My whole life, I’ve found it very hard to passively enjoy most anything artistic. Enjoy in the sense that somehow I don’t interpret it as some divine calling to me to create. To just appreciate without movement. There has been a very small sliver of things over the years, usually ones that are truly unique or special in a way to me personally, that really stick. And even then, they bear some weight of an albatross.
For me, there is some innate desire to create that over takes everything. Getting older, loosing the once crippling dependency on substance, hasn’t changed this. I think it’s actually strengthened my need for creative escapism.
It makes it hard to listen to an album. Harder even to read a novel to completion. Sometimes even finish a good movie. There was a time it was even hard to play computer games without rushing to start coding my own.
Listening to a good song, reading good prose, makes me god damn instantly run and start to write my own thoughts. It’s incurable. I have reams and reams of songs and poems and stories started from this. While I am thankful that I have that drive, it can be so lonely and isolating. It’s not something I talk about much, but there is a lot of sadness that comes from the way I am. Although I guess it probably comes across in whatever things I make public, some emo trappings always at the ready. But any other way of behaving feels so alien and dishonest to me that trying to swallow it and acquiesce feels so fake and disrobing that I instantly retreat.
The best relaxing diversions for me have always been the most simple and mindless. But with the perpetual motion of health, age, paranoia and all the other demons on the road, simplicity starts to seem like the enemy.
Currently, I am working hard on my novel, about 25k real words in. For the first time ever, I feel like I truly have something here. Train of consequence and all that, a real story, characters, conflict. Not a collection of hazy vignettes, or pages of aimless exposition. Hopefully.
These thoughts even are mostly quiet. I am attempting to follow the write every day mantra, and when I need to reflect on the novel, I’m going to attempt to chronicle things here. No idea how it will go long term. Most thoughts will likely end up in notes that end up in stasis. But this is a first step, I suppose, on getting some of this working externally. Suppose?