It’s been nearly three years since I began writing for Film Score Monthly Online. I am still so grateful to be a part of this magazine, and consider it pure cranberry bliss to do what I love (write) about what I love (film music).

Young and hungry, I began by writing album reviews. A few months later, I was asked to conduct my first interview with a composer.

I was overjoyed about the interview, mainly because I was ecstatic over the idea of actually talking to a real film composer who worked in Hollywood. Though the virginal jitters have, dozens of interviews later, mostly worn off, the actual interview process is still my favorite in my work for FSMO.

I did not anticipate how challenging conducting an interview really is. A good interview goes way beyond reading off a scripted list of prepared questions (though many interviews read and sound like this is exactly what was done). A good interview involves being a good listener, following up on unexpected trains of thought, earning trust (from a complete stranger, in many cases), being genuine, knowing when to ask certain questions, and knowing when to shut up.

It took me several years to discover that writing is what I wanted to do with my life. I never expected that interviewing, this subgenre within my field, would come to eclipse my love of writing. I love the challenge it presents to many disparate skills: research, writing, communication, people skills, and knowledge of the craft being discussed.

I have a new respect for good interviewers, and am always trying to refine my own process. Who would have guessed that asking people questions would become my favorite thing in the world to do?

Faithful reader (and winner of the Brainiest Comments Award) Alan recently complimented my bashful foray into fiction, noting that the literary devices I often use in my writing felt more at home in the fiction genre. Those same devices, he argued, often make my nonfiction come off as affected.

I’m not going to argue whether Alan’s assessment of my writing is accurate, since it is fairly obvious he was acting out of deep envy and some form of repressed childhood rage (I kid because I love, Alan.). But his comment started the ol’ wheels in motion; you see, I dislike fiction in a very general way for the very reason Alan felt my writing is better suited for fiction. Fiction, to me, feels affected.

My favorite author is C.S. Lewis. I gobble his words up like they were Turkish delight falling into an empty stomach. Yet when I explore his fiction works (most notably the Chronicles of Narnia and his “Space trilogy”), I find the experience uncomfortable. With his space trilogy the content ultimately triumphs and I eventually warm up to the style. I have never been able to stay inside Narnia.

It’s not just Lewis; I used him as an example because he is my favorite author. I’ve slowly relented to the fictional works of others: Tolkien, Dickens, Card, Ishiguro. But even in the novels I’ve made it through and enjoyed, I always feel like I am intermittently choking down something unpleasant throughout the experience.

Fiction is, by definition, fake. It’s a lie, if you want to be brutal. Stories can be well told, the words cleverly crafted, characters painstakingly developed—yet, in the end, it’s still a “made up” story. To me that fact always surfaces, always plagues the best fiction. And the more serious the author takes their story, the more worked up a character gets, the more difficult it is for me to hang on.

I’m not sure what this trait says about my wiring (or my writing, for that matter). I certainly don’t claim superiority.

Inconsistently, perhaps, I can easily set aside these reservations when watching (good) fictional films. There is just something about the written word, used artfully, that feels wasted or inappropriately applied when telling an untrue story. The author’s sincerity, hard work, and finesse seem awkward in the employ of their tall tale.

As I said, I can overcome this reticence with a good novel and genuinely come to appreciate it. All I can figure is, the reason I don’t care to read or write fiction is because it is time and craft devoted to an illusion. I find the truth far, far more compelling.

A recent message board thread asked the question: “Which soundtracks have you killed?” The question immediately resonated with me. I have lamented the death of many beloved film scores, the blood of which was on my hands.

These are the scores that I listened to over and over and over. I abided in them for a season, memorized them, ate and breathed them. And after either a short spell or several years, I awoke to find the scores absent of their once virile power. They were dead. It’s as if I was imbibing on their very blood with each listen, and sooner or later their store was bound to be depleted.

Sometimes I can go back after taking a lengthy break from one of these “dead” scores and enjoy it afresh. But with so many scores, the bewitching sway that the music once had over me is either sorely lacking or completely gone.

How do we kill art that we love? Is it simply through sheer overexposure? Does good art need to be balanced with the enjoyment of other art in order to endure? Is this murderous ability only an attribute of some?

I can readily understand why the latest “instant pop single” loses its catch after a couple dozen listens. It’s one of the reasons why I prefer orchestral (specifically film) music; with its abundant layers of instrumentation, lines, forms, and styles, it is endowed with an infinitely grander capacity for appreciation and “staying power.”

Yet it is the choicest selections from within this “infinitely enjoyable” genre that I am able to drain of their aesthetic vitality.

It’s far easier, still, for me to castrate a good film. Watching one of my favorite movies twice within too few years is enough to squander its beauty. I wait annoyingly long stretches between viewings of what I consider the best films for this very reason.

There is certainly a unique bond forged between art and its listener/observer. Some art touches me and leaves you cold. We either respond to it or we don’t; some art we respond to at one stage of life where we do not at another. There is a mysterious collaboration of sorts between the beholden and the beholder, and I think that the answer to the current quandary might lie somewhere in this mystery.

Art is not objectively beautiful, or powerful, or moving. While we may be able to measure a work’s technical skill or complexity with some impartiality, its intangible power lies within the individual recipient. And because it’s up to me, in a way, whether this particular score (or film, or painting) is beautiful, it stands to reason that this tricky trapeze act between us might not always be achievable. Sooner or later someone’s going to get dropped.

Still, I continue hoping that the art that once spoke so clearly and so empathically to me will again, someday, find me a receptive audience.

I will readily admit that I’ve not been sidelined by the current recession to the extent that so many have. I’ve been blessed with pretty steady employment, and have been able to cover all of life’s expenses without sinking below the surface of debt’s watery grave.

Having said that, though, I believe my post-college life has been dramatically colored by the nationwide economic retching of the past few years. Additionally, thanks to lax academic standards and America’s bum rush to get every boy and girl a college education, bachelor’s degrees are now a dime a dozen. Add to that my choice of liberal studies, pejoratively associated with its ability to bestow burger-flipping powers, and I seem to be only a few baby steps ahead from the stage upon which I received my high school diploma.

(In defense, I still believe that my college education was powerfully equipping, and still maintain that the breadth and depth of a liberal studies program make it a fantastic choice for plenty of people. But maybe that’s just me.)

Breaking several vows, I reluctantly slid back into a green Starbucks apron upon graduating from college. I then took a penance-paying job in the equivalent of a concrete shoebox packing and shipping orders of Matzos bread and Sunday School workbooks. On to a slightly better-paying writing gig for a spell…and now I sit in a labyrinthine call center with several people younger than me, explaining to bamboozled housewives and myopic retirees how to click on the giant blue words: “CLICK HERE.”

All this to say, several years of employment famine and malnourishment have made the idea of attending graduate school more and more appealing. I was never convinced of a master’s degree’s necessity, and after sixteen straight years of education I was ready to throw in the towel for good. But between the lengthening monetary plateau of paychecks and the bed of quicksand that all my job applications seem to be falling in, I’m back in the grad school application saddle.

A classical music critic, whose brain I was picking for advice, soberly warned me that a master’s degree won’t necessarily solve all my woes. He did concede, however, that perhaps retreating into a two-year program of study right now might harbor me from the ugliness of an ongoing “career Vietnam.” Perhaps, he suggested, I’ll come out on the other side into a brighter economy and, consequently, employment field.

Besides being a striking metaphor, it makes sense. There are still many hurdles to leap, as in actually being accepted to and able to pay for graduate school. Who knows what a master’s degree will even be worth in a few years. Who knows if the program I get into will really equip me for a good career.

But I guess I am of the cowardly kind—all too eager to change my name and move to Canada in order to avoid the burn of napalm and venom of snakes. And while I haven’t yet lost much in the war other than some self esteem and a few adolescent dreams, there is always the threat that I might take a bullet in the wrong place and end up angry and in a wheelchair like Ron Kovic.

And, believe me, I want Oliver Stone to keep his greedy hands off my life story.

The aspen’s last leaf spiraled in the sudden gust, quickly unscrewing its stem from the tree’s gnarled branch. Sucked into a vacuum of winter winds, it left the last tree in a row of trees as bare and brown as the others. Autumn, at least in Brush, Kansas, was over.

A carpet of brittle, fallen leaves was swept up in the onset of wind, brushing through the legs of a tall man in cowboy boots. The boots were nearly as brittle as the leaves, and the man’s face betrayed a soul that looked as if it, too, was ready to snap off its branch and drift away into winter.

Ed Riley dug in his pockets for the familiar feel of his car keys. Every day he had the same thought: I keep too dang much in here. Finally he thumbed the chipped ridge of the key that unlocked his ‘67 Ford F100, and slowly sidled into the truck. The wind’s ghoulish whining instantly stopped when Ed shut the door. Peace and quiet. Or at least quiet.

The truck groaned down the road, past the mostly empty remnants of a once vibrant main street, out beyond the final traces of town, and into the vast sameness of the Kansas plains that led to Ed’s house. Condensation began to stick to the windshield; it was definitely going to snow.

Inside his house, Ed mechanically opened a can of pinto beans. He dumped the runny brown contents into a rusted pot on the stove, caked with the residue of identical meals over identical weeks. It was already dark outside, and the last glimpse of the sunset was an ugly one.

Ed kicked his boots off by the door and slumped into the folds of a couch whose feminine upholstery offered a bizarre irony. He spooned in slow, lazy mouthfuls of the beans, long having lost their taste through repetition—not to mention expiration. The meal would never have filled another man his size, but that was okay; he didn’t have much of an appetite these days.

He finished his dinner and clumsily set the pot—from which he‘d been eating—onto the end table next to the couch, knocking over a framed photograph. The picture, yellowed with age, was of a grinning young couple in typical 1940s wedding garb. The young man had Ed’s dark complexion, the same crooked nose.

An hour or two passed. Ed wasn’t sleeping, just lying there without a sound, without a thought. The grandfather clock in the hall announced nine o’clock’s arrival to an unreceptive audience. Ed checked his wristwatch instinctively, remembering as he did that the time had been stuck at 4:01 for a few days now.

He ambled up off the couch, the bones in his legs complaining about being called into duty. He staggered to the front door, put his body weight against the latch, and stumbled down the steps against the round of snow now descending. He didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t much care.

—

The next afternoon, around half past one, Mitch Holcomb pulled up in front of the Riley home in his ailing postal service delivery truck. Time was less precious in Brush, and Mitch usually shared a few words with the residents at each of his stops. Especially out here on the prairie—this sea of land with no horizon—conversation was all he could do to retain his sanity some days.

Mitch stuffed the unwanted ream of coupons and junk mail into the leaning mailbox, looking up at the front door out of his peripheral vision. Ed usually heard the loud grumbling from the mail truck’s exhaust pipe long before Mitch arrived, and nearly always was standing on the porch with at least a wave.

It seemed particularly quiet today, Mitch thought. No Ed at the door. He glanced around. Ed’s prehistoric truck was there on the dead grass. Last night’s snow had fallen on top of the truck; a patch of yard lay bare beneath the body of the vehicle. The front door of the house was ajar, he noticed.

Mitch hopped out of his truck, the engine idling. He was heading for the door along the front walk when he spotted a pale hand in the snow, tensely clutched. His new fears were quickly confirmed as he traced the rest of Ed’s body with his eyes. Ghostly pale and motionless; there’s no way he survived out here in this weather, Mitch thought.

Unexpectedly, a few warm tears demanded release from Mitch’s eyes. Despite the daily small talk during his stops, he hardly knew the old man. No one really knew the old man more than that he was a widower and never said a word more than was required in any given situation. He was always civil enough to Mitch, though something about him seemed distant, unreachable. Maybe even mean. There were plenty of times when Mitch drove away from his brief encounters with Ed muttering under his breath about how hard it was trying to be friendly to such an old crank.

And yet he cried, and he wasn’t sure why. It was obvious the old man was dead; he didn’t need to feel a pulse to know that. It was kind of pathetic, him just lying there stiff and icy on the ground. But it wasn’t as if he’d never seen a dead body before; there wasn’t an aunt or uncle still alive on his side of the family.

Mitch gained his composure as suddenly as he lost it. He would call the Brush County Hospital as soon as he got back to the post office; there was nothing he could do in the meantime, or at least no real reason if he could. His eyes did linger on the reflection in his rear view mirror a little longer than usual as he drove away from the Riley house, but after a couple more stops and the thirty minutes it took to get back to the office, he’d nearly forgotten all about Ed.

And that was pretty typical, not of Mitch’s memory, but of Ed’s.