brain dump

Post 85 of 90.

I found myself in need of a major brain dump today, and this entails writing longhand in a notebook with a pen. Something about using a pen for this exercise connects you to the physicality of who you are while you simultaneously pour out thought, and I think I filled up about six pages, all various rantings, ravings, and obsessions that have been rumbling about in my mind.

There was a sense of pressure and necessity to this. It was all stuff I cannot tell anybody else without repercussions, and none of it was appropriate for this space. But, I've been doing this exercise for years and found it valuable. It originated in the Artist's Way work I began in earnest in 1995, and which I still revisit today. I must credit the work I did with this in the period immediately following with helping me gather myself together. I had been self-destructing and thrashing about in the dark, like blindly crawling on my hands and knees through a cramped, pitch-black tunnel miles underground, with no promise that I would ever reach the surface again. That was the feeling and flavor of it.

I'm convinced I burned through some major karma in the first 1/3 or so of my life.

I'm tempted now and then to gather up all of these notebooks and burn them. I rarely go back and read them, and I would pity anybody who would take it upon themselves to wade through the up-chucked sewage of my mind.

If I did build a bonfire and burn all of them, I'm not sure whether it would be a loss, a liberation, some combination, or something else entirely.

I don't feel the same way about the recorded artifacts I've made over the years. I am occasionally shocked by moments of musical insight or invention when I go back and listen. Some little idea I threw down onto tape over ten years may have been beyond my ability to develop a little further at that time, but now I would know what to do with it. And my ear has improved so that I could actually figure out what I was doing!

I'm still listening to the Sun Music recording from Shimmies & Strings 2 a lot.