I paid for last night today. Paid big.
Like every Sunday, I had to leave at nine to meet my folks in Rouken Glen park. It’s usually just me and Monty, but Mo was up (giving me daggers for my behaviour of last night), and so there were three of us heading to the south side. Hangover doesn’t cover it. Hell comes close, but not quite. It felt like the double helix of of my DNA was about to spin out of control, liquifying me instantly. I was looking forward to it.
My dad couldn’t make it to the park. He has good days and bad days and according to my mum it’s been a pretty bad week. He’s on a variety of pills for his heart and there’s a delicate, constantly shifting balance of dosage and competing side effects. Lately there’s a lot of fluid in his lungs from one drug, but the drug he takes to help that lowers his blood pressure to the brink of zero, so there’s a lot of back and forth. I’d have taken the dog to see him after the park if it hadn’t been Mothers’ Day, but since we were heading back there later I went straight to my primary school to continue my nostalgia-porn video shoot.
(Side Note: I was Twittering something similar to that last sentence on my phone, and when I accidentally typed ‘poen’ it helpfully suggested ‘porn’ instead. “Thank you, iPhone, I did mean porn, very well done!”)
First off, Thornliebank Primary. Having Mo with encouraged me to commentate. “I shat myself right here!” Then, later, at my High School, “I got my face kicked in just behind that fence.” It was true. I suffered terribly from hay fever, and Saduf Riaz thought it’d be funny to throw all my unused handkerchiefs in the bin. Purely to demonstrate the inconvenience of this to him, I wiped some of my snot on his face, to which he took great exception. “Didn’t you fight back?” asked Mo. I shrugged. “I thought he over-reacted. It was an unprepared Kenny that met his flurry of blows.” We made up later, I should add. He’s a doctor now. I like to think I prepared him for a life of unpalatable bodily fluids.
As yesterday, I intended to visit nurseries, play groups, locations of notable maternal relevance. But, as yesterday, my tech failed me. This time “Memory Card Full.” So, that was that.
Whether I had enough material to cover the song I was going to use I never got the chance to find out. I was still so sick that I went back to bed for a couple of hours. Dragging myself up for the second time that day, I had only two hours left to record the bloody song, let alone cut a video for it. As it turned out, I barely ended up with a passable version of it by the time I had to leave. It’s definitely not fit for public consumption, but as my mum doesn’t know if I even still play guitar, and is completely ignorant of the miracle that is Garageband, I figured she’d be impressed by the fact I could still find B minor and strum it over a couple of drum loops.
The song will never be fit for public consumption, to be honest. It’s a song written for my mum, ferchrissakes! It was an interesting excercise, though, having a very specific audience and some genuine emotion to put into it. My main songwriting problem is subject matter. I need to find things to write about that actually get under my skin, instead of vague, imaginary romantic situations. As I write, I’m listening to Forever in My Life by Prince. It’s a song about settling down with one woman after years of “juggling hearts in a three-ring circus.” The lyrics are taut, evocative, perfect. Being a fan, I happen to know that this, like mine, was written for an audience of one: it was his way of proposing to Susannah Melvoin, and it is pregnant with telling detail and blunt honesty. He united the specific and the universal, which is why he’s Prince and I’m me, but it’s something to aspire to.
As predicted, though, my mum was overwhelmed by the tune. I doubt anyone’s written a song for her before, so it needn’t have been a work of genius. She liked the melody and recognised herself in the references, so job done.
I also paid for her Mothers’ Day chinese meal (take that, woman-who-lives-in-my-old-house!).
