle. They then turned the horse loose and it wandered around for some time. People reported seeing the horseman, riding headless, which was of course true. Some time later, they found the horse at a watering hole, dried out husk of a burden still upon its back. They buried the man, but people still report seeing the horseman.
And Irving’s story of the horseman is based on real places in his hometown. The white church with the holy grounds the rider cannot enter, for example, is a real place.Sigh. But I’m not done, yet. And I’m going to have to detour from this to work on the “confined spaces” assignment that rob and I have to have ready for our songwriters in the round performance in Providence this Sunday.
