Listen to Your Wife, part II, entitled “Do What She Says Immediately”

Yesterday I said something and my wife told me, ‘you should put that in a blog post.” Damned if I can remember what it was now. Probably something that could save the world. Something so clever and inspired it must have come directly from the Mouth of God.

So many events like that come and go, and I don’t immediately go and write them down. All I’m left with, in such situations, are laments like this one, where I keenly regret not having captured some transcendental gem in Microsoft Word.

Do our “own” ideas actually originate with us anyway? Is there anything we can genuinely claim the copyright on? If so, then why the hell are we stumped when it comes to coming up with good ideas so much of the time?

Today I heard an NPR podcast about the Talking Heads song “Once In A Lifetime.” The vocal was the very last part they wrote. The band had the basic groove, which they thought was cool, but no lyrics at all. They came close to dropping it from the album because the producer wasn’t even into it.

David Byrne said, “There was a motion to just abandon this one, but I thought there was something about this that I thought ‘I’m sure I could write words to this that would make it work, that would pull it together.’” Then Brian Eno (the producer) came up with the melody for the chorus, and Byrne started building on that.

No one involved with the making of that record said anything like, “oh, yeah, I simply willed that song into existence, and it came deliberately and fully-formed from my mind.”

Any artist knows there’s a certain amount of shooting in the dark going on. If you fire enough ammo, you’re bound to bring down some game. By “ammo” I mean you know there’s something there, or you have faith that something is there, you don’t know exactly what it is, and all you have is the little trigger of your mind that keeps firing, firing, firing.

My prayer lately? “Please give me the necessary whatever to do what I feel I have to do. Without Your help, Your energy, Your mercy, I can’t do anything good.”