CARNAL NODE

fl, cl, S, pft, perc, vln, & vlc

The text of Carnal Node is comprised of e-mails that I received from a friend over the course of a year while he was living on a farm with his parents. These e-mails chronicled in startling fashion the plight of a young man dealing with readjustment to solitary farm life after having lived in San Francisco for two years as he suffered through the year-long process of gaining admission to law school. I edited portions of several of these e-mails to focus on the one facet of his ordeal which found him a man who was desperately trying to find love on the Internet as he bided his time in mateless rural Pennsylvania. Over the course of the piece, he e-mails a girl expressing his feelings to her, pines away waiting for her reply, laments at how he may live his life alone, and then finally meets the girl at a party only to be left emotionally naked and just as alone as when he started. The soprano fills the dual roles of narrator and protagonist: her narration is characterized by dry, stagnant, recitative-like lines which are accompanied by sounds of bongos designed to invoke the image of a typewriter or a computer keyboard. By contrast, the soprano as protagonist sings in a broad, melodic fashion which is characterized by wild oscillations in emotional content, ranging from skittish to overly dramatic.

Bill Holab Music

Leave me not to twist in the wind,
Give me back my dignity.
Cut me loose so I can go on with my shambles of a life.

This is a story about a friend of mine, Constructed from e-mails he sent a year ago. He lived on the farm with his folks for some time, After moving home from San Francisco. Life decisions and the studying of torts, Helped him find women to tell others he had met. His fourth, third, and second to last resorts were personal ads and chat rooms of the Internet.

Well, no response yet, ugh.
How can she not respond? ha ha ha!
WRITE ME BACK AND DENY ME YOU SILLY VIXEN.

So, anyway, I will make you laugh,
I am a really nice guy,
and one hell of a model American!
So, anyway, I will make you laugh,
I am a really nice guy,

I am not a nerd,
I am a really nice guy,
and one hell of a model American!

Leave me not to twist in the wind,
Give me back my dignity.
Cut me loose so I can go on with my shambles of a life.

Now, he could not email her without referring to the previous email. If he had, he would have been a psycho! He considered every detail, an absurd amount of details. She lives too far away, anyway. He thought she was being polite. He thought she had really hated him. I think that he thought that she thought that he was an ugly nerd who would never be loved again.

I will live with some old guy, and we will talk about how the kids these days have no respect for their elders, and we will smoke and drink until we are old and fat. Then, when the first one dies, the other will set him into a chair and talk to him like he=s still alive. Then, thePolice will come and take the survivor to the sanitarium.

He was thinking about having a Monday morning dance-party in his red satin suit. He made little cue cards to carry in his pocket, and if he flipped them very fast it spells out YOU ARE A GEEK, in true animatronic fashion. A smoochie would be extremely pleasing. He will ask her the night he meets her. She is adorable, she has beautiful eyes, and she is the greatest girl he has ever met so far…

And if she invites me to stay the night, I will be like a carnal node that blossoms over and over, until I am left weeping in the corner of my room.

(Alternate ending)
He has false memories of your party-talk and the lock of hair he clipped as you slept on the couch.