Where do I even start with this year?
Musically, we lost Prince, David Bowie, Phife Dawg, Sharon Jones, Maurice White, and Leonard Cohen. Other notables include Gene Wilder, Muhammed Ali, Alan Rickman, and so many more. Some were less surprising due to health issues, but no less sad to see pass on.
I also lost two friends this year, John and Cheri, two fantastic people. You can read more about them here.
Personally, however, my year was full of creativity. As a DJ, I played 22 gigs and made 19 mixes of various musical styles, 5 of which were recorded live at their respective events. You can enjoy my entire collection of mixes at my mixcloud site HERE. There are 59 mixes of various styles of house, trip hop, hip hop, downtemo, techno, funk, soul, boogie...you get the idea. If you can't find a mix I've done that you enjoy, then you haven't checked them all out yet. There's a little something for everyone, guaranteed.
As a writer, I finished writing fewer stories than I would've liked (3), but had 2 short stories picked up for publication and wrote 9 articles for the Weekend Collective / YeahKC! sites. I'm also releasing my first short story collection called "Scaring the Stars into Submission" on Amazon in both digital and hard copy. I could not be more excited about it as my good friend Rob Romine did the cover art and was infinitely patient with my constant revision requests to his evolving work.
I think the contents of the collection will be a deeply disturbing surprise for those that have never read my stuff before, but who may know me as an individual. The contrast between the art and the artist is stark. I've never been able to really explain why so much of what I produce lies firmly at the bottom of deep, haunted canyons other than I find that the stories first birthed and then unearthed in the dark are the most interesting to me. Trite, happy endings tend to leave me feeling like I've been robbed of some kind of reality, like some kind of truth has been glossed over and hidden away from hearts and minds seeking something tangible due to a need for something pretty in the end. Fiction should reveal truths about ourselves, not obscure them.
I did a fair amount of traveling, seeing my degenerate West Coast family in San Francisco in May, the Missouri Ozarks twice, Chicago with that same West Coast family in August, and then Phoenix in November. I spent the majority of the summer in my pool, entertaining friends and family alike. The days in the unbelievably hot sun (95+ degrees most of the summer) were tempered by the water, a small pleasure I've not gotten to enjoy for the last several years. Pretty sure I made up for all that lost time with my afternoons in the pool.
In November, I saw my youngest sister get married to a guy who I immediately liked the moment I met him. That's pretty huge considering I'm the older brother and there's always the inherent tendency to protect our sisters from those that don't have their best interests at heart. They seem to be perfect for each other, which pleases the hell out of me. They always seem to be in good spirits around each other and in relation to each other. That bodes well for the longevity of their union.
And then there was the Presidential election, which I won't even go into, mostly because I've always wanted to keep this blog politics-free despite having minored in it and having followed political discourse since high school. Suffice it to say, I'm less than enthused by who the country decided to elect. I'm mildly terrified by the quality of people being put into cabinet positions. Not terrified for myself, mind you; I'm terrified for all my people of color, my womenfolk, and my LGBTQ family across the country. They have the most to lose right now.
A light injury in February turned into a very serious injury in September. What I first imagined was a pulled muscle in my back became something much more dangerous: a herniated and ruptured disc between my L4 and L5 vertebrae with pieces of the disc having broken off and fallen down my spinal column. There, they pressed against my sciatic nerve, which caused severe pain down my entire left leg. Xrays, an MRI, and a surgery later, things are back to being semi-normal. There's still a significant amount of pain in the mornings, but with a little movement and forced walking, that tends to go away relatively quickly. Another few weeks and I should be back to 100%.
Every year brings new lessons to learn if one is paying enough attention or bothers to take the time out for reflection (as I often find myself doing more the older I get). Some lessons hit harder than others; some are just purely surprising in their repetition or their suddenly obvious nature. I am easily distracted by certain things or people and that was certainly true this year. But, with the deaths of my friends early in the year, I made the conscious effort to spend more time with the people I left over six years ago and returned to last year. It's a decision I would gladly make again despite how some of the situations turned out. It's all been worth it.
I came away with two lessons this year, both worth discussion and revision, but both feeling apropos of the events of my moving back to Kansas City.
Lesson 1: Some doors aren't meant to be opened; not by keys, not by words, and not by force.
Lesson 2: If the status quo is good enough, don't go asking or looking for more; always be grateful.
I don't know quite what to expect out of the next year. I'm fully planning on making serious creative moves, having decided to pick up painting as another outlet to my writing and my music. Perhaps, if I get good enough, I'll try to pain the cover of my next story collection "Machinery of the Heart: Love Stories," which is completely and totally done. I've also commissioned my friend Makenzie to do some of her collage work for the cover, so we'll see which route we go. I'm realizing I'd like to be able to showcase the talents of my friends on the cover of each book I release. Plenty of them don't get enough credit or exposure for the cool things that they produce, which is disappointing.
It'd be nice to see "Scaring the Stars into Submission" do well, however. No publishing house, no agent, just all hustle on my end and a little high gloss sheen by a friend. Weird that publishers and agents didn't want the collection despite so many of the stories having already been picked up and published by a large number of reputable magazines and literary journals. Maybe it's just too weird for most, which is fine. My stuff has always been far left of center conceptually. I always knew I'd be writing for a very small, niche group of readers with very specific tastes.
Regardless, it's not worth worrying over. The only thing left to do is create and never stop.
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