Pondering: can the day's (creative) work be considered honest only when you combine the discipline of showing up with the willingness to set aside the perceived expectations of yourself and the imaginary audience and follow – without thought of gain or productivity or any other artificial metric – the path of your inspiration even if, at day’s end, it led you down a (temporarily) unusable path? Leaning towards probably…

Lesson being to be unafraid to throw out everything you thought you knew about the thing you were working on to find the better way through no matter how much you like what youve written as the beginning at the beginning because the beginning you wrote as and at is rarely the beginning with which you finish.

tracks

The sameness of my days keeps me sane until I think about it: the perpetual repetition, the same thing day in and out. Remembering something from ZEN MIND, BEGINNER'S MIND about not looking down at the track: summers tend to open up too much time to look down.

Maybe it's that I'm jamming everything that I consider to be forward motion (writing) into a single morning chunk – basically 0445 to 0745, which I do love: not only is it the closest I can get to working at night but the knowledge that this is all I get tends to cultivate deeper focus – and the surplus of time outside of that – shock of shocks, I do want to spend time with my wife for the three months she's a.) not drowning in the needs of seventy-five representatives of the future and b.) I don't have to worry about her being shot for doing so. But she's on her break, which is necessary for her – even if I don't do well with breaks.

Also: this could be a symptom of withdrawal from social media – as much as I love Mastodon and the Fediverse and what it means and what it stands for, it's still social media – and the perception that it, social media, was part of the forward motion, my only option for opportunity in this backwoods hell. It wasn't and isn't: the only thing that moves me forward is doing The Work and sharing it here or in the NL but I'll cut myself some slack (my therapist would be proud): when you've spent the last decade and a half hooked on an addictive substance like social media, coming off of it and finding clarity in the space the release allows will take some time. It took me eleven tries to quit smoking, after all.

Head up, walk the track. Don't look down.

hours and roles

For too long, I realize (only) now, I've hacked and slashed my day and my life into the artifice of hours and of roles – writer, husband, dog-dad, collector, grandson, son-in-law, (I gave up on being a son long ago), caretaker, family member, etc etc – and it's done me no good: everything, every inhabitation of each, felt like a performance done by a husk waiting – desiring, only – to be swept away to the next inhabitation, the next gig, in the hopes that one of them might feel like the real me.

Reality is that they are all me and that I am all of them and more, simultaneously: there can be no separation, no selective inhabitation between them; to pretend otherwise is to live an illusion, life as a half-hearted performance on a splintered stage to polite golf claps and patronizing pats on the head.