Listening to New Order's Your Silent Face and reckon it sounds exactly how I feel about turning 50 next week. It's not a happy song. It's not quite a sad song. There's a bit of hope in it. There's a lot of looking back at the road behind you to it.
Let's see me type about where my typing onto a page or screen is right now. Or let's reflect on what it was. Where it started. Where I expected it to go. Where it's going.
Or not.
At first year uni literature/creative writing/whatever it was called we learned a lot of things. But one thing I found was useful was automatic writing. I was taught to get a 2B pencil, sharpen it and write until it was blunt. Forget everything and see where your fingers would take you. This is pretty much what I'm doing now but it's a computer I'm typing to and I think I will type until the end of this record. I think there's two and a half songs to go.
And I found pretty quickly that listening to music while you do this automatic writing, causes the words and ideas to hit the beats and melody of where the music is going. Definitely hits the mood. The mood to the song on now is driving down the south east arterial on the way home from the coast. Look to the right and there's VFL Park, now a shell of the grey concrete wonderland it once was. Now it's half the colosseum surrounded by townhouses, late 90s Melbourne mansions and disinterested cladding.
So that's where the music took me just then and the song was called Ecstasy. Funny to think of VFL Park, once a place of ecstasy when your team kicked a goal and you looked over to the sepia toned video scoreboard for a glitchy replay and now a place where, look, I suppose people in those houses all have their ecstatic moments in their own special ways.
So the song on now is Leave Me Alone, which brings me to the original point to this entry, turning 50. Zero birthdays really punch my brain. I think of all the stuff before and all the things I should have done and then think of nothing. The first thought would be LEAVE ME ALONE, but I do know that all the people I love will show their love and make me feel okay.
The needle has hit the end of the record and I haven't thought about my writing and where it is going. Maybe next time. Or maybe New Order's beats distracted me from all that, telling me, Geez Glenn, get over yourself.
All is fine.
LISTEN TO THAT BASS.
