Lip Service West, tonight at 50 Mason Social House in San Francisco. I’ll be reading a light-hearted non-fiction piece about women’s issues like Mormanism, appearance and the music industry. Other women will be reading about other topics, all as a fundraiser with proceeds going to a non-profit benefiting women. Win/win.
More info here: http://www.lipservicewest.com/
I’m in an odd state of limbo. Waiting to get over a hump. My life is kind of hanging in the balance. Musicwise, relationshipwise, workwise.
Right now, my band mates are driving to South by Southwest for their other band project. The other keyboardist in my band got hooked up as synth player and dancer for the other band our other mates are in, and so she’s out having a blast with them. It’s OK. I’ve got stuff to do here. Work, basically. I’m supposed to be writing a melody for a song for this band, and I’ve got two ideas but I don’t know if either is the right direction, so I’m waiting to share them until my band mates get back. Then we’re supposed to put our noses to the grindstone. I talked to my boss today about switching to a sub position where I have flexibility and control over what shifts I pick up around the county. No health insurance, but, well. Don’t we all struggle with that dilemma these days as artists? Permanency and health insurance or flexibility and no health insurance.
There was a time, year or so ago, when all I wanted was to be surrounded by artists. I got my wish, and now I have an arsenal of people to talk to. When I was trying to figure out what to do about my, “I might have to tour,” dilemma, I talked with a couple of people who do music as a living, or did music as a living and they were like, “Yea, go for it,” and they helped me talk about options. Everyone was like, “I think you should do it.” Which isn’t even a question for me. I was trying to figure out how, and now I have an option, I’m just waiting to find out if/when we are actually touring in a few months, or if it will be later.
I also found a really cool guitar player for my own band project, the one that’s more a casual project where we might play a show sometime in the future and have about 8 songs we’re working on right now. So that’s good. Just slow.
And tomorrow I have practice with my girl friend, we started a band called SO WHAT?!? that’s like an avante-garde project. Covers, punk songs, screaming, fun. Everyone we get involved is super stoked about it.
I’m such an excitement junkie, I want to be doing performing, touring, recording and practicing ALL THE TIME. I’m a born performer. Born for excitement and hard work towards music goals.
I’m sure I will get my wish, soon. I’m trying to tip the scales so that’s the deal, instead of music still being something in the gaps. I need outside impetus, like tours coming up or an album to record or a show to play to keep me motivated. It looks like all of this is in the process of happening or I am working towards it happening, whether with these projects I’m currently doing or others.
It’s all learning.
It’s the waiting that kills me. And all the stuff I have to deal with in the interim. Trying to work hard to be the artist I want to be and not be distracted by drama or boys or whatnot.
But I kind of love the drama.
My friend Kirsten reminded me the other day to remember to do my daily practice so I don’t get the freefalling feeling I’ve been getting. Usually, I wake up every morning and write a page, write in my journal, meditate and do tarot. Then I make sure I hike once or twice a week, do strength training twice a week and fit in some yoga or bike riding. I also have to remember to eat three meals a day, stay away from too much caffeine or nicotine and not get too caught up in anyone else’s needs or wants.
Ha. I’ve had people come to me for help recently, with addiction problems, relationship problems, you name it. And these are important things too. I write this blog and I share my experiences with people so that I can help them. My journey here has been rough at times. If I can help someone else get through the rough times, like others have helped me, well, life is meaningful.
Plus, I have to remember to not drive myself into the ground, to actually have some fun. Milkshakes and the like.
I was talking to another friend outside of one of my favorite coffee shops to frequent, and he was talking about having to write some stuff coming up and being blocked. I moaned about having to write a song and a column and do some readings coming up.
Why are we whining? We’re doing everything we want to do. It’s slow, but we’re moving towards our goals. Everything is OK. There are many days with no excitement, and then there’s a ton of excitement. And then many days of no excitement.
That’s life?
I do admit, sometimes I get a little bored with writing this blog. I know, I know. It’s my own blog, why would I get bored? I have to keep reminding myself of what the point of this blog IS, actually. And the point really is kind of the meaning I’ve made of why I’m here in this world–to share my creative journey and process in hopes what I struggle through and overcome can help other creative types do the same. I want to inspire people to not be afraid of their art, because I have found that art, to me, is one of the most important things in my life, outside of human connection, and the two go hand in hand.
I just spent a crazy week driving to Las Vegas and then over to LA, writing an article for a freelance magazine while in Vegas and visiting my bandmates in the studio in LA while they were working on their other band project. I saw friends and family, and now I’m back home, working at the library and trying to get my own band projects going. I’ve got two readings coming up in March, and one live performance in April.
I’ve been doing a writing group with two of my best friends, and it’s been successful! We all trust each other and are sharing work we’re excited about. I’ve been working on a short book about my teens, when I hitchhiked across the country, and I just shared a chapter with them, which means I’m getting ready to put my nose to the grindstone on that. I have a lot of chapters.
Writing is hard work. It takes time. And balancing writing and music and live performances and travel while you also have to work a day job is difficult to boot. I may always be slightly broke, but at least I’m fulfilled. And I do admit, after weeks of social, social, social, the library is nice to be back at, the hills nice to hike alone.
No huge epiphanies were had on my trip–I’m finding lately that hashing up the past and trying to figure things out isn’t always helpful. People in this country are overtherapized, I think. We talk too much about our issues instead of living life. The moment is now. And now. And now.
I thought I’d offer you a brief update, so you know I’m not dead, or neglecting you, my faithful handful of readers, forever, just kind of getting my bearings after a couple of busy, busy weeks. Decompressing.
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” -Charles Bukowski
Sometimes, I believe that when you throw a buncha creative stuff in a black hole it fuels some mythological unknown beast somewhere who holds the keys to creative freedom and one day BOOM, your hard work pays off and it makes sense. But until then, you gotta white knuckle it.
My life is profoundly weird and intriguing. And so is yours, and yours, and yours, if you just look around and see with your own eyes. Like today, I bumped into a guy wearing ostrich cowboy boots on the way down from my hike, and a little girl ran screaming, blasting out everyone’s ear drums in the library. I talked with a girl I met over a decade ago (before I stole her boyfriend, who is ex for us both) who has my exact same name and is one of my best friends and most favorite people in the world.
I texted with a guy who I’ve known since I was five, my psuedo (and psycho punk) older brother, (we grew up in the same church and the same small town), who is my new band mate, about music files we did last night, four hours of jamming, him on drums, me on guitar, with our keyboardist last night, some psychedelic, trippy music we were surprised turned out really well. We are going to send it to the gatekeeper of this project…we need to write a whole album, soon!
I listened to samples of songs I’ve been working on with a really cool drummer and bass player for my own band project on speaker while hiking because I forgot my headphones.
I read a chapter about Faust, a German Krautrock band who were supported by a record deal in the ’70s in Germany to make an album, when record labels were just throwing out money for experimental bands. They got basically a year of free living and recording studio and they fucked it off to make love and do drugs. They told the label they were going to be the Beatles. They ended up being…rather obscure.
I read about Harmonia, members of Neu! and Cluster who escaped the Krautrock drug scene to go be serious on their own, working with Brain Eno at one point before they all broke off into their own solo projects.
I worked on an essay I’m writing for a women’s issues reading fundraiser coming up in March, about wearing a dress to impress a boy when I hate dresses, but I’m trying to make it about so much more than that. It’s about Mormanism and marriage and expectation, about trying to be someone you’re not. At least, I hope it will be.
I read poems I had published years ago, trying to figure out which ones to read in March at a reading series in Oakland. I found a book on Nefertiti for a patron who came to the reference desk at the library, and then I wondered about the ancient Egyptians for a moment, and how they tie in to psychedelic Krautrock music. So much mystique. So much material to mine.
Just another lazy Saturday. The world is full of stuff to write about and learn about and as long as I’m learning, I feel alive. As long as I write and do music. As long as I stay focused on DATING MY MUSIC, and not getting caught up in what other people think, feel or do. I read the beginning of Joni Mitchell’s biography “Joni” today, and the writer was talking about how in our society we have to be defined by these limited structures of what is acceptable. Don’t be too different! Make sure you are only eccentric in a certain construct, prefabricated by the people before you!
Let’s stop modeling the lives of the artists before us and become our own indefinable artists. The world is ready for more trail blazers, more people following their hearts, letting fantasy take them away, thinking big and open and wide and outside of all these lines and barriers that pin us in and in and in, let’s get out, like crazy hot air balloons, go wild, what’s the worst that can happen?
We’re not hurting anyone, but we are pumping air into our art so we can go curbing like Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, riding the wheels of our creations around corners, thrilling in the trip of whatever we believe destiny will be for us. In a parallel reality, I have done and am everything I ever dreamed, which is why I don’t think we are limited so much as we think we are. Nope, the world is filtered through our own perceptions, and the strange cosmic joke is, in order to get more and achieve what you dream, you have to first feel as if it is possible and embody it, validate it.
We are love, already. It’s opening up to that, accepting it, and from that, we attract and build on what already exists. It is IN us. We cannot GET it from anyone else. That’s the key. So train hop to your future, and I’ll train hop to mine, but we will get there, the limits are only in our own brains.
I think a lot of people have the misconception that for artistic people, creations just fly out without any forethought, planning or daily routine. Maybe if you are Billy Childish (a prolific musician, poet, writer), but not so much for the rest of us.
I know a lot of writers, musicians and artists. The Bay Area, especially Oakland and San Francisco, is a magnet for us. Of the ones I know who are successful, there is a daily routine, whether it’s sitting down every morning to write a number of pages, or getting into a practice space alone or with a band to work on music.
I think we get this idea that creating music, writing or art is something that just POW happens. I assure you, it’s not. Sure, I’ve had many moments where I’m on a long road trip and some tiny little line comes into my head, for example, today as I was walking to my car to go to work I was thinking about how punk in Oakland has become this glam thing all around (what happened to cutting your own hair and sewing on your own patches? When did all the punks become fashion models?) and I thought, “Well, fashion punk is not dead.”
Inspiration comes in random bits. And the bits are what we make of them. If I scribble stuff down when it pops into my head, I can pore through all my scraps of paper later and maybe cobble together a song or poem.
But in the interim, I have to do things like wake up every morning, meditate, throw some tarot cards and write a page in my writing notebook. That way, I have a center, and a notebook filling with writing. A page a day doesn’t seem like much, but at the end of the year, that’s 365 pages to choose from. Two pages a day is 730 pages.
Same goes for music. Right now, I practice music once a week with other people, and work on songs in whatever spaces I have, usually late at night from midnight until 2am. For the once a week practice, that’s 52 days of practicing songs with other musicians. Twice a week is 104. And on it goes.
So, even if those morning pages or that band practice is shitty on that day, you are showing up on a routine basis for the muse to strike when ready, and while you’re not looking, you’re getting better at your craft. If you have a routine, you don’t have to stress the fuck out all of the time, because you know every morning, (or night for you night owls) you can go back to whatever you’re working on, pick up where you left off. It becomes a habit, and if people ask, “So, what have you been doing lately with your art?” you can validly say, “Oh, just writing (practicing music, painting, etc) every morning.” It also makes that crazy passion and intensity a bit less like a firework waiting to explode.
And now, when you look back in a few months or years, there’s actually going to be something to draw from. Of course, you still have to make sense of what you created, but…it’s a start. It’s harder for random life stuff to knock you off balance when you’re strong in your own center of gravity, and that strength can come from something as basic as showing up for yourself in a simple routine.
I’ve been doing real good with a morning routine in general the past eight months, but the past few weeks I got sick and then in desperation to get out of the house I went out to shows and to the city and did social shit, which kind of knocked me off my routine because I drank coffee and stayed up late and got all manic from interacting with dozens of people, and then couldn’t sleep because I had to process all the interaction. Another routine I got out of because of being sick is hiking and kettlebell, both which serve to calm my mind dooooown. So, as much as I hate anything seemingly stagnant or, god forbid, boring, I cannot wait until I am feeling well enough to kick some hiking and strength training ass and get back on some sort of stable routine in other regards.
I fell in love with words at a young age, words that stretched my brain, made me think about something in a new way. I forget this sometimes. I’ve become inured to them in a sense after so many years of using them, harhar, but some words intrigue me. I want to write them out by hand, create songs using them. Anathema. Heathen. Decay. Beauty. Puissant. Ruse. Misguided. Orbital. Fractal. Shattered. Entropy. Dystopian. Cathartic. Transcendence. Translucent. Tumultuous. Turbulent. Trepidation. Isotopic. Isolation. Isotope. Sweetheart. Stilted. Lilted. Lover. Tumble.
When I was locked up in a foreign country boot camp type school as a teenager, we had six hours of self-guided class a day where we were to sit and do work while staff watched us to make sure we weren’t talking or misbehaving or non-verbally communicating or note passing.
Instead of the algrebra books and such, I pulled a dictionary from the shelf and hand wrote the definitions of words I found interesting, for hours. I wrote poems with those words. I sent the poems home to my parents.
Before the boot camp school I had a gutter punk boyfriend, my road dawg, who would get mad at me for using big words, as if it was a threat against his intelligence. “Stop trying to make me feel stupid,” he would say. Other kids used a lot of slang and dumbed down words. But I couldn’t stop using big words. I read a lot as a kid. They were stuck in me. To stop using them would be to stop being me.
“People always ask me if I’m English,” I said once to a friend. “Because you can actually articulate words?” he said. I’d never thought of it that way. I always thought big words made me exotic, using them in sentences made them interesting. There are so many words with so many different meanings. Some words I repeat over and over in my head. Some songs are titled by one word, one word which resonates through the body of the song, conveys a mood. Yet so many songs named by the same word are different.
But that’s the beauty of language. That all of us can write these songs based on one word, or encapsulated in one word. That words can mean so much, or so little. There was a guy once who told my friend, his girlfriend at the time, that he was ambivalent about their relationship. I thought that meant he didn’t care about her, so I freaked out. “Why would he say that to you,” I told her. “What a jerk!”
But then I looked up the word and found it meant conflicted. He’d been pursuing me while with her, and my own loyalties were ambivalent. I was young. But it made me more intrigued, that he could use that word to describe a relationship. And that the word applied to not one, but two situations in my current reality.
Words have strange power.
I’ve heard it said that for writers, there are two types of writing. There is journaling, which is recording emotions and events, and there’s writing writing, which is actually writing stuff that matters.
I think the journal stuff matters.
My mom taught me to journal before I was able to write. She gave me giant blank books and I drew horses and told her my dreams so she could write them down. My parents at the time believed in dreams, that they could be prophetic, and there was a lot of weird dreaming going on in our house. I made up dreams, big dreams about the end of the earth and everyone going to live on the sun. I had fantasy worlds I created in my head and they went into these journals.
My dreaming and fantasy got me in trouble, just like my other writing did later. In first grade, we were supposed to keep journals about our lives. I lived in a town where we were one of the only families who rented and didn’t own a house. Many of my peers had ranches and horses on the outskirts of town. They wrote about trips out of town and horse rides.
I wanted to ride horses. So I wrote down my adventures of riding horses and going to Disneyland and all sorts of other fascinating things I did…in my head.
Somehow, my teacher found out my non-fiction journal was fiction, and she called my parents in for a meeting. She was super upset at me. She took it personally. She really had believed my stories. She called me a liar and I remember this formerly super nice woman now being extremely angry, her face turning ugly as she accused me of terrible things, just for making up stories, like I’d done something horribly wrong.
But kids make up stories. And as a young writer, not wanting to live the life I was actually living because my friend’s lives seemed more interesting, I created my own unique life in words.
There is nothing wrong with this. It’s not like I was signed up to Penguin books and had advertised my first grade journal as a memoir. No, we were supposed to keep journals and in the journals, I made up stories. Other teachers gave me trouble later too, as I outlined in a self-implicating previous post: Writing Always Got Me Into Trouble.
In spite of Ms. Whatever’s insistence I was a horrible child for making up stories, my parents were non-plussed. I don’t even remember them getting mad at me at all. They pretty much always took my side when it came to the crazy teachers at school, which I’m glad for.
The point is, I didn’t stop writing in journals. In fact, I’m staring at a cupboard above my closet that has about thirty filled journals in it, from age 11 up. The ones previous to that I lost due to a housecleaner thinking the giant trash can in my room I used as storage was actually a trash can. Oops.
As a writer, I observe the world around me in hyperbole. Things that are intriguing or make me think, conversations I think are worth remembering, I write down in my journals.
Admittedly, the journals I had as an 11-year old were filled with angst about the boy who lived next door not liking me, jealousy over my wealthy friend’s ample supply of toys I didn’t have and rants about music I listened to on the radio. And the journals I have now haven’t changed that much. There are still rants about men, questions about friend behavior, gushings about music I like, etc.
I keep a journal in my purse and a fancy journal at home. I write every morning, sometimes for hours. Wherever I am, when I see something intriguing or have an interesting thought or feeling, I write it down. I write goals and lists, I process relationships and situations.
Looking back through them is like a treasure hunt. When I’m running out of ideas or feel stuck, I go through my journals and get new ideas. I find song lyrics, poems, ideas for where to submit my work, things I tried in the past. Reading months back sometimes is like watching the stupid character in a horror flick you’ve already seen before. “No! Stop! Don’t go in that room! That person is not who you think they are! Ruuuun! Oh fuck. Nevermind. You’re gonna do it anyways. Well, later you’ll figure it out.”
Sometimes, I want to burn my journals, because I find them filled with ruminations, stupid decisions I’ve made I can’t ignore and endless obsessions. But that’s my brain. I can’t deny what I am by burning the evidence. Sometimes, I write things that I don’t feel later. Sometimes I make judgements that I find to be false. Just because something is written down doesn’t make it true, but sometimes what I’ve written down makes for a good story later.
Keeping journals, while probably something that will implicate me in every single friendship and relationship I’ve had after I’m done with this life, has been extremely helpful as a writer and a musician. My goal in my art is to convey emotion honestly. If I don’t feel something from my work, I don’t think other people will either. All I do comes from real life. And real life is recorded daily in journals I will never ever let anybody else read except myself.
The best way to find out how to learn to let go is to make plans dependent on other people. Today is Thanksgiving, and I have been sitting in my pajamas all morning. I rolled out of bed at oh, 11:30am, made myself a cup of coffee and some leftover crepes with Nutella, and then got back on my bed. It’s fucking rad. I love this week.
Oh, sure, I had other plans. I was going to drive to Henderson, Nevada to see my aunt and uncle and grandma and cousins, and to do a freelance music column I have due by January 15, but then I changed my plans because I wanted to go with a girlfriend of mine. But then my freelance check didn’t come and my girlfriend had different days off than me and I couldn’t get Saturday off due to working for the county and all, so we didn’t go. But then we were going to go up to a cabin in the woods, which I was pretty stoked about, and two of my oldest friends were staying nearby with family so I was going to say, “Hi,” but. That didn’t happen either.
Lest this sound too much like a journal entry, I’ll get to my point. All of my plans fell through, but instead of being bummed about every single thing like I have in the past, I am grateful that I got to spend the past couple of days with myself. I really, really (maybe almost too much) like spending time alone. Since I separated from my ex-husband, I’ve been more social than I have been in years, and it’s fun, but exhausting. I have so many friends in this new urban terrain I can’t even remember who said what on what day, or what I said to who at what hour. It’s a bit freaky.
Writers tend to like to spend time alone. A lot of them, at least. The more reflective ones. When I do spend time alone I realize that a) I can totally depend on myself and b) I can totally process whatever has been going in my life recently. Also, c) I can clear my head for once. It gets pretty cluttered in there.
So today, on this wanker holiday where we are all forced to say what we are grateful for in honor of what we did to the people who were on this terrain before our Puritanical asses arrived by getting together with people to gorge on overstuffed force fed turkeys, I am truly grateful for my self, my beautiful self. And you all, for reading this. And for a cheap-as-hell room in Oakland, a part-time job at the library, musical projects coming together, all of the new people I have met in the past six months, my old friends who have showed up for me, for my car, for being back in an urban area, for my bicycle, for the Bay Area, for a visit to Portland, for having so many astounding soul friends who go back years and years. I am grateful for my wacko family, for all of the music I love, for the fact that I had enough grinds for a strong cup of coffee this morning, for my guitars and my voice and my love of writing.
I am going to try and get out of my pajamas and off my ass to go hiking, then maybe watch Wesley Snipes movies all day with a friend on his projector for “Snipesgiving.” If I leave my bed, that is. I’m having a lot of fun here. Don’t really want to. It’s been so long since I let myself just sit and do absolutely almost nothing for a few days in a row, totally enjoying my own company.
When I was in junior high school, my friends and I were into sophisticated note passing.
Note and letter exchange started for me in elementary school. The first time it got me into trouble was when a guy friend who used to hang out at my house all of the time and play footsie with me when my parents weren’t home (in order to escape my crazy neighbor who his mom wanted him to be friends with) sent me a really cute note in the mail with a picture of Bart Simpson on it that said, “I like you.”
I was embarrassed by the note, because I was hanging out with a girl I wanted to impress when I took it out of the mailbox. “What does it say?” she asked, and I, being shy about feelings if still outspoken in general, lied rather than reveal the truth. “He wrote me a nasty note,” I said. We decided to write him a letter that was all cuss words. We decorated the outside of the envelope with pictures of bunny rabbits. We laughed.
I cringe to think about it now, it was super mean. He was bummed, his mom came over and cried, horrified by my behavior. His older brother (my friend to this day, actually) cornered me on the playground and told me I had to be nice to his younger brother. I went to the boy’s house to apologize and he looked at me, his face shut off, and said, “You don’t have to apologize if you don’t want to.”
“But I do,” I said. “That was stupid, and I’m sorry.”
I was baffled by this experience. I didn’t realize that my words affected others. I was impulsive, and didn’t think much before I did things. I thought words were just words, it was all in fun, that I could take them back. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me, right?
Even if I was mean, I didn’t really feel that way about him. The cuss word letter was a mask covering up the fact I had feelings about the boy, really liked him as a friend, but his letter signified to me that maybe he wanted something more. In fourth grade, that freaked me out so much I completely eviscerated him with cuss words. Hmm.
The mother of my best friend from childhood, Radish, loved me up until I started dying my hair blue and smoking cigarettes, listening to “the devil’s” music. Before I hit puberty, she encouraged me and my BFF to hang out all of the time. I wrote letters to my friend on my typewriter.
A lot of bad stuff was happening around me that I couldn’t really comprehend or process, and I let it out in my letters to Radish. I was quite expressive, talking about how I was going to kill the girls at school who were mean to me, being extremely detailed about blowing them up with bombs. I also talked about how I felt depressed and like killing myself at times. My friend’s mom found the letters. She took them personally, and very seriously. She highlighted phrases and sent them to my parents, forbade me from ever seeing my best friend again. Here were my words again, ruining my relationships with the people I loved.
My best friend and I started a secret letter exchange, hiding a box outside her grandparent’s house where she lived, and we kept in touch this way for years, until we were old enough that her mom let go of the belief I was sent from the devil to steal the soul of her daughter.
I started writing notes at school to my friend Ginger, and kept up my line of brutal honesty with ample embellishment in my stories based on real life. I also kept up a note writing relationship with another friend, Cami, and we made up stories about atom bombs and the school exploding, to channel the reality of being trapped in a building with a bunch of other junior high school kids we didn’t necessarily relate to, being taught what seemed like useless schlock from teachers we really didn’t like, on a daily basis, to prep us for our future as nine to fivers in the working world. We were bored.
Ginger, like Radish, wasn’t careful with the letters I gave her. She ended up leaving them out on the counter during a class with Ms. Riley, my English teacher. Ms. Riley and I had a stormy relationship, to say the least. Once, I had been writing a note during a movie and Ms. Riley’s eyes went wide. “Give me that,” she said. Instead of giving her the note, I put it in my mouth, and laughed. Ms. Riley found my letters on the counter and took them straight to the guidance counselor’s office. I was mandated to go talk to him about my “suicidal impulses.” My parents were notified. Fortunately, my parents didn’t do anything either of these times.
Writing was completely imperative to me, had been from the time I was a small child. Wasn’t it just an outlet for my angst? Wasn’t it better I wrote about these things instead of acting on them? Sure, the note to the boy who was overly kind to me was a bit of a stretch, and super mean, and I never repeated that mistake, but on the note-passing, really?
When I worked at a publishing company, I made the Dooce mistake and blogged about a coworker who I worked with. She was LDS, and had some opinions about being gay. I couldn’t abide with it, the Prop 8 bullshit was what made me sever all ties with the LDS church. My entire immediate family did the same. Before that point, I’d simply ignored it. This time I tore through the history and debunked all sorts of fallacies I had been taught my entire life.
I understand people who want to believe in, or do believe in something like religion. But. It’s not for me. I do my best to maintain a healthy distance from overly religious people, only because they are threatening to me when they try to change my values and beliefs and can’t just accept them. That is the one thing I dislike about black and white belief systems. To each their own. Please.
Anyhow, she read my blog and got offended and I felt bad and took down what I wrote, even though I hadn’t used her name, had used a piece of her conversation to illustrate the fear-based bigotry I was seeing in members of this church that said gay people couldn’t go to heaven. She had been going to seminars that taught her why Prop 8 was gods will and I felt compelled to let out my opinions. In public.
I learned from that I had to be a bit more careful, because when you write something, you are creating a tangible artifact people might actually read. The thought is frightening, if you really grasp it.
My writing still gets me in trouble. I’m opinionated and still tend towards hyperbole in my writing. It’s the actress in me, the performance artist seeking to entertain. My views are not static, but change often, and each blog post is a moment in time, not an absolute truth. But the more people who read this, the more I realize I have to be careful about my words and opinions.
***
There is one exception to these incidents. In seventh grade, I wrote a series of poems about guns and suicide, and instead of rejecting me, my teacher, Ms. Jones, referred me to the advanced English department at the local high school. “You have a real talent,” she said. “You should pursue this.” I was baffled by her words, because mostly, I sat in her class stoned or made animal noises from the back of the classroom to get the boys to laugh.
“I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it.“
-Alan Moore
I couldn’t sleep the other night, and one of my friends was on facebook. He kept pressuring me to calm down my inner spaz and sit still long enough to watch this random Alan Moore documentary he had posted, and I was like, “But it’s SO long.”
“Chill out and watch it,” he said.
“OK, asshole,” I thought.
Alan Moore is the author of From Hell and other such fascinating comic strips. He likes to wear rings on his hands that weigh a lot, apparently, so it was hard for me to take him seriously for the first 8 minutes of the documentary. “He’s lord of his rings,” said my friend. But then I as continued to watch, I got hooked. He speaks my language.
Moore talks about writing and other forms of art as magic. He also talks about almost everything you could think of, from the perils of monotheistic religions that ignore all that “primitive” cultures have to teach us, to tarot as a form of communication with the universe.
As a magician, Moore steeps himself in the mystical. He speaks of a type of idea stream that connects us all–the reason, he thinks, that 6 people came up with the idea for the steam train at once in our recent human past. He talks about how our greatest responsibility in life is to discover and respect our own soul–that too many people are numbing their souls out because of this responsibility we each have to tune and and listen to our own intuition, to be our own person.
How horrifying that thought can be. Being our own person, knowing what our soul needs, he says, is our reason for being here: To know and be true to ourselves serves the universe.
It all resonated with me, specifically since I am at a point in my life where I am not easily swayed by easy answers. I’ve had to spend a great deal of time alone recently, recalibrating my entire modus operandi and tuning in (yet again) to what might be my purpose in life.
We are here, and the one thing each human being has been given by nature, god, what-have-you, is a will. Why would we be given a self by nature if it is so unwieldy and untrustworthy, if we have to constantly pray to be released from it?
We have free choice. To turn your will over is weird. Who are you turning it over to? A group of other people so afflicted by their own wills? Someone else’s god?
It’s OK to ask the universe what your purpose is, how you can best serve mankind, but I don’t believe this mumbo-jumbo monotheistic churches and programs with god-fear in them teach you about how your own intuition and will is a bad thing. It’s not.
Sure, I chose to pursue substances to numb myself out in my early life, and who is to say whether that was a biological, mental or emotional urge to obliterate myself or escape what were very hard-to-bear situations in my life, but I choose not to do those things now. I learned from my mistakes. I don’t credit anyone else for my choices. It’s a constant reassessment and decision for me to not obliterate or anesthetize the soul I am responsible for.
I can’t say I don’t wish I could take an escape route at times, that being so painfully aware of everything, having an “inner spaz” as my friend puts it, is not completely overwhelming. But having to face the demons I’ve had to face in my life has made me aware, also, of this: We choose our own reality. We choose what we believe in. Almost anything you believe in can become true if you believe in it enough.
No one else can give us the answers. This is my life to live. No one else can tell me what to do with it.
I spent the majority of my twenties trying to do what others thought was best for me, from my husband to support groups to my employers. I didn’t want to make those decisions anymore. It was too hard to be responsible for what the outcome of my own actions would be, too hard to face that I alone was completely accountable for where my life went. If I don’t practice guitar, I won’t get better at it. If I don’t reach out to new musicians constantly, I won’t be able to start a band. If I don’t write, I won’t finish my book.
I am responsible for my own life. I am not a passive rider in this vehicle of body and soul.
I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant, but I have been pondering a lot of these things lately. I, like anyone else, want to belong to something, fit in, be cool. But because of the lessons I’ve learned so far in my life, I am also extremely self-reliant, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. Groups can be dangerous. People in numbers tend to do things they wouldn’t on their own. We all have our own intuition for a reason. There is no larger universe that doesn’t mind and communicate with each and every one of us. I don’t need a group as my spiritual medium, I have answers all around me, through my pen, through my gut, in meditation, out in the woods, if I only listen.
“Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well. The difference between religion and magic is the same as what we were talking about earlier – I think you could map that over those two poles of fascism and anarchism. Magic is closer to anarchism.“
-Alan Moore
Back to Moore’s idea that writing is magic. I believe he is right. We have the power to change what people think through words. Writers, musicians and artists ARE magicians. We are changing consciousness through our craft, it’s a great responsibility. Moore also mentioned that fame as we know it never existed on this level in the past. In the past, you could be famous and have around 1,000 people know who you were. But now, with mass media, the fame machine creates and regurgitates celebrities, people dream of becoming famous instead of heading out to sea, as they did in the past. At least the sea, says Moore, is an element that can be understood. Fame is not.
Anyhow, I recommend you watch this. It blew my mind. This guy is tapped in, for sure.
