11/12

i'm thankful for the silly bounty of the 107 track rerelease of the white album, which is my favorite beatles album. 

i'm thankful for the acoustic demos, which is the thing i would have been most excited for when i was younger, especially thankful for "child of nature," the trills of acoustic lead and the high keening unison vocal harmonies, especially since i never really liked the lyrics to "jealous guy," but i'm most thankful, i think, for the alternate takes, even though i've never been someone who has much gone in for listening to alternate takes

—i guess, though this one of those things that i've decided without ever actually consciously thinking about it until now, that it's since if i love a song i love it because of the totality of its sound, these exact combinations of tone and timbre and reverb and echo, and felt that an alternate take would lack the glow of all of those things being in the perfect alignment of the completed and released version—

i'm thankful, though, thinking of that belief, to reflect on how different that is from my own creative process now, how i don't write for the 100% perfect thing, i write loosely and roughly when i have the time and mind to do so. i'm thankful to remember how when i was younger the pain of the long periods between spikes of creative inspiration where the problem was wanting to write and not feeling like i could, that there was something missing, 

i'm thankful that d and i were talking about this the other day, how weeks and weeks in advance of a story being due in our workshop i would start putting in hours a day at the library to try to make things happen and sometimes they did but sometimes i just sat there for so long not able to do anything and i'm thankful to reflect on how that seemed to be such a permanent intractable problem for me, that i was going to spend the rest of my life going through these periods where i desperately wanted to write but just couldn't get the words onto the paper

and i'm thankful that simply is not my problem anymore, not with this and you, that it's so far from being my problem in a way that i could never have predicted back then. i'm thankful that now the problem is finding the time to sit down and talk to you and myself, i'm thankful to think of all those hours in the past where i was punishing myself for not having the thing i wanted and was trying to slowly and painfully force it anyway and to wish that i could have set myself free from that, even though when you're young and things feel hard knowing things might be easier in the future is never that much solace

i'm thankful it's not much solace now, as i was feeling not great the past few weeks, but i'm thankful that it's some solace now and any solace is better than none. i'm thankful to know that not having the time to write here is not really that big of a problem, that it's been a blessing, kind of, since it's helped me realize that i don't have to sprint forever and that if i miss a day or two or even a few, it's okay, i know that eventually i will find it again, and that it's better for my happiness to not bind myself into some kind of structure with more boom and bust.

i'm thankful for what the alternate takes make me feel like the last few days, which is that all the things we think of as fixed and firm don't have to be that way, that this detail could change, or this one, or that one. 

i'm thankful for the way audio recordings, even though they can be tricky and manipulated like any other form, capture, like photographs, an imprint of a space and time, a partial representation, and that for old recordings, when editing was harder and takes were longer and more complete, there's a sense that embedded in the tape is a room for a moment and the people there (the sound waves bouncing off their faces, imperceptible outlines in the hiss), their voices mixing in the air. 

i'm thankful, since i'm soft, that i've always loved "i will", and i'm thankful for the way that the first alternate take of that on the rerelease (which is apparently the thirteenth take of the song during the sessions) starts in medias res and then breaks down almost immediately into silliness, with mccartney saying "it verges from the sublime to ridiculous" (the last word he pronounces as if it rhymes with "cellulose") and then doing some vocal warmups, before counting in a new run through that suddenly sounds like the version i've heard on the record, the grain of his voice and the the strum of the guitars, the gentle insistent cymbal.

i'm thankful that we then cut some period into the near future or the past (the sound is so similar that you know the people and the microphones haven't moved far) they do a silly little cover of "blue moon," that breaks down halfway through, and then, another splice in the timeline and another take of "i will" (the 29th take, it's so many takes of these boys sitting in a circle and singing love songs) that ends with mccartney singing the answer to the chorus's question, but instead of the eternal sappy "i will" of the song, he blurts "i won't" and the guitar falls out and i just love that it exists that way, that there's a moment where it's like that and we have that for as long as things like that can last and can go back to it whenever we want to, to this silly moment one day in 1968, just like i can go back to this to try to remember what it felt like in my mind in this room on the night i was writing it. i'm thankful for "good night," which i'm listening to the end of as i type these words, when ringo whispers "good night, everybody, everywhere."

i'm thankful for something i found out the other day, which is that when i copy an email out of the text editor in the program i use to write emails to customers at work (since really, all i ever do is write emails, a true calling), and paste it into google translate and translate it to spanish, it, for some reason (and only for spanish, seemingly) renders the invisible newline characters in between the greeting and the body and the closing of the english text as the phrase "al aire libre."

i'm thankful for free air.