Chime.

Here we are. It's another day. The sun's out, or it isn't. The birds are singing, or they aren't. You're filled with a sense of existential dread that you're masking a little more than usual.

Or you aren't.

I love the idea of a New Year's party. We have people from all across the world and all walks of life cheering our little planet on as it makes another turn around the sun. I like that thought, all of us shouting encouragement at the Earth as it books it for the celestial finish line. I like even more that the race starts over again but we're still cheering until someone hits someone else or throws up in public.

Or maybe I don't. I'm not sure yet.

New Year's celebrations are beautiful in the darkest way; for a few minutes we completely embrace the passage of time, hoot and holler as the clock winds down, the numbers go up, and we get a little older. We celebrate our own mortality, raise drinks to our locked drift through the days, and make our own peace with the end of it all. New journeys start as old adventures finish.

You know what the greatest part is? We all watch a clock and count down the last seconds of the last minute of the final hour of the final day, pushing the time along into another year, a greater number, closer to greater and more final endings...and we start it with a kiss.

The first word most people speak every year is 'happy.' Tell me that isn't beautiful.

Drip.

Starting the day off with five moderately good shots of espresso and French jazz because Edith Piaf is one of the greatest things to happen to music and caffeine is one of the greatest things to happen to me.

After a brief voyage into strange and terrible places, I am back and radiating glory. The only real regret I have over the last couple days is that I didn't write a fucking word, and shame on me for that. There's poetry even in a massive depressive episode, dammit, and I'm going to catch it and pin it down next time 'round.

New songs are happening. Words are starting to gather around me like hungry pigeons, waiting to shit on me or peck my eyes out or maybe just eat my bread and fly away. That analogy may have escaped me but I'm still pretty fond of it.

Uh. So Christmas. I've written bitchy, miserable, misanthropic pieces about how Christmas is secretly a dark time of introspection and no one's actually happy. Younger me thought that I had stumbled on to some dark secret that maybe a few were privy to, or that maybe I was just IN TUNE enough to understand the Human Condition while everyone else lied to themselves. Christ, I was an egomaniacal little shit back in those days. This year, I've got Plans. I'm hosting an Island of Misfit Toys christmas involving myself, whoever wants to show up, multiple bottles of whiskey, and Die Hard. I've never seen Die Hard and dammit, this is as good an excuse as any.

The espresso's long since worn off. Time is getting lazy on me. This is good.

Tremble.

There's a lot that I could nitpick about my appearance; the fact that I'm making a real effort to go completely bald by 30 (my hairline is running like hell for the back of my skull at a speed that make Usain Bolt blink once or twice) or the fact that my gut hangs heavy and, were I a woman, I'd be getting asked when I was due by mongrel vultures on the street. I suppose I lucked out in the face department -- I've got a pretty handsome face -- and my teeth, apart from coffee-stains and one chip, are nice and solid. None of that much bothers me; I'm working to lose the gut, I keep my teeth in order and will eventually get the chipped one capped, and I look pretty good with a shaved head.

I hate my hands, though.

They're boxy things, wide and solid. They're thick hands, neither rough with work or soft. The fingers are a tiny bit short for the size of the paw, but they're not the squat little sausages of so many fat people. They're stupid hands, fumbling over themselves, but stupid hands can be trained.

They shake, though. They always have a tremor, for as far back as I can remember. I think I saw a doctor about it once when I was very, very young. The doctor told me to cut back on caffeine; the result was that I was miserable and I still shook, and shook a little more because I was angry and didn't have my favorite dopamine hit on hand. My hands shake like bastards, and everyone notices. Sometimes the tremor spreads up to the arms, through the chest. Sometimes I swear it sneaks up my spinal column and sends my brain to shaking. But my hands always shake.

I work on harmonicas, and harmonicas have a large number of small parts that need to be modified in tiny, delicate ways to improve. This requires dexterify and grace and a steady hand. I have killed many harmonicas because my thick, stupid, shaking hands have snapped a reed. I've learned when to drop my tools, or how to move slowly enough and microsopically enough that I can change what I need -- very slowly and very carefully.

Not too carefully, though. They shake worse when I try to steady them

I like card tricks. Learning card tricks, though, sends me to hell fury. I can't pull them off. My hands shake too badly.

Sometimes I'm tempted to break them, snap the fingers all in one go like a bundle of dry sticks just to teach them a lesson, just to show them that I hate them for how much they shake. They deserve it, these trembling coward's hands of mine.

If it's a brain tumor it's taking its sweet time in killing me.

Weird observation: My right hand is dominant, my left is more dexterous. I'm also right-handed but left-eyed. I think getting dropped as a child may have had some unusual effect on me.

Scribble.

I'm not a writer and don't have any plans to be, writer here signifying someone who spends the majority of their day writing and gets paid (hopefully well enough to survive) for that writing. I like doing the creative thing - I'm taking the next as-long-as-humanly-possible to be a musician, and I enjoy writing. The idea of sitting down and bashing out stories isn't something that I think I could do in the same way that I could sit down and work on music. I don't know that I've got that many stories in me to begin with.

All that aside, I'm writing. I'm writing here, I'm putting down lyrics. If a turn of phrase tickles me, I jot it down. I'm hoarding linguistic twists now, and I've gone analog with a lot of it.

I wandered into what used to be called a five and dime and is now a 'cheap probably poisonous shit from China emporium' and grabbed a few memo pads, the little fuckers with the spiral on the top, fifty small pages. Started keeping it on my desk next to me at work, in my pocket when I'm wandering around. I put it on the edge of my desk next to my bed to jot down stray thoughts as I'm trying hard to sleep and failing.

You know something? It's working. Bastards were right.

Listening to Weird Shit

Another studio night, and this is going to be one of the last for the Echo Charlie EP. Still reeling from putting the old band to bed, and no one feels good about it. Dave couldn't give less of a fuck if he'd bothered to keep one. Myles may actually try to tear my throat out with his teeth. Oh well, it'll make for a good last show.

Working on new piece, learning a bunch of covers. Reading again; I finished the Welcome to Night Vale Book last week and just finished Freakangels yesterday. I've cracked open The Maltese Falcon, and started on Worm, which I've been told from somewhere on the Internet is really excellent and I'm a bastard for having not read it already. If I can hack out song lyrics, I might actually try my hand at some fiction again. Who knows, we might see a Christmas miracle and I finish a piece.

All of this is just to keep the words sloshing around in my head. Get as many weird ideas and sounds in there as I can and let 'em all out in a controlled stream of glorious brain piss. Or something like that.

Hellfire. Music's difficult. Forcing new and exciting sounds out of my harmonicas for the first time in years, and that's also indicative that I made the right call in leaving the band. I certainly didn't mean for everyone to follow suit so quickly; I figured that they might as well record and play without me, and I just wanted the time to do my own thing. Apparently I don't get to do that, and it's all or nothing. HEre we are. And now I'm starting to experiment again, to (cautiously, but consistently) stretch my musical neck out just a little bit further and see where I can take things. New positions, and understanding what those positions actually indicate. Bashing away on guitars, stapling chords together like an arts and crafts class gone terribly wrong just to see what kind of sounds I can get. It's like I'm aware of what I'm doing now; old music theory ideas that made my eyes gloss over are starting, ever so slowly, to make a little bit of sense.

And, like the gym, which I have been skipping, it's got to be a consistent thing. Just like writing, if I can drop a few words here and there and bash out a few notes and various noises, I'll eventually wind up with something usable. Right? Law of Really Fucking Big Numbers.

Right.

Oh, and I've started smoking again. Don't you look at me like that, I never said I was quitting. I said that I was going on a hiatus, and a hiatus was what I went on. I may go on another just to spite you all.

Murder.

I've never killed anything before.

That's a lie, actually. Lots of insects, huge number of them. I fucking hate anything with more than four appendages and will wage all-out war with all the wrath and fury behind me that I can muster. The second thing I've killed was a stray lizard that somehow made its way into my room. I tried to catch the thing and, I guess, accidentally brained it. Poor little fucker was dead before I realized I'd cornered it, and I still feel bad for it.

Those are different. That lizard was an accident. Insects don't count as life forms. So let's rephrase that. I've never intentionally killed anything before, until last night.

I'd say that it was a mercy killing, and I genuinely believe that. I can certainly say that it was premeditated, because I held off on blowing the brains out of the fucker the night before. That's what it boiled down to. Months and months of worrying, of lost sleep, of time and effort put in trying to keep moving, to be okay with the way things were, hoping to Jesus that one day I could just accept it.

I got rip roaringly drunk and worked myself into a king-hell panic over nothing at all on Saturday. I put away an irresponsible amount of liquor and was grateful when my body decided to drop in several milliliters of pure adrenaline to top it off. And I went to bed thinking that I'd either commit murder or commit suicide, and either way it couldn't happen soon enough.

My gun hand was trembling. I thought about the years we had together, the memories. The things we've built, the lives we've changed. I thought about throwing away an entire life to build a new one in a strange town, just for the sake of this. I remembered our most beautiful moments together, the fights we had, the making up. The dinners. The late nights. The trips. The fun. The road. The music.

I remembered all the love I've ever had for so many people.

And then I put a bullet in between its eyes.

At the end of the day, I was the one holding the gun. It was my call to make. I made the right one.

Habits

Of course I relapsed, because that's what you do when you're stopping something you've done every day for eight years. You do it again. So, another patch on this morning, carrying on like nothing happened. I'm not Quitting. This is a Hiatus, and I can start smoking again any time I want to. I just don't want to yet, despite what my Lizard Brain might be screaming at me.

Creating is a weird thing. For the longest time I couldn't imagine creating collaboratively; the words that were falling out of my head were my words from my head. Even playing music wasn't a collaborative creation, per se. My first band played jazz covers, and Mylo Ranger had all the songs written by Myles. I found parts to play, notes to sing. My part, my notes. His song.

Echo Charlie is nothing like that. Very rarely does it pass that one of us has a completed piece that we take and run with. The act of sculpting and shaping, molding odd sounds and stray chords into something playable, something that sounds good, is now exclusively a communal thing. The idea is brought fourth but three pairs of hands shape it, adding here or tearing away there. In some cases, the idea is created, tested, and then re-done entirely. It's bizarre and it's fantastic. It's immensely helpful --I can write in prose until my fingers fall off (see the rest of the blog for evidence) but writing in lyric has always thrown me for a loop. It's a block of my own doing that I become so obsessed with the fact that I have to make something metered that rhymes that writing about something becomes daunting. With a little bit of the responsibility shared among the three of us, the pressure lessens and the ideas start trickling through.

I'm still not very good at songwriting, or at least writing a lot of songs regularly. Come to think of it, I've never written regularly at all. I almost let this entry slip, but the nagging junkie-howls in the back of my mind telling me that I should be sucking down a Pall Mall like the world is ending acts as a nice little alarm clock.

Buying a double shot of pitch-black Cuban coffee and smacking a keyboard until ideas fall out might be my favorite addiction treatment yet. On a side note, nicotine patches are irritating as all hell. They  itch, and they itch persistently. Evil little things.

I miss being near woods. I miss my small town where I could go explore an abandoned building or walk train tracks until I didn't recognize anything. Even in Pensacola I could wander around my little park. Delray feels wrong. Too false, too constructed. I'd like to be able to take a walk to somewhere that didn't lead me to another office park. My thoughts keep drifting back to cold woods, quiet and still buzzing with life. I'm thinking of Roswell, of Asheville, of the kind of South that keeps calling me back.

I think we're obsessed with the idea of change, my generation. The idea that things need to change but they can't, or that if we change this or that we'll wind up happy. We're all troubleshooting our own lives - at least, some of us are. I know too many people who bemoan the state of things and then never modify a moment of their days. It breaks my heart how many of the people I went to middle school with are still in that rickety little crater of a town, still saying to this day that they'll get out soon, that they'll come to Florida or move out west, go see the world.

So many of them never left the state. I hope they all see an ocean.

I'm not brooding, here. On the contrary, I'm thrilled with just about everything. The caffeine is working wonders and the clicking of my (completely sub-par) keyboard is keeping my thoughts off R.J. Reynold's demon-whispers. Hockey game right after work, then locking down for some good reading. Mylo Ranger has a show on Saturday, and it's a little upsetting that I can't bring myself to be excited about it anymore. I get so much more thrilled hacking away at new things, new sounds.

Kicking old habits is simple; just replace them with new ones.

New Echoes

Old ghosts haunting dusty rooms.

The last time I threw any words at this page Obama hadn't yet been re-elected. I still thought that I was a journalist, and I fueled this by telling everyone that I was a freelance journalist, which is a nice little bit of bullshit for "I have a blog I shit my thoughts out on." Of course, the election came and went, I discovered that there were other writers than Hunter S. Thompson, and four interesting years of life came and went. Moments of joy and misery happened, new and strange and exciting things cut through the mundane, I switched careers more than a handful of times, and I wound up a better man than I was when I still wrote about politics.

Here we are again, four years later. I'm writing this because I've gone on a Smoking Hiatus, and I need something to do with my hands at my mostly uneventful office job. I'm writing this because writing is a habit I'm picking up again like eating healthier and going to the gym and practicing my instruments and not just fucking around. I'm writing this because once upon a time, I turned out to be pretty good at that, and I intend to do a fair bit of writing in the big uncertain future.

I'm writing this here because I know that not a fucking soul is going to read it, and that means I get to say whatever the hell I want.

Of course, that's not entirely true. It's the Internet, and god knows if someone's going to stumble across my stockpile of stray thoughts. I know that. Performing is in my blood, and at the end of the day I still want an audience. Let me entertain you with my worldly views and creative ways of swearing.

So the Nicotine Hiatus. The thing about working an uneventful desk job is that you ultimately wind up getting paid to fuck around; now, the organization and nature of that fucking-around time is the challenge. For the most part I've spent that non-time watching British sitcoms on YouTube and wishing I could either be playing music or have the ability to write a fucking song for a change. Being on a company's dime and plowing through Father Ted sounds pretty good, and it is at first, but the human capacity for boredom knows absolutely no bounds. You all know me, and you know that I need at least some level of panic in my life to function.

I'm not going to claim that I have great ideas lying in wait, ready to spring on you like meth'd-up jungle cats. I don't have a damn thing rattling around in my head right now, and that's okay. Reading Warren Ellis's newsletter and website (morning.computer and yes you'll thank me later) got me caught up in words again. I finished the Welcome to Night Vale book last night and I couldn't for the life of me remember the last time I'd felt that satisfied by consuming content. TV shows don't do it for me, and Lord knows that staring at Reddit is just another fuck-around sinkhole.

So here I am, and theoretically so are you. Words are going to happen, and none of them may mean anything. Maybe some of them turn out to be pretty good; I can only hope.

Let's talk about the now, though. I've joined up/co-founded a new band with the explicit intention of making that band my career for as long as possible. That means no more mostly uneventful desk job. It will also mean no permanent address, no guarantee of stability. It means that I'm going to wake up in strange places with my bandmates and go to other strange places. When we're not playing for people, we'll be practicing, writing, re-tooling, or figuring out how to play for new people or more people. It's a long time coming; I've been with Mylo Ranger for the better part of four years and it's high time that I do something I seem to love this much full-time. It's a lunatic idea, and it might turn out to be the best thing I've ever done.

You're going to hear about it, whoever you might be.

So much has happened over four years. I've forgotten most of it. Those lost thoughts and memories come for me at night, right when I'm fooled into thinking that I might get some rest. Ambushed by rogue memories, long dead remembrances coming back for another embrace or another swing at me.

On the to-do list: go be somewhere pretty outside. Take the walk home slow, and pay attention. And stop fucking thinking about smoking, you're putting rose-colored glasses over your tarred up lungs, you junkie shit.