Conflation weekend, after Once More to the Lake

One weekend in 1997 or 1998 three friends and I took our little punk band out to play a couple shows in small towns that weren’t the small town we lived in, to audiences that weren’t mostly our friends. The engine on my old Mazda blew up in the heat, we had to push the car down the highway and to an offramp, and a literal clown yelled mockery at us out of the loudspeaker on top of her clownmobile. Our band would break up soon after and I am rarely in touch with any of those friends. Still, the shows we played and the time together stand amid a lot of duller black and white memories as bursts of color, happiness, possibility. I can’t stop myself breaking in here, the suited host interrupting the movie of my own life just as it might be getting to a good part to say that I suspect I am conflating more than one weekend and more than one band, not that there were many of either, then I interrupt the interruption - whose driving this thing, me? Or I? - hoping to segue back by noting that while the fact of the matter does of course, well, matter, pressing multiple memories into one can bring out through the blurring of conflation another element of truth: it’s a matter of standing at the right distance from the thing to take it in correctly. Now let me tell you about Todd giving us a VCR.

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Wrote the above as an exercise trying to emulate elements of the first couple lines of E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” which go as follows:
“One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond’s Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine.”

I looked at that and saw it as follows: “A long moment, loosely placed in time, an event where the protagonist is passenger; moderately negative outcomes, positive assessment, assessment returned to repeatedly,” then took a crack at typing some lines and what’s above is what I came up with.

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Our little bands didn’t last long or make much, in any sense of that phrase. Nowadays my creative efforts slant toward writing, more contained, easier to fit in a bag and easier on my back than the amps and bass drum, and involving far fewer phone calls to coordinate, and I get paid a bit on occasion. Sometimes, though, the boring but jittery checking and rechecking of my email and the constant wondering if I ought to be writing or being annoyed that a meeting has taken up my writing time or the guilt that I squandered uninterrupted writing time makes me want a less disciplined creative activity, the way guitar and band practice didn’t feel like practice but like play, even when frustrating, and all the time alone - alone by myself, or alone around others - and the time spent crowded and wishing to be alone to write makes want to be in a car with just a few friends on the way to play a small show for less money than we spent on gas, friends who know each others’ jokes and verbal tics and the music is the whole point of being together but also just a convenient vehicle for being together.