November 18th, 2004.

I’ve been trying to hide out for a couple of days now. There was originally a plan of “taking November off”… but then there was PLOJ, and a couple of showcases we couldn’t turn down… then there was Firedean’s offer, and the practices inherent in that… and now there is a Funk Box show, and the practices inherent in that.

You've Come A Long Way, Baby. Yes, the is mini-me, I think at about age 5, at what might be my first on-stage appearance. That's my cousin, Alana, who was part of a well-known Baltimore-area cover band during the 80s. She just asked me to sing with her, and I'm telling her that I can't because I don't know the words. Man, I still do this shrug. — You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby. Yes, the is mini-me, I think at about age 5, at what might be my first on-stage appearance. That’s my cousin, Alana, who was part of a well-known Baltimore-area cover band during the 80s. She just asked me to sing with her, and I’m telling her that I can’t because I don’t know the words. Man, I still do this shrug.

I need a break from people, and everyone gathers me up and asks how my break is going and how the writing is going and how the world is going, and there’s the horrible realization that it’s November 18th already and the break hasn’t happened yet. That scares me, because one of the SPECIFIC purposes of the break is to get some writing done, and it’s going very, very slowly.

It frightens me, the depths of my writer’s block. I’ve never written as prolifically as I did in college, but I really fear that the three year momentum of working a desk-job, where my priorities and concerns were SO far different – I fear that that momentum has got a lot of damage to do yet. I fear it’s still rolling through my skull, replacing words with code and blocking me from that mainline, the one that used to keep me writing all the Live long day.

It frightens me how THAT has changed. Now I struggle to force my attention span onto one thing, and the words are a battle. I went to art school, but most of my scholarship money came from my writing portfolio. Hell, Alan Ginsberg gave me money for my poetry so that I could go to MICA. What the Hell did I love, how did I lose it? And how the Hell do I pick it back up again? Mew.