Actually Finishing

I got my first warning this morning from Beeminder - ‘You’re in the red! BARE MIN of +1 to be on the red line’.

To be honest, I expected this a lot sooner. I didn’t think I’d be on month five of the project and escape the red for so long.

I have plenty to argue in my defence. January is the second hardest month of the year for me, work is ramping up, finally got my ADHD/Autism report document back, etc. But a deal’s a deal, and I need to hold up my end of the bargain.

Immediately my impulse was to just take the hit. It’s $5, I’ve got enough reasons to justify my failure to myself, and I can just take the hit and carry on. Needless to say, that impulse didn’t last very long.

Then it shifted to the impulse to just write anything. With the absence of analytics, I can’t tell if anyone’s really reading this or not but my money is not, so it’s not like I have any real social pressure here. I could post lorem ipsum for 500 words and technically call it a day. But I would know, and that’s enough for me.

That then invites the question of the sliding scale; where on the line is good enough? How much effort is required to satisfy my internal approval?

Well, first it has to be actually relevant to the previously set rules of the project. For example, writing around the pressure of deadlines…

Secondly, I actually have to write them. No copy paste, no recycling of previous posts, no end of the season clip show. Sit down at my MacBook during my conveniently timed team meeting on Teams, and put fingers to keyboards.

Because this is the whole point of the project. This is the aspect of my hobby pursuits that I historically struggle; I set the goal, and then make excuses for my failure to stick to it. So if I have the deadline of 14 hours from now and can write x amount of words about struggling to meet the deadline, do it.

It’s good enough. Not perfect, not even A grade. Good enough.

Fortunately, I do have some snippets I’ve been keeping for a rainy day. Just a couple of verses I’ve been working on. No, this doesn’t count as a clip show. Yes, I’m comfortable with that.

This one came about around half 11 at night, silently playing guitar and being transported 20 years ago to practicing before bed.

Slipping in space All of my as one Running the same race But we’ve already won Hands collide With the sounds inside Times up The song is done

It still feels hollow. The problem I think is I’m trying to put words to feelings I’m struggling to describe. This is one that needs a lot more work but I’m keen for it to turn into a song.

There’s a world out there And it’s terrifying Everybody laid out bare And it’s freeing No shadows to hide in No silence to shield your words Light fills needles Straight to the vein

This one was on a short trip down memory lane, thinking about how the internet was versus now. I’m getting more and more anxious as time goes on about how almost unbearably bright it is, and not only is there almost nowhere to hide but no-one seems to want to anymore, which is both amazing and terrifying.

Of course, the hypocrisy isn’t lost on me. I shove that needle in just as much as anyone, and I still want more.

Writing on the internet isn’t a new experience for me. I’ve had Bear blogs, Wordpress blogs, think I’ve had one or two Blogspots in the past. Most of those though were by me, for me, with no-one else working on them or editing them. All except for one.

I don’t remember the site name, we’re talking easily ten years ago now, but I do remember what it was. A review site I got introduced to through a friend, who also wrote for it. Every month I’d get a handful of DVDs - movies, TV shows, even WWE once or twice. There was no word limit, just a style guide and a deadline for each one. Some of it was fairly average, including an Alan Moore thing I barely remember except for a line or two. Some of it was really really good, and some of it was really, really bad. That‘s the bit that sticks with me the most.

There’s a scene in the Sorkin drama Newsroom where the guy who runs the digital news desk came back from being on the run after feeling the state to protect a source to find everything he’d worked for trashed by some dude who’d rather fill it with badly written listicles like ‘the most overrated movies of all time’ and fill it with the Matrix and Avatar. It’s great scene; Neal dresses him down thoroughly and calmly, before leading the way forward. Peak Sorkin, I watch it probably once a month on YouTube.

And then I realised I was that dude, and I relished in it. When I got the chance to write a bad review, I went full steam into it. There was one in particular, some little indie movie that I hated every second off. Typical British late night BBC3 style crap geared towards a certain crowd. I think I spent three or four hours making sure I could be as savage as I could be. It was the only that ever got heavily edited before it went live.

I don’t necessarily regret writing a bad review, and I wasn’t consistently as savage. There were movies that were just boring - I didn’t particularly enjoy Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty for example, except for the last scene with Sean Penn. I also made a point to not just judge it on the movie. I’d look up what trivia I could find, any interviews, background on the cast and director etc.

What I do regret was being bad at it. I gave into tired edginess and let it sway me into just being downright terrible. I was a CinemaSins loving, mid-20s cynical sarcastic git, and I was more than happy to let that shine on the page while I ripped apart someone else’s work. What’s worse, I proud to do so.

As I write my reviews here, it’s something I’m trying to bear in mind. Smart Notes in particular was tough. Like I said in my opening sentence, I was all geared up to be harsh, which is fine if it’s deserved but not if I’m just doing it to feel good. It took me a good while to write, and few edits and proofreads to check over, just to make sure I was being fair and balanced and not giving into my worst impulses. Interestingly, I also ended up scoring it higher as a result, and was left wondering how many of my earlier scores could have benefitted from the same treatment. Would I have been so direct and brutal? Could I not have found something?

I’ve learned a lot from writing bad reviews badly, and hopefully I keep that lesson in the front of my mind.

I wasn’t going to share this for two reasons. First, I don’t feel like it’s anywhere close to done. It’s not even a v1.0 in my mind, it needs a fair amount of work. Including on a title.

But more importantly, I’m not overly convinced I hit what I was trying to say. More on that later though, because both are irrelevant. I have a post quota to hit, and I need to get in the habit of sharing and not hiding, so here we are.

More and more I find I Spend my days Inventing ways To go back to when I had More to say. Before my days were copy/paste, Blankly staring into space On a screen, avoiding my dreams. Where I had passion running through my veins Before I voluntarily put on the chains of Responsibility. Spending my days Arguing over addresses and names, Filling out forms to fill out more. Select/copy/paste. Select/copy/paste. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Nine to five, Mon to Fri, So I can live without feeling alive. It wasn’t always so, But that was a lifetime ago And yet. And yet. A man can dream.

It started as a lot of my work does in the past. I feel a feeling, I get a snippet, and that snippet sits and waits for me to be ready to expand on it. In this case, it was lines 1-5: More and more I find I Spend my days Inventing ways To go back to when I had More to say.

Yes, I’m pretty sure this was a Monday morning. Job satisfaction is pretty low at the minute/month/year, and I’m pretty prone to the old Remember When: when you were younger and freer, didn’t feel so trapped in work, were more active in various areas etc.

Lines 6 and 7 followed on quite quickly before I put the notecard down: Before my days were copy/paste, Blankly staring into space

I liked the idea that copy/paste meant two things to me; that my days are often repetitive unless I put the effort in to adjust, and that my days are literally copy/pasting information from one place to another, and then another, and then another…

I’m less convinced by lines 8-13: On a screen, avoiding my dreams. Where I had passion running through my veins Before I voluntarily put on the chains of Responsibility. Spending my days Arguing over addresses and names, Filling out forms to fill out more.

I often find that the way forward creatively is to take a feeling, twist, and exaggerate to get more interesting language, but in this case it feels too far if only because it feels resentful of my role in life. The chains of Responsibility are real; a husband, dog owner, mortgage payer, future family man, all of which need paying for so I sit at my job that bores the skin off me because taking a risk elsewhere jeopardises all of the above. But I’m not resentful of that, because the rewards are obvious and plenty. I have a wonderful wife, a great dog (but needs more training), a house and a salary. I resent the boredom, and not the responsibility, and so it just feels hollow and fake. Not what I’m trying to convey at all.

I have a similar problem with the last 5 lines: It wasn’t always so, But that was a lifetime ago And yet. And yet. A man can dream.

It’s weak sauce. How my head feels like a poem should end, rather than words I believe in.

The repetitive section though and the two lines after hits something for me, so an initial rewrite would start at least at: More and more I find I Spend my days Inventing ways To go back to when I had More to say. Before my days were select/copy/paste, Select/copy/paste. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Nine to five, Mon to Fri, So I can live without feeling alive.

Not sure that’s totally complete, but it’s already miles better.

Just needs a name.

Desk job?

I rarely ever listen to or pay any real attention to lyrics in songs, not consciously at least. I’ll find myself singing them later, so at least some part of my brain does, but in the moment I’m focusing on how they fit into the song. The melody, the rhythm, the harmonies behind it, the place each have in the mix. One big soundscape.

It’s why I listen to a fair amount of non-English language songs, largely J-rock or J-pop, with a smattering of other European countries. On the other hand, it’s also why I’ve long struggled to write lyrics to any songs I’ve written. I can hear the cadence in my head, beat it out on the desk, but any time I put pen to paper it just feels hollow. Devoid of meaning, just words for the sake of words.

On the other side, there was poetry. That I could do.

One of the reasons I keep some kind of notebook with me at all times is I’ll get just snippets pop up in my head. Two or three lines of rhymes or feelings, a snippet of dialogue, a direction in which to go. Every now and then I’d review them, see which ones still have a place in my brain, and try and flesh it out.

And I was kind of okay at it. Put some online, got some praise. In particular a war one I wrote around Remembrance Day that I can neither find nor remember. I’d do open mic nights locally and not totally bomb, which is a solid minimum result. Then I just kind of stopped.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do a lot more recently is avoid over intellectualising things; change course from treating everything like it’s a deep intellectual puzzle that needs analysis and just see if the surface diagnosis fits. In this case, it is that simple: the open mic night closed, so I fell out of that routine, depression and neurodivergence did their work on distracting me from it, and I never allowed myself to go deep in process. It didn’t worm its way into my core.

And I was alone. Not truly, I had friends, I have family, but on this I was alone. I had no friends trying to do the same thing, no mentor I could learn from, and I didn’t have the social skills to try and make one. I was ‘on the breadline’ poor, so taking classes was out of the question, and while there were libraries and books, I had no idea what I was looking for, especially as I was so wrapped up in my perfectionist ‘I can do all the things if I try’ mindset.

But times change and so do I. I may not be surrounded still by poets and artists, but I can change that, even if it’s digital interactions over physical in the short term. I can lean back into my curiosity, expand myself out there again. I’ve got my Zettelkasten ready to accept snippets to flick through, and collect snippets from poetry that resonates with me. And I’ve got a much better selection of research tools than I did 15 years ago, not to mention a much better understanding of my self, how I tick, and how to get around my shortcomings.

I need to finish the three books I currently have on the go, but after that, I’ll be buying/adding A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy as a starting point. Then we’ll go from there.

The thing about being a relatively busy adult with a load of responsibilities whilst dealing with neurodiversity issues is that it’s really easy to lose sight of the fun and creative hobbies you want to do. This then leads to the skills behind these hobbies atrophying, creating the dreaded skill gap - the distance between what you can do, and what you want to do.

I feel this most with my guitar playing. I’ve been playing on and off for nearly 20 years, but I would say my skills are trapped in that state of high beginner. Theoretically, I can hang at an intermediate level. Modes, positions, fingerboard awareness, extended chords and how to use them. All in my brain ready to use. I just can’t back it up.

I can definitely play, and play rhythm fairly fast and accurate; I can follow along at around 160bpm, and I can sort of solo. Improvisation is an area I often fail in outside of a pure flow state, usually because all I can hear in my head when I’m trying to solo over a backing track is the original solo (or a live recorded version).

Then there’s the fiddly bits. My bends aren’t 100% accurate and I struggle to put vibrato on them. I can hammer on/pull off pretty cleanly up to about 100bpm in quarter notes, but not much further or faster, and not for more than say 4 to 6 bars. Slides often get a bit blurry if I try to apply speed so the target note gets lost. Then there’s the speed picking issue, plus the fact that I struggle above the 15th fret in any position really.

Combine that with the tendency to play unplugged and I’m left with the inability to turn the sounds in my head into reality.

There are other hobbies I’ve let atrophy, or ones that I want to start picking up, that are similarly easy enough to assess the skills gap. The one I struggle with though is writing. How do you assess something essentially subjective? There’s no real 16th note alternate picking or speed legato playing equivalent in the art of writing, outside of perhaps grammar, and even then, there’s ways around it. Hello, Claude.

Experience has told me that unless it’s universally disliked, writing is difficult to qualify. Low effort, badly written books can still pick up a fan base, whilst highly rated best sellers still have their detractors. For example, I’ve personally tried and failed to read One Hundred Years of Solitude 3 times; I just can’t get on board with it. See also: Rivals by Jilly Cooper, a book that seemed more interested in introducing the 6 page glossary of characters than writing about any of the things said characters actually do on the daily, other than cheat on their partners.

ChatGPT (whose grammar opinions I trust less than Claude, for reasons, although I find it better for general purpose use) tells me to try and assess things like storytelling and structure, narrative pacing, scene construction, but again, being a relative novice at this how would I know? Then there’s the directions I want to push into more - poetry, story writing, etc.

Of course, the answer is simple: I find out by doing the thing. Start writing poetry. Start writing more fiction. Make it more of a daily habit. Then assess it. Pick up things I struggle with, just like I notice the struggle adding vibrato to a string bend.

More importantly, stop using the unknown or unknowable as a reason to not do the thing, or even learn more about doing the thing.

My pencils are sharp enough.

Yesterday morning, I felt compelled to write. I woke up with a story in my head, and I knew if I didn’t get it out it’ll play on me for the rest of the week.

It’s as yet unfinished, but just starting it is enough to keep the beast fed. The question was whether to start sharing it now, know it’s both unfinished, unedited, and hardly original.

But art demands to be shared, and at the very least, I can compare it against alter works and claim an easy 500 word win.

And so.

The rain pelts my barrier as I surveil the scene a final time. All must be exactly as the dreams I implanted to prevent breaking the reverie too soon, ruining the careful work of months. It took too long to find a suitable subject this time, I don’t relish the thought of what it would cost to secure another. Already this shell wears thin.

Satisfied with my surroundings, I close my eyes and project myself outwards. Externally, I see a new mirror image of the dream self. The face half illuminated by the moonlight, half hidden by my wide brimmed hat. My overcoat hiding the shape of what lies underneath, my shoes appropriately black as the night. With a small effort, I stretch out my barrier a little further from my body to enhance the ethereal look of the rain not getting close to me in the slightest.

All is as needed.

Pulling myself back into my shell, I start to flex my muscles in well practiced order, from scalp to toes and back again, re-orienting my mind to this body. The process takes longer than usual, additional effort being required in order to will muscles into being. Patience, I remind myself. Soon we will be fulfilled again.

I glance up and down the street before checking my pocket watch. Five minutes to ten. Not long now. The street is empty, ensured by a combination of this deluge and my chosen location. Graveyards, contrary to popular myth, hold no real symbolic power in the world of the occult; they’re just locations conveniently avoided by most, largely unlit apart from the occasional street entrance like this one, and usually attract only the grieving and the dispossessed, both of which have their uses.

Additionally, nobody wants to go running after the screams heard in a graveyard at night. Better to just believe it’s a figment of the imagination.

Lights to my left alert me. Looking around, I see a vehicle coming. Life was so much easier before cars. Sharpening my sight shows three young men, none of which are the one I’m waiting for. The one in the front passenger seat is pointing at me and says something, the others laugh. I freeze the moment temporarily and commit their soul signs to memory before they speed away. They will come in useful later.

I check my pocket watch again. One minute to ten. I hurriedly put it away, focusing the body into the correct posture. All must be perfect.

And then, they arrive.

I slowly look up to see the subject and our prey. The subject wears thin himself, his skin pale, his eyes hollowed and dark, his hair ragged and falling out in patches. After months of work, the dreams have him so completely that he resists even blinking to stop seeing the afterimages. He huddles himself against the cold and wet, standing barefoot in his nightwear, staring at me in fear and awe whilst his companion is frozen to the spot.

I allow myself to smile, ensuring precision in every movement. I beckon them over with a gesture as the gate opens on it’s own behind me.

Finally, the feeding can begin.

On the list of things I both love and fear doing at the same time, writing easily sits above all others. Nothing could signify that more than this post.

I’m a guy with a dozen and one thoughts running through his head every waking minute, from dawn to dusk. I go to bed thinking, I wake up thinking, it simply doesn’t stop. Communicating them, however, often takes a huge amount of effort.

This stems from the fear of being Misunderstood, or to be more precise, the fear of Having To Try To Find The Right Words Over And Over Again. It’s why my therapy sessions often have five minute pauses whilst I search for the most efficient words, or why I’ll pause arguments because I know what I’m saying, but I’m clearly not getting my point across. I get flustered, frustrated, and soon enough give up.

But when I do find that near perfect combination of words? Pure, divine satisfaction. I’ve grinned ear to ear talking about some of my darkest moments for no other reason than finding the cleanest way to explain the exact situation and feelings it evokes. It’s an absolute joy when I’m able to clearly express myself, but that joy comes as a result of a journey that is often too daunting to take.

There’s also the familiar and oft repeated fear of sharing, the vulnerability that comes with expressing yourself to others. As with a lot of complicated feelings, it’s inconsistent; I’ve written and performed at several open mic poetry nights with no issue, for example, and published several blogs in the past, but have re-written this post five times over because I’m just not quite satisfied that it’s good enough for Others, despite the complete lack of consequence if that’s the case (especially compared to the risk of bombing on stage).

So then why persist? Because again, it brings me joy, and joy is often in short supply in life.

I also have an over abundance of ideas; brief bursts of poetry, stories half mapped out, blog post ideas, essay topics. Getting them out there seems the better path, rather than sitting under the weight of them.

And if nothing else, it’ll help lift the monotony in a far healthier way than endless YouTube shorts.