So, there’s that

Posted August 4th, 2004 by Sean Williams

I called to reschedule my fitting for this show I’m doing and the girl I was talking to sorta made a joke about the terror alerts. I said, “Yeah, proud to be an American and all that…” just trying to go about my day, and she said, “I’m really starting to wonder, y’know.” I think I actually said something like, “Yeah, I don’t really give a shit about any of that, can I just reschedule my thing and get back to my life…”

I’m a prick, and the last blog I wrote about how prickly I’ve been might just be a harbinger of future manifestations. Anyway, I jumped on this poor girl who is simply lovely, and I need to figure out a way to apologize. I’ll make cookies for rehearsal, I guess.

I’m a little bit blocked on my music, which makes sense. I’ve written four songs in the last week, at a certain point you run out of runway, so to speak. But it’s making me anxious as hell. I’ve been wanting to get my music published for a long time and now that it’s starting to happen it’s not flowing like it usually is. I have three totally different things I could be writing for and I just want to listen to hip-hop.

I left my Ipod upstate.

There were several things I wanted to talk about, but the one thing I keep coming back to concerns “News”. For the days after September 11, everyone was staring at the TV watching the planes hit over and over and over again and in a way it was kinda funny. I mean, we would sleep five hours and then, first thing when we woke up, we turn on the TV to see if there are any developments.

At the end of a basketball game that I’ve just watched, I can’t wait for Sportscenter, to see the whole thing again. Same with the Democratic Convention, I wanted to know what everyone was saying and thinking.

The problem is, when it’s personal news. If you have a friend who’s getting married or, like, our cousin who is pregnant, I just want to call over there every twenty minutes and find out what’s going on. But nothing is going on, they’re still just pregnant. In fact, the only possible news is bad news. And I feel so stupid, I want to ask “How are you feeling now?” every thirty seconds, as if there is something new to know.

I think maybe the question, or the wanting to ask questions, is your way of having the news for you too. We watched the buildings go down a hundred thousand times because we couldn’t bear not to share it, we watch Sportscenter so we can hear Trey Wingo freak out about an alley oop the way we just did twenty minutes ago. But with your friends, you can’t just keep calling or hanging out or whatever. You just gotta accept that things smaller than the news are actually larger in many ways, and your only recourse is to sit and smile to yourself.