The arrangement of words....

I used to know this guy who was one of the most gifted writers i knew. He would write these songs that were so beautiful, so insightful as to who he was. His words were true poetry.

One day we were sitting around his living room drinking coffee. He asked me if I wanted to see how he writes songs when he is uninspired, when the words wouldn't come. I said sure. He grab the news paper sitting on the table and reached for a Vogue magazine his girlfriend had left behind the night before.

I thought to myself what is he going to do? He got up and walked into the bathroom and then returned a few seconds later with a pair of sissors and some foil. He sat down on the floor and unwrapped the foil, exposing a fresh new pile of white powder. It was his daily use of herion. I sat there watching him as he preppared to do his next fix. He had a routine. He would lay everything out. The foil, the straw, the mirror all lined up in front of him. He poured out the contents in the foil and then sit there for a second as if he was fighting to urge to go down this trip one more time. In the end it was his decision. He would then knock on his forehead 4 times, as if knocking on a door. When noone answered he put the straw to the dope and his nose to the straw. I had seen him do this before. So it was of no surprise to me what he was doing when he snorted that line as if it was everything in the world.

As his eyes changed, I could feel his fever. Have you ever felt that kind of fever?

I asked him, "are you going to write a song now?"

He looked at me differently now. His eyes had become sour as he glared at me and with all the wild things running through my mind, I should have been concerned when he reached for the sissors, but I wasn't. I was still interested in how he was going to write the next song for the band.

He randomly flipped through the Vogue magazine and found a page. He began to cut out the words. Each word, word for word and placed them into a pile on the floor. He did this again and again. Once he had about 75 words he changed his attention to the newspaper. He began the process again. Cutting and slicing up the page as if he were a surgeon. Once he had enough words in the pile, he took them and placed them into a jar. He shook it up and then began to pull out one word at a time.

This is where I was in awe. As he took out each word he began placing them in random order. The words he had chosen were begining to tell a story. It made sense, yet no sense at all. Soon he had all the words sprawled out with a title "Flying Fish that Glow" and a song was born.

It was then I learned how you can take something, disect it, rearrange its contents and create something new. From something to nothing, to something new. That took place on the other side of the universe.