I spent last night and part of today listening back to some recordings I made in the chapel last week. Listening objectively, I have a damn fine voice. But listening critically I find that it changes significantly from one day to the next. Maybe that is common? I remember Ugo commenting on an NPR interview I did, where he could barely reconize my voice — a voice with which he had become somewhat weirdly familiar on account of the hours he spent editing the film I helped him out with.

Anyway, point being that I should plan to be ready to do programs all at once, on the same day. And I don’t know how long I’ll be able to do it before they kick me out.  I mean, if they find out I’m recording stories which tend toward lurid and sexual in a Catholic chapel they could well bar me from entering the place. Or maybe they don’t even care. “They” being the St. Patrick’s Diocese.

I love the sound, though. it is rugged and well-suited to binaural gear. The chapel itself makes popping noises at unpredictable intervals. It’s like the building has a pulse, or a heartbeat. But it is not steady. Not steady at all.

I’ve combined elements of a few stories into one, eliminating or displacing some factual details. In August, 2005, the morning after the last time I talked to my father, I woke up face down at the Alsop Cemetery with a William Styron book about depression beside me. I had originally planned for that incident to be a centerpiece of the story but it looks like it will not even make it in at all. It is as true a tale as any I can tell but it doesn’t seem to fit this narrative, which revolves around the chapel. And in reality I got the call from Daytona Beach police over a week later, but I’m going to condense that down to getting the call the next day, while I am at the chapel. I may even be done with the damn story, to be recorded tomorrow. Have to limit visits to weekends for now on account of the fucking landscapers causing all kinds of racket and disruptions. Nothing like getting chased out of a chapel by dudes wielding weed whackers.

…

I finally read the HuffPo piece. It’s nice. Harmless. Innocuous. As expected. But God the pictures of me are horrible. I do not have the most favorable self image but I know I do not look as fat and pasty as I do in those pictures. It’s also interesting how she excised any scintilla of negativity. Circumstance of dad’s death? Nope. Living in a roach-infested shithole after moving here in 1990? No thanks. As my friend Dave commented, though, he could see leaving dad’s suicide out, since I was 40 when it happened and it was not exactly a life-forming event. But I thought it mattered because on account of that incident I had to cancel what might have been an important (for me) performance of the Beethoven Choral Fantasy for piano, orchestra, and chorus. And the Parc Lincoln, well, that experience had its way of defining part of who I was for many years after I got the fuck out of there.

But whatever. It’s a fine piece for what it is. A few people who know me have mentioned that they learned things about me they never knew.

Now I wait to see if I need to do anything else for CBS.

This coffee is awful today.