Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Broken Wheel


In the immortal words of the mighty Snoop Dogg Lion, "Guess who's back in the mutha####in' HEYOUSE!"  I figure five years is an adequate hiatus from putting pen to parchment.  Time to knock off the dust, settle in, buckle up, and drop phat subjects and predicates.

The reason for the absence is impossible to explain.  It started out as one thing then became another thing and ended as a different thing.  A melange of life experiences.  But through the process I lost the drive to write.  I forgot about the blissful catharsis that writing can bring.  I tried reinventing in different ways.  I tried my hand at art, beginning with watercolor and fizzling with acrylics.  I tried music, but my chronic instrument ADHD got in the way of much progress with anything. Coincidentally, if anyone is in the market for a guitarist, bassist, ukeist, banjoist, mandolinist, pianist, or harmonickest for a I/IV/V band that only plays in C and never strays from that pocket then I'm your guy.  But eventually I came to the inevitable conclusion that writing is the standalone way for me to clear my emotional mechanism.  

So many years have passed that I'm confident this blog is forgotten and lost beneath the dust.  Are blogs even a thing anymore?  But this is good.  One of my many reasons for the pause was the fear of putting my thoughts on a page.  Somehow it gives them life.  It makes them real.  In my head I can mull things around, work and churn them, then toss them aside with no one being the wiser.  But as soon as they are documented then they become real and thus harder to confront.  A troll is easy to ignore if it's in my imagination.  Less so if it's given life, standing in front of me swinging a tree stump at my face.

But I'm beginning to think the troll needs to be fought.  

There is an old Italian proverb, "l'aqua chieta rovina i ponti."  Translation, "still water ruins bridges."  The idea is that the surface of the water may be still and calm, suggesting there is no danger, but below the surface there is corrosion, sediment, and various ecological processes that are literally destroying that bridge from below.  I am exploring the concept that idle thoughts unwritten can destroy the mind.  At least if I grant them life I can confront them.  

And so we begin.  Back in the saddle.  Standing.