We are not Alchemists.

The alchemy of the act of creation happens in between synapses.
So subtle, your hands know things your mind will never fathom.
Your thinking brain is only ever playing catch up.


From the outside, it's romantic. A myth arising.
The Creative Genius. The Tortured Artist. The Eccentric Visionary.
Such familiar phantoms.
All drama and intensity; conviction and passionate purpose, flamboyance and elegant outrageousness.

So much caricature.

Because on the inside, creativity isn't always dynamic.

It isn't always pretty. Or cool.
Sometimes it isn't even particularly interesting.
It lives in the quiet places.
And sometimes more resembles sheer doggedness than beatific ingenuity.
That telegenic flurry of inspiring activity you're imagining?
That's a movie montage.


That isn’t to say that sudden, electric flash of inspiration isn't a thing.
It's just not 'The Only Thing'.


Between the seminal flash and the realized creation there is all the work of creating.


And it is work.
It is sweat. It is muscle, blood and bone. It is creative ADHD. It is schizophrenia. It is loneliness. It is resistance. It is doubt. It is losing perspective. It is going too far out. It is not knowing the way back. It is giving up. It is getting back on. It is lumbering through. It is feeling. It is finding. It is doing. It is looking. It is looking again. It is repetitive. It is mundane. It is grunt work strung together, end to end till something larger unfolds...becomes; till something of value is formed.
It is work.


Myth-makers you do us no favours.

Of Broken Things

Beware
the pull.

The strange beauty
of broken things.

The fracture
unthinking
breeds treachery.

The sirens
don't sing
to your health. 

The Shard

It may have happened before.
And maybe it'll happen again.
But every time, like a serial somnambulist shocked to wake up and find yourself teetering on a high-wire, you wonder how the fuck you let it happen. Again.

You let someone get under your skin. Not just that - you went ahead and built them a fucking serviced apartment under there.
And you did it without checking to see if they had further travel plans.
And they moved right in. Stayed; used the facilities.
Why not? There was a heated pool and room service. No need to pick up after themselves.

And then it happened. You woke up on that fucking high wire.

I break it off.
You break it off.
He/she breaks it off.
We break it off.
It doesn't matter.
Point is - it breaks off.

And everything you thought they were/ we were/ it was - is gone.
Your pleasure palace burned to a cinder, razed to the ground.
All That Was/Might Have Been is reduced to rubble - to a hard jagged shard left inside you like a molten splinter to gouge with vicious glee at the soft unguarded heart of you.

In the thick of the aftermath, every breath is blood.
But, the thing is, you've been to this circus before.
And so, you know that fortunately, at some point, the bleeding will stop.
And not so fortunately, all you can do till then is wait.
Wait till breathing is only merely excruciating...and then only painful.
Wait for the wounds to scab over. Wait for the scar tissue to come in. Wait for it all to eventually be just one more unevenly mended rent on the fabric of your existence.

And the irony is that it won't be the pain you'll resent.
It'll be the time - the time it'll take for that scar tissue to form; the time it'll take till you're you again.
When you aren't busy being utterly devastated, you'll find yourself mostly being really annoyed by that inconvenient little nugget of reality.

Because that shard is a voracious, persistent, many pointed little bitch and it won't let go of you easy.

A few weeks in, its bite will have dulled to the degree that you'll stop being constantly braced for impact. You'll manage to go about your day to day business doing a credible enough impression of a functional human adult.
But then, when you least expect it, someone somewhere will drop a word into the conversation - a word as random as Dremel, or as mundane as July. Or you'll see something as banal as AstroTurf, or as ubiquitous as sunlight. And suddenly that little bitch will shift and stick you with renewed vehemence.

Over time, though, that scar tissue will come in right and thick. The Shard will settle in and become a numbness within that remains largely inert. At the most sometimes, in maudlin moments, it might cause you a dull twinge - if you're the sentimental kind.

In time you'll forget it's there.
You'll forget that the numbness hosts a living wound.

And then someday in the future, you'll open your eyes and come to the sick realization that once more somehow, despite all your efforts to the contrary, you've landed on the same fucking high wire you swore you'd never so much as go near, let alone attempt to traverse.

And as the newly implanted remnant is in the process of ripping you a new one, as though that itself weren't punishment enough, every old forgotten shard inside of you will come screaming to life, as sharp and vociferous as the day it was born.

Gleefully, in unison, this syndicate will turn full circles under your skin to make sure to jab you with their pointiest sides. And as the voices in your head start up on their symphony of recriminations, mocking you mercilessly for the dumb fucking impulse that led you to make the same fucking mistake all over again, The Shards will join in to offer a command performance of their greatest hits - 'I Told You So', 'You Should Have Known Better.' & 'How Did You Not See This Coming?' 

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

You left your splinter in me.

I gave you lunch and moral support.
Held your hand when the pain wracked through.
You said it was like barbed wire
scraping your insides raw.
I assumed it was the cancer.
Now I wonder it wasn’t the cocaine shakes.

 Fat lot l know about either.

You took a nap and you took your chance.
The Shins and your mouth.
Wincing the Night Away
and the late afternoon sunlight
streaming in from the sea.

And you left your splinter in me.

Right in the middle by my breast bone.
I guess I'm lucky you weren't aiming for the heart.

I made you coffee after.

Gave you leftovers to feed your body
And books for your soul.
I’d have given you anything.
Easing your emptiness,
that became my Holy Crusade.
Thank God, you'll never know.

And then, a couple of weeks or so later,
when you took me out like trash,
How come you got to keep all I gave you?

And all I got was this splinter.
This phantom shard in the center of my chest.

It’s real for all it’s invisible.
Too insipid to be called painful
too persistent to just ignore.

That's the size of the damage you got done.

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

On Ephiphany and The Blackness of Soot.

The peculiar thing about having an Epiphany is that it usually happens very, very quietly.

There are no early warnings. There is no fanfare - no dramatic sound effects or signature theme music no matter how much the general sitcom supra-conscious may have conditioned you to expect something like that.

Quietly these profundities saunter into rooms where your Experiential Self is on auto-pilot, processing and simultaneously perpetuating the phenomena of living.
Quietly they lurk, surreptitiously trying to catch your eye before they have to slink out again so non-clamorous that sometimes the only way you can tell they were present is by that vague sense of disquiet within that tells you : you missed something important.

Of course, the times they do manage to make themselves known, outwardly, it's such an unremarkable event. The earth does not stop spinning on its axes. Physical laws like gravity and motion are not reversed. Time and space are not invalidated. Nothing has changed. But inside you is a cataclysm; a private earthquake and nothing is precisely quite the same again.

It's as though a word or phrase in the topographical landscape of a conversation or cognition shifts ever so subtly and rearranges itself just so, suddenly giving you access to meaning that is immeasurably beyond the immediate and the mundane; giving you one more piece of  the jigsaw that makes up life as you understand it, changing the way you process the world forever.

The first time I remember being gobsmacked like that was over a handful of soot.
Yes, soot.
Or lamp black - that black stuff that collects on things that have been held over a flame.
I found a coat of it on some object I was in the process of cleaning, I think.
And after the first thoughtless smush of my fingers over the surface, I had an involuntary meditative moment that lasted for maybe 15 minutes and consisted of me mesmerized, just staring at this stuff on my fingers for the entire duration.

It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen - dense and lush and creamy. It was solid and amorphous at the same time. So dark and soft. So deep and intensely black that it consumed light but at the same time so pure it was luminescent.

It was beautiful. It was perfect.
It was devastating.

Because no sooner had my intuitive self recognized the perfection than my experiential self needed to make something of it.

I wanted to crow about it as though it were a new species of rare flora or fauna that I'd discovered; as though somehow by noticing the presence of the sublime within the mundane, I had had a hand in its very creation. I'd been given a one-off pass to the other side to see the beauty of the universe and all I could think of was getting a souvenir for when I went back to the real world just so I could say I'd been there.

To my mind, merely sensing beauty wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow translate the insight into something communicable.
What was the point of perceiving perfection if it couldn't be...disseminated; its properties mined, its attributes applied. What good was it if it couldn't be used.

But nothing that I came up with would fit. For years I tried. I'd revisit the memory and think: What? How?

And it came to me gradually, over the course of years. Through a process of elimination, I realized that there is nothing I can do with or make of the perfect blackness that I had witnessed that would create, in another human being, the same experience or understanding I'd been given in my moment with it. This, I came to realize was the reason I'd been tussling creatively with this concept for more than a decade. I had been trying to share it. I had been trying to make it better, clearer...so I could share it.
And so it came to me, just recently, that by it's very definition, you can not do more to perfection. You can not make it better. It is perfection. It is.

And the gift I has been given was the opportunity to see the perfection...not the perfection itself.

Shut in. Shut out. Shut up.

I'm sitting here 

hating the sound of my phone when it rings

and still 

I'm pushing against the silence 

that's thickening and crusting over in this room,

smothering the furniture and the books and the TV flickering wordlessly.

I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I dont know what I'm doing. 

Ignoring the things that need done, doing things that have no meaning.
Boredom. Lethargy. Exhaustion.

What is this? 

It would be so simple - to walk out into the world.
To engage. 

 

But right now it seems to require a monumental act of will. 

And right now I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I'm letting the lonliness achieve critical mass.

I contain multitudes.

The chief problem in living with the schizophrenia of me is that I never know which avatar is going to be in the driver's seat at any given point.

There's obssessive compulsive mimi, paranoid delusional mimi, chocolate fueled degenerate mimi, endorphin laced earth mother mimi, ass-whuppin' tank grrrl mimi, whingeing wimp mimi, nasty crunchy PMS mimi, weeping willow PMS mimi, super efficient professional powerhouse mimi, temperamental prima donna artist mimi, mother of confusion mimi, super slick rockstar mimi, nobody loves me mimi, couldn't give a fuck mimi, hypersensitive wuss mimi, insensitive bitch mimi, oddball goof mimi, stoic buddha mimi, queen of chaos and melodrama mimi, rational pragmatist mimi, juvenile delinquint mimi, aging singleton mimi, infantile passive aggressive mimi, firebreathing dragon mimi, peace corps pacificst mimi, social butterfly mimi, complete social retard mimi, sanctimonious purist mimi, raving alcoholic mimi...

and on and on and on...and on.

And if you thought listening to these whinging wierdos was a pain in the ass, think about when it's time to buy them shoes!

Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.