Jack of Harts

I listen to music while writing. Always. I can’t imagine silence while doing it, as it helps to get me in the mood and tickles my inner muse. Johnny Cash is one of those artists that has tons of songs that breathe stories to life in a mind. But the songs he recorded in the last decades of his life are powerful even for him. The Man Comes Around is an amazing album with songs that make me want to write all kinds of stories. If you’ve ever heard his version of Hurt, you know there’s an awful lot of story there. Though it is a little more dark than I like to spend time writing in. Now Personal Jesus makes me want to write a story with a man stepping off his starship and sauntering into town as his eyes scan back and forth in search of something to do. Someone to save. All while looking cool doing it. Wearing shades and a snazzy suit. He’s the man with the plan to change someone’s world. Yeah. That’s a Jack story right there.

Two decades ago I came home from work to find out that a plane had hit one of the World Trade towers in New York. I was watching live when the second plane hit. I saw both towers fall in real time. And when I went to the fan site I was a mod at to talk with my friends about it, the mods had shut the forum down because they didn’t want us dumb Americans talking on their turf. And they’d erased my mod credentials at the site as well, because they didn’t want THIS dumb American talking on their turf. It seems a petty thing. On one hand, an attack that killed thousands of Americans. On another hand, being silenced from even talking about it with my internet friends. The two are fused in my memories as one long shared experience. And it is one of the reasons I have nearly as strong an aversion to censoring or muting people as I do to killing people. Both are attacks, one physical, the other mental. A civilized society should accept neither.

I like to listen to music when I write stories, and I have a play list specifically for that. Running Up That Hill by Placebo is one song on that list. The Kate Bush original is also on the list, but the Placebo cover will be the one I use when it comes time to write a story. It will be a death scene, written from the point of view of one of the Cowboys who died during The War. It will cover the moment they realized if they took one more step forward, there would be no coming back. And then, because others would die if they didn’t, they took the step and threw everything they had into getting the job done before they fell. I’ve never seen the official video, so all I have is the sound of the song to go by, but that is what it has always sounded like to me. And that is the story I will write while that song is playing. One of these days. 🙂