McNutt Against the Music

Do you know what this dark, blurry photo is? The lyrics to “The Darkest Dogs of Rome,” a song that represents the first piece of creative writing that I’ve completed since April.

I’ve discussed my writer’s block before, and I’m not sure where it was coming from or what was causing my brain to lock up when it came to writing anything new, but damn it feels good to be over it. I even have another untitled piece with a whole ton of thoughts and lyrics already composed. I still need to get in the habit of writing on a regular basis, make it more routine, but for now I couldn’t be happier.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been looking over my previous writings and fragments that I have sitting around on my computer and in the more recent stuff – the last year or so – I’ve noticed three welcome trends. The first is that my lyrics are becoming more complete and cohesive, less a mis-matched compliation of metaphors and sentiments than fully-realized characters. The second is the move away from trying to consistently describe abstract emotions and instead place things securely in the physical world; I’m writing more about touch, taste, smell, etc. And the third is that my writing is becoming both more and less political at the same time: on the one hand, nothing I’ve been writing is aggressively anti-this or pro-that, but the language and imagery I’ve been drawing upon is the language and imagery of our times – and more often than not, it’s the imagery of war (this is why, should I ever be able to compile my work of the last year or two into some sort of album/compilation/etc., my current title would be Soldier Songs).

So while there’s still a long way to go to earn my “Prolific Writing” Boy Scout badge, things are looking up on the writing front for the first time in a long, long while.

On another point…

You may have noticed an extra link in the upper right under my contacts. Over the past month or so, I have been introduced to the brilliance that is Facebook, the phenomenon that has swept college and university campuses throughout Canada and the United States (and beyond) over the past year.

Now, I’ve been very hesitant about jumping into the social network bandwagon. I only have a MySpace page for the sake of uploading music, because the whole MySpace thing scares me, from the hideously ugly design, to the child predators, to the prospect of having dozens of people I don’t really know all add me to their friends list and then have to read their comments in horrible, horrible internet-speak.

But Facebook has won me over and I applaud its creators for their ingenuity. Facebook organizes its members into networks – mostly based around educational instutions, but now branching out to include cities and workplaces as well. For example, I’m a member of the networks for both Dalhousie (as a staff member) and Acadia (as a graduate), along with the Halifax, NS network.

I can see the profiles of anyone in my networks; if they’re not in my network, I can only see their name and profile pic. If I add someone to my Friends list, I fill out exactly how I know them, making sure that they actually ARE worthy of being on my list. I can browse my friends’ lists to see if other people I know are on Facebook that I want to add, or I can search by any of my interests to find other people in my Networks who share them. And whenever people on your Friends’ list updates their profile, or adds friends, or joins groups, it all goes into your news feed – this makes it easy to keep tabs on what your friends, new and old, are up to.

What’s brilliant about Facebook is that it makes it so, so easy for me to keep track of old friends, even ones who I haven’t talked to in years. It’s like stalking them politely!

If you’re reading this and you’re currently in university, then odds are I’m preaching to the converted already. But if you’re out of university as I am and haven’t heard of Facebook before, I seriously suggest checking it out. You may be surprised by what, and who, you find.