A Rock and A Hard Place

I figure I can post this in the middle of the night. No need to share it on any of the social media sites. So if you’re reading this, then boy did you take a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

I’ve been out sick for the last week. Every time I cough, the iris closes in, everything fades to black. The apartment is giving me cabin fever. It’s made me sentimental. I’ve been digging through old memo pads, sifting through the ghosts of stories past.

A couple years back I tried my hand at a fiction blog. It starred a man charged with exorcising a haunted house before his fiancé came to term. She couldn’t stay through the renovations because, uhhh I don’t know, asbestos or something. The story was called The Straw House. Its hero referred to himself as the Straw Husband. Each of the ghosts represented a part of himself that wasn’t ready for marriage. The punk rock stars who died of exposure on the ground floor. The red-eyed ghost chugging cough syrup in the bathroom. The dark shadow of unyielding rage in the basement.

The blog was a multimedia extravaganza: staged haunted house photos, drawings and music (a wee little bit of music).

The site fell apart, because well it did… The server crashed. Stress killed my muse. A far more seductive story happened through my path and I followed it away.

Here’s one of the few songs written as accompaniment for an entry called A Rock and A Hard Place. It’s a minimal synth piece, a relative of Vangelis’s Blade Runner soundtrack. Check it out.