Under a Black Rainbow

Everything remains in strange stasis.  I am drowning in the listening of music, but have lost interest in seeing the performance of it, as well as any interest in my own live manipulation of it.  The last few years have been an interesting foray into more droning, ambient soundscapes. The sound of wind being clutched and stretched and scraped across the earth's surface; a chorus of haunting cherubs whispering faint discordance behind cloud cover; the earth's molten skeleton hardening and grinding against itself, slowly toppling continents above.  I'm currently enjoying an album called "The Great Blizzard," which is a great title for it. Weirdly, I don't recall the album that was my first introduction into the genre, but I do remember the radio program Hearts in Space, which played a lot of this stuff. Nocturnal Transmissions was another show on local radio that I'd fall asleep to back in the mid-90s.  I think I like the expanse of it. Like turning time int...

I've been thinking a lot about a previous post recently. The aspect of burying myself in my work when a life catastrophe happens, in particular. More exactly, I've been thinking a lot about my behavior and how that manifests.  I saw a therapist for a while. Saw a couple, actually, with only one of them really jiving with me. And she was great. We got right down to my percieved issues in need of addressing and talked about habits (work and play) and feelings/reactions to life things in general. And also about all of those things happening now as compared to a year ago, shortly after mom died...and then again about the time shortly after dad died.  She posited (not incorrectly...in most situations) that perhaps the writing had gone away because I no longer find myself in the same kind of struggles as previous. I am mostly happy; I have a job that I love, I have a stable housing situation, a stable transport situation, I make good money, and I'm creating in other ways. And whi...

This is the longest I've gone without doing much drinking. Aside from a drink here and there at dinners or lunches out (which are both rare), I don't keep any booze in the house to drink and I don't drink when I go out to the club (which is super rare). It hasn't been a difficult thing to do, but I also haven't seemed to experience anything new from the abstention.  May, June, and most of July are turning into a very introspective and creative time for me. I'm trying to make time to read, which I'm hoping will also jumpstart some writing. There is some of that already at play for my gaming table, but that's a very different kind of writing, but which is really forcing me to carve out some deeply interwoven narratives. It's been fun.  I took medical leave off from work for the entire month of May. The only vacation time I'd taken in the last year was to handle business surrounding mom's estate or my own new place up north. Very little of that ...

I have this pattern, see.  I have this way of navigating each new catastrophe that rears its head and makes a name for itself in the annals of my timeline. Call it a coping mechanism, call it retreating into some other shade of existence, call it whatever. But one that appears has brought about a massive, and often positive, change in my trajectory.  This current moment in my timeline is no different. There are the normal complications that come with being a being, but I know those will all end up getting worked out eventually. That's just how it tends to go, no matter how much we try to fight it all the way back uphill. I learned a while ago to not waste the effort in futile or empty gestures.  But there are also a large, LARGE number of really great things (truly phenomenal things!) happening at the moment, much of which has emerged as new output from the last catastrophe. The painting being the most earthshaking of them. In my last post in mid-February, I said that I'd...

In my previous post, I explained my impetus for painting (having never taken any classes or had any formal training in it). That was in the middle of November. Three months later and I've just had my first show at a local gallery. Right timing, right circumstances, right people to know, and my desire to try something different...that's really how it all came about.  The painting remains therapeutic. Primal, even, where I am simply obeying an internal instinct that says "this color here" or "this shaping there." Some have turned out pretty good (in my personal opinion); plenty of others have turned out to be hot garbage, which I then repurpose into a new painting with new features and traits. Each layer of color reveals something new about the final product and I rarely ever know what it will look like when I'm done, which I very much enjoy. Much like in writing, I find that the best work I do is the work that surprises me when I'm creating it. If I a...

  I truly recognized it today for the first time, this pattern of the last few months. Not that I didn't see it happening physically, only that I didn't see it for it what it was until now.  I've been angry about my writer's block and my reader's block. These are two things I used to take a great deal of enjoyment in doing. I've had to pivot my creative output into other avenues because my old stand-bys are on indefinite leave. Part of me hates this because it's the longest blockage I've had since I actively started focusing on my writing some 20+ years ago. The other part of me hates it because I can almost taste the potential stories on the tip of my mind's tongue. Frustratingly out of reach.  My music block is another one that's been really tough to grapple with these days. I've got some gigs coming up thankfully, which has lit a fire under my ass to really get back into it, but it's been an uphill battle.  You might be wondering where...

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