It’s the start of another work week, which I guess is good from a certain point of view.  It’s a sign of…I don’t know, economic activity or some such.  I mean, it is good for people to be productive in that sense, though it’s also nice for people to have time and space to rest and to enjoy life.  After all, what’s the point of working to sustain existence if that existence is mainly dominated by discomfort and fear?

The world is complicated, of course, and many things are happening in nearly any place at nearly any time, but ultimately, for each individual, there is merely moment to moment experience.  And if that experience is negative in general, none of the other crap really matters very much.  Or so it seems to me.

You may recall—though it’s unlikely—that my workplace recently changed to a different office location.  It wasn’t a big change; we’re still in the same zip code.  But the new location is more pleasant, and the office is more pleasant as well, though smaller.  Also, in addition to there being a goodly number of apartments right across the road, there is also even a “high-end” trailer park nearby (yes, such a thing does exist).  I haven’t been to the latter, but I can see the former, and they look pretty decent.

My coworker and my boss suggested to me that I should think about moving and renting one of those apartments or—apparently these are nicer—one of the trailers.  When they suggested this, I basically gave a standard reply, with the main thing being that I hate to move.  By which I mean, I hate to change the place where I live, not that I prefer to remain stationary and frozen in person.

I hate the process of moving, I hate the necessary upheavals, the new connections to new landlords and services and so on, all of it.  I also don’t want other people touching and getting into my stuff to move it for me, and I’m not going to be able to do it myself.  Dealing with “paperwork” is another significant headache.

Ultimately, though, as I thought about it after our conversation, I realized that really a big part of the reason I don’t want to move is that I have no desire to go forward, nothing toward which to proceed, so there’s no point to the effort.  There is nothing fulfilling in my life, and I have no hope for improvement, so it seems ridiculous to spin my wheels.

I started my current living situation under the delusion that I would continue to write stories indefinitely, and then that I would make music too, and that I might reunite in a real and meaningful way with those who matter most to me.  A lot of that was a pipe dream, though I have at least made more of a connection with my youngest child.  We’ve actually been in each other’s presence twice since May, which is twice more than any other time since 2013.  That’s very good.

But otherwise, what I’m basically doing right now is waiting to die, just killing time until time kills me.  It’s being a bit of a slacker, I have to say.  I suspect that I’m going to need to take a personal hand in things—if one wants to have something done “right” one should just do it oneself, that sort of cliché.

But that runs afoul of various societal mores (and possibly morays, for all I know).  Not that I’m good at following or even grasping social mores.  I mean, the ones that make sense I have no trouble remembering, but a lot of them are irrational, and I have difficulty even desiring to internalize those.  Eventually, I’ll probably break down and say “to hell with it” and take matters into my own hands, unless something else does it for me, or unless I find some internal or external motivation that changes my status.  I don’t particularly know if I want to hope for that; everything seems to be more work than it’s worth.

In other news—either parallel or orthogonal to the above, I’m not sure which metaphor works better—I was thinking about songwriting, which I think I discussed briefly last week.  I know that at many times, bands (like the Beatles and so on) are tasked with preparing a new album, and will sit down and write songs in quite short order for such an album.

That seems intimidating, but it occurred to me that it’s probably analogous to what Stephen King does, and what Ray Bradbury described doing:  you just sit down and produce something every day.  Worry about making it better in the rewrite/editing stage, but just get something down.  It won’t all be genius—in most cases, anyway—but it will be something.

I thought, you know what, that’s probably a lot like what people like the Beatles (specifically Lennon and McCartney) did.  They knew they had to write songs for their next albums, so they just sat down and produced something, and then worked things out, rejecting some, improving others, and so on.

I thought about trying to do something like that, just out of curiosity, as an exercise, but I always have trouble thinking of topics or subjects for a song (or a poem, as the case may be), and so the poems and songs I’ve written have tended to be highly intermittent and often rather peculiar.

But I nevertheless thought that, maybe, I could set myself the task of writing songs more rapidly, just the way for a long while I wrote fiction every day.  I couldn’t write a song a day, of course.  I thought about trying to maybe write a song a week*, but even that felt intimidating.  But when I thought about writing a song a month, that seemed too slow, somehow.

So maybe I would be able to achieve something in between, maybe a song every two weeks.  But who knows, if I don’t expect myself to produce and record the songs one a week, I might be able to crank out something once a week.

And it occurred to me, also, that for subject matter I could turn to a source that I use (AZ quotes) when I can’t think of a pertinent Shakespearean quote for the title of my Thursday blog posts.  I could flip a coin to narrow it down by halves to pick my subject from among the long list of such subjects for quotes on that page.  It’s probably better than trying to find a subject by picking a random word by flipping through the pages of a book with my eyes closed.

So, who knows, maybe I’ll do that.  Maybe I’ll try to write a new “song” every one to two weeks, at least the words and basic melody.  Who knows, maybe if I’m pleased with any of them, I might do more with them and actually “release” them.  Though I currently have two songs that I wrote and haven’t yet released already:  Mercury Lamp and Come Back Again.

This is getting way too long for a single blog post, isn’t it?  Sorry to keep you, if there is anyone out there who has actually read this entire thing through to the end.  Hey, if you have, and if you feel like doing so, why not leave a comment below on WordPress so I know.  I would ask perhaps for you to leave the first line of Mercury Lamp to prove you’d read that far (and listened) but it seems unfair to ask you to do two things during a busy day.  So maybe just try to write something that makes it clear that you’ve read here.

Now, I let you go, with apologies for being so long-winded.

*I’m not talking about completing a song a week, as in getting all the parts prepared and recording and mixing and all that; that would be utterly unreasonable by myself, even if I weren’t working full-time.  But words and basic melody could be done.