Well, now I believe I was correct in my previous post, as playing with a band this recent Thursday has confirmed that I am done with acoustic stuff, this band is gonna be awesome. I'm starting to feel like I have something similar to a plan forming about this whole career business. I had a really good weekend. The show was a ridiculous success at the Capital in fredericton, and I can't wait to go back. I didn't get to do tree-go this weekend, but I did see Inglourious Basterds with a bunch of awesome people that I was pumped to see, and I did get really high, and drunk twice throughout the weekend (for very little money), and I did see the Bad Arts in top form, and I also listened to each First Aid Kit album pretty throughly. They are a great band and I need to see them live very soon. Anyway, successful trip, got to see a lot of people I miss, and apparently I'm gonna be back in freddy in the next month.

I think my problem right now is that I've already done all the things I want to do that were/are within my means. What I mean to say is, with what I have now, there is nothing new for me to do, and that's why I've been bogged down with this idea that I'm never excited about my own work anymore. I used to be writing songs, and just constantly listening to the demos as they piled up and being pumped and thinking, 'Fuck, this is exactly what I want to be doing, and isn't something I've done before. ' Maybe I wouldn't quite articulate that in such a manner, but essentially that is how I felt. I was constantly excited because I was constantly writing and consistently conceptualizing, creating and defining something I had in mind, musically, and as much if not more important, lyrically.

I don't think that I'm necessarily not writing good songs. It's not like any of the songs I've written since I've moved to Halifax have been fucking stupid, or useless, or unlikable, really. They've been called boring once (sort of), heavy-hearted (which can be applied to most my shit, I think), and it's been said that they sound like what I've been doing anyway. Aside from that they've been recieved as 'awesome' by just as many people. So it's not like I can convince myself that my career is over and that I'm somehow past my prime at 21 (god, I hope not). But I am not doing anything that I haven't done before, and that's where I get conflicted.

I think that this is because there is nothing left for me to until I get this band going. I've done pure country, alt-country, countrypolitan, straight pop, smiths-ish pop, rappish smiths, my b-steen thing (from Nebraska to Hungry Heart), 90's radio rock, drunken 90's dirt-rock, my Kurt Cobain thing, noise-rock, sad bastard pop, my Jeff Tweedy thing, lots of Elvis things, finally a duet that ended up exactly as I wanted it to... my point is that at this point, I have to do as much as possible with this new band (I still need to do a little more Sonic Youth/Black Eyes stuff while I have my youth, and there are many other obvious things I'll be able to do in a band) but after that, all I really have left is a coherent rap album. At least one. Then maybe I'll be a guitarist for a Motorhead cover band called Killed By Death. That would be so awesome.

prose

'She's at Carol's drinking tea, I imagine,' as I lift another rotting 2x4 out of the wreckage, watching for rusted nails and placing it abruptly onto the pile on the edge of what used to be my bedroom. Rick is asking me where my fiance is and smoking on the grass with a coffee mug, and I am sweating already in the morning sun, watching the last few grains of mist rise into the clear air of Eveleigh. This used to be our basement, and my older brother and I had both lived down here at one point or another. In the early days, it was only housing for our water heater and wood stove, often shared by the family's various pets and probably some wildlife, and thusly not entirely habitable. It also housed our bicycles in the winter, and was hollow enough that we could drive around in small circles on the cracked concrete floor. As long as a long rain hadn't come any time recently, which would render the basement completely flooded, at times so much so that a simple pair of rubber boots would not even suffice should you need to move the woodpile or check the water heater. Or ensure that the various tools my father kept were safe from the water, lest they become rusted and useless.
The basement continued to flood even after my father had dismantled the upstairs bedroom and rebuilt it downstairs for my older brother, expanding our living space to accommodate our expanding family. He eventually dug a hole into the concrete and placed a water pump inside that ran the flooding water out of our house and into the grass, but this didn't always work wonders, which meant that every so often, something you had would be ruined by the water rising.
At first our house was only a small shack. The basement was as previously described, but the house itself was only a kitchen with an attached dining room (which my mother would eventually use to keep her growing collection of unicorn figurines) and a small living room and bedroom, these two sections being connected by a short hallway where the bathroom was. I distinctly remember the bathroom door having a sign on it that read 'Pay Toilet 5cents.' I never did find out where it had come from.At some point shortly after my father bought the house from our neighbor up the hill (our neighbor to the left was my grandmother) he'd built an expansion of three rooms, a whole other section of the house, almost completely by himself, with whatever scraps he could muster up. Due to his particular building circumstances this section of the house was missing some giprock on the walls, and none of the rooms really had ceilings, which meant that this section of the house was also poorly insulated. This section of the house came down a short flight of stairs on the left side of the living room, to two bedrooms of exactly the same size, mirror-images of each other. Past the doorways facing each other to these two bedrooms, there was a larger flight of stairs leading into my parents bedroom, in which there was a small door leading to the attic, part of the original section of the house. The area between the plastic coated insulation and the wood on the ceiling of my parents bedroom became a housing facility for bats over some time, and I remember my father and I lowering the plastic and sending hundreds of bats out the window with faded tennis rackets.

I climb out of the hole that was our basement and sit on a stump beside the burning barrel, and start drinking the coffee Mary's brought for me from next door. Mary's age shows now more than ever, as she aches to bend and pass it to me. I thank her and light a cigarette, wiping sweat from my brow lazily and spitting onto the dirt I used to play basketball on. The old backboard I'd built from scraps of wood still clings haphazardly to the tree, but the hoop is missing. I assume it's disappeared somewhere in the backyard junkyard. Rick asks me about the date of the wedding and about what could've inspired this idea, but to me that's a silly question and I answer casually. I remember imagining this moment years ago, I tell him, and continue to relay the emotional weight of my latest purchase, and the hell-or-high-water approach I took with the project of reclaiming my childhood and bringing my life full-circle. 'What does she think of all of this?' Mary asks, pointedly, raising an eyebrow just enough to send waves through her forehead towards her gray hair. I dive headfirst into an unnecessary explanation of my faith in my loved one's commitment to me and this project, and I glowingly explore aloud the extent of my devotion, and even now this makes me somewhat nervous, but that feeling passes. I feel the tangible difference this time. I feel the tone of all the people in my life and I recognize a recurring calmness and relief and satisfaction in this choice. The attitude is right, the mesh is right, the foundation is on hard land, which must be worked and cultivated honourably. And I feel a certainty I've always chased, not so much as a wave over me, but as a bright illumination, and I can see everything.

I walk around the yard of my past and future and stop at a large rock my mother had painted, both on the edge of a small pond my father had built, and the woods. The paint, though faded, still clearly reads Elliott Family with a small frog to represent each member, with our names written underneath our respective frogs. This was certainly the work of my mother. I am relieved to still have it, not that I'd imagined it would somehow escape, and I lean in to brush off some dirt and get a closer look at the lettering. This rock is beside the entrance to the large path my father and I had built in what I'd always called our mini-forest. This was a large area of trees covering much of our two acres and stretching to the pond we used to skate on. All of these trees were about the same size, and much smaller than any trees in the surrounding woods, and this created a sort of mini-forest look, I'd thought. One winter the snow had gathered on the top of the mini-forest, such that the sleet and hail were able to form a surface atop the trees, which you could actually walk on in some places. One summer my father and I had cut a path through these trees that began at the rock, and ended at the edge of what used to be our massive garden. It was for our three-wheeler, which usually couldn't make it through without stalling.
Our garden seems dreamlike in retrospect. We grew cucumbers, carrots, pumpkins, peas, string beans, etc. I remember the garden as plentiful and delicious. I think about my plans to recreate this garden as best I can, first by burning the grass currently occupying the land, with the help of men with shovels and water buckets to control the blaze. The I would turn the land and hope for good soil. I walk up the hill in our front yard and lean on the tree I'd always climbed. After some hesitation, I climb it. I sit on a branch and look over our land and past the tracks to the river and beyond that to endless trees.
'The tracks' is a path stretching from Saint John to Fredericton that pretty much passed through our backyard. It used to be railroad tracks some hundred or so years ago, I guess, but the tracks had since been lifted and left only a perfect, seemingly endless path perfect for youthful energy and small off-road vehicles. Streams broke through the tracks on their way to the river in some places, and once I found a still maturing catfish trapped in the debris when the water level had fallen too far for fish to swim. I'd considered taking him home and gutting him in the sink, but instead I freed him and watched him swim for freedom, and I don't know why.
I peer inside the remains of the clubhouse I'd doggedly attempted to fix every year, constantly putting a hammer through the wall or bringing it to a halt on my thumb. I remember some of the bikes that are there, left over from our ever-growing collection of junk bikes in various stages of disrepair, scattered around our yard year-round. I sub out my smoke and climb back inside the shell of our basement, continue working and begin to daydream about the house of my future, with my wife in a rocking chair, reading a book in front of the fire. Listening to records and walking around the countryside. The day wears on and eventually I head to Carol's for my coffee and to join my future wife at the table. Later, when the sun begins to fall, we play cards and drink more coffee and tea, and answer Carol's many questions vigorously, with youthful enthusiasm. When I peer over my cards at the woman I love, I feel light-headed as though the nostalgia in the air is intoxicating my emotions, and I remember all the reasons I love her, and she catches me looking, winks quickly, and smiles a perfect smile that lands my feet in concrete, with a satisfaction better than any I've felt after a day of hard work, or the completion of a harrowing project, although this part of my life will and has required elements of both.