M. David Hornbuckle

Blog

  • Roadtrip Days 2-4

    On Day 2, I headed off to Charlottesville to meet up with Mark Rock, aka Peter Markush. I stopped in the exurbs between Baltimore and DC for the first of what will probably be many Chick-fil-a sandwiches consumed on this trip. I also took the first picture with my new camera. As you can see, I was not able to refrain from consuming the sandwich before taking a picture of it.

    I found my way to Random Row Books, where I was set to perform with Mark Rock and a very good guitar/cello duo called Barling and Collins. It was cold and rainy out,  so the event was sparsely attended. Barling, Collins, and we all sat in with Mark Rock, and during my set, Mark Rock accompanied me on piano as I read “The Boy Who Cried Wolves” (which, incidentally, was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize).

    That afternoon, I got bad news about Poly, so I decided to drive to Richmond early in the morning and catch a flight back to NYC. By the evening of Day 3, however, we got good news from Poly’s biopsy. The tumor doesn’t appear to be malignant, so the immediate threat is not as serious as we feared. She will probably be okay.

    Day 4, I shared some bacon and eggs with Poly, did some dayjob work, ran some errands, and watched TV. That night I attended Jonathan Letham’s reading in at Book Court in Brooklyn. It was pretty good, but not as good as the Big Buford sandwich I had at Checkers on the way there. After the reading, I packed my things to prepare for an early flight back to Virginia to pick up where I left off.

  • My Friend Poly

    Poly is a cat. She is very sick, and I am very worried. I have another dispatch to post from my road trip, but my heart is not in it. I don’t even want to read/sing tonight.

  • Road Trip: Day 1

    My trip started out on a melancholy note because one of the cats I’ve lived with for the past eight years is sick, and the vet doesn’t know what’s wrong. Tonight, there are reports that she is improving though, and she has a sonogram scheduled for tomorrow, so I’m thinking positive thoughts for a quick recovery.

    In the meantime, I’m in Philadelphia. The first order of business was to meet my friend and sometimes songwriting partner George Mostoller for dinner. On the way down, I listened to a mix tape that George made me in 1994. It is still one of my favorite mixes.

    George took me to Brauhaus Schmitz on South Street. The waitstaff all wear traditional Bavarian outfits. I had two very large, delicious sausages. The pictures on their website really don’t do the place justice. I should have taken some pictures, but I haven’t taken my new camera out of the box yet. But in lieu of that, here is a cell phone picture of a cat at a pet store.

    George is kind of a hermit these days, so it’s up to me to keep his songs in circulation. Here is a video of me performing one of those songs.

    I’m staying the night with Jason Fagone, author of Horsemen of the Esophogus. We discussed the state of contemporary short stories and Rick Moody’s Twitter story before watching Obama’s speech, followed by So You Think You Can Dance, which I’ve never seen before tonight.

    I’m getting up early tomorrow to drive to Charlottesville, VA.

  • Holiday Project Update 2

    Since I started the project, my friend list has gone up modestly from 626 to 632–still well within the scope of possibility. I believe I’ve sent messages to about 360 people, and many, many of them have written back. Some people have asked me what interesting things I’ve learned about my “friends” from this, and although people have told me some fun facts about themselves and some wacky anecdotes, the real value is not something reportable; it’s the connection itself. It isn’t about what I’ve learned so much as it’s about what I’ve felt, and it varies from person to person because each contact is different and has its own flavor.

    The Internet makes some people extra protective of their personal boundaries, just as it reduces boundaries for others. Some people reply but with a tone that essentially says, “Thanks for sharing, but I know you about as well as I want to already” and that’s fine. Others have been very open, and we’ve talked about life and love and things that matter to us. This has been especially wonderful with people with whom I was once close but haven’t seen in a very long time.

    So I’m not going to fill this blog with lists of “cool” things that I’ve learned about people, though when it’s all done, I may have some things I’ve learned about myself.

  • Subway Graffiti Triptych

    Subway Graffiti Triptych

    I found this amusing graffito with Facebook-themed meta-graffito in the 23rd Street F station this afternoon. I kind of hope that this trend of writing “Like!” on things catches on.

     

  • Facebook Holiday Project Update 1

    At this point, I’ve contacted about 200 of my 629 Facebook friends. I looked at each person’s profile, looking for some information I didn’t know or could ask them about. Or I tried to focus on how I met the person, or if I hadn’t met the person, how we came to be Facebook friends. In any case, I tried to come up with at least one or two things I could say in a personal message. I also attached a blurb and link to my original blog post about the project as follows:

    So I have this project for the holidays–really it is a sort of crusade to reach out personally to people on Facebook and make it more the kind of social outlet that it was when I first started using it. I hope to hear back from you. And if you think this is a good idea, please pass along the blog post.

    https://mdavidhornbuckle.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/project-for-the-holidays-make-facebook-personal-again/

    Of the roughly 200 people I’ve contacted so far, I’d say about 60% have written back to me. In a lot of cases, one or two messages back and forth have been all I needed to feel like the connection was satisfied for a while. Some of these people told me they actually don’t use Facebook much, or that they really joined it for professional reasons. For folks like this, there isn’t much to talk about besides just saying hello. In other cases, conversations have continued for days–about old memories, family, friends, past and current creative activities. A lot of the connections have turned out to be very interesting and satisfying.

    There are some days when I really don’t feel like doing it, or I’m pressed for time. I’m afraid that a few of my outgoing messages have been “phoned in,” especially when it was a person I didn’t actually know well. But even so, I have to say that the experiment has been more successful than I imagined it would be in the sense that more people have written back than I expected. Also, while I can’t say that the whole thing has gone “viral” I have seen that my blog post was re-posted by some people I knew and re-posted again by friends of theirs that I did  NOT know. So people seem to like the idea and are passing it around.

    So far so good. I’ll continue to post updates as it goes on.

  • Project for the Holidays – Make Facebook Personal Again

    When I first joined Facebook in the early summer of 2007, only a handful of people I knew were using it. Unlike Myspace or Friendster (remember Friendster?) I was really impressed with the ways it actually could be used as a social tool. I found people I hadn’t talked to since high school or college, and I had meaningful communications with them on a regular basis. I was able to keep in touch with people I rarely saw as if we still lived on the same block, and to me that is the entire purpose of social networking. The “networking” aspect is misleading.  The “social” part is what I think is most important.

    For that reason, at first I vowed to keep my FB “friends” only to people I was actually friends with, or at least had been at one time. But then something happened later that Fall that sort of ruined that. I published a book. Now that I had a product to push, I was willing to friend anybody and everybody on the offhand chance that I’d make another two dollars of royalties as  result. It’s ludicrous. I probably set status updates for 75% of them to “ignore” so I wouldn’t have to look at pictures of their babies or whatever else they had to say that had nothing to do with me.

    I could still use Facebook to keep up with the people that mattered most to me. I made “friend groups” so I could filter status updates based on who I was interested in hearing from or interacting with at any given time. This is useful, but it’s gradually gotten so it’s hard to tell if anyone is really paying attention to anything anybody else does on there. I know I’m missing a lot of interesting things that other people post because it’s harder and harder to sift out the content. So mostly I either feel like I’m missing something or I’m speaking into a vacuum.

    So this is what I’m proposing–between now and Christmas, I plan to leave a personal message for each of the 626 (and growing) friends I have on Facebook. Just a quick connection, which I hope will spur a lasting conversation. If it’s somebody I don’t really know, I hope to learn something interesting about them. If it’s someone I rarely see or talk to, I hope to reconnect in some meaningful way. If it’s someone I see all the time anyway, no harm in saying hello.

    I guess I will approach this systematically, contacting my friends in alphabetical order. I’ll need to contact about 15 people a day to finish by Dec. 25. I don’t know if I’ll use the wall or send private messages. That may depend on the person. Anyway, I hope that this will catch on and others will have a desire to make Facebook about positive social interaction.

  • Thousand Mile Journey

    In the past 60 days I have:

    • Ended my primary 8-year relationship as well as a secondary romantic relationship that had been going on for a year
    • Been burglarized
    • Been in a fire
    • Started drinking again after almost six years sober
    • Published a book (at least that’s one good thing)

    As a result of all this, I’ve started questioning a lot about myself that I have previously taken for granted. I feel like there is a huge void in my life, something essential that is missing, and I really don’t have much of an idea what it. To facilitate the search, I’m going to do some travelling in December and visit people I know in various cities. This is also going to double as a book tour and solo music tour.

    The Relationships

    My eight-year relationship had some problems for a while that I was unwilling to deal with directly. Most of these had either to do with the way we communicated or were problems internal to myself. Very little could be blamed on her. Basically, I was unhappy and filled with an unfocused anxiety. I began another relationship late last year that was long-distance and more emotional than physical, though we were able to see each other three or four times over the course of that year. It was out in the open, as far as my primary relationship was concerned, but aspects of it were not always as out in the open as they should have been.

    Even though I had some previous experience with polyamory, and I’ve read all the major books on the subject, I still made mistakes. I’m no superman afterall. I ended the secondary relationship, feeling that I had neglected the primary too much and needed to focus on that for a while. Ultimately, I felt like I had done too much damage and, though communication was better, my own problems with the relationship just didn’t seem resolvable, so I broke that off too.

    The Burglary

    In September, I moved into a one-room “apartment” in Kensington, Brooklyn. There was no kitchen, and the electricity was spotty, but it was a place to shower and lay my head. Within three weeks, it was burglarized. My laptop and desktop computers were both stolen. They didn’t take my guitars or anything else of value. Thankfully, all my actual data was backed up on an external hard drive. It could have been worse, but it shook me up quite a bit.

    The Fire

    At the beginning of October, I rented a room on the Upper West Side from a pothead opera singer. He was nice enough and left me alone. When I was there, I was usually in my room with the door closed, working or sleeping. I stayed home from my day-job one Monday because I had a cold–this was a little more than two weeks after I moved in. I had taken some Nyquil and was sleeping soundly when suddenly I became aware that I was surrounded by smoke. Over the previous weekend, I had bought an electric blanket (the room had no heater and was excessively cold on cold days), so I thought that was the culprit and quickly pulled out everything that was plugged into the wall, but the smoke seemed to just be rising up out of the floor. I opened a window (after a few moments of struggle to find the latch), and I saw flames shooting out of the window directly below me on the third floor.

    I left my room and found that there was still smoke everywhere. I didn’t notice until later that there was no smoke alarm going off. I don’t believe there was one in the apartment. When I opened the front door, I ran into a crew of firemen in gas masks who were seconds away from breaking in with an axe. They asked if I was okay, and I said that I thought I was, making my way through the smoke to the stairway. As I approached the third floor where the fire was, the smoke got much thicker, and I couldn’t breathe. For a short while, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it, but once I got to the lobby, I was okay again.

    An hour or so later when the fire was out, the firemen let me go back upstairs to put some clothes on–I had just been wearing a t-shirt, sweat pants, and socks, and it was cold out. Plus I had walked through firehose water somewhere along the way, and my socks were soaking wet. I got dressed, grabbed my essential belongings, and ran back to my old girlfriend’s place, where I’ve been staying ever since. It’s been fine, and it’s been a comfort for both of us to have each other around. At the moment, I plan to stay there until I leave on my trip.

    The whole experience of the fire really intensified the feelings that I wasn’t going to find happiness on my current path. Something had to change, and I had to get out of New York, at least for a short while, to get some perspective on things.

    The Drinking

    This started a couple of days before the fire. I only had one. I had one more a couple of nights later. And since then, I’ve had one or two every few days. It hasn’t been a problem, and I don’t feel obsessed about it, and I feel like I do have another recovery in me if it turns out that I need one. As one of my (two!) therapists pointed out, the timing is “interesting.” It has a lot to do with the general questioning of everything that I’ve been doing lately. Other than some anxiety I had about telling people in AA, not to mention other friends who knew I was sober and might be concerned, I haven’t had a lot of feelings about it. Maybe it’s just because I have a lot of other things going on.

    The Book

    I am quite proud of the book, and the fact that I have it has given me more of a reason to reach out to people.  It includes my novella and several short stories that have all been published previously in other forms. I’m very excited to have all this material packaged in a collection, and the book itself is beautiful too (thanks M!)

    The Trip

    I plan to leave on the first of December and visit people in Philadelphia, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Mississippi before landing in Birmingham where I will spend osme quality time with my family and other friends. From there, I will likely take some side trips to Atlanta, Dothan, and Gainesville. So far, I’ve got at least a couple of planned music gigs, and I’m hoping to arrange some readings also. At the very least, I will try to push the book and maybe read a story at the music gigs.

  • Billy Wayne Carter Discography

    1997 Little John Thomas & His Mango Patch – eponymous demo (o.o.p.)

    1998 Bursting Forth from the Cow

    2000 Rara Avis

    2001 Not For Sale

    2001 Little John Thomas Comes of Age

    2002 Amadeus Ex Machina

    2003 The Regular

    2004 She Walks In Beauty

    2006 Anonymous

    2007 Elementarianism

    2009 Antimatter

    2010 Haunting Gilgamesh

    2011 Acrostics

    2011 Red Shift

    2012 Physics

    2015 River

  • Hornbuckle and Rock

    I played a show last Sunday with my old friend Mark Rock (aka Peter Markush) who is visiting me from Charlottesville, VA. Since most of you missed it, I put videos of the songs on the youtubes.

    Just as a teaser, here’s an unusual version of an old fan favorite: