Dear Internauts,
I don't drink coffee. It's not any kind of moral stand or anything. Just never got the taste for it. Sometimes I like the smell. I also kinda like the smell of wood smoke from a bonfire, though I also find it unlikely I'd drink anything that flavor.
Thus, my usual cafe drink is some form of iced tea, often mixed with lemonade. More calories than coffee and less caffeine (apparently, tea has more caffeine before brewing but loses much of it by the time it reaches maximum drinkability). In the winter, I will sometimes get a chai tea latte, but it's usually too thick to feel refreshing. Thanks, probably, to my dad, I'll have iced drinks throughout the year, no matter the weather. One of the strange minor adjustments the few times I've been to europe is that restaurants tended to use less ice in their drinks, many thinking Americans quite odd for our abundance of cubes. Most of the time, ice is used to make sure you get less actual drink with your cup, but such habits are tough to crack.
All this to say, I don't really go to cafes for the liquid refreshment so much as for the destination. Sure, being around a bunch of strangers in a sometimes noisy, sometimes crowded, sometimes hectic environment (though never as bad as, say, the mall or supermarket) can play the fiddle with my nerves, the point is really to be out at all. Leaving my bedroom helps me wake up, but leaving the house entirely is sometimes necessary for forcing my creativity into gear. This too may be a matter of habit formed from practice. Sometimes, thankfully, it can be as simple as taking a walk around the block or a short drive for some thoughts to rearrange inside my mind. Other times, I could travel to the moon and back and still be stuck on a single line.
Sometimes I wonder if my mental illness is truly a symptom of sickness or simply another habit. The further time flies from the inciting trauma, the more it seems like my inability to function at my preferred level is no longer a direct reaction to said trauma but rather a learned pattern of behavior based around the shape in which my brain settled via an evolving set of maladaptive coping mechanisms.
It's like a wagon with one slightly off-balance wheel. Sometimes bumped it the wrong way, busting it too much to run as well but not enough to break it down entirely. Every day the wagon goes up and down the same dirt road, digging in a gradual trench along the wheels' usual tracks. Before too long, the trench begins to direct the path of the wagon more than the wagon shapes the trench. The trench pulls the slightly off-balance wheel deeper into its learned pattern, a little more off each day. Eventually, the trench forces the wheel too far away from the rest. Maybe the wagon gets stuck or maybe the wheel breaks off entirely. Either way, the current damage, while set in motion by an original bump, has been so exacerbated by this trench of repetition, that it could be said the dirt road did far more damage than the bump.
Then again, maybe it wasn't the most solidly built wagon to begin with.
I decided to spend August diving back into songwriting at a more steady pace than I have been so far this summer. It's frustrating how easily I've fallen out of practice with some simple things, needing to rebuild the callouses on my fingers and the old wordsmithing patterns in my head.
On the topic of inspiration, I find myself agreeing with some words I've heard from comedians. The overwhelming glut of socio-political mayhem of the day, which itself was so utterly unexpected in its extent, was to some extent expected to be an outpouring source of material. Instead of being a drinking fountain, though, its like being caught in the garbage disposal. Circling the drain as furious tides pull all sense of straightforward thinking toward an uproarious demise.
Since many of my songs' subject matter is gleaned from social consciousness, from my reactions as an observer of the world and its shifting tides, the large majority of lyrical material I've crafter (or simply expelled) has the delicacy of a scene from South Park, but without any of the wit, humor, or creative experience. The songs with which most folks seem to connect—and often those with which I still feel most connected and eager to continue performing—are those which emphasize more my position as a human in this world versus my position as some distant watcher picking topics off a list.
In his songwriting class, Rick Elias told us many times that the best songs were far more personal, that trying to write a song encompassing the entirety of some archetypal Ur-concept like "man's inhumanity to man" in three and a half minutes was a futile gesture in mediocrity. He didn't say it exactly like that. The idea is essentially that a song isn't meant to be a wikipedia entry. Granted, I took this for me as not writing a song titled "Racism" and trying to capture every side and aspect and historical context with two versus, a chorus, and a bridge, but for many it could also mean that writing a love song about how it feels to be in love has simply been DONE. TO. DEATH. Whether it be Shakespeare or Swift, it's pretty easy to make a worse imitation of something popular than it is to make something unique.
But it doesn't have to be.
Creative folks often have this weird habit of forgetting that originality and a unique perspective are already things we possess. No one else can live your life for you. No one else has walked in your shoes or seen the world through your eyes. Even attempting to walk in someone else's shoes or see the world through their eyes will fail to capture their true human experience while succeeding in revealing something new about yours. Opening ourselves up to new experiences and to other points of view can broaden our compassion and connection with others, as well as our sense of complex selfhood.
This is what great art can do. If it comes from an honest place within the creator, then those who experience it will not only experience something of that place as visitors but a news lens through which to visit the depths of themselves. Thus why collaborative creation can be so astoundingly powerful. A performer can bring their own hopes, fears, doubts, and desires into a piece of music or theatre or poetry or dance which originally came from someone else's experiences of hope, fear, doubt, and desire.
Or, if you're a solo act like myself, each new performance is filtered through the shades and hues of every bit of life I've lived since first writing the song. And it's always great to see what producers or instrumentalists can make with their great talent out of original songs when it comes time to record. There is, of course, more of that on the way. ;)
Thank you for reading,
Odist
P.S. - some suggested great art I've gotten to experience in the past month or so:
Books:
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
Death (collection) by Neil Gaiman
The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas
Fullmetal Alchemist (series) by Hiromu Arakawa
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (series) by Amy Reeder, Brandon Montclare, Natacha Bustos
Movies:
Three Identical Strangers dir. Tim Wardle
Won't You Be My Neighbor dir. Morgan Neville
On Chesil Beach dir. Dominic Cooke
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot dir. Gus Van Sant
Blindspotting dir. Carlos Lopez Estrada
Sorry to Bother You dir. Boots Riley
Mission Impossible: Fallout dir. Christopher McQuarrie
Eighth Grade dir. Bo Burnham
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