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.