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Untitled, Unfinished, Unwritten, Unconceived

by C Alexander

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Christopher Alexander
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about

More or less as it was written in Summer 2004. As a better song goes, married girl don't you wanna smoke a little marijuana? I don't want to embarrass anyone, but this is the start of realizing something unpleasant about me. You know how in The Long Halloween, Batman realizes that Gotham was a less violent place before, somehow, the supervillains started showing up he "just has to take care of?" I should have asked how I thought leaving in first-draft grammatical mistakes would "get even" with this person. Anyway, I tried to record this many times over the years but it never worked until one lonely, unemployed, terrified night before the election. The key was ditching the click track, which left me feeling unsafe in a way this song also does, in part because of the grammatical errors, in part because I didn't want to admit this person had wounded me - or, rather, that I could not help but wound myself in what had at first seemed like a fun fling.

The title was taken from a Martin Amis book called The Information. The fact that this title is actually said in the song makes it much more useful than my other titles; later, I hope to show you a song I wrote with my friend Graham called "No Title in G Minor."

lyrics

I wrote this screenplay with you in mind
All of the dialogue was in Leonard Cohen lines
I said "I was your man" but I couldn't convince you
You said "I was just a Joseph. with no manger to turn into"

It's in the papers that the rage, this summer, is infidelity
Well, I guess we jumped up on that wave and rode it in too early
I know I'm the other man, with no business to care
Who you're fucking in your town because there's nothing else to do there

In that screenplay, I had a scene of the two of us in school
Trying to recapture all of the pain and loneliness we went through
And in the end I wrote some things I thought would cut right through you
But you don't even care for movies, do you?

The last night I saw you, it was cold for June, and you wore my sweater
Which would still bear your scent when I went to wear it three days later
When I dropped you off, all your friends had already started drinking
So I took my leave, and wondered what it was I had been thinking.

I was thinking about a song I wrote when I was seventeen
And all the others: untitled; unfinished; unwritten; and unconceived
I thought about the way you made that other night seem half as long
I thought about a lot of things. They were all wrong

But I thought about the way your skin looked
When the moon shone through my window
Bathing us in light when we lied down to do the thing we came to
And I thought about the way your arms had
Felt in mine, bereft of clothes
And goddammit how can anybody help but think of things like those

credits

released July 20, 2021

license

all rights reserved

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