Drunken Owls and Other Delights

It's been a weird week in which I'm not listening to my mp3 collection. It's sitting safely on one of my externals, but I just don't have any of them plugged in right now. I mean, I could plug them in and spend part of my day off today adding new things and listening to whatever comes to mind, but I'm actively choosing not to. And that's something I haven't done in ages.

Instead I'm just listening semi-passively to whatever KEXP is playing right now, and I'm fine with that. In fact it's something that's a long time in coming: simply enjoying listening to music rather than manically obsessing over collecting and curating it. I'm well aware that I've been doing the latter for too long and I'd been trying to find ways to back out of it. It seems detox was the only answer, looks like! Heh.

Seriously, though: I've been thinking a lot about how my connection with music has evolved over the years. Sure, I'm proud of my ridiculously huge collection -- I'd wanted this sort of thing since I was a little kid -- but in the end the collecting was taking over the enjoyment of it and that was really starting to bother me over the last year or so. Like I'd forgotten how music resonated with me (pardon the pun), and I really wanted to remember and relearn that. This was one of the reasons I'd created the kind of playlist I did for Queen Ophelia's War: I wanted it to emulate that feeling I'd get when I used to listen to Cocteau Twins -- finding myself deep in a sprawling forest, away from civilization but not exactly alone. I found that I really missed that level of immersion, and obsessive collecting had been the biggest thing obscuring that.

So I'm taking this time to unplug, to detox, to just...immerse myself in the sounds again. To remember how to do that again.

Christmas was a relaxed affair this time out, but I'm not complaining. We opened our presents, had zoom meetings with both families, and spent most of the day kicking back and just enjoying the day. A had an extended weekend anyway, so we spent most of it doing a lot of walking and watching fun UK shows and documentaries. No big plans, just enjoying the days as they go by.

I haven't done much writing work, but I'm not too worried about it. It's the end of the year and I've got more important things like my Best of 2020 mixtape to make! Heh. Seriously though, I did manage to get some work done, so it wasn't a complete wash. I'm getting closer to the end of the Diwa & Kaffi cleanup, just in time for me to prep it for submission out into the big wide and wonderful world. And the time off has actually given me some space to think of how to expand on the projects I currently have going.

So what am I doing for these last four days of this admittedly bizarre year? Well, just like the election, I'm probably just going to exhale and untense my shoulders for a few moments, thankful that it's over. Then I'll move on. I'm kind of amused by this reaction of mine, to be honest...a quick flip through the archives of most of my blogs from years ago shows me as leaning heavy on the retrospective, but now I seem to be leaning more towards the introspective now. I think part of it is that I can only repeat myself so much, but a bigger part of it is that I'm more connected with the present now. Part of the big internal housecleaning, I suppose.

Anyway! Aside from updating my blogs and maybe squeezing in some actual creative work, I don't have too much planned for these final days of 2020. Just going to take them as they come.


Hope everyone is having a good holiday season!

I've been thinking a lot about returning to my blogging. On the one hand I went on hiatus because I felt I was just repeating myself over and over with the writing blog and phoning it in on the music blog. On the other hand -- and I've said this before -- the Day Job changes had put considerable stress on me in those last few months before I quit.

I miss sharing the music that I've been listening to. I miss sharing my writing processes. And I also miss the schedule, believe it or not. Scheduling gives my brain a bit of stability and direction. And that in turn inspires me to work more on my fiction.

Hell, I'm even thinking of scheduling my Daily Words again. I'm ready for it.

I just need to stop Making Plans to Do It and JUST FREAKIN' DO IT ALREADY.

Hell, I've already returned to journaling and poetry. Not with any schedule, mind you, but I'm actively pursuing those again.

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I've also started leaning heavily on my music again. I've been inspired to record my noodling, and not just on my phone for demo references...I'm learning more about what I can do with the foot pedal my sister gave me last Christmas (it's a Zoom G1 Four and it has all sorts of neat sounds and effects!), and I'd like to start recording things onto my PC. (Do I even know what I'm doing? Hell no. But that's part of the fun of it all!) 

Part of this stems from the fact that I haven't been able to write music for a long time, at least not in the way I used to write it. I toyed with giving it up or treating it as a hobby, but I don't think I'm ready to do that just yet. I still create melodies in my head that I haven't quite figured out to play, and they're not going to do anything if they remain there on endless loop. This forces me to hear sounds in a different way and build it up exponentially. That in turn will teach me how to layer a song, giving it depth. It's the same as my writing, really -- the only way I can learn is if I keep immersing myself.

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So what about my artwork?

Well. That REALLY fell by the wayside over the last year or so, and I'm annoyed and saddened by that. Same reasons as above: creative frustration, little time, too many personal things going on. But you know, it's been months and things are better now, so I'm adding that to my creative schedule as well. Any aim on that in particular? Well, not at the moment, but I think I'm going to approach it a bit differently this time. No projects, no specific aim, no goal. Just taking pencil (or pen) (or stylus, if I decide to finally upgrade to a new Wacom) and doing a bit every day just to do it. See where it goes. I just want to do it all again.

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So yeah. I miss the level of creativity I used to have just a few years ago. It's high time for me to return to it.

I still have the whiteboard up. Let's get this thing filled up again.
 

Coming up on two months of unemployment here, but I'm doing fine. I've been sending in a few job applications every day or so, and though I haven't heard anything back, I'm still actively searching. I'm treating the process the same as before I quite the Former Day Job, making sure I focus at least a few hours' worth of searching, prepping, and sending out.

So what am I doing the rest of the time? A bit of this, a bit of that. Cleaning, errands, story idea research, personal things, catching up on old projects, guitar noodling, talking with a friend or two about career ideas. Sure, I'm doing a bit of goofing off, but I'm not wasting the entire day. I've also been reading some of my older stories, again, to get back into the groove of writing. No solid plans yet, but I'd like to at least be able to start writing new stories again.

I've also been listening to some of my 90s mixtapes and albums from the same era. This in turn has made me realize that it was about this time twenty-five years ago, in my broke-and-starving-writer guise, when I had the use of my then girlfriend's PC and decided to transcribe nearly all of my longhand work thus far to WRI files. In early summer 1995 on my days off from the Day Job (the movie theater) I'd gone through most of what I had on hand: the Infamous War Novel, the numerous now-trunked ideas, six years worth of poetry and lyrics, and so on. This, on top of working on the new project, True Faith. I had nothing better to do (and no money to do it with) than listen to WFNX and WBCN and stay up way too damn late working on these things. Essentially, my drive to write with a consistent schedule was partially informed by my inability to go anywhere at all other than maybe walking around Boston smoking Newports and feeling sorry for myself. 

That summer pretty much prepared me for the next few years creatively. Life and finances sucked, sure, but I've already gone on about that here and I've already made my peace with it all. All the positive moments then were me watching free movies (and scoring free popcorn, soda and hot dogs for dinner) and spending all that time writing, figuring out what kind of writer I was, what my style was, and what I wanted to do with it. I'd gone from struggling and flailing to a writer with goals, and I knew that was a Long Game, so by a few years later I hit the ground running when I started The Phoenix Effect.

I say all this because I think I'm at that point in my writing career again. The last five years have been extremely fruitful creatively, and not gonna lie, I'm damn proud of myself for being able to pull it off, exhausting as it often was. I deliberately chose to take time off after finishing up the Diwa & Kaffi project to step back and take a good look at where I was, both personally and careerwise. It was a much-needed distancing so I could have a clear head and heart, and figure out where to go from here.

So yeah, it's sort of like summer 1995 again. On a strict budget, listening to a hell of a lot of music, and making some more long-term plans. Only I'm eating a hell of a lot better, keeping in better shape, not depressed AF, and not smoking anymore, heh!

I'm trying not to get TOO used to this new schedule of mine, because I still want to find a new position somewhere in the city.  That's taking a lot longer than hoped, but I kind of expected it. Still..I'm making the best of what I have right now. I can work at home one day a week so I of course decided on Fridays, for two reasons: one, that I get to listen to new music releases (yay!), and two, that I can treat this as a sort of three-day weekend. 

The Day Job is pretty tight on internet security (given my position, it makes total sense), which is a mixed blessing...I can't waste time on social media unless I take out my phone (which, I should add, gets about 2-3 bars because I'm in a dead spot in the middle of my building), but I can keep up on the news sites if I want. But on a VERY positive note, I can access 750Words! I'm not sure how long it'll last, but I'm going to use THAT access as much as I can, considering this whole Back To the Office Thing took away a lot of my writing time in the first place. So what am I working on with these entries? Right now I'm still experimenting with various things related to the Mendaihu Universe (Book 4 ideas, short stories, outtakes and whatnot). I can work on these during slow moments in the day so I'm not really goofing off and Not Working, am I? Heh. But yeah, this was an extremely positive thing that happened this week and I'm going to embrace it.

As for Year End stuff...yeah, I know I should be doing my musical round-up blog entries, but I just haven't had the time or the inclination. Not that 2019 hasn't inspired me musically, but right now I'm still basking in the moments where I don't have Far Too Many Deadlines hanging over my head. I still have the entirety of the month to work on them, though, so I'm not too worried. I'll be doing two, of course: the Best of 2019, and the Best of the '10s. I'm just as curious as you on what'll pop up on the latter!

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

It's another typical late spring day here out in the Richmond, with a soupy fog rolling over most of the neighborhood, with the temperature hovering just over 50 F. I've got my apartment hoodie on (the 'too ratty for outside' one, natch) and I'm almost thinking of putting on the heat for a bit.

The latter half of May has been quite a roller coaster. The one-two punch of my LA trip and BayCon soon after took a lot of energy. I'm not exactly tired, but maybe a little drained. Between those two things, Tidying Up Spare Oom, and of course the Day Job, I've been quite busy. I'm not complaining, actually...I've been distracted for too long and getting myself moving is a good thing. I"m happiest when I have things going.  (I'm equally happy when I have lazy days, but I don't like having too many of them or else I get nothing done.)

SO.  What do we have on deck for June?  Good question.  I'm around three-quarters done with the revision of Diwa and Kaffi, and then I get to go through it again, woohoo! For the most part I get to do a bit more clean-up and finally write that [SCENE GOES HERE] chapter. This particular run was all about taking the roughness of the version I wrote on 750Words and bang it into a better shape; the next run will be to make it even better.

I'm still up in the air as to what other projects I'll work on, but I'm keeping all options open. My recent foray into finding old Murph drawings has inspired me to look further into reviving my passion for art...something I've been meaning to do for YEARS but never got around to. I know exactly why, too: I spent these last twenty-plus years focusing on my writing, simple as that. I needed to get that all squared away until I was content with the quality of my work, and now that I'm finally at that level, I can branch out.  So: there's a good chance I may start doing a hell of a lot more doodling from here on in.  We shall see.

My music platform, interestingly, is the inverse: I'm at a level of contentment with the quality of my guitar playing...but I'm currently feeling quite uninspired with songwriting. I still pick up one of my guitars on a daily basis and play a few riffs, and I'll even record some of these riffs on my phone for reference and later work, but I'm just not feeling any interest in writing any songs at the moment. I think I've felt that way for some time now.  I'm not worried, though. I went through this multiple times in the past, I'm sure something will eventually come along to light a spark.

ANYWAY! It's the end of the month, and a new one right around the corner. Looking forward it!

Coming back from visiting my hometown, I'm reminded of why I used to listen to The Smiths so much in my teens and twenties.  It wasn't so much about the people or the places, but I was struck -- quite heavily, actually -- by how much I've changed over the decades.  Listening to the Smiths while I lived there as a kid and later as an adult (specifically songs like 'Reel Around the Fountain' and 'Back to the Old House', and of course 'How Soon Is Now'), they were a means of escape, much like most of the other alternative rock I listened to at the time.  Years later, I'm nowhere near the person I used to be back then, on a lot of different levels.  Part of it was getting married and A jostling me in the right direction, sure, but a lot of it was deeply embedded wishes, plans and thoughts that I desperately wanted to follow up on and could finally do so.  I remember posting on my old LJ some years ago about finally cutting ties with that part of my life.  And VERY recently I've been making some serious personal changes in my life that has taken me further away from who I once was. 

On the one hand, it was good to see friends and family, but on the other hand, I realized that I really don't have that much of a connection to that humdrum town or much of Massachusetts for that matter.  Even Boston has changed considerably, to the point where I still love the city dearly but it's not the city as I remember it.  (I don't want that city back, mind you -- I'm happy whenever a town or city evolves for the better.)  It's really hard to maintain that connection at this point, because I can't play that old role anymore.  I'm not saddened by this, mind you.  Well, I am to some extent, especially when there is a certain level of stagnancy involved.  But I feel that I've disconnected enough that whatever steps I take next, my past won't influence it.

It's a weird feeling, perhaps even depressing in its own way, but it's also a relief.  I can look forward without looking back.

 

Glad to be back home here in SF.  Hope everyone's having a nice weekend!

Why do I give myself so much to do on Wednesdays?  I don't mean to do it, it just happens.  Mind you, I'm not really complaining, just that I've been using HumpDay lately as a day for prepping my Thursday and Friday blog entries, as well as writing and posting this one, doing my daily 750 Words, and if I can, writing a bit of poetry.  It keeps the mind active, I guess...!

Been listening to a lot of 1998 today.  It ties in with my 'Twenty Years On' series on my music blog of course, and I thought I'd give some of these albums another listen.  Some of them I'd listened to quite heavily during the Belfry Years, others I listened to more in the back room at HMV.  Just for the hell of it I put them on one of my mp3 players for something to listen to at the gym.  I'm sure I'll go through a lot of these and suddenly get the urge to write another Bridgetown trilogy, heh.  I'll try to behave.

In other news, we've had very weird weather today.  It was overcast this morning, following up with a pretty heavy rainstorm late in the morning...and now it's gorgeously clear out there, with just a few clouds.  California has very weird weather, I tell you.  At least with New England I could expect long, protracted fronts that would last for a few days.  Here's to hoping it stays clear this weekend!

Hope everyone's having a good week so far!

I was thinking the other day about how I've been listening to music over the last few years.  As far as expensive habits go, at least I'm not collecting cars that I won't drive, or picking up housewares that I'll never use.  And I've always been pretty frugal about it, very rarely spending an absurd amount on something.  The more tunage I can get for my money, the happier I am.  But at the same time, I think I've made some purchases where I'd probably be better off keeping them as streams.  There have been some albums that I liked but don't listen to all that often.  I think the first clue when this happens is when I''ll listen to an album I like the sound of, but the songs don't stick with me in some way.  [I'm a listener who picks up on the melodies before the lyrics first, so sometimes the sound fascinates me, but the song as a whole doesn't make an impression.]

I was also thinking about some of the radio stations I'll listen to online.  There are some that have an interesting mix that keeps my interest, and there are others that adhere to a set rotation to the point where I get bored easily.  [One particular station I'm thinking of was a favorite of mine, but now I rarely listen to them because they've been playing the same songs for the past 2-3 years that I'm not really a fan of.  I get the idea of set rotation, but it needs to be recycled after a few months otherwise you'll lose a portion of your audience who really doesn't want to hear that same damn Lumineers song for the 374,539,453rd time.]

I also feel like I'm not quite immersed in the sounds when my listening habits are stretched too thin.  Don't get me wrong, there are some years where a ton of great albums come out and I love them all, but there's only so many hours in the day where I can listen to the albums.  Not to mention that I'm not listening to current albums all the time...sometimes I want to listen to something from a few decades ago, or a different genre altogether.  For instance, I've been listening to the Beatles channel on SiriusXM lately because a) c'mon, it's the Beatles, and b) it was a refreshing change from all the noise I've been trying to escape.

Perhaps my collecting gene is getting the best of me.  There are moments where I'll be a little too focused on trying to find a band's entire discography and not enough on their music.  The idea that I'd listen to their full work is there, but it doesn't always work out...it really does depend on how connected I am to the music.  I never really wanted to be a music collector for the sake of owning something -- I find that a bit wasteful and pointless.  This is precisely why I'll pass on collectibles if I already own the songs.

Is this partly due to wanting to recapture the excitement of turning to a station and hearing favorite songs?  Who knows.  It might be part of it.  But I think it's also partly my collecting habits getting the best of me sometimes.  I need to rein it in again.

I've been listening to a lot of Cocteau Twins and other bands from the 80s-era 4AD label lately.  I blogged about the band over at WiS but it occurred to me afterwards that their music always evokes a certain time of day for me.  Specifically, right around 4:30-5pm during the fall semester.  I'm quite sure it's because that's about the time I'd be wrapping up most of my homework after I got home from school.  My radio would be on from the moment I got home until I went to bed that night, and it would always be stuck on WAMH.  Blue Bell Knoll, their 1988 album, was getting some serious airplay then, having been released mid-September.

I'd be wrapping up my homework - or at least finishing up part of it - and my mom would be getting dinner ready.  Dad would be coming home from work.  The sun was setting behind the treeline behind my house.  Sometimes I'd look out there, listening to the echoes of traffic of the highway about a mile south of us, everyone heading home.  It was the end of the work day and everyone was coming home. This was ages ago, when the far edge of Massachusetts seemed so far away, and the rest of the country was a vast unknown to me.  I had images, but I could only imagine. 

It was that stretch between the end of the day and the start of the evening, two separate lengths of time.  The intermission before prime time television, or in my case, the evening radio shows.  The afternoon shows were brighter, more exciting, but the evening shows were stranger, more experimental.  Those later shows were where I'd hear the industrial, the punk, the weirder side of college rock.  I'd listen to these throughout most of the evening while finishing up my homework and working on whatever story, poem or lyric I was writing at the time.


I think about this now, looking at my present daily schedule.  It's more of a blur now, given that I have music streaming from the moment I log onto my home PC, and my Day Job is a work-at-home situation.  That afternoon entr'acte sneaks up on me, where I log off the Day Job at 4pm.  Sometimes we'll head to the gym or walk around the neighborhood, sometimes we'll just sit around and watch something on Acorn or PBS until dinnertime.  Come 6:30 or 7, I'll head back into Spare Oom for an hour or so of writing.  More tunage playing, often my own collection.

I suppose that mystical reverie I once felt with the time and the music hasn't really left me, but it's certainly been muted by maturity and distraction.  There were many years between then and now when Real Life took precedence.  I've also become a bit more worldly in my years and the Earth isn't as beyond my mental grasp as it once was. 

The reverie will come back now and again in odd places and times, and most unexpectedly, and I always embrace it, each and every time.