Cracking open a Word document and deciding to write about writing after not doing so for over five years [huffs] is like chasing a half decade on the couch with a 5K on New Year’s Day [puffs].
I used to write a lot. Too much, really. That was the problem. My early twenties is a weird fugue state of cranking out a third album review of the week at 2 a.m. and phone interviews with musicians in bizarre circumstances (asking Sleigh Bells about the pressures of the sophomore album next to a zebra enclosure at the zoo, querying Rob Zombie on the balancing act of albums and films on a rain-slicked park bench in Lindsborg, Kansas).
And that was fun, until it wasn’t.
Your mind corrupts into a content machine really fast. I wouldn’t so much savor albums as I would abduct them for a slapdash probing before ejecting the liner notes out into the woods before the sun rose. By 2015, I was past a little burnt out. I was a marshmallow that fell off the stick and congealed into an charred clot on the side of a embered log.
So, I stopped.
That was hard, because supporting the music I loved by writing about it felt like my form of community service (*cough* ten cents a word *cough*). Quitting writing felt like quitting on the artists I cared about.
But a role at Norman Music Festival helped alleviate that guilt. So, too, did ramping up on illustration and design work. I might not be covering a show, but at least I could book them with a touring artist they admired or put together a poster for the gig. And that’s what I’ve done ever since.
But, if I’m being honest (and, I think, a reasonable degree of selfish), I’ve rarely let myself be the center of things, not in writing, only occasionally with art … and never all of myself at once. Less of an itch than a chafe, what I do and how I do it and how it’s all informed have been sitting slightly at odds, like a Jenga tower with the pieces all jostled and poked.
I’m ready to let the boundaries between my illustration and art styles blur, to embrace writing again and reawaken my voice. I’ve got a couple of resolutions this year, but the most abstract (read: admittedly pretentious) of which is to be more prismatic, taking in all the disparate notes and strokes and serifs that light me up and beaming out something new of my own creation out the other end.
I think that’s important, especially over the past two years, where at my best I’ve felt like a dulledpane of glass and, at my worst, a brick wall for my inspirations and desires to thud against.
It’s not only celebrating all the facets of my creativity but all the myriad of influences that have informed it. I’ve been cute but rarely simultaneously dark. Hip and current, but not also funny. I love music, but also standup. Cultural criticism and breezy storytelling. Aliens and hip-hop and cartoons and death and basketball and apocalypse and post-punk and bright colors and the desert and halftones and grief.
So I’m going to use this little digital acreage to grow something new every week. No strict format in mind. Beyond intersecting my own art with my own words, I can see everything from essays like this to fiction to poetry to other abstract versions of written word popping up … maybe even revisiting pop culture writing through a more personal lens
It’s a little daunting and clumsy starting out, but it helps that I feel more like a proper creator and less of a curator of my happiest accidents. I’m sure I’ll cringe at what feel like my greatest successes here this year in another five, but maybe a thankfulness will follow, the same that I look back at my first concert posters and earliest reviews with. Which is what this is about, beginning a trip into new terrain that I’ve needed to start for a long time.
Plus, the first mile of a run is the hardest, and mine is already done.
DISPATCH ONE INPUTS
What I’m listening to: Turnstile’s Glow On, Spirit of the Beehive’s Entertainment, Death, Money’s “Down4ever,”The Smile’s “You Will Never Work in Television Again”
What I’m watching: Station Eleven, Blade Runner, And Just Like That
What I’m reading: Clarice Tudor’s cartoons, Adam Soto’s This Weightless World
