Write it down

Your life has meaning because there's a pulse and that means a part of your body attached to the rest of you wants to stay alive. You're not a rock or a meteorite. You may have no idea how you get here, what your trajectory is, or any of it.

But you are alive and no matter what you do, writing it down is what I hope you will do. 

The One With the Clear Update

The headline lies, as it usually does. I opened up this window with the sincere desire to say exactly what was going on. 

But then I forgot what particular thought of mine led me to take such an action.

I wrestle with the idea of relaxing. I am a person who feels relaxed mostly when I am writing something or creating something. 

Tonight I have to go sleep earlier than usual for Lynchburg time because I have to take my father to the hospital to be there at 5:30 a.m. for a surgery. For the past four months or longer I've been a major character in their lives. If this were a play or a sitcom or a movie or a chorus, we would all be players. 

I'm far too tired to write that out at the moment, but I know my own song in this epic is one of trying to figure out what storyline of my own life I'm supposed to follow. 

When I used to sing in a band, I never wanted to write songs. I just wanted to see where the music took me. This has resulted in a lifetime where I know my music but what I create is cacophony to most.

But for the past three months I've not done any recording of music. Or if I have, I've not been able to focus on that. I have to focus on the melodies or cacophonies of my family. Each of us has a story and not everyone wants to hear all of it. Over the years this blog has not had anything really about me and what I've done through. I've become more obscure and distant because I can't put out details into the world. 

I've also spent the last 20 years or so trying to establish my professional reputation. I keep sabotaging it, or threatening to sabotage my work, all through ridiculous deceptions against the self.

The clear update is that I am still me in this time, even while around this who don't seem to go through the life the same way I do. I can't explain myself to everyone. I know that I'm a strange person. 

What does that mean? Am I copping out by deliberately being obscure, or do I just like writing in a way that threads multiple storylines into one? Do I like feeling like anything is possible as long as you plan for it? Do I like that I'm almost 50 and I know there is a reservoir of optimism in me hidden underneath a crust built of years of bitterness?

Who am I?

I don't even know. I just show up to be me every day and hope for the best. 

What makes us who we are?

I'm losing my story, my grasp on my narrative. I spent a long time crafting it and cultivating but it's fading now. It may come back but for a moment this morning I forgot who I was and where I was and it was a little scary. The family situation that is ongoing is rubbing off on me. 

And then I'm in Pennsylvania...

I'm beginning to know my way around and feel like a machine might feel as a map populates in its memory as an actualized thing. I've been here now three times in about 30 months, and I will most certainly be back here in a month. 

Things have changed and they won't change back. I'm at the point in this experience where I realize that the solitude I attained during the pandemic is gone and that is no longer the normal state. 

What is that normal state? Idaho? That's where I see the potato. 

Forgive me, that's a very small bit from an improvisational thing I did back in 1999 when I was not even 25. In many ways I feel like that time is one of those fissures that you could fly a plane in if you got paid enough money to star in that movie.

I'll get back that to rhyme from earlier. I think it's important.

I'm in Pennsylvania at the moment trying to stitch together a new reality from a whole lot of scraps. I have a lot of scraps to put together into something should I have find the energy to make it happen. 

I'm here because my mother has already moved here, and my father is about to move here. This is an epic event in my life, as 43 of my 49 years have involved my parents living in Virginia. That's about to change.

This has resonance for me because much of my self-identity is about their being first generation Americans. They lived most of that time at the same address in the house I grew up in.

That's all gone now. 

This created a challenge of the self for my mother, my father, as well as me. 

And this isn't the time to right it out as my mind wants to get to relaxing for a bit.

Or maybe I shouldn't write any of this stuff publicly. I write to process how to think and I want so much for anyone in the future to know what I thought about things. 

And that includes the music I do. The following snippet is from sometime in the summer of 1998 or 1999 when I was young and I did try to spend some time creating something that deigned to be artistic.  

I kept unfurling. And it's strange to go back and realize that I have so much of me in the past that feels like I made it when I was deranged and disconnected from my professional self. Yet, the professional self would not exist if I hadn't believed in myself to think that me making music was somehow important.

Maybe it is. Maybe this is something I should do. Maybe I can finally begin to believe that's at least something something that would be worth pursuing. After all I will die one day so maybe I should step up from bread crumbs and try to learn how to weave a tapestry. 

Sean Tubbs · Star IS Boring - Sample - One