Deviant Rambling

My inner critic was alive and well for much of last week, telling me that I am never going to make anything out of this life as a creative.

“Just give up and be normal.” – A familiar refrain that I’m accustomed to feeling to my core. The words that I say to myself in times where I feel uninspired.

It isn’t that easy, though. I won’t give up on this, and I’ll never be normal. The very notion that I should concede is another instance of the pressures of polite society weighing on me. As I’ve gotten more bold about professing my choice to be an artist, I’ve found this same polite society greet me with a mix of confusion and elation.

I’m the one who will have to starve to succeed and I think that other people fundamentally understand this so they find it harmless to tell me “That’s cool.” They have some part of themselves that feels the way I do, though, and maybe that part of them had to die for the sake of a normal life. So whenever I get the half-hearted congratulations from well-meaning strangers and might as well be strangers, I mourn a little for their lack. It also gives me another opportunity to express gratitude for my life.

I have the freedom to pursue this insane thing because of the stability of my living situation. I am lucky almost laughably beyond measure.

Above all, I’m not just alive, I’m living.

For the first time in, well, ever, my hands felt compelled to illustrate without words.

Just what exactly I was attempting to draw isn’t clear, but it felt good to try and I experienced a completely tranquil hour mentally that just blew by.

I believe this is the visual representation of my “man in the river” narrative, but it took turns I hadn’t expected. The hands were compelled to different spaces and I employed the use of geometry to fill out a good deal of my canvas, in this case, a scrap piece of 3/4″ plywood. I had a Sharpie nearby so that’s what I used to draw it.

It appears as though the man’s mind is a chaotic spiral, but there is some semblance of order within. It is in these moments of order that images like this fall out of me in whatever form is handy.

I am working on some of the writing that is a paid project and it has me reviewing places where people go for a vacation experience.

The website shows a woman standing on a grassy mountainside in front of a borrowed horse taking a selfie of herself and the horse, presumably to share the experience with her people. It is staged for a promotional photo for the website, and I, the observer, find myself wondering what the hillside, horses, and general public will feel about this picture.

Part of me understands that this sort of self-documentation and display is just how we communicate now, but the other, more cynical part of me asks if it is relevant or meaningful. As is tradition, I’m critically overthinking my place in all of this inception-level marketing.

I have to approach every place I review with a completely objective viewpoint but it is nearly impossible. Just as soon as I set eyes on a website, 40+ years of predisposition come crashing down on the keyboard through my hands and make all of the words heavy. I wish I could just toss this judgment aside but it feels fundamental to my being so I don’t.

…If I could, though, my work would be one hundred times easier and probably equally profitable and relevant.

It’s been a year since my brother died and I am not sure I’m any closer to having sympathy. It gives me pause to think that maybe I shouldn’t continue looking.

I am lucky to possess the level of awareness I have about who my brother was. The detachment from emotions surrounding him was easy given the impossible distance between who he was and who family wanted him to be. There was no connecting the two logically, so I saw no reason to invest in him emotionally. He was never going to change and although it is tragic, it was completely avoidable. But that isn’t the world we live in.

We live in the world where sometimes the bad guys win. In this case the bad guy was drugs and alcohol, and the loser was my brother. The stakes were as high as they get, but the outcome was rigged.

Remembering him is too easy. Remembering him at a time where he was healthy is next to impossible. I find myself seldom trying to recall him in any state.

We weren’t close. And that living, breathing fact is sadder than his passing ever will be.

Next week is a preview of the season at our doorstep and I look forward to it. I can already feel the to-do list growing as I think about all the things it will be nice enough to accomplish since it won’t be in the mid-80s or 90s.

This is the time of year where it is nice enough to spend the day outside and it still doesn’t get cold overnight yet. So as long as it isn’t raining it has the chance to be a great day. Better still it will be a week worth of days like this.

If I can’t get things done in these kind of near-perfect conditions, I’m not going to get anything done ever.

Today is shaping up to be one of the hottest days of the year, if not the hottest, pushing the mercury to just a few degrees shy of 100 by the end of the day. The room I’m in has a mostly covered window that I can look out of and see that it even looks miserable outside.

The air takes on this heavy quality because of the amount of moisture present and it weighs down everything you look at. It’s a phenomenon that is only exacerbated by the haze we get from distant wildfires.

Things aren’t the same as when I was young and some of the changes are fairly alarming. The planet is changing before our eyes and I suspect the changes will grow increasingly violent as time goes on. I’m sure I won’t be around for the real shit show but it worries me for the people who might have to be.

I’m gonna continue trying to do my part to be a part of the solution and reduce my impact but I admit I am ignorant to exactly what that impact is. My consumption needs are fairly low but I live in first world comfort so I imagine that baseline is an appalling use of resources by default.

As with so many things in life, I want to do better, but the sheer amount of information kills any lasting motivation.

The scattered mind plagues me today and I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on much of anything. It is a reminder that I need to get back to clearing the clutter out of my head instead of just letting it accumulate like so much trash.

The second after I finished that sentence my mind wandered again and I had completely forgot what I was doing.

It’s time to start meditating again.

It’s never enough to fulfill the nonstop desire to create. I feel an incessant, animalistic drive to continue pursuing whichever direction feels right on a day to day basis.

None of these things pay me especially well in worldly ways, the ones that allow me to buy shiny things I don’t need, and maybe that’s completely fine. Maybe the fulfillment I feel every time I work on a project or create something from nothing is the payment.

Maybe it’s never going to be enough and I’ll always be searching for more to do, more to be, more to feel. Maybe it will all make sense some day and maybe it won’t.

I still can’t help but see myself standing still in the river of time as the world passes me by, an observer of it all. Always more than a little out of place, but never bothered by the fact.

I’ve yet to find a place in this world that made sense to me, but it won’t stop me from trying to make one.

I decided to indulge and picked up the Audible version of Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act and I have to say I am floored by it.

I already had an idea that this legend of the music business was on another level than the rest of us but having a window into it is incredible. The insight he has amassed over the decades is astonishing to have delivered by the man himself.

The amount of understanding this man has of the creative mind and how to best harness this power makes me believe anything is possible. If I sound like I’m gushing it is because I am. It feels like the man has sat in on exactly what I have experienced first hand and took notes to relay to me.

It is always nice to get an affirmative nod from the universe that what you are doing is right and this book feels like almost 6 hours of continuous nodding.

There is a pseudo-Buddhist spiritualism attached to his thinking that catches me off-guard sometimes, but he has gone out of his way to say that it isn’t any one system or way of thinking. That just happens to be a lens he has found useful.

Any time the word spirituality comes up I can feel my skepticism ramp up thanks to my distrust of organized religion. It is a slippery slope for people to use quasi-religious terms to convince otherwise well-intentioned people to be terrible. To be clear, that isn’t what is happening in this book.

Rick has distilled his wisdom from endless observation and provided it in a highly digestible format, the type that doesn’t push. The information is laid out in plain sight and allows the consumer to do with it what they will.

I intend to continue as I have been doing with the addition of this wisdom. It never hurts to be more aware.

There exists a sort of organized chaos within the clutter of my mind. Most of the time I spend trying to wrangle it into submission for the sake of being a productive human being. Every once in a while, though, the patterns become clear and there is a calm in this otherwise messy space.

I’ve spent the past few days in the calm and have had an incredible amount of output, writing-wise. The concern is that once I’ve exhausted this energy, I’ll be back to never being able to find the words I’m after. That is always the concern but it is an irrational demand I make upon myself.

You can’t expect peak-level output every day of the year. We need time to reset and decompress, but there is some part of me that sees this as an unforgiveable act of laziness. Then I’ll dig myself a hole to sit in and mope before realizing it wasn’t necessary.

I find it easy to have compassion for others but there are times it is nearly impossible to have any for myself. It is something I need to address actively so I can live a better life, something approximating the life I imagine I should be living.