White People Can So Have The Blues

You may have noticed my rather severe absence from this blog...I'd like to thank the more patient, faithful, or habitually ingrained readers among you who check in on a daily to semi-daily basis...yes, eventually I will be back in full effect, but it's slow coming.

Between the inevitable feelings of fucked-updedness that come from having a girlfriend leave the hemisphere and an absolute sledgehammer monsoon of work-related stress, I haven't had the energy or desire to blog regularly. Nobody wants to read about an artsy-fartsy guy missing his lady and it's way way too easy to commit professional suicide with a blog. Better to just shut up and lay still, I guessed.

Looking back on the past month or two, both in real life, and my blog posts, I can only deduce this: I must have immersed myself in so much blues that I actually caught them. Look at it this way: cooks eat well. Investment bankers get paid well. Even submarine captains get a little wet sometimes. So there's no way I could go on a Southern blues odyssey and not pick up my own case of the screamin' and cryin'.

I can only hope that I have also gotten funkier, or more soulful. Some days it is all I can do not to pick up a tin cup and a guitar and hit the streets.

Then I look around me. A very good friend of mine lost her sister in a horrible automotive accident perpetuated by a driver on crack a year or so ago. I hear tales of gangbangers, teenage dope dealers and unrepentant dog-fuckers (more on that later) from my man Clarence, and I perk up and smile. I'm fairly healthy. I am not my good friend, and I don't have an illicit attraction to dogs, nor am I a dog owned by a perverse owner.

I just got the blues is all. Right now life is subjecting me to tremendous heat and pressure, and as a result I'm getting harder and tougher. Shinier, too. What's been getting me out of bed at the moment is the thought that all these ambiguous life pains are making me into a glitterier, more beautifully brilliant specimen...all I got to do is get on through in the meantime.

Future posts will be more substantive, I swear. For now, I'm off to practice the harmonica...

posted by Jeff Simmermon @ 12:16 AM