Where have you been, my lonesome Jack?

[jack_babalon]

Dark Moon Books sent me their final draft on the soon to be 'published-published' version of High Midnight two weeks ago. In the process of going through the re-edits and scene shuffles at my publisher's request since, I've discovered how much my book has become an entirely different creature in it's slow metamorphosis over the years. It's as if I'm reading it for the first time now really. In a weird way I feel as if I am a parent, one who has sent his child off to find their way in the world years ago and s/he has come back to me at long last, (in this place on no map and found only at the bottom of a rope). Cleaned up. The fat burnt from the meat, the bad grammar-stammer stripped until the verse crackles without distraction. Sleek. Faster. The rust scrubbed off the essentials until the story sparkles confident.

All that's stayed the same I guess is the author.

The work's tough. Tougher than I thought it would be. Not because I feel shocked at the changes presented, but more in the unique challenge in having to find this new rhythm to the work itself. It reminds me in a way of my brief time as a DJ, having to have the next track lined up and beat-matched perfect to flow out of the last one. Only this time I'm seguing out of an unfamiliar remix of a once familiar song. For example, spent four hours over twenty pages today. I had to read them several times to get the beat right in my head. The whole time nervously pecking minor word changes and un-doing them. Somewhere around hour three instinct took over and got me through them in a blur.

In my down time I'm running frazzled. When I'm not playing the starving artist the gravity of everything else in my life just balls up and hits me. Sometimes you forget how easy it is to stab yourself in the back when you pat yourself there for so long you forget you're doing it. All this shit I cannot even give voice to, because it's not my shit alone to give.

My only reprieve of late has been a drunken Monday night that went full throttle until dawn. This after I got comp-ed into my buddy's musical where I apparently guffawed myself silly. Magpie and Teddy-Bear guest-listed me afterwards into the post show drinking fest with the cast. Briefly, like Old Man Iggy, I became 'just a passenger' and I rode and I rode on the whirlwinds of my friend's charisma. Swept up. Overwhelmed. I become a shadow in the company of flames.

Until the last bowl had been packed, the last drink emptied, the last regret voiced and the last promise made... right when the sun crawled out of the dark to remind us of our place... we groggily made our separate ways.

Now? Now it's two cigarettes left and eighty pages to go. Twenty dollars to the wallet and triple that owed. I survive on the fat stored up from the soft years past and pay my way with a currency of tommorows. If I had a door, maybe the wolves would be at it, yes. But what they would find when they clawed their way in, is the fact that I'm exactly where I want to be.

Knee deep in the work and pushing forward.