Summer nights and long warm days
Are stolen as the old moon falls
And my mirror shows another face
Another place to hide it all
Another place to hide it all

And I’m lost, behind
The words I’ll never find
And I’m left behind
As seasons roll on by

It has been way too long since I’ve posted. I’ve been creating. I’ve been creating a lot. Drawing, writing, making music. But it’s in those ADHD-driven bursts of hyperfocus. Inspiration comes in strange waves over the summer and it’s hard to schedule for it.

Do you ever put something off that you want to do because you’re afraid when you’re about to do it that it won’t turn out exactly as you wanted so you avoid the disappointment by keeping it in the realm of potentiality as a “goal” rather than an action? Yeah, me neither.

I’ll block out time (from 4 to 5 I’ll animate), but do I know if I’m going to feel like doing that between 4 and 5? What if 4 comes and I’m not feeling it? Or what if 4 comes and I make the thing and it’s not what I envisioned? Or what it it is what I envisioned and then what? Then it’s done? Now what?

There are simple answers to all of these questions and none of them are worth spinning in place over. And yet…

…together they create a traffic jam in my psyche. Two hours later and I’m doomscrolling Instagram writing snarky comments under the Kennedy Center’s announcement that they’re running a Leni Riefenstahl film festival. But I digress.

Then there’s the question of when to share. When do I share what I’ve created? When is it ready? I’ll make a drawing and wonder if I should animate it, add music, make it part of something else. Meanwhile I start something else.

So I have a bunch of projects in various states of _incompletion.

For now, I made this video. It’s one of my favorite songs ever written. It’s called “Seasons” by Soundgarden front man, the late Chris Cornell. I bloody love this song and have been transfixed by it since I first heard it on the Singles soundtrack in the early 90s. I’ve always wanted to learn to play it and add it to my repertoire, but it’s in this odd tuning (F5? FFCCCF)… it’s hard enough for me to keep my guitar in tune when it’s in standard. So the thought of retuning just to play one song and then tuning back always produced a barrier (I’m looking at you “The Rain Song”)…

Meanwhile, earlier this summer I purchased an “smart” guitar to lay down MIDI tracks for soundscapes to add to my animations that I’m trying to learn to make. A cool feature of this guitar is that since it’s MIDI, the options for tunings (and timbres) is limitless. For instance, I’ve long wanted to get a baritone guitar. Now I can emulate one with this.

So I tuned the guitar to F5 (actually, I went a step down to E5) and this is my first attempt.

If I should be short on words
And long on things to say
Could you crawl into my world
And take me worlds away

More to come.