Stuff I miss

Tonight I’m a little bit into my thoughts of nostalgia. I miss listening to music on the back porch in the summertime. I miss smoking cigars by the firepit and listening to old R&B songs. I miss good whiskey and making love in the silvery light of nightfall. I miss drinking coffee on the road, driving back from a new adventure.

I put a lot of these things into stories because I feel like they carry enough weight to deserve being immortalized.

I broke my promise to myself tonight and I had a few drinks. It’s an empty promise. When you are alone it means nothing. It’s a moot point. In five years it won’t matter to me. In fifty it won’t matter to anyone. All that matters is that I used every moment that I had to its fullest and I didn’t waste any of it.

I wrote a new podcast yesterday about procrastination, but I don’t know if I’m going to produce it. Maybe I’ll do that another time. Right now I’m enjoying the silence and listening to good music. I can’t believe had fast the last year has flown past.

A year ago, I was licking my wounds after giving up on a romance that wasn’t meant to be. I went dark on Facebook and other social media. I hunkered down and worked orn my book. My heart was truly and irreparably broken. I fell in love with my best friend at the time and it wasn’t meant to be. She’s happy now. Someone else is taking care of her. He doesn’t know her the way that I did, but that’s okay too. Nobody knows me that way anymore either. Since then I’ve grown. You can’t step in the same river twice. Either you or the river is different.

Lately a wonderful song has come to high-rotation on my playlist. Weird Goodbyes by the National (feat. Bon Iver).

I don’t regret the love that wasn’t meant to be. I only regret the time I spent on trying to get through it. But it was just the latest in a lot of wounds I hadn’t been letting heal.

I don’t miss her anymore.

I don’t fucking even know her. Maybe I never did.

I do miss times when I smoked cigars and visited with my son. He would tell me about a sitcom he wanted to make. We would laugh. He is a beautiful soul. When he makes it out, I want to sit down and visit with him again. We’ll catch up. We will tell funny stories and listen to music together. There won’t be any way to keep us apart. He’s a good man.

I’m the good luck charm. The one everyone falls in love with before finding their true love. And my name is never heard from their lips again. Even though I was the man who woke them up. It’s better that way. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone deserves their person. If I helped them find them, then God bless them.

I had a dream in Ireland about my first girlfriend calling me. I could hear her voice just as it was back then. I woke up with happy tears. It was good staying in touch.

I’m going to bed now. Be kind to yourself. I miss those old versions of myself. This new guy, I’m just getting to know him. He seems okay.

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New Podcast is up: Drafting and Editing

Tonight I posted a new podcast episode.

I was really stretching myself thin when I recorded it and ironically enough, I didn’t really edit the script much before I produced it. I can’t help but wonder if I’m just not super boring and listening to my podcast is the cure for insomnia we all need, but don’t deserve. You be the judge. Here’s my link:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2079202/11916283

I hope you enjoy the show!

–Clint

A little night music

It’s midnight and the house is still and quiet. All of my friends have gone to bed for a few hours now. I was going to edit, but I know how my brain gets this late at night with something like that, so instead I have been listening to music. Tonight it has been Alice In Chains, specifically their Unplugged album. Brother, Down in a Hole, Nutshell…it’s a smooth as the whiskey I wish I had right now. But I don’t.

There’s nothing in my glass tonight to cloud my thoughts or mask my feelings. Stark, like dancing shadows cast on the wall by candlelight.

There are just some nights like this where the world is so silent. I’m not even drifting through an evening of melancholy. I’m just here in my place, listening to the harmony of Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley. I’m sure if I could plot it on a graph, I would see that this time of year is rife with Alice in Chains listening. I don’t know what it is about November. The change of the seasons, the creeping darkness that takes over just a little bit more each passing day, or the emptiness that surrounds this month like a scratchy blanket.

The music keeps the night at bay. It’s like the warmth of a glowing fireplace, the sound of crackling wood popping and hissing in the flames.

Today I produced a new episode of my podcast. None of my posts sold on the platform I write for. There’s always next week to build more potential sales. But I am hoping to get away from that. Making the podcasts is a lot more fun, fulfilling. A friend suggested I add some intro and outro music to boost production value. I have been holding off on that because royalty free music is more than I can afford. Then I remembered that twenty five years ago, I was in a band and we made a demo. I still have most of the songs on my computer, and hell…might as well dust them off and let them see the light of day for a change.

In doing so, I had to watch some tutorials on GarageBand, which is what I use to record the tracks. For being a piece of software that comes with the computer, it’s not bad. I don’t think I had wittingly played any of these songs in years. They might have come up in my shuffle from time to time, and I would probably skip them if I was paying attention. Just like a lot of things, I only hear the mistakes. I only hear how green and unpolished my playing was. And sometimes I remember the end of that time and the friendships that faded. But we all made something together, and at the time, we had fun doing it.

I had to choose between a couple of the songs. Just about any of them would have worked, and fading in and then ending the show with one was a nice touch. I guess you just have to use your resources and do what you can and sometimes you are pleased with the result. Each day I record something new, I learn something I didn’t know before, and I get to add that to my skillset. It’s genuine growth and accomplishment that I can measure. Sometimes it’s a nice diversion from editing, which I’m having a problem with lately. Mostly because I am being forced to look at my mistakes, and can quantify my growth as a writer from even a year or two ago with the novel, but also because there is no promise or monetary reward. My conditioning–like a lot of us–has been to give value only to things with a payoff. We shuffle off to our jobs every day, and we are rewarded with money that sustains us just well enough to keep us coming back to our jobs.

When you take on a project like writing a book, or making a podcast without any promise of a paycheck, it’s hard to keep yourself motivated. You have only yourself driving the process and a lot of the time you wonder what the point of any of it really is. That fear that creeps up just out of your periferal vision can be real sometimes. You can feel it breathing down the back of your neck. Hot, stale breath. Putrid. It’s the smell of a mass grave where so many dreams have gone to die.

Yet, if you listen to a beautiful song, or read poetry, someone else took that path, just like you are trying to do. They made it to the other side and they gave a gift to the world. That gift gets to fill your heart when the empiness would otherwise allow it to collapse. It’s moments I think about that which push the fear back into the shadows. A bright light that warms my bones and lets me keep going. Understanding that this work is as important as anything I could do pushing papers from one side of my desk to the other for someone else. Likely much more important.

It’s hard sometimes to remember that. Especially late at night when the bills are due and I have responsibilities the Muse doesn’t concern herself with. Anyway, not a lot of people will get what I’m saying. It probably makes no sense. The only reason it does to me is because I lived the other way for so long, and it did nothing for me. It started to break my spirit down until I could hardly do anything unless it was assigned by some kind of boss or schedule.

You can water plants and they might grow, but without sunshine, they will never bloom.

I fight myself everyday to do the work, and once I’m in it, I absolutely love it. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take time, with a lot of quiet evenings wishing I had a drink in my hand to counteract the demons of fear with the spiritis of oblivion. It’s going to take the rattle of my fingers on the keyboard, the scratch of my pen on the page. Reading silently, reading outloud, and hammering away at it until it is ready.

Or something to that effect.

Tonight’s podcast is about getting out of your own way. I wish it could have been longer, but I’m out of free minutes for the month. More will come in December. In the meantime, I’m going to script out some new episodes, record them, and post as they are produced.