We travelled to visit a friend in California a few weeks ago, and it took an unusual length of time since then to return my mind to the kind of centeredness, the degree of focus, to which I am accustomed. Surely many things may have contributed to this wobbling: I’m a lot older than I used to be and my brain and body are thus much less elastic, so the jet lag was more profound, and the long airport delays did not help, and the shenanigans we got up to while there were wonderful but also exhausting, and so forth. But I have felt a kind of slackening for while now, the sense that something is off, a surreality upon waking where dream flotsam circles my head for a long time, a chopped sleep rhythm that often never seems to get to dream in the first place… some bafflingly intense, though not necessarily unpleasant, thoughts… an exhaustion that pervades mind as much as body. I feel healthy enough, just slightly to one side of my self, and it is starting to bug me.
As I try to figure out what is causing this condition, I wonder, once again, if a lack of space for creative work in my life is the culprit. And not just creative work; though I would like to devote much more time to music than I am able, I do manage to play with others in rehearsal and on stage somewhat regularly. Rather, what I am missing is what I am doing this moment, writing, arranging my thoughts to specific effect, working out mental muscles that atrophy without use. And reading as well–I read and write plenty at one of my jobs, but what I am able to read is typically very narrow for months at a time, and certainly what I write is largely email, reports, the grease that keeps organizational wheels turning. So: I must pledge to find more time to write creatively, songs and poems and stories and things whose genre emerges with the telling. Maybe starting here is a good idea, no one reads blogs anymore, so I needn’t worry that I am boring anyone as I wander around my head, looking for structures to repair and destroy. Let’s see if I can keep it up–as I started this post, with pen on paper, I put it down for a day and promptly got some nasty respiratory virus. I am back now, and ready to try. This is the first of a series, then, committed to the digital ether on November 11, 2025.