365 Songs – Larry Lines

The only way I am going to end this absence from writing is to commit myself to an entry.  So April 7 will begin my daily writing again.

It’s funny how this whole thing works.  Blogging every day leads to a lot of words and ideas that can lead to an array of contradictions.  I have never written as much as I have written this year in such a short period of time.  I feel like I don’t even know who I am anymore.  I read entries in this blog, and it feels like someone else’s writing.  And then it occurs to me that I have only written about 80,000 words this year.  An average book is about that long, perhaps longer.  For authors that have written several books, I wonder what it must feel like for them to read one of the earlier works.  That must be an incredibly unsettling experience.

I feel like a totally different person than the person that started this blog four months ago.  Babies change everything, so there is no denying that the birth of my second child has contributed to these changes.  But there is something to the creative process.  Creating something every day changes you.  I find this to be true for me even with creating software.  In creating, there is an alteration in perspective.  The new perspective might very well contradict the perspective in previous creations.  So if a person is prolific in his creativity…

I think this also explains why so many people have a hard time creating consistently.  Or struggling with ‘writer’s block’.  Or whatever term one uses for explaining the paralysis associated with lack of action.  Creativity changes us.  But we are also creatures of comfort.  We like to travel, but we spend an awful lot more time in our own comfortable beds.  We like to create, but we also like who we are at certain points.

Sometimes I reach a perspective that I don’t want to change.  It’s pretty easy for me to do that right now.  I have a miraculous new baby girl.  An amazing six year old boy, his perspective and energy are undefinable.  My wife and best friend, with me in an evolving partnership of love, wit, charm and stupid luck.  I live in the most amazing community of inspired generosity.  Packages of people and materials have been arriving daily for months to help us with every possible need in our time of need.

And sometimes I think: “Who the hell are we?  Why do we deserve all of this?”  And that’s a perspective I don’t want to change.  I am grateful beyond description.  This life has truly been blessed.  This blog has been one of the more important things I have ever done.

So tomorrow I will get up and begin to change once again.  And hopefully I will have something interesting to say.  Because truly, the music is that important to me.  I wouldn’t do any of this if it weren’t.  It’s not just a soundtrack.  Or a series of audio events.  There is life in sound.  An expression of who we are all together.  And the changing perspective in music and other art due to changes in communications via the internet is part of the evolution of the human species.  There is something happening to all of our voices.  I refuse to believe that this is all without reason or cause.  It’s like the voice of art is our call to survival.  We will die in stagnation or live in the ever changing perspective of creativity.

I turn the page on who I am today.