On the plus side however, I have finally pulled my electric guitar out of hibernation. Part of my inspiration came from this odd fellow, Ronald Jenkees, who seems like a kind of young Harry Carey-muppet hybrid, the sort of character whose eyes are attached to his glasses and not his actual face. Check out the video clip to the right and turn up your speakers to be amazed. He has a bunch of other clips on youtube as well. I have to admit to being inspired not only by his talent but his apparent guileless love of music. So last night, I plugged in the blue beauty and tinkered around with a piece I had worked on a while ago similar to this, even jamming along with this tune for a bit. It was a blast and the stress totally melted from my body, evidenced by the hours that went by in minutes--the ultimate indication of a good time.
I'm hoping the culmination of all this hard work will result in a creative liberation, though it's difficult to say which direction it will go. I anticipate the release of an enormous weight from the difficult trials of Colorado, something I have described to friends as "finally starting life in Boulder". Obviously, money is a factor in this but there's also a larger picture of events and people that are swirled in there. I certainly have regrets in regards to my reactions to hardships and part of me is a bit fearful of a bitter backlash at the time lost struggling to regain my metaphorical footing. As a generally optimistic person however, I think that will be outweighed by all the new opportunities the coming months present.
I'm hoping to reignite a lot of projects "on hold", some for several years now: my highpoints, my music, more writing for fun and not money, a second book, pursuing the open road. It's funny how our brains store so much yet the roads to those thoughts are often abandoned, to me looking like a literal broken road, with cracked strokes of weed-lined injuries. Neglected long enough, those roads will simply cease to exist and the only back to those archives of memory are alternate paths--or triggers that remind us how to get there.
Listening to the aforementioned youtube song made my fingers tingle with the long-lost joy of playing guitar late into the night. I'm amazed at how hard our brains get as we get older-- partially from getting pushed into survival mode, partially from aiming our pursuits at different goals. But we still have those old inspirations somewhere. Here's a slightly fitting example:
Behold the Xonox double-ender game "Spike's Peak" and "Ghost Manor". I had vague recollections of Spike's Peak, heck I even wrote a lousy review for it on Gamefaqs.com though to be honest, I couldn't remember if I played it on my Atari 2600 or my neighbor's Commodore 64. It wasn't until a chain of events earlier this week brought to mind how I knew the game. For some reason, my co-workers and I got into a spirited discussion about classic Atari games, which led me to look up E.T. and a few others on youtube. One of the games I wanted to check out was Haunted House--and on the links to the right was one for a game called Ghost Manor. It seemed faintly familiar and when I clicked on it, a whole gaming experience I had forgotten came back to me. A little more research brought me to the Xonox double-ender game, packaged with Spike's Peak. I can't for the life of me remember holding or owning the cartridge but I clearly remember playing through both games in my childhood (Mom? Dad? You guys remember this game lying around?) In my defense, I couldn't have been older than 7 or 8 when I played it but it's frankly amazing that my brain had a familiarity with Ghost Manor after all these years. Like hearing an old song, the experience was new and yet oddly comfortable.
The bigger picture of course is that many of my old ambitions are thawing as the next month of hard work opens new doors for Spring. A fitting rebirth of desire and yet, a sorrowful acknowledgement of time lost because as we all know, you don't get any more time in life. You have what you have, no other way around it. As Rollins puts it, "There's no such thing as spare time, you either do something or you don't."
So now is the time for hard work and long nights but much like Spike climbing his namesake Peak (while dodging polar bears and eagles) the summit is near. (As an avid hiker/climber, I know that the true end of the hike is back at the start but in this case, the Spike's Peak metaphor works because the game ends when you reach the top). Maybe not many updates for a while, but the spring should be just awesome.
