I have been a failure more times than I can count, and more times than anyone else could call me names. I’ve started up so many projects that just fell to the side because something else got in the way. Gabriel Morton once said it’s like a bee in your bonnet, you get another bee and you just tear off on it again. That’s creativity.
I was once going to build a carbon fiber violin while I was a junior in high school. Got pretty far in until my engineering friend graduated. Then I was left with some pretty cool pieces of something I didn’t know how to finish. The parts still scatter around my room.
There was a point where I got the idea to melt down a bunch of brass bullet casings to smith something out of them. I was going to make a forge to achieve this. It didn’t get past the planning phase.
Every poem, almost, can be labelled a failure. Every one. Not just mine.
I think it’s inherent in art to fail at the ultimates of human expression. To that end, I personally think that music is the most powerful art for its ability to project into the listener. Lesser, but close following, are music videos. Mostly because with music you can glean your own interpretation from it.
Interpretations are what makes humanity what it is, you know? It’d be a pretty fucking dull rock if everyone looked at everything the same, like an entire world of fascists.
Without difference of opinons, there wouldn’t be art.
Radio Reality city was created with the idea of knowing what’s mine isn’t yours:
Reality and truth and fact, verisimilitude, simulacrum, all that good stuff. It’s different from person to person.
You can read words the wrong way, and in fact it happens all the time. Take a look outside your window, or look at the television in your living room. There’s something wrong, in your eyes. You can find it, and latch onto it, and yearn for something different. It’s not what you want.
It makes me wonder if musicians have ever listened to something they’ve made and thought it was awful, some way down the line after a year or so has passed.
Does anyone really care about these nearly poetic musings of mine? Probably not. See, I’ve already thought this journal was awful!
Anyways! It’s summer in washington, like I haven’t mentioned that already. I think the rain is what moves me to make in this state. The sun doesn’t do much for me anymore. Not like it ever did, but now it’s somewhat clear to me that it’s always raining in Radio Reality City. Fantastic.
What this means is that the summer depression comes in the form of stillness on the presses. I’m journalling here a lot more, but the ink in my pen doesn’t often taste the flesh of paper these days. It’s really annoying.
I absolutely killed it with my poem about last Friday, and I’m still banking ideas to move in on. So it’s not really a stillness as much as it’s a defensive stance. More often than not, I’m entirely aggressive when I get down to writing.
When I did break the rust and pen “Inferno In Stillness”, I had on one screen Virgo Olympus, and on the other I had Murmur. As well as various wordy websites like thesaurus.com and rhymezone.com. Both inexpendable resources.
As such, I unfortunately do not have an excerpt prepared for this journal. Which is fine.
I can keep being autobiographical still since this is a journal and not just a soapbox or an interrogation confessional. My weekend never really ended. I housesat and worked, I recontacted someone that’s been on my mind for a very long time and ended up making something healthy out of it, I was invited to a party at 10:30 PM on a Monday night where there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t do because I had work the next morning. Still had a good time with that.
Had another date, drove a lot again, got a picture of a great sunset, got yelled at by a member where I work, and reminisced a lot. Still have to get my car checked out tomorrow, too.
I’d love to write about myself and my life, but I don’t know what good that would do at all.
It doesn’t really inflate my ego more than it already is. And I also DO NOT want to become one of those insufferable fucking blogger types where I document every detail of what’s going on. Life is also a little too complex to get it down in a word count. Autobiographies are a failure in that respect. Failure to really capture the human experience.
These journals always take me to weird philisophically places, which is why they mostly end with something meant to inspire the reader. But honestly, is this going to be my legacy? Hell no. I’m not letting it stop here. But I do hope to one day get these journals to a place where they are helpful for everybody else.
Here’s a start: I’m inspired lately by nostalgia. Summer depression (not actually a depression this time, that’s just its name) brings those old blood thoughts and just old thoughts in general out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my last summer and who it was with, the places we went. Camping, too. Went camping last summer in the Yakima Valley and in Cle Elum, by Cooper Lake. Both fantastic places, both with some pretty potent memories.
I remember for “Photographer Two” I was kyaking into the middle of Cooper Lake to get a picture of whatever mountain is at the north end. It was incredible, if for a split second. Those split second moments make life what it is. (Here’s the stupid fucking philisophical part of this again).
There’s a lot of tension in life. A lot of heartache. A lot of bad shit that never goes away and hangs over your head. Nothing will ever actually be perfect, but there are times where that droplet of absolute perfection spills from the sky and you can taste it in your skin. You can feel it when it happens. That’s what it’s all about.
I don’t live to pay for gas, tuition, or scrap for a job. I don’t live to please others. I don’t live to listen to music. I live to win, when those droplets pour down and those perfect storms of tension end in the best damn hurricanes ever made. That’s life.
And when you come out of the storm, washed away and adrift on an unfamiliar sea, you see clouds in the distance and you paddle that way to get carried away again. It’s hard, there’s no oars to row with, and it’s a struggle every mile of the way. But when you get to that hurricane again, it’s the most fun fucking thing you can experience.
My business makes me catch those moments when they pass by and I find myself idly sitting on my raft again. It’s all about split seconds.
Poetry. I’m still in the middle of a storm right now, so perhaps it’s not a summer depression as much as it’s my annual hurricane because I haven’t had an opportunity to sit and write yet.
From the end of May and Abstergo Invictus I paddled into Friday the 14th, and was carried away by a storm to a place that was familiar, completely blowing away all my expectations of the hurricane. So this is Jake Thomas Shaw from Storm 2017, hello Radio Reality City.
So I’m inspired by nostalgia. Split seconds that have already passed are a bit more attractive since I’ve had a lot of time to appreciate them, and today I’m thinking about Storm 2016. Maybe I’ll actually write something in a moment.
I hope any of this has been useful and doesn’t just pop up as an unexpected wall of text in your email inbox.
If so, I’m a failure one more time!
Consume Reality! 