Dear Summer, it’s Autumn now. The nights are upon us early. Leaves fall from the trees. Nature prepares for a fresh beginning. Sheds yet another layer of skin preparing for growth.
The past year’s been a strange time. I don’t know. I’ve been realising every year seems to be a strange time, every day, every moment. Stop and think every now and then about the bizarreness of it all. The things that must’ve happened for me to end up right here right now. It’s quite wonderful really, isn’t it? Awesome in the true sense of the word. Then there’s the fact that none of what we do will really ever affect anything on a sizeable scale. And isn’t that wonderful too? No matter how much we fuck up or make mistakes it’s not the end of the world. And I’m not saying that is an excuse to make mistakes, moreso if you have seriously messed up you can still get up and go again. Brush the dirt off your knees and carry on walking. Forge a new path through life.
I go, where they never can
I float, I don't ever land
I’ve been really getting into Lonesome Dove recently. Started it before my trip to Italy but only reading it on-and-off, it’s a long one to get through. A real voyage. You learn so much about this cast of characters and the bleak background they’re set against. I’m only a fraction of the way through and I’ve already been on a journey getting to know them all.
I find it especially interesting seeing what everyone wants from life in the story. They’re stuck in this barren hellhole of a town which none of them seem to particularly like, and they all ended up there for vastly different reasons, now with vastly different ambitions and goals and all acting by different codes for life.
When it's dark, you don't know where you goin'
Need a light bearer to lead you home
We go through life subscribing to a lot of other people’s beliefs and values. Instilled into us by family, friends, teachers, other guiding figures. Because there isn’t a handbook for life, telling you which way to go and what’s the best decision to make. You just gotta do, take the plunge into the next pool with no idea where the bottom or the far shore may be. We have religion, laws, codes of ethics all trying to quantify what you should be like. What’s ‘good’ and what isn’t put into words. How you should feel about certain situations, how you should react. All defined.
The problem lies in that the world isn’t like that. It doesn’t draw a line down the middle and between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We do things and feel conflicted. Did we choose the right decision, did we not? Did we do what we were supposed to do?
Always looking for that something to guide the way. Reassure that it’s all going to be okay, that the path chosen was the right one. That mistakes weren’t made. But mistakes - in the idea often perpetuated that ‘mistakes’ are the less effective options - are made all the time and that’s just an inevitability of life. We don’t live on a straight path. Realising and accepting new ideas and truths is just something we have to get used to doing.
A small example of this is on here, Substack, for instance. The idea I could supplement my writing with live music, studio recordings, photos, videos, poetry and excerpts from books or songs. That was such a freeing moment for me. I’d never considered this or more unorthodox approaches to writing or structuring. I didn’t even realise my art had been in chains. And I don’t know how it comes off in my pieces, whether people reading listen to the music or watch the videos, but I feel it adds to the writing. I see it like sampling. Utilising other’s art to express more of me. And I guess that’s why I write. To express me. I feel so full of everything and I want to let it out, capture it on the page or the screen. Share it. The joys and the burdens. I treat these pieces like experiences of me, a moment or series of moments captured. Like a snow-globe where snowflakes of emotion and feeling perpetually fall. I began writing when I was younger writing stories. Fantasy stories, detective stories, spy stories, you name it. I began last year to write fantasy tales again, reigniting my love for writing. Now I find myself writing whatever these are - just the words in my head no matter what form they come in.
And I feel they can be quite fractured. I don’t really focus on structure when I’m writing them, I just write whatever comes to my mind whenever it happens to. I’ve just written the second paragraph of this piece, almost everything between that and here was written yesterday. Thoughts are fractured though. Or mine are at least. Trains of thought crisscross like my mind is the London Underground, stopping off and hopping to different lines, going back to revisit past stops or just stopping and starting up again somewhere else.
Sitting in the back of a parked car wine-drunk at half four in the morning waiting for my uber, the two of us sheltering from the nighttime downpour. I got my foot stuck under the seat, she laughed. We hugged in the falling rain, she went inside and I got my uber home.
Lying at home listening to HIGHJACK by A$AP Rocky. Still more than tipsy. Lying in bed after a warm shower staring at my skylight listening to Graduation. You just remember some moments don’t you. They just stick with you. Idk I just have those moments I realise some shit. I’ll figure it out in time. And that’s alright.
(I came to you with love)
Akin to Dish walking into the Dry Bean and finding Jake Spoon at a table with Lorie. It doesn’t have to be about love or women or whatever he was thinking about. But you have those instances, or I do at least. Moments I realise things have changed. For me personally. A lot more uplifting than Dish’s but that feeling of a wave of realisation hitting. Catch myself thinking about or reacting to a situation in a whole new way. Realising I’ve come so far from where I used to be. Where I used to be is barely even in the wingmirrors no more now I’ve made up so much distance.
It was as if lightning had struck, burning his old notions to a crisp in one instant. Nothing was going to be as he had imagined it - maybe nothing ever would again.
It’s not that everything does change in an instant quite so, for me at least. But that’s the moment I realise. Looking over my shoulder afterwards I can see how these changes have come to be. In hindsight. But in that singular moment I feel it like a splash of cold water on my face in the morning, the rising sun shining through the bathroom window above the sink. Realise it’s yet another new beginning, finding spring in the summertime. You can find your spring wherever, whenever. Find rebirth constantly, in anything and everything. Start again at will. Change direction countless times. And it’s important not to rush the autumn either. Or the winter. There’s times they’re maybe not so pretty, not as fun as the summer, refreshing as the spring. But they’re necessary. Leaves can’t grow from where dead branches hang limp. You can’t change direction if you persist on sticking to the same path. Following the signs set by judgements oh so long ago. Take time to turn around properly. There’s times for us all where we follow a fork in the road which leads us to something we wish we hadn’t found. Mistakes you’d call them. But there’s nothing stopping anyone from leaving that path and going off into the undergrowth in search of another. Or retracing their steps and going down the other road in the fork. It’s not our mistakes ofttimes that show our character, but how we react to them.
Put a foot wrong
Played the wrong note
The wrong chord
Wholly wrong tune
In my eyes at least
But it was still to my rhythm
The bars I felt were to come next
Steps I felt were natural
At that time
Now I’d play a different song
Different melody
Different riff
Go a different path
Re-tuned my instrument
Restrung the guitar
Playing in a whole different key now
I wasn’t playing the wrong song
Now is just the time for a new one
Making up the setlist as I go
Laying the tracks in front of the train
Steam belching from the engine
Right behind me
Set course for one destination
Winds blew me off course
They say shortcuts make long delays
But life does that anyway
If you find yourself on a broken road
Forsake it
You’re not giving up by changing direction
Paying a toll to leave beats staying
As it becomes ever more fractured
The paving stones ever more crumbled
Beginning to stumble as you go
Trippin’ and fallin’
Even if you a wise man
You can’t always be right
So turn around
Find another path
Follow your heart
Not the crowd
Take a different train
A different track
Set course for a different destination
Play a different tune
Hell, a different instrument
Just go the way you feel
Even if that means turning around
The only thing I had to do was get my heart out
The greatest blessing in the world is the fact you let me get my art out
Absolutely in love with the way you combine so much art and media into these posts of yours---without detracting from the gift that is your writing itself. Loved this.