Finding An Entrance

Well...here I am.  It's a week from 5 months since my last post, and about 4 and a half months since I first began my current journal (which is now a bit less than half-filled).  I've met a ton of people, and gotten to know many friends I already had a little or a lot more.  I've discovered dozens of artists and albums I couldn't now do without, and I've learned an incredible amount about music from using my ears, creating, and the occasional video or read.

Despite all this I'm still here finding my fingers clumsily exploring the electronic keyboard nearby, repetitive in my examinations and hardly knowing what I did when I do find something worth keeping.  I have half a year of school piled on top of the oncoming senior year.  I won't be able to make music on the computer for likely another couple of weeks, although the new, much better computer my brother and I have been working toward for months is finally almost built.  I still find myself reluctantly dragging to bed far later than is wise, and I still wake up either completely exhausted or limp and dull from an overindulgent rest.

And I feel an urge to write in my fingertips.  Words flow so free and easy when I find something worth setting my mind loose on, but would that I could unravel schoolwork with such ease.

Spindrift by Biosphere on the headphones.

What am I missing?

Lately I've been learning a few things, or rather, things have been settling and forming solid pictures in my mind.  I'm learning that although people might have good intentions, and their advice is good to someone, it's not always good to me.  I'm learning that not everyone's anger, disrespect, dismissal is justified; I'm not always wrong.  Of course, I'm not always right either.  I suppose the lines between the two are growing clearer is all.  And that demands some action, some standing up for myself, some willingness to remove myself from the influence of certain places.

But it all has to be replaced by something stronger and healthier and better or I'm back to my own devices, and I'm not everything I need.  Far from it.

I understand music and God and the world a bit more, but also less.  I'm tired of everyone's advice that feels like bags of rocks I have to carry.  I'm sick of opinions.  The past couple of weeks have been a storm; Robin Williams, ISIS, Israel and Gaza, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the riots in Ferguson.  Who's right?  How much does my opinion matter?  Am I entitled to not voice my opinion?  I don't feel like I am, with the way others shout their opinions, their convictions, with such anger and volume that I, the teenager far removed from all of this, feel personally attacked for not saying something or agreeing with them or them or...

EVERYONE SHUT UP.

I don't have anything to give to you.  Leave me alone.

I'm sorry if I sound selfish, but I have too many things clouding my mind to let political heat and misguided advice make things worse.  Go away.  I don't wanna hear any of it.

It's about time I built a soundproof room in my mind to escape to in times like these.  I need a break from all this noise.

So, back to where I started...what now?  How do I solve the little mess I've made for myself?  It's a tangled mess that I don't know how to solve, and all my attempts at music, schoolwork, sleep just leave me tripping over my own feet in an attempt to even be adequate.  How do you untangle a knot?  How do you break down a seemingly impenetrable mass?

Find a hole, a loose thread, a door that still opens.  Start there.

So what's my door?

Maybe this is it, right here.  This freeform solidifying of thought that moves as fast as my fingers can type.

Is it really that simple?



Why not?

I'm beginning to realize that the key to almost everything, at least when it comes to my particular approach, is a steady flow.

Music isn't an indecipherable mass; it's a weave with strings.  But the strings have to start and end somewhere, flow through in a particular way, be a certain color, a certain strength.  Every string has to be set up correctly, and it can change, but it has to be treated as its own little rivulet, or single-cell organism among many others.  The information's made of start-and-stop, rise, diminish, filter, gate, sidechain, pan, fade; but in reality, it's much more than that.  It's a sound-creature, playing with other sound-creatures, or waves of noise flowing in and out among the rest.  Music can be truly a world of its own where each instrument is not merely noise, nor is it an animal like anything we can understand.  It is a gust of wind, a flow of water, a tremble in the earth, a twisting and gliding beam of light.  It is sound, and although it's just moving air, it has a life that can be directed, controlled, subdued and twisted, or egged on and let loose like a wild animal.  Structure, rhythm, tempo, key are all systems to keep them lined up in beautiful rows, and they can cooperate or fight.  But music behaves best when we let it find its wings as we work.

Heh...went a bit off on that.  Whoops.

Where was I...steady flow, yes.  It applies to a lot of things.  Life, thought, writing, schoolwork, music-making, sports, cooking...pretty much anything.  It's all about getting it down.

You've just got to find an entry point where you can get the wheels turning, especially if you're out of touch.  Maybe that's why small goals work so well; it keeps our momentum between start and finish.


Anyway...all of that oddity and rambling to say, I'm trying to get a handle on how to do things.  It's going okay.  The world's been too much for me lately and I've had to care less about the noise and the unhelpful words in order to get the ball rolling.  I feel so close.  Very soon, I know I'll break through.

Till then I'll be poking around for an open door.  It's around here somewhere.

Broken Music

I can't remember the last time I made a blog post on here.  I do remember that they always end up being pretty introspective and kind of depressing, but...maybe that's what this space is for.  I dunno.

Moving on.

I've been on a kick of emotionally-intense music for a while now.  I never understood why people liked music like this, until things started getting bad.  Then I realized that maybe it's a sort of attempt at shocking yourself awake with emotions, like taking an injection of brutal humanity straight into the bloodstream to wake your heart when it's feeling dead.

Whether it's through a poet screaming about God, at God, about himself, at himself; piano music that sounds like it's been run through a wood-chipper of electronic processes to shatter it into something that some might consider more noise than music; the dark, aggressive words of a band of the lost; or electronic beats, gentle backdrops, and everything in between that hold traits only 50% in common with the music most people like, there is something about music that is different that is powerful to a wounded soul.

In my case it might also be an attempt to somehow counteract the heavy dreams I sometimes have, the dark nights where I'm gasping for someone to acknowledge my existence, the long hours added up from every single time I wake up, dragging myself out of bed at a time so far from "morning" that my sleep cycle would fit better somewhere in west Asia, and who knows what else that screws with my head already.  As if the double negative of broken music and a broken life will somehow equal normality and I could start again from zero.

There was a picture I saw that represented depression in a simple graphic: a small white cube, falling through a gradient running from gray to black, and when the darkness seems complete the bottom drops out and you're falling from the top of the gray sky again.  It's like a disc that keeps skipping, playing the same bit of a song over and over and over again, and each time the end of the loop is more unbearable, and the start of it is more empty.  Sometimes it's a mercy just to be able to cry.

Anyway...I do way too much of this sort of self-pitying rambling these days so I'd better stop.

I just hope things start making sense soon, and the world has color again.

But I am deaf to all their threats.
I am silent before them as one who cannot speak.
I choose to hear nothing,
and I make no reply.
For I am waiting for you, O Lord.

You must answer for me, O Lord my God.

I prayed, "Don't let my enemies gloat over me

or rejoice at my downfall."

I am on the verge of collapse,

facing constant pain.

But I confess my sins;

I am deeply sorry for what I have done.

Do not abandon me, O Lord.

Do not stand at a distance, my God.

Come quickly to help me,

O Lord my savior.

(Taken from Psalm 38.)