Wallitner Weekly 32
Hello everyone!
A lot of productive things happened this past week
I have a confession. It is currently 3:22 am Friday morning as I am writing this, but I was reading a book of poems and decided I needed to write the weekly now before I wake up this afternoon. I promise i’ve been productive, I didn’t always stay up past 3 am this week, but when I did, it was because I was reading and learning and writing.
See my fiancee and I opened our gifts to each other this week. We tend to do this because the chaos of the whole family Christmas gets in the way of the more personal gift giving. We have a tradition, her and I (Powerful things, traditions). We give each other a book from our local bookstore. She prefers fiction, I prefer poems. So we go to the bookstore together, pick out one for the other and then try to sneak it to the register without spoiling the surprise.
Other than gift exchanges, I wrote a poem about a color. “Crimson kisses” to be precise. I am not sure if it will fit the style of the color madrigals my friend and I will be writing, but I like it all the same. I also started writing a drinking song for mens choir. Because, tis the season… haha
I’ve got lots of plans for next week too!
By the time you’re reading this I will hopefully be fully packed since my fiancee and I will be making the trip across the state to stay with family for the holidays. I plan to write some more poems and maybe even a little music while I am away from home, but the holiday parties are relentless and will likely keep me from doing so. I’ve decided this is less of a winter break and more of a winter relocation, but a welcome one.
The three wise men and the widow Jane.
I don’t know how long this story will be, but it is 3:33. I didn’t write that because it rhymes, it genuinely is just passed half passed 3 am.
ANYWAYS! I started writing a drinking song about spirits! Get it, spirits, like alcohol. I like my cleverness to be on the nose. The piece is a story about the three wise men. Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam. And then they meet the widow Jane (also a bourbon whiskey brand) while they’re out at the bar.
So the whole story is about going out to drink with the three wise men, but the bar was filled up with all of their friends. Johnny walked in, he was talkin with jack and Daniel too. But poor Jimmy was left on Manhattan avenue. (A Manhattan is another whiskey drink) I have to explain the whiskey references since my dad doesn’t drink, but he reads the weekly’s!
I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but the chorus of the tune will be, “We drink for the good times and drink for the bad. We drink for the times that are yet to have passed. We drink for the moments that could never be. We drink for the people we wish we could see.”
Now I will say you’re probably reading into those words, trying to discern what the full story is and perhaps you're thinking, “When Chris writes about people he wishes he could see, they’re usually dead.” To which I would respond, “I started writing a drinking song about spirits.”
SEE! I think its such a clever premise for a song, and I love the potential for double meaning. Im super into that sort of thing, but I’ll definitely need to go whiskey tasting in the near future… for research purposes.
Now I could end this story there, it is 3:48 in the morning after all. But I told you I was reading poems when I decided I should write this weekly. My fiancee got me a book of poems for Christmas called, “the grief of a happy life” by Christopher Howell. It’s the kind of poetry book that makes you think, “Why is the title in all lower case?”. Howell’s cleverness isn’t always so on the knows, but it is still quite clever. EE Cummings would play with punctuation too. He has a great poem called “i thank You God” in which the only words that are capitalized are in direct reference to God. Things like Him and You and He.
you or i could spend hours wondering Why howell left the title lowercase. perhaps he wanted to show the insignificance of our Grief And happiness in comparison to some sort of higher power. its Not my place to put meaning to words for him, but i do Love a puzzle.
Reading poems like these make me feel more clever than I am, and that’s the best time (in my unqualified opinion) to write a newsletter.
The second half of this story was about a specific poem of Howell’s that I read, the one that inspired me to write the weekly now instead of in the afternoon. But my backspace button is winning the war against my spacebar. To increase the word count, I can’t find the right words.
See, the poem had this phrase that stuck out to me, “This has been a recorded message”. I was thinking of all the clever ways I could manipulate that phrase for my own, like some joke at the end of one of those longwinded voicemails. The ones where you pretend to have answered, but really you just let it ring since you prefer to text. By “you” I of course mean me. I wanted so desperately to have told a story about leaving voicemails and writings behind so that people in the future could read them. I think that that’s really important. I value the idea of being remembered more than most 24 year olds do. (Probably because I’ve spent so much time studying long since dead people) I write so that people have the option to look back on things I’ve said, if they want to. Since some people don’t have that choice with their loved ones. I suppose that’s why I was here writing at 4:27 am on a Friday morning in the middle of December after having read a few poems from “the grief of a happy life” by Christopher Howell.
I say “was” because Im not doing that right now, as you’re reading this. This has been a recorded message all along.
