Weathering The Weight Of Hard Times
This has been a strange summer, to say the least.
As we get older, there's something so anticlimactic about the summer months. It's like we are expecting this magical feeling of long, unending days and grassy knolls and bluebell meadows...
And in reality, we wade through days and oceans of rain, grey skies, sickness, texts and emails sent into the ether, heartbreak, self-pity, anxiety and discernment.
Friends and family get busy. And then, there is only you - sitting in the house where you grew up.
This has been a tough season so far. There have bright points but right now, I am trudging through a patch of soul-sucking mud.
I am a 36-year-old who lives with his parents.
Sure - I've done my share of stupid things. I've backed off. I've been cold where I should have been warm. I gated myself off instead of opening up.
But I've mostly made the peace with that shit. What's hard is making a final decision about one of the saddest topics I've ever had to traverse across in my life - lost love.
Are two people sometimes truly too different? Or is there an all-piercing, universally core-cutting love that can pervade even the darkest hearts and the most messed up relationships and make a severed unit whole again?
I don't know.
But a hard truth lies in the fact that no one is going to help you. You have to get up off your whiny ass, get outside and walk in the rain. Sometimes, you have to walk long and you have to walk fastidiously until your bones are soaked - but there is good coming. No matter the length or the depth of the storm, the sun always returns.
There has to be good. Otherwise, all of the work we have done will have been in vain.
All of the songs, poems, houses, fences, relationships and late night lawn talks will have been worth nothing.
But as we all know, they are not worth nothing - they are something.
I guess I'll stick around and see what happens.
Leaving The Mark
I watched a documentary tonight about William S. Burroughs. What a long, tired and bitter life that man lived. He lived and died by the pen and he lived and died in the midst of people he loved. I was never a reader of his works, but his admiration level is off the charts. He shot a lot of guns, he drank a lot of drinks and he smoked a lot of weed - but he had a knack for telling the unbridled truth.
What is it about the truth that we miss? Why can't we get there? Why do we live in such a plastic society of fabricated goodness and sugary-floury life-meaning that revolves around pictures of offspring and salary comparisons? At times, I want to leave this fuckhole of a planet behind.
I've got some new projects on the go. And mark my words, when they come out, they will be a truthful extension of me. I'm not doing it for money or the pleasure of others - I'm doing it so I can sleep at night and know that the words are out there. Sewn. Soil-covered. Creating a root system.
Out of the words, new life arrives.
After all of the tour bus trips across this great, rugged country with talented musicians - and all of the late-night, green room, ice-clinking drinks with songwriting wizards - there is still a longing within me. A longing to convey words. The writing drives me - it pushes me on. Even when I know I will only get less than 5 hours of sleep, I sit by the keyboard and I hope that inspiration will find me once again. Inspiration; a long lost wind that sings of distant galaxies of creativity, lost loves and all of the longing that mixes the cocktail of great art.
I don't just want to pretend to like someone - I want to be fascinated. I want to be transfixed. I want the idea of that person to be coursing through my veins in the wee hours. I want to fart out redemption and spew freedom from the innards of my soul.
I don't want lip service - I want the words to mean something. I always have.
Dust Trails and Angels
You are players from a life I used to know.
The script evades me and the plot is locked away in a distant room.
I graze through these once lush fields, but the colours have faded.
The grass has cracked and the dirt is now caked mud.
Dead leaves. Dead hearts.
But I have forged my own trail, past the tombstones of your guilt.
I have stayed in the light, even when you peered at me from nearby darkness.
I have stayed the course and no judgmental gaze can take that away.
And I am burning the oil of dusklight with my rusty lamp of wisdom.
Bright sun. Bright minds.
But as the distant voices die and as I move beyond the gazes, I journey on.
I stick where you want to jag and I forge the pathway, gaining no dust.
There is new light coming from the east, and the west will be lost in the ether.
I may leave some innocence and acceptance, but I breathe in the night air - deep.
New angels. New hope.
