Monday, April 23, 2012

4/23/12: burn party

Yesterday I finished burning the boxes of journals I have toted around for years.  Since '94 (I think) I have written three longhand pages a day, inspired by Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way.  I puzzled off and on about what to do with all this writing.  My handwriting makes it mostly illegible, to me or anyone else.  But I kept it all--boxes and boxes, all musty and stacked up.  This stuff has seen me through the creative processes that went into six records, and all kinds of basic life stuff: work, relationships, bad weather, bad Royals baseball. 

So, part of spring cleaning this year was to torch it--all of it.  Well, there may be a cache of recent stuff on a shelf in the studio.  It feels good--opens things up, like taking a truckload of unwanted stuff to Goodwill.  I listened to The Royals lose their 9th or 10th game in a row, AT HOME, and fed spiral notebooks into the woodstove in the garage.  I pulled out any doodles that were funny, including the classic "Rilke Goes Skinny Dipping."  

And it was good to find funny doodles, because I am just dismayed and pissed off by the Royals' start.  On their way to being swept at home in THREE SERIES to start the season.  All the off-season PR just seems like a really bad joke.  Hope they turn it around soon.  Sometimes I wonder if Melky Cabrera in the 2-spot, hitting after Gordon, was really a spark plug for the offensive success of pretty much everyone last year.  But I'm guessing Cabrera is not a PR kind of guy; he's gone, and that amazing outfield was dismantled after one amazing year.


One of the other tools Cameron teaches is the "artist's date"--a simple outing to a new place, a browse at a specialty shop, a short walk in a new park.  I find these much harder to do.  Much harder to break routines for even a fifteen minute detour.  So after being dutiful, committed, and very true to the morning pages, I'm going to really focus on the artist's dates, and break my pledge to handwritten writing, and use my laptop for a while, and see how that feels.

Bought this on Record Store Day, digging it: