Brand New Idea

Posted 4:10 AM by sean
SAo, this will be the first blog I've ever written completely shit faced. I am drunk on a combination of stuff, all of it lovely, and I'm at Ian and Tessa's farm house with damn near twenty of my friends. God, it is good to see some of these people that I haven't seen in a long time, Caroline, Anthony, Deb and Steve, it's just wonderful.

I'm actually gfoing back and fixing tyupung mistakes that I make as I go, but I might not catch them all. I just tried to walk around Tan and Tessa's bed and I banded the holy behjessus out of my leg on the foot board. I have to assume it's called the foot board, if the thing at the top is called the head boartd.

There is, seriously, nothing you can do about any of this. I can puyblish a drunjk blog and you totally vcan't stop me. Y'all aint got shit on me.

Is it pathetic that I would be drunk at this age? I don't know. I just don't know.

I can tell you this, I really miss Ian and Tessa when I'm here and they're not. Not so much the day to day, which is actually relatively easyu to maintain without instruction, but the conversation. They are lovely people. I went into the bathroom in their room, where I'm sleeping, and I saw a copy of the same cooking magazine that I have a subscription to. It made me so lonely for all of us being together, not that we don't really have an ancestral homeland. We don't have a place, all of us, to call home and we always have before, and I see Cook's Corner, or some damn thing, I can't think of it now, and It's like we're all family and love each other, in our own way.

What?

We talked about Blogs tonight for quite some time. I can't reallty worry about the group of friends I have that check this blog every once in a while. I' mean, let's be honest, this is all bullshit, and we all know it. I could tell you any number of things here and you really ought to discount it all as an exercise in creativity. Blogs are interesting more for what they are trying to be than for what they are. But that's a conversation for a more sober time.

We talked about the blogs we read, about how awsesome it is that our generation goes nuts and reads each other's blogs. My friend Anthony? I read his *girlfriend's* blog, someone I relaly dfon't know very well, but who I adore because of her writing. And a lot of people check this.

You know what? Screw you guys. Read this if you want, but know that I'm not a writer, I'm a liar and you shouldn't trust a damn thing you read in here. I love the way Jordana looks at me when she reads my blog, it's the same look she gets when I break dance. "Yes, yes, we're all terribly impressed, but, you see, I know you, and I know what you let none of these people know."

Okay, seriously? Jordana was getting ready in the bathroom and I farted, just a regular fart, but it sort of went up in tone at the very end and Jordana, wet head in towel, called out and said, "did you just ask me sopmething?" That is mother fucking comedy.

Man, I really broke the hell out of my leg on Ian's goddam bed. Why the fuck do people need a head board *AT THE BOTTOM OF THEIR BED*? Hey, Sean Patreick, do *you* haVE A head board at the bottom of your goddam bed?

Man, white people got stuff I don't understand.

The Wirk...

Posted 1:20 PM by sean
I am going through a cyclical sort of period of intense ability to focus, so I'm hammering out a lot of shit that's been sitting on the back burner. I wrote a screenplay about ten years ago that sorta sucks, but there was one exchange that I really like where a character says, "I'm a painter, I'm always painting, even when I'm not" or something to that effect. And it's true.

I've been working on a piece of music, a song for a children's series that I'm really excited about being involved with, and I'm also working on music for a show that my co-producers and I are writing called "Fleet Week". According to our schedule for Fleet Week, we have about three months to have a completed script and start casting for a January performance slot, so I'm feeling a little bit of pressure to try to throw some songs together for that, but the deadline for the children's song was, um, three weeks ago. So that has sort of taken precedence.

Wanna know how I write music? Okay, I'll tell you.

There are two ways. Way one is the easiest way, and that's when I start with a melody line. I'll be lying in bed or... who am I kidding, it always happens to me lying in bed. I never sit down, pen in hand, and suddenly a melody line comes to me. Mozart did that, all other composers heard melodies and harmonies only once they were well away from the paper and quill, where you would realize that they were slipping out of your mind faster than flour through a sieve...

But sometimes I hear the melody line and I get somewhere fast enough to jot it down, sometimes it's just sung right into a tape recorder but often I'm able to figure out the key and time signature fast enough to get it down.

Key and time signature might seem like something that should be fairly obvious, but it's actually very weird. Key signatures are hard to determine for a lot of the most interesting things. My mom once told me to just write everything in C and put in the accidentals and then when a key started making itself known you can go back and stick it in. That was when I was about 8, now I'm pretty good at knowing the key, but a lot of times it changes really fast.

Time signature can be just as weird. You can think something is in 4/4, but then as you write it down you realize it's actually 6/8. And as you play it slower, you realize that it's just a waltz (3/4) with four bar melodies, and then you speed it up and it's not a waltz at all, it's a march, in 12/8, that swings. It's really not all that easy.

You think I'm showing off, but really, the real musicians who are reading this are thinking, "Dude, if you can't hear it's 12/8 right off the top, you're an idiot." And they're right, I am. An idiot who LOVES TO PLEASE THE WOMENs.

Anyway, this is sometimes the fastest and funnest way to write music, but if the melody line is off by a hair, if you start tweaking, man, you are screwed. I've tried to take dictation from that part of my brain that sings to me all the time, and if you get the rhythm a little bit off or if the triplet doesn't fit or something, I just want to throw the whole thing away. And I have. Lots of times.

I've thrown away stuff before I even get it completely written. I've opened music files to find acres of empty staves, key signature and time signature not just written in, but changes as the empty staves roll by. Just no notes at all, like at some point I selected ALL and deleted and then saved the changes and quit.

Because even when I'm not writing, I'm writing.

The other way is fiddling. I don't know if writers of words can do this, can just sit down and start stringing phrases together. Sometimes I think they do.
"I have a pomegranate, but not a seed."
"You have no earthly idea."
"Yeah...wait, what? Oh! Yeah, wait... what?"
"Faster than flour through a seive..."

And then you start writing a play? I don't know. If someone does this, I'd be psyched. But I do, I sometimes pick up a guitar and just start screwing around, playing with this and that. A few times this has led me down (up?) the path that, y'know, primrose or something, where you go down a path and it leads the wrong place? Goddamit, what is that? Anyway, a couple of times I start playing something and I like where it's going and then I really like where it's going and then I start making up a tune to fit it, and it's like God is speaking through me and then... it dawns on me that I'm singing "Maneater" by Hall and Oates.

This hasn't actually happened to me that much. Also, the fun thing is if you sit down at a piano and start writing out melodies and progressions and designs and then you try to switch it to guitar, the weirdest shit happens. Same with the reverse. I wrote a country sort of ballad on guitar that, when switched to piano, sounds like Randy Newman. Which is oh so much better than sounding like a country ballad.

Sometimes I use a combination of the above. I'll get a tune in my head, a melody line, and as I try to get it down I find myself fiddling into something infinitely better.

So, I really just wanted a new post up because I hate that I was baited into writing that last post. I have to get back to the music, because I'm closing in on finishing the wonderful ballad duet between a Coast Guard Captain and a national monument, and I want to write it down before it leaks out of my brain.

A Game of Basketball

Posted 8:31 PM by sean
My brother has maintained a fantastic blog for years now, but because dumb people keep giving him shit, he's thinking about shutting it down. No such luck for me. Maybe I moved enough as a kid, but dumb people don't bother me quite as much.

I'd love to be able to get my panties in a twist by someone's misunderstanding of my writing but a) I'm not sure the misunderstanding was all that profound, b) there is a certainty that comes with being right about something that makes you not really sweat criticism and c) this blog and, in fact, my entire "writing life" are just a laugh for me. When someone misunderstands my life as an artist, I look to fact B for comfort and very often there is little to be found. When someone misunderstands a blog, I'm actually amazed that my writing is cogent enough for it to happen as infrequently as it does.

Most people I know wrap up a lot of their emotional life into their sexual lives and it's a shame. One's emotional life is dripping with reversals and nonsensical aberations and confusing twists and spirals (even *without* wrapping it up in your sex life) that equating it with some sort of binary did-I-or-didn't-I-screw-him kind of crap is really selling one's emotional life short. But everyone seems to do it, virtually every woman I've ever slept with does it and about half the guys I know do it so either I'm awesome for avoiding it or I'm dumb as shit.

Plus, if you write a treatise supporting abortion, someone's gonna get all up in your shit. (Interesting side note: the one woman I've ever known who had not a shread of feminine instinct and, as such, fucked people the way date raping frat boys do, cried when she got an abortion. I mean, it was her fifth, so maybe it was... I was gonna say shame but no, it was probably just fear of being a cliche...)

I have no idea if I'm good or bad in the sack, in the same way that no-one has ever come up to me and said, "You are actually a *bad* actor". It's a push-poll, no matter how you phrase it. And, of course, that's what I said so many months ago, that I do what, in my mind, is standard stuff and I get celebrated for it. But the celebration has to do more with the fact that I'm a human being, that I've never really *tried* to get *ANYONE* to have sex with me. I'm the kind of guy who sleeps with my friends and stays friends with them for years afterwards. Or more specifically, I'm the kind of guy who almost sleeps with my friends, stops the act before it enters into what I recognize is emotional weirdness for other people (regardless of my complete personal disrespect for it) and stays friends with them for years.

Now, as the actual beginning and end of my entire defense, I would like to present: This Entire Fucking Blog. Reading my blog and assuming that I celebrate my own sexual prowess and that I don't have compassion and understanding for the people I share my life with, including women, is the kind of selective editing that could secure you a job on the Daily Show or The Committee to Re-Elect the President.

God dammit, I always get sucked in. I like talking more than I like just gloating and being right. Anyway, Ian, I'm sorry that people are fucking with you and your blog and I'm sorry that shit like this is making you give it up.