Tag Archives: writing

Train Hop The Future

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” -Charles Bukowski

train hop

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.

What’s Next?

A writing group serendipitously sprung up on Facebook the other day. It includes a few of my writer friends, each from a different strata of a past or current life. A friend from childhood whom I met when I was 11 years old in the church parking lot when we both were ditching church. A friend I met at age 19 when I was obsessed, in a musician envy sort of way, with the band her boyfriend was creator of. A writer dude who used to be in a cult-popular local punk band and lived on my street briefly before moving away. A dude who reads in the same literary circles I read in and is friends with a number of mutual friends: writers and punks and musicians. A Russian friend who is a total female rock star writer blowing up the literary scene in the Bay Area. A friend who I met when we read at Lip Service West together, and who I often bump into while loitering at an Oakland coffee shop seemingly everyone we know either hangs out at or works at.

The group started when one of these friends tagged me in one of those posts where you tag a number of people, you know, those posts you usually ignore. The game was that you had to look on page 7 of your manuscript and transcribe 7 sentences to post on Facebook, and then tag 7 other writers.

I was bored, and sick, so I pored through a bunch of my crappy writing to find a story that was actually seven pages long. I had to go back to my early twenties, when I was going to San Francisco State and studying Creative Writing. I tagged some of my writer friends, and the thread became super entertaining as they all posted excerpts of random stories that were either tragic or hilarious in a disturbing way. Then one of my friends said the thread, which got to over 90 comments long, was making her want to start a writing group.

So we did.

I went off about the ebils of Facebook a few weeks ago. I had decided to disconnect from it for a while, went all crazy on it in my rants. It helped. A couple of guy friends asked me if I had deleted it because of some dude. Wouldn’t they like to know.

Anyhow, I got a necessary pause and when I came back to it, I learned to let go of the outcome, to use it like a tool. I now observe everyone’s awesomeness without getting caught up so much in comparison and envy. I have given up (mostly) on expectations of any specific result from others, instead focusing on what is cool about it for me. If I share things with people without making it too personal, writer and musician discussions abound. Connecting to friends of friends, learning more about family, finding awesome music and bands…the pros outweigh the cons for me right now. Who gives a who who thinks what about who.

My whole philosophy on this upcoming year is, instead of trying to find out the purpose of MY WHOLE LIFE, to ask myself, “What’s next?”

I was talking to a musician who had just gotten back from tour. She was floundering a bit, because the tour had been her goal forever and now it was over. “I don’t know what to do with my life!” She said.

“What’s next?” I asked her. Baby steps.

Instead of comparing myself to others seemingly further along the path than me, the myriad of friends I have who are currently touring or have multiple books published, instead of letting the green-eyed monster consume me…just bloody DO something already. Take action. Don’t stew. Move along. There’s no time to be jealous unless it propels me along on my path, spurs me to action. If I want something I feel I can’t have, what can I do to obtain that thing, if it’s possible for me to obtain? Can I at least try?

There is no room anymore for being grouchy or sulking, playing a victim or blaming anyone else for my success or failure. There is only room for growth.

So…

What’s next?

write

Keeping Journals

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.

Why I Write This Damn Blog

I write this blog for both altruistic and narcissistic reasons. I want to help others. I also want to help myself.

Mostly, I write it because in spite of being born to artistic kin, I still struggled for many years with being true to my own artistic abilities and actually believing in them. Took me much longer than others around me. I was surrounded by prodigies and success stories and always felt behind and slow and why couldn’t anyone else see my secret hidden talents. The main reason? Because I didn’t share them. And I wanted it all NOW. I have never been a patient one.

It’s the little things that get us through. I was telling a friend whom I love dearly the other day that if I died tomorrow, I would be happy I’ve lived the life I lived up to now, that I’ve gotten to experience the things I’ve got to experience.

“I don’t even know what my path is,” I said, “but I enjoy the little things.”

“You’re happier than most people,” said my friend.

That comment has been sitting with me. Because I am pretty happy. Sometimes I have to work on playing victim and being moody and a little cynical and jaded, but in general, I have more happy moments than not ever since I stopped seeking solace in unsustainable things like jobs and drugs and other people. Not that other people don’t make my world go round. They do. But now, I’m learning to let go of expectations in a way I’ve never had to before.

I was kinda bitching on Twitter about what the point of continuing to write this blog is. It’s so unpredictable. I get traffic every day, which is good, but not a lot of interaction and I often don’t know that I am actually affecting anyone outside of a handful of people who are very awesome for continuing to subscribe and read this. A guy who discovered my blog about a month ago responded that since he had found my blog he had gotten himself together, joined a band and had a great first show.

Kinda made my day.

I was talking to a friend about that, how I keep writing this thing, trying to connect to this quantum wavelength out there even though I get little feedback on if what I’m doing is working. I’m trying to connect with this unseen consciousness through my art. I write this because I actively believe in something bigger than all of us, something that connects us together, be it particles or light or shards of glass, I dunno, whatever. So what I am trying to do is tap into that thing that defies all the constructs and logic of structured society and the illusion of what is physically here in front of us. I don’t care about the material things, the money, the conventions. I want to transcend what appears to be real and probably isn’t.

Sure, I have some structures in place in my own life to keep me from getting into trouble, but in my mind, and in my own weird way, I am trying to defy preconceived constructs by channeling my energy and art into something bigger so that it can fulfill the role I think it’s meant to fulfill. When I take an emotion or an experience and put it into my music, it’s not a passive thing. It’s a conscious effort on my part to take one little human person’s experience and throw it out into the universe, magnify it, and to ask the universe to make it matter somehow, whether to another person or merely to myself.

I know, I sound like a pagan or a punk or a hippy. Whatever. Maybe I’m all of those things. And none of those things.

I know why I’m here–to help other people with their art and path. That’s the meaning I have ascribed to my life. I have friends who feel the same about their path. So when I happen to affect one or two people, it keeps me going. I do this blog and music and writing thing because I feel compelled to do it no matter what little I get back. But every time I hear that I’ve actually helped someone with their own art, it makes me super happy. Because I needed to read something like this when I was struggling the hardest, and I couldn’t find it, I decided to write it for myself and others. Fuck it.

***

When I did that recording in front of a bunch of high school students a few months back, one of the girls was inspired by my songs, because they weren’t conventional. She thought, “Hey, I can do this too.” She’d been depressed with her own path, wanted to do music but didn’t know what to do or how to do it. When she came and took that class at the recording studio she decided to pursue her music and ended up taking a consultation to figure out how to push forward. And she’s doing this as a teenager, already light years ahead of me. It’s great! Sometimes, because you didn’t “succeed” in your own life how you thought you were supposed to, you can take those experiences and turn them around to help others get forward where you didn’t know how.

It’s not just about ourselves. In this narcissistic American culture we tend to focus on only ourselves as the bottom line, but if you think ahead, we are affecting things in tiny little ways and helping or hindering future generations, not merely our own little lives and worlds.

Writing Always Got Me Into Trouble

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.

Writing As Magic

“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.

Obscurity is Comforting

Ever since I realized how many people are actually reading this thing whom I know in person, I kind of lost my momentum. I think, for me, art has been easier sometimes when it’s a struggle or a fight against something, like obscurity.

Which is silly, because there is so much more to learn about life and art than merely battling against obscurity and finding a niche in deciding you are obsolete before you’ve even reached your peak. There’s kind of this undercurrent of philosophy in our society that if you are independent, niche, or obscure, your art is more worthy.

“…for some reason–self-defense, perhaps–artists find it tempting to romanticize…lack of response, often by (heroically) picturing themselves peering deeply into the underlying nature of things long before anyone else has to follow.

Romantic, but wrong. The sobering truth is that the disinterest of others hardly ever reflects a gulf in vision. In fact, there’s generally no good reason why others should care about most of any one artist’s work.”

–Art and Fear/David Bayles and Ted Borland

So, there’s this disconnect–thinking that if no one notices you and you’re good at your work that this means you have some type of higher call  others don’t get it, that this makes you better than more established artists. There’s also this credibility issue. There are always little pop media traces like the suicide note Kurt Cobain left quoting Neil Young’s song, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” There are the artists who were unknown in their lifetime but became legends after they died, like Thoreau, Poe and Dickinson. It’s tempting to think to oneself, “Hey, well, they’ll discover me after I’m gone. It’s all good.”

I guess it depends on what your art IS to you. I’ve pondered this again and again. Is it something I feel good doing and so compulsively continue to do it because of this?

I’ve been known to say that if I didn’t write or make music I would probably murder myself. Sometimes, people stare at me funny when I say this, but probably they simply haven’t experienced this feeling. As Bukowski put it: “He asked, ‘What makes a man a writer?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘It’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.’”

I believe for me, art is about processing, creating and connection. I don’t want to labor in obscurity, I do get something out of creating something and then sharing it with others. I love performing and singing and jamming with other musicians. It’s all hard work and a constant uphill climb, especially here in the Bay Area, where many musicians are either loaded, working 9 – 5, or already involved in other projects.

I dunno. Some days, you want to throw up your hands, or continue to write songs for yourself, by yourself.

My whole point here being that now that people are actually reading this thing, I’m not as inspired to write in it. I have to take a look at that and wonder–do I enjoy obscurity and the mystique that comes with it? Probably. I sometimes have a crazy fantasy I’ll die and someone will publish my journals Sylvia Plath style. But then I freak out, because *I* don’t even like reading my journals most of the time, as they are filled with all sorts of crazy freak weirdness I don’t even understand, inter-spliced with profound deep thoughts on life. I would feel terrible for any person having to weed out the wack from the sensical.

It all boils down to the fact that we are each nothing and everything. We both matter and don’t matter, in the larger scheme of things. But since we fashion our own reality, we have to check in with that drive inside and keep striving to follow whatever our dreams are–as long as they don’t involve raping, pillaging, or murdering in some nebulous god’s name (my opinion. Do what you will. Whatevs).

When You Find Your Muse in the Corner

(This is a blog from about a year ago, November 2011. I thought I would recycle it. Regurgitate it. What-have-you.)

Write what you want to read. Be your own damn self.

Think about what you are, everyone you’ve loved and known in your life, every desire you’ve had, every dream you’ve made manifest, and decide for once and for all which things move you.

Hold those parts. Scribble them on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on envelopes of bills you never plan on paying. Pile your scraps of paper up until something sticks, then run with it.

If it’s not fun, writing and music, what’s the point? Tell me.

Continue reading →

5 Signs You Are a Writer

In the vein of 6 Signs You Might Be a Musician, here’s one for writers, too.

1. You write.

This one seems obvs, but bears mentioning. You are a writer if you write. Not only do you write, you feel COMPELLED to write–if you can’t write, you get itchy. You find yourself writing on whatever you can, and if you are sans one of your ten notebooks you type notes into your phone or write on your hands. You are constantly seen going, “Hold that thought, I have to write this down,” and people who know you stop noticing after a while, because you scribbling stuff down as they speak is all too common.

2. You tend to think. A lot. About Everything. 

You are constantly ruminating on something or another, wondering about this or that, postulating potential quandaries or conversations in your mind, having interactions between real or imagined characters in your head. Your ideas have ideas and they breed additional ideas and problems that need to be mapped and charted. Dictionaries and encyclopedias need to be consulted, libraries visited, information gleaned constantly, endlessly, all the time. It’s a 24/7 convenience store of analytical thought between your ears.

3. Life is being transcribed by you as it happens

While you’re sitting in the current moment that’s happening, you are also co-existing in a completely fictional world of your own creation fashioned on the hinges of the world you are witnessing. While you’re talking with a friend or enjoying some music or food or reading a book on the bus, there’s a script running in your head. Current events are replaying in your head and you’re planning on writing them or are already writing them as they occur.

Your philosophy is that life is meant to be transcribed: “And then the old lady dropped an entire bag of lemons which rolled under people’s seats on the bus, a little kid slipped and his mom got irate and the bus driver swerved…”

4. The people you spend time with are a little odd

Writers tend to relate to other writers and analytical people. Trouble is, when people are all up in their head, all the time, things like putting on makeup or buying fashionable clothes are second (or third or fourth) to the drivel that runs on endless repeat in your head, thoughts and ideas and conversations that NEED TO BE WRITTEN DOWN ALL THE TIME OR ELSE. Because of this, you look around at some lit party and find…
a buncha freaks.

Not to say all of us are this way, but writers don’t tend to look like rock stars. Books and poems and non-fiction pieces speak for themselves, the face of the person who created them secondary to the actual piece itself.

5. Your success is never good enough

Even when you get that one thing published, you are looking to get that next thing published. If you’re in this fabulous journal, you want to be in that fabulous journal, it’s as if as soon as you reach a goal, it evaporates and becomes moot and you’re already on about the next thing. Nothing will ever, ever, ever, be good enough.

It’s My Birthday

It’s my birthday today.

There were a lot of things I wanted to write about this week, but I’ve been keeping my head down and moving ahead one foot at a time. I’ve bumped into a lot of old friends from San Francisco all of a sudden, which is trippy, like they’ve been waiting all this time to just pop back into my life.

I went into the studio this weekend, had a blast, got a song worked on that I didn’t think was going anywhere and now is working well. The song’s called Awkward, and I love the lyrics, but the guitar was too busy. Writing by yourself and then working with other musicians is always a trip, because you often have to par back what you were doing by yourself to fill up the space in order to better let the other instruments complement. Believe it or not, it’s much harder to be sparse in a song than it is to be busy.

Here’s a rough mix of the song:

***

Another welcome surprise from my husband was a gift of stuffed Domo (you may not know how much I adore this little Domo guy, and you may not want to know, but I do) and a mini 2-watt Fender Greta tube amp, which I’m actually going to exchange for the Vox AC4 4 Watt tube amp I’ve been dying to purchase since I found it at Portland Trading Company in Portland.

Perfect amp for solo gigs!

I got my tattoo worked on this Sunday, to take my mind off the drama going on. Got a bonus finger tattoo I’m stoked about.

Perfect tattoo for someone who works at a library, as long as I don’t actually use it to shush the patrons!

Peripheral stuff, right? But I’m happy if it’s all about me in a fun way right now, because there’s so much heaviness I’m going through right now with the separation emotions and having to find a place to live and figure out how we’re going to work the car situation and basically how to survive in the Bay Area on a part-time and freelance income, which at this point seems to be asking a lot. Even storage spaces are expensive. One day at a time. One day at a time, it will all work out even if it seems like it couldn’t possibly work out. Hell, if I got through benzo withdrawal and gluten allergies I can get through anything in the whole world.

I said I was going to talk about the insanity of the artist mind, and I will…later. For now, Happy Birthday to me. 31 years old. My life feels like it’s already been lived but it’s just beginning. Here’s to the next few years bringing me all I’ve ever hoped and dreamed for in my writing and music. Here’s to hoping I won’t give up, that I’ll give it my all and trust that I can see these things out to their ultimate potential. I don’t know why music and writing are so important to me, or why they’ve brought me back to life, only that I fear ever losing them again so I’m giving them both all I’ve got. Starting tomorrow.

My sister is an artist, and asked me what I wanted drawn for my birthday. Casually, I said, “A Bunny or a Domo.”