woodshed triage

in

The past several weeks, maybe past several months – at least since LAST CHRISTMAS – have found me in something of a creative restlessness, or perhaps the start of a midlife crisis (though I'm reticent to call it that, having been through a quarter-life one and well and truly fucked things up then) but more likely than not the starting line of a new creative epoch / era / whateveryouwanttocallit, an occurence about which I am both well and truly terrified and intrigued.

Which is where I should be with it.

To triage it, my symptoms presenting are:

  • An urge to burn down all creative processes and start from scratch: check.

  • A frustration of having something to say but finding present abilities and normal rhythmic paths to be not up to the task. Check.

  • A desire to refocus on fundmentals and pare everything back to the bare minimum. Check.

To dismiss the reality of life in my trenches is folly: I'm now possessed of a surplus of brainspace that I've never had before – my mother, a source of endless exhaustion and self-loathing and anxiety and trauma, is dead; I no longer have to do a fuck-tonne of math to stay alive – H.E.R.B.I.E. the insulin pump is handling that; Elon has bought and ruined Twitter and with it shattered the hallucination that putting enough coins in the slot machines of ambient attention would help me break through the noise and/or my station in the middle of fuckall nowhere to find station in the middle of fuckall somewhere – and I’m learning what to do with it, the brainspace. All I do know is that part of that calculus needs to be a refocusing on fundamentals and what truly matters to me (or figuring out what, after 20 years in the trenches of myself, that is, exactly).

There's a fourth symptom that needs to be noted here: an increased revisiting of Amanda Petrusich's 2017 New Yorker article about Sonny Rollins's woodshedding period and his time on the bridge, particularly this passage, where Rollins spoke his woodshedding-in-public period:

“Usually, I don’t pay too much attention to the trains—I’m usually absorbed in what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m sure subconsciously I change what I’m playing to blend with the sound of the train,” he admitted. “It all has its effect.” He also spoke about solitude—what it offered him. “Eventually I want to communicate, but it might take being alone to communicate.”

Check.

Treatment? TBD.