This one dates back to 1994. I was still dealing (reeling, more like) with the death of my dad, the year before. Throwing myself deep into my work was always my way of handling loss or pain in my personal life, and I think that at the time of writing, I was excelling myself at doing that. On the outside, I appeared to be on top of the world, but on the inside, I was desperately treading water.
I don’t remember what triggered me to want to take singing lessons, or to even know that was something that you can do. I was wondering if it had something to do with Lena Zavaroni’s record-breaking winning streak on ‘Opportunity Knocks’, the 60’s and 70’s talent show hosted by Hughie Green (who later turned out to be Paula Yate’s birth father), but after asking the Google, that turned out to be in 1974, which was 6 years after I’d started taking singing lessons, at the age of 7.
This is another poem from my archives. I think that I probably wrote it in the mid to late 1990s, when I first moved to the US. As such, it precedes flat-screens, and streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Apple+, HBOMax, Peacock, etc. One thing that hasn’t changed however, is that the product isn’t so much the TV shows, but our attention is what’s being bought and sold, whether or not we realize that fact.
Back in early 2001, I was waiting for my divorce to be finalized, and I was finally feeling ready to dip a tentative toe back into the dating waters. Early in my separation, when word got out that I was newly single, a number of my friends had taken it upon themselves to try and help remedy that, by suggesting that I go out on a date with one of their friends, a fellow co-worker, or someone they knew from the gym or from church. My answer was always the same… “thanks, but no thanks”, followed by “I’m not ready to date, yet”.
Something that I noticed when I first moved to the US, was that terminal illnesses were often handled as chronic illnesses that just needed to be managed. It confused me at first, because I was used to terminal illnesses being about preparing to die, rather than fighting to live.
This is my one and only attempt (to date, at least) to write a short play. It’s interesting to go back and read it now, but it feels a little bit like opening a time capsule. It was written in 1984, which was a very different time, with very different attitudes, particularly when it came to things like sexual orientation and gender identity. It was a very black and white world, back then. While there are many things that I’m nostalgic about, that isn’t one of them. I realize now that some of my friends would do exactly what Simon does here, in switching personal pronouns to hide the fact that they had a same-sex partner.
As a child, my window into the world was small. Outside of parental and sibling supervision, I was restricted to exploring just the street that I grew up on, Seanor Lane, which Google just informed me is 293 metres long, or approximately 320 yards in old money. The Google also told me that there is only one ‘Seanor Lane’ in all of the UK. I always thought that it was a special place to grow up, and I now have confirmation of that fact.
My Dad was a storyteller, and what would always pull you in, was his attention to detail, and his ability to convincingly answer any clarifying questions that you might have, without taking a breath or blinking an eye. Whenever I think about his warm teasing and playfulness, I feel a smile breaking out across my face. I hope that you might feel the same way, as you read this.
I’m currently in the process of collating all of my poetry, short stories and general musings, with the intent of publishing a book. It’s proving to be a time-consuming process, because some things exist only online, some in the myriad of journals that I have a penchant for buying on an all-too regular basis, and then also spread across digital archives, that have been moved from computer to computer, over the last 30 years or so. One thing that I’ve learned is that straight text or html files are really the best way to store documents, as many early Word…
As I’ve previously talked about on here, back in 1999, I created and ran an online writer’s collective called The Final Carrot, which lasted for 3 years. Sadly, the platform that it was built on (Geocities) was acquired by Yahoo, which rolled the functionality into Yahoo Groups. With Yahoo’s dramatic decline in recent years, Yahoo Groups was shut down, and all of that content is long gone. I did try searching on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but sadly, all you can see is a tantalizing list of entry headers, but none of the underlying pages are included in the…