"it's like i wrote every not with my own finger"

There is very little method to the madness. I am no DJ in some swanky club, expertly mixing songs. I have no experience as a producer, so I haven’t had extensive experience in determining how to best place a song among others on a cd in order to achieve some sort of concordance. I often find myself struggling for gifts that wont cost a fortune and gas money, and my first inclination is to craft a delightful mix that will suit the recipient’s current situation. Whether it be a puzzling predicament or something as simple as elation. However, some people think it’s cheap to just make a mix tape as a gift. The same who think the most efficient way to show somebody that you care is to shove twenty bucks in a Hallmark creation and scribble an “i <3 u!” with their name on the inside. If you are especially cared for, I have found that you receive cards that make noise when you open them. Disney Princess songs, Jimmy Buffet, whatever you’d like in card form. Word on the gift-givers’ circuit is that you can even record your own voice. Surely, that would be the ultimate expression of true feelings for a person.
Naturally, I disagree entirely. If I make a mix CD, you may be certain that every song has been chosen for a reason, regardless of the haste or deliberation with which is was chosen. Especially on the occasions that you receive my mixes as gifts. While some just slap a set of songs in mixed up order on a 10-CD block and shoot them out at friends with a specially crafted iTunes track list, in which case it’s a different story. If your track list is hand-written in special ink with a paragraph’s worth of explanation for the selection of each of twenty one songs, and the CD has been decorated carefully and precisely with seven colors of Sharpie markers, it’s got a different feel about it.
In fact, as I found myself at a loss for a birthday gift for a comrade that I would have ranked among my best, my highly undeveloped method collapsed into “Girl, you have fifteen minutes to jam some songs on a cd and make it look pretty.” Ergo, to the computer I flew, dragging songs from about every other band name as it was listed alphabetically. The moment of compilation never seemed to be a suitable time to consider editing, leading to the difficult cuts that would have to be made later. Having begun with A.F.I.’s Decemberunderground CD and made it successfully to 1997’s ...A Better View of the Rising Moon, I wound up sifting through 63 songs destined for a cd that would hold roughly 22. The 1.2 hour limit could not be breached by any exception, forcing me to eliminate Sam Phillips and Telexx, two artists that wound up making the preliminary selection by chance alone.
Scrolling through the extensive list, deleting a song here and there, it became increasingly more difficult to pick and choose. How could I just erase The Scene Aesthetic's "Boats and Birds" cover when it was practically the anthem of our summer? A peculiar choice of anthem, yes, seeing as it failed to breach the bpm of anything one might consider “up-beat” or peppy, but our anthem nonetheless. A song about codependency and trust that really doesn’t end with the brightest prospects, when put in even the cheeriest arrangement, would logically stand alone in a room of anthems. However, despite what the album cover says and regardless of the copyright information provided on the insert, the listener makes the music. As the mix creator, the responsibility fell upon me to make the point. I began surrounding the song with others that held similar meanings or at least places in our hearts, and a natural order began to form, as it is wont to do in these matters.
Between Eisley’s magical account of a day in “Trolley Wood” and the hopeless end that Andrew McMahon finds in “Cavanaugh Park,” a journey takes place, not without its own share of ups and downs. Beginning with Eisley, my last minute gift became an account—practically a testament—to our friendship. The tone of songs began to shift up and down as their meanings overflowed into the surrounding music, writing a story I could only have made by accident.
Having settled on my first set of six songs, it was time to move on. When you are selecting music from your own library, it is surprisingly difficult to keep someone else in mind and discount your personal preferences for even a moment. However, anticipating their reactions and providing appropriate music to accompany it is what these gifts are all about. Therefore, after starting off with a thoroughly depressing selection of songs, it would be cruel not to lighten the mood with some acoustic Relient K and the spastic yet delightful rhythms of Nevershoutnever, two selections that would be hard put to evoke anything but grins and giggles.
“My eyes, they don’t see the way they used to,” wails the “Heregoesnothin” singer, a lyric that I could only hope would serve as a climax to the journey this CD was taking. Our friendship, not unlike the CD, had a faltering and generally unpromising start, slowly picking up momentum as we learned the characters of each other. At a point, though, two personalities such as ours are forced to either abandon or jump recklessly with it. The title of “Heregoesnothin” in itself depicts our reaching of that point in our friendship, and the positive outcome carries on into the next song: a pop-punk, ghetto-charged Cobra Starship hit. I rounded off the “golden age” of our friendship with a promise from Five For Fighting, ensuring the important place that it held in my heart not only would last, but required my friend’s presence for mere survival.
All great empires, though, must fall at some point. Egypt fell to the Kush, and Rome went down in flames, and as two mere humans with one great connection, we stood little less of a chance. As “Cavanaugh Park” made the list, there were no other places for my CD to go. It was the end. I read down the track list one, final time, and clicked “Burn.” That was it. Listening to the final progression of songs into the vital lines of one of Something Corporate’s greatest power ballads, our friendship came to its conclusion. The lyrics confess that “there was never any place for someone like me to be totally happy. Now I’m running out of clock and that ain’t a shock. Some things never do change.” It became apparent as those words reverberated through my headphones that we had regressed to square one.

Once the songs had been whittled down to a mere twenty one, the point became clear. Every mix CD, whether it’s be carefully composed or carelessly thrown together, has a feel. You listen to the songs, and you hear how they run into each other. The lyrics coincide in every direction and convey messages, both intended and accidental. The magic of the mix CD is those accidents. The intended mood can put the listener in a place that changed the big picture that Imogen Heap meant to convey in “Hide and Seek.” And that’s okay. They say that strong personalities clash, but that doesn’t mean they don’t acclimate first. Something that began so rocky and became so seemingly perfect was doomed from the start.
I scrawled the list of painstakingly chosen songs on graph paper to ensure maximum legibility and neatness and cooler the CD front with my beloved Sharpie markers, finally stuffing the CD into a pre-bubble-wrapped envelope. I carefully folded the track list and slid it in beside the purple jewel case, and sealed the gift with the self-adhesive tape line. What better gift is there to give than closure for these things?


--MRS 2/11/09

Ps. This is entirely fictional. The track list is real, the meaning is not. It's a CD that I made for someone else and it's got nothing to do with not being friends anymore. So...I made it up for Creative Writing class. Sshh!

Petrarchan Sonnet

Amidst the long sought after font of lore,
A spirit sweet and ripe as blossom’d flow’rs
Resides to fill the sun’s oft’-fleeting hours
While glist’ning waters of the spring outpour
Faint youth that’s free to dream, to love, adore.
Rich laughter rings from bluebells in the bow’rs
Whilst cherries drop from limbs before they sour.
Such saccharine youth ne’er dragged up on the shore.
Yet stems and leaves fall silent, quick to ash
As heavy blackouts fall to close the show.
Upon the flow’r who finds her fault to drowse
The sickle swift that deigns to show shall pass
While bearing no mercy, the blad cuts mis’ry and woe.
Unripe and rotten flow’rs collapse in bows.

--MRS 11/19/08

Creative Writing Class

Couplet - Dactylic Tetrameter
Falling from parachutes back where I’m bound…
Falls never hurt. It’s just meeting the ground.

Tercet – Iambic Tetrameter
Old, secret secrets, sealed in ink,
no man who holds the key can tell.
And so forever they’re untold.

Quatrain – Anapestic Tetrameter
For our special today, we are dishing it out.
Try the sarcasm served with a side of self-doubt.
We can shatter self-confidence—used or brand new.
Simply give us a call and we’ll bring it to you.



Villanelle
November 21, 2008

In my whispering frame I forever will stay.
Will you join in our dance through the dark corridors?
For it’s soon we’ll awake to the end of our day.

Come and spin with the skits that are dancing so gay
On the damp, once familiar, now echoing floors.
In my whispering frame I forever will stay.

Before the ball closes all shall fade to gray.
If you can, before Sun, make your way to the doors,
For it’s soon we’ll awake to the end of our day.

When the sun never sleeps, it’s always yesterday
And I’m trapped! Trapped in ignition boards.
In my whispering frame I forever will stay.

The quartets, so enticing, now wouldn’t you say?
The musicians forget to catch anymore
For it’s soon we’ll awake to the end of our day.

Once sealed with oil, some presumed to portray
Dancing souls, frozen mid-waltz evermore.
In my whispering frame I forever will stay
For it’s soon we’ll awake to the end of our day.


-MRS

Romanov Sestina

Sword held aloft on the arms of a silent, old figure,
Shards in great flurries cascade through the ominous passage.
Smallest of boots hurry fast the whole length of red carpet,
Heads so discreetly averted from transparent windows--
Guardians fogging the youngest so desperately running,
Silently saving their Papa's mysterious secret.

Spinning on heels to retrace through their own concealed secret.
Racing the shadows of a towering, ominous figure
(Outlines of lips which with orders are constantly running,)
Children--the hunted-- dash back to their safe, secret passage.
Time then allows for the fleetingly opportune window;
Grants them their chance to slip under the discolored carpet.

Sliding on water, the boot heel unsettles the carpet.
Neither's to blame for unveiling their haven so secret.
Shots ring out, shatter the last of the isinglass window
(Back-up arrived for the enemy, as one may figure.)
Catching a glimpse of a boy taking off down the passage,
Coats begin swirling, the men moving in take off running.

Soldiers come raiding the home, several running
over the glass and the mud that sinks into the carpet.
Tessa remains with lips sealed for the shadow men's passage
over the chambers so bleak 'neath the tapestry's secret.
Woven deliberate, seeming a nonchalant figure,
Silk deceived not the intruders from spying the window.

Boots of fur stomp through the stone wall's cut window.
In children's wide eyes, a glass river starts running.
From beneath hair, faces turn to the shadowy figure...
Shots that might echo if not for the bloody, red carpet
silence Dmitri, forever concealing his secret.
Kicking up dust, Anastasia retreats down the passage.

Breezes of ice billow through the once comfortable passage.
Draperies flutter from jagged new holes in each window,
whispering, leaking the manor home's every dark secret.
Bases of statues collect dust with which they are running,
pooling the remnants of that which adorned the fine carpet.
Sword at his feet, there is nothing resembling that figure...

Gusts whip the secret through each gray and echoing passage.
Out full length windows the last of the shadow men's running,
Trampling the carpet that welcomed the figure's invasion.

---MRS 11/08

(I know there are grammatical errors and mistakes with the punctuation. I am just too lazy to fix it right now.)

(p.s. Mrs. Lowe loves this. I hate it. With a passion.)

one day you're in.

she just, she can't.
she only has to.
she knows the magnitude.
and she knows the sitch.

she can never fix it.
she can only watch.
shudder, cringe.

don't unravel.
you can't fall apart now.
hopelessness is not a stranger to her,
to fiver.

she writes and she wrote and she will write more if she needs.



listen to your saddest songs
listen to her. things will go wrong
and nobody should make these rhymes,
and nobody should have the time to read this.
but what if they need to?
she shouldn't need to.
you shouldn't need to because you shouldn't be there.
There is the place that holds you down.
There is where dreams are hidden.
the people There don't want what's best for you.

look up out of the well.
look up because she has been there and found the way out.
she can't show you, apparently.
she can't help you that much.
but at least she can let you know
that you can.



-MRS 10/19/08

ps. i think this sucks. but i really felt like i needed to write something even though i can't write anything.

faker

you don't miss her.
clearly.
and there are no words.
she writes anyway.
but there is nothing left to say.

just a tired apology that spins over and over
on a broken record.

a sigh of vinyl and we're nowhere new.
calendars marked up in hope
are only scars on her wall.

nobody can make it go away
because the cause was incomplete.
and you didn't get it.

she knows. she knew.
she just wishes it were different.
but that would make everyone different.
because they make it this way.

and she is so tired of being vague.
and she just wishes you would at least even the playing field.

guilt is ten times worse than sadness.
and she's got a bad case of both.
but you don't care enough to help her.
you didn't care.
and you don't miss her.
clearly.

--MRS 8/30/08

sochelle crab?

so she believes in it.
so what?
it is not what you said.
never what you said.
it's logical. sensible.
still lovely and ridiculous.
but practical.

revisions of older days,
in hindsight, unwise.
with today and with right now,
not a great idea.

but an idea, nonetheless.

---MRS 8/24/08