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.