This has hardly been an isolated instance of hardship, and not the most enduring of them all, and when I consider that I could not have dealt with and ridden-out the events without assistance, my conscience tells me to be gratefully acceptant of the hand that had been dealt to me this year. It's just that I would prefer to effect changes in my life on my own terms or under my own power. Anyone who'd known me 30 years ago might snicker at that, but such is the person I've become since then. Self-determination versus being a victim of circumstance? No contest. So, what I'm left with is to collect all my gratitude and harness it as a force for positive action, despite the mountain of debt that I've been forced to incur this year and from which I have no reason to believe that I'll ever excavate myself. After the smoke has cleared and the blood has dried, I'd like to somehow put it toward helping others. Not that I've been moved to altruism, but I do feel a duty to transfer the energy to others.
A gnarly barnacle on the underside of this year was the Presidential election. In the week preceding it, I had this vivid, semi-lucid dream about the two candidates, with intense scenarios like in a gangster movie, from which I awoke with my heart racing. I took some deep breaths, and went back to sleep – and found myself back in the gangster movie. This happened several times, until I decided that the sleep that I'd been getting was counter-productive. I myself am non-political, and certainly non-partisan, and don't pay attention to mainstream news, but the dramas I'd been receiving from posts on Twitter/X and the apparent intrigue behind the overblown, distractive histrionics of the whole ordeal were messing with my mind on a subconscious level. I'd assumed myself to be clear-eyed about it, feeling like the Grownup in the Room amongst the Conservative and Liberals letting themselves be herded toward either side's paradigmatic reality. My sense of the Big Picture caught me off-guard, however, and though it's still difficult for me to put into words, I'll venture to say that the treachery I've sensed this time around is new and novel; that the software running this video game had been stealthily updated in the background while everyone was too preoccupied with the action to notice.
An unfortunate consequence of the massive existential distraction that I've experienced this year is that I've produced less music this year than in the past 15 since I'd been making music again. I've not been without ideas, nor without time to work on them, but my "system resources" have been almost entirely devoted to mentally shoveling myself out of the shit. Additionally, losing the studio environment where I'd felt creatively free and at-home, and relocating to a place where it's hard to get to feelin' it and lettin' loose had put a damper on my creative drive. I've laid down sketches and beginnings, germs of intention, but completed little. This domestic dislocation and existential turmoil have also distanced me from my artistic habituations. It's hard to envision going about things and producing results in ways that I had been for so long. I have no idea of what "my" music should be as a result of all of this. Maybe next year I'll find out.