The Broken Soldier

I was having a conversation with a high school friend yesterday.  Vince is his name.  He’s in a band.  A band enjoying a fair amount of notoriety and success.  He moved from Michigan to L.A., as all musicians hoping to make a living ‘musicing’ apparently must do.

We were just shooting the shit.  I was asking his advice for getting a group together.  I’ve been in several, but it’s hard to make them work.  Artsy people are a bit weird by themselves.  Several of them in a small place for longer than ten minutes will almost inevitably result in lots of slap-boxing, yelling, spitting, and shoe throwing.  Too much ego and inflexibility and ‘don’t step on my vision’ kind of thing.  It’s hard.  There’s a certain art to it that I haven’t been able to master.

During the conversation I made some off-the-cuff remark about him taking confessions that day.  I forget the context.  Vince said something about having to be a monk or a priest to do that, but even if he were one of those, he’d probably be too drunk to absolve anyone of anything.  Blah blah blah.  Something something something.  Skip ahead a bit of back and forth, and then Vince got to asking me about ‘demons.’  Demons as in baggage.

He started on about the affect these demons can have on one’s creativity.  He suggested I put them to work making music.  He cited Delta Blues singers, war chants, etc., as examples of what he was talking about.  In theory it seemed sound.  But not all demons are the same.  Demons of poverty, pain in service of a purpose, etc., are a bit different than the legions that ‘dwell within.’  While I can’t afford the surgery and post-op care out-of-pocket on one salary, Sarah and I are far from poor.  As well, the suffering Sarah and I endure serves no purpose.  And neither do the demons that suffering has spawned.