I will admit to being stressed-out. I sometimes wonder how much more productive I’d be if I could just shelve my worries, make a list, and work through them one by one. The Holidays are slowly adding to them as I worry more and more about money, work deadlines (music and graphic), about what to GET friends that I seem to know SO well the REST of the year, as I worry about the next financial quarter’s taxes.
I’ve got three web jobs looming, the biggest of which I’ve just realized I don’t have the grasp on that I thought I did. I’d slated Saturday as the day to wipe it out and I realized I made a bad choice back at the beginning that’s going to force me to redesign almost from scratch. A couple of computer issues, a connectivity issue, and the 7pm departure time for our gig came around all too fast, leaving my need for progress and completion deeply dissatisfied.
It also means that tonight, as opposed to moving on to my next project, excitedly and enthusiastically, I’m reapplying myself to something that I’m kind of glaring at.
What else? I’ve got hours and hours of Live recordings to review… I need to give our friend Susan a working overview of multitrack recording so I can just send everything to her…. She’d a) really Love to hear everything and b) probably has one of the most comprehensive (verging on obsessive – and I mean that in a good way) understandings of ilyAIMY’s sounds and could be an excellent judge of such recordings. (note to self, this actually might not be such a bad idea… hrm…) She also has a similar aesthetic and Love for Live recordings and bootlegs…. Double hrm…
Then there’s House of Musical Traditions. It’s factoring a little more into my financial Life than I’d like it to right now, and the holidays are a difficult time for retail and it would be a quite rude moment for me to say “sorry, I need a day for Other Stuff” – not to mention we’re leaving on another tour on Thursday morning… another Thursday away from my open mic…
Everything’s whirling in my head. An ilyAIMY.com redesign, some HMTrad.com redesign… somewhere in there I need to spend some time with my guitar – I need to write music. I’ve got lyrics overflowing in my little not-black book and they need to link up with chords. I’m still getting over one of the most brutal colds I’ve ever had so on top of everything else I sort of just want to SLEEP.
I wonder what it would be like to just have all of this lifted from my head in the moments when I can’t do anything about them. To fall directly into sleep as opposed to spending unproductive HOURS (and I do mean HOURS) lying in bed, tossing and turning, too exhausted and incoherent to code, too mentally twisted to sleep.
Last night we played another Dogfish Head show, this one at the Gaithersburg location. The owner always schedules his own shifts to coincide with our shows there. The servers stop and watch – some dance their way through the room where we’re playing. We drag people in from the bar, we fill the room with our own cohorts… everyone there Loves us and yet we can only get booked there about two to three times a year. We want to be there more, they want us there more, but there’s a booking company sitting in the way Getting a more stable schedule there would make everyone happier and would even take a tiny sliver of financial concern off the top of my skull. But no… nothing works the way it ought to. Sigh.
In good news? We were on Mary Cliff’s NPR program the other night. She played Oklahoma Revival and I got a bunch of phone calls from friends who said they were listening to us on the radio. Though we get airplay in Illinois and Missouri, occasionally in New England and elsewhere, airplay in our HOME market is rare. To be recognized on a local, folk-oriented program on a big station is even rarer.
(it’s at this point where I’m reading back over this post and rather than restructuring my rant into something more cohesive, I’m just going to apologize and move on)
In good news we’re touring soon, which I Love – CD sales are going well – we’re finally budgeting enough to join one of the big music collectives – Thanksgiving was fun and not too disastrous despite my three strikes – traffic’s flowing well…
But my brain stays worried. Even when I’m not concerned about time and money, taxes and breathing, a commercial about cancer comes on the radio, an article about Alzheimer’s crosses my screen. Things that can’t really be planned for or effectively avoided or predicted. Things that take up substantial parts of the processing power of my brain that shouldn’t be real concerns for another couple of years at LEAST…. Shouldn’t I be able to simply shelve those niggling worries? I wonder how different my head would be if I could simply not worry about my 40s and my 50s as I Live out my 30s. I’m surviving, I’m even planning (a little bit at least), but I spend TOO MUCH
TIME worrying. Too much time not sleeping. Too much time not writing.
Fuck you, grown up Life. Just fuck you.
