Post Number 203
Well the Trailerpark celebrated its fifth birthday this past week, and while my posting has slowed down as of late, I keep feeling that it’s only a matter of time before circumstances change and words start coming out easier. The good part is that I’ve been writing new songs in lieu of weak prose, and am just starting the long process of recording them all and putting out a CD this year.
I don’t know what I expected of this site when it started, I certainly wasn’t thinking five years down the road. I think in some ways it was a response to the fact that I was having trouble writing songs and I was hoping that one thing might help another. In a lot of ways it has. I started The Prairie Dogs after I began this site, I wrote the soundtrack to Kennewick Man: An Epic Drama of the West, started playing music on a regular basis and finally got my BA from The Evergreen State College.
The biggest surprise from all this writing is how it hasn’t gotten easier, or all that much better. I think I was under the false impression that after a few months of typing, things would start falling into place, spewing effortlessly from my brain to my fingertips—that after a year or so, mangled sentences would come out clean on the first try, and stories would come out in order and not a jumbled mess. After five years I have come to realize that it will most likely never get easier, only harder as the easy stories have already been told, and that the only thing that will make what I write any more readable is time spent rewriting things over and over again.
The whole idea for the Trailerpark started because my friend Lisa was railing against the cowboy poets who had gained a modicum of success at the end of the 90’s, and was saying how she wanted to write a book called Trailer Park Poetry and ride it all the way to the top. Although we’re all still waiting for that book, she was gracious enough to lend me the name when I was looking for one for my web site. Over the years she has done more than here fair share of helping me with the HTML aspects of creating, and I couldn’t have done all this without her help. She’s a peach—you can tell by how easily she bruises.
I want to thank everyone who has come by over the years for giving me a reason to update. I miss reading the blogs of friends who have stopped and so I will continue to try to keep posting, even at those times when it really just feels like work.
I don’t know what I expected of this site when it started, I certainly wasn’t thinking five years down the road. I think in some ways it was a response to the fact that I was having trouble writing songs and I was hoping that one thing might help another. In a lot of ways it has. I started The Prairie Dogs after I began this site, I wrote the soundtrack to Kennewick Man: An Epic Drama of the West, started playing music on a regular basis and finally got my BA from The Evergreen State College.
The biggest surprise from all this writing is how it hasn’t gotten easier, or all that much better. I think I was under the false impression that after a few months of typing, things would start falling into place, spewing effortlessly from my brain to my fingertips—that after a year or so, mangled sentences would come out clean on the first try, and stories would come out in order and not a jumbled mess. After five years I have come to realize that it will most likely never get easier, only harder as the easy stories have already been told, and that the only thing that will make what I write any more readable is time spent rewriting things over and over again.
The whole idea for the Trailerpark started because my friend Lisa was railing against the cowboy poets who had gained a modicum of success at the end of the 90’s, and was saying how she wanted to write a book called Trailer Park Poetry and ride it all the way to the top. Although we’re all still waiting for that book, she was gracious enough to lend me the name when I was looking for one for my web site. Over the years she has done more than here fair share of helping me with the HTML aspects of creating, and I couldn’t have done all this without her help. She’s a peach—you can tell by how easily she bruises.
I want to thank everyone who has come by over the years for giving me a reason to update. I miss reading the blogs of friends who have stopped and so I will continue to try to keep posting, even at those times when it really just feels like work.
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