Sunday afternoon
Walked around the Rose Garden today; that, and pretty much the entire day so far, have been spent working on Quiet Victories. There's a rough but "complete" lyric and a corresponding recording. I may have them up in a few days, but there are some people whose personal stories a couple of verses are based on, and I had to give them a head start in case they wanted to kill me first.
Hmm. Could post some of it...
(first 4 lines instrumental) Sit down with me and talk a while; And please believe me when I say I don't need much to make me smile, Just tell me how you spent your day. Forget heroic fantasy That's not the tale I need to hear, Tell me of quiet victory Of of love and life against your fear. Don't tell me of the Amazon The battle-lust that fills her breast; Just tell me what the mirror showed: A warrior's scar across your chest. Would he still love you after that? Would you die beneath the knife? The cancer gave you Devil's odds; You rolled the dice and won your life. And still you see your friends and kin Roll the dice, to lose or gain Against the old familiar foes Grief and fear and death and pain. ... That tale of dwarves, and rings of gold, Dragons flying through the air Is that the movie that your girl Was watching in intensive care? And when at last she's home again, You dread the word you'll have to say: She asks, can she walk home from school? You swallow hard, and say ``OK''. Tires squeal all afternoon; Tbe sirens make your blood run cold. She'll be a woman all too soon; You let her grow up strong and bold. Forget heroic fantasy That's not the tale I need to hear, Tell me of quiet victory Of love and life against your fear. Here's to the women, gently brave Mothers, daughters, lovers, wives, And to the quiet victories We seldom notice in their lives.
That last verse made Colleen cry; I'm probably onto something. The first verse, with all due respect to the brave ladies whose posts started me down this road, is about my mother, who earned her Amazon's scars half a century ago.
If you've stayed with me this far, your comments would be very welcome. The overall structure is still rather unstable, especially the first partial verse and the ending.
As for getting much of anything else done over the weekend, well... I'll make some repairs to the drip irrigation system in the front yard, after the gardener (a friend of jilara's) is finished with rakes and shovels and other implements of potential destruction to hoses.
My current web publishing scheme has become distinctly haphazard. It's all because my "main" site is still on rahul.net under thestarport.org, in spite of the fact that everything's really on dreamhost and could be updated trivially by rsync and maybe some symlinks.
6-9 08:14 Will post in full, with music, later this evening after I've had a chance to make a few edits and cut a new recording.
current mood: high