I was writing on purpose when I wrote the Ragdoll Rag.
I don’t know what made me think I could, or that I was good at it. I have never been one to take a compliment, much less believe one. I felt like I was pulling it off. I did believe I was good at it and that it was important to do.
There is all kinds of s**t about my life at the time I wrote this song that would not survive any scrutiny. I was living an unexamined existence and taking days as they came. It sounds romantic and to me it was, but it was surviving a lot of blows and saying things like, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is objectively b******t even in dim light.
I certainly thought I was holding it together in my daylight hours. I was working what to me now were shitty jobs with pride of purpose, barely peaking my head above full of s**t and really just believing myself to look successful, to look fine. I was years into daily getting f*****g knocked out and I was employed and housed and had a group of friends some of whom were getting daily knocked out and some of whom just saw me when I wasn’t.
Most of the time I didn’t feel like I was f*****g up. There were people in the world who lived their lives like I did and were senators and movie stars and writers and artists. It almost seemed like a path to be on. It took me way too long to figure out why it was so rough.
Sometimes not being alone in something means that you are supported and sometimes it’s just encouragement for bad behavior and there is no line dividing the two.
Strangely to me [both at the time and from here] I was loveable, if briefly. And when you are broken that’s what you attract. Also though if you are unforgivable and someone takes you in that is worth its weight in reciprocal forgiveness. You see yourself looking back and accepting your damned fool ass and it just might make you smile.
Not only can it make you smile, you can see honor in things you might never have considered. Things that seem to have worked.
We’re here aren’t we?
Obsessive little relatings that flashed by in a night or two or went on between bouts of too hammered to carry on for months seem like specs from here, but in their moments were whole and the take aways real and the things that didn’t die in the black of unremembered time are reliquaries of a rare era. They’re like vanity photos from an adventure no one knew was doomed full of smiles and cigarettes and drinks. Everyone seems to be in the middle of something and it’ll be years before anyone knows what they were in the middle of is falling down.
There is an education in it. You laugh when you fall down, because you can still get up and not everyone does. The small tragedies pale. The blows become immaterial in their own number not as overwhelm, but as acceptance. Coping is built and will hold. And it’s not hard that you get. It’s sweet. It’s ripe. It’s done.
Some people know they’re cooked and revel all the same, shields up, rolling unsafe, whistling in the dark and they might be saints. We’ll all be long dead before the canonization takes, and all the foibles will have been forgotten, the errors erased, and a golden light added in their wake, their birthplace marked, their tales told, those who judged them harshly seen as blind to obvious glory.
https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/re-inventing-the-wheel
