Month: May 2022

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The other day it occurred to me that the most uncommon interest I have, the one I am least likely to get into a conversation at work about, is songwriting. I know plenty of other people who write songs, I play in a band with three of them, and I have a lot of songwriter friends but as far as “normal” people go, songwriting is not a common activity. You can’t just drop “so, I wrote a new song the other day” into casual office conversation and expect anybody to say “Oh really? Me too! Have you recorded a demo of it yet?”

I work with lots of people who play a musical instrument of some kind, piano or saxophone or guitar or violin, but they don’t compose new music, they just play music written by other people. I work with lots of people who enjoy music, who listen to it constantly, who can discuss it at length, but it never seems to occur to them to write any of their own.

Even my mom, from whom I inherited my musical talents, a woman who sang on stage semi-professionally for my entire childhood, is not a songwriter.

It’s mystifying to me because I’ve always written songs, quite naturally. It is so natural that for a long time I just assumed it was something that everybody did.

The first song I ever wrote that I still have a recording of is from kindergarten. I wrote (and recorded) a lot of songs in elementary school. They were mostly silly lyrics but I made sure even way back then that I had verses and choruses and melody and structure and rhythm. One song I wrote called “I’m Insane” even had several movements in different musical styles. When I listen to the recording today I’m kinda blown away by how musically sophisticated it is for a second grader. There is even a piano piece with no lyrics called “The Burner” that I wrote back then.

It’s not like it’s ever been easy. Even now, after having left a trail of over four decades worth of songs strewn in my wake, I still wrestle with the challenge of composing new music. I think of it like fishing for some sort of elusive species of fish. I go through all the trouble of waking up at dawn, loading up the boat, heading to the lake, and then I cast and cast and cast for hours without so much as a bite until I manage to land one. It’s lonely work and for every time I succeed in finding a song, there are a dozen where I get nothing or wind up with a song I don’t even particularly like.

If I’m being honest here I think it’s one thankless pursuit.

And yet, also being honest, it’s the thing I have the most pride in, the work I find the most personally rewarding. Songs I’ve written are also my anchors to important pieces of my past. When I hear a song I wrote, either as an actual recording or just playing in my head, I remember the time and place of my life when that composition happened and I relive pieces of my past. Sometimes it works the other way around, I remember something that happened to me and then a connected song comes into my mind. The times in my life when I let myself fall out of the songwriting practice are the ones where my memories get the fuzziest, the years that feel “lost” somehow. As if, failing to enshrine them in songs, I never really got a good mental record of what happened. Times in my life that I remember but don’t have songs for feel as if they could have happened to somebody else or as if I could have read about them in a book rather than having lived through them.

Even though I haven’t released much music of my own over the last several years, spending my time playing with other bands doing other music, I have written dozens of songs at home that will probably never be heard outside of my studio and my head. Even when I don’t perform or record my songs for other people, I still write them. I have to.

Weird, right? Of all my interests and pursuits, songwriting is easily the weirdest one, and yet there it is. A thing I do because I am compelled to do it.

Last night I mentioned to Esther that I had written a new song the other day. She asked about it, what was it called, what was it about, could I sing it to her, and so I pulled out an acoustic guitar and played it. After I was done she asked me to read the lyrics back to her again and told me that she thought they were really beautiful and that my lyrics are one of the best parts of my songs. I thanked her and felt a little flustered, showing a new song to another person (even one who I have known intimately for 18 years), is one of the only things I get legitimately nervous about. Most people don’t know how to respond to a new song. They either love it immediately (if it’s super catchy) or they listen without really hearing or absorbing. New songs from any source often take several listens to find their way into your brain and during those initial listens a person may not even know whether or not they like the song. They may just be absorbing it.  A lot of people struggle to internalize new music after they hit their 20’s so it’s a lot of ask of somebody, if you think about it.

If the source of the song is a person they know, they may feel as if a response is required of them, as if they need to say something about the song, “that’s really great” or “I liked it” but it’s kind of a lie because they probably don’t actually have an opinion yet. There is novelty and there is familiarity and a song that is catchy often gets you with the former while a song that stays with you often requires the latter. If I was the sort of songwriter who created a lot of catchy ditties that set toes a tappin’ it might be easier. Unfortunately(?) I’m the sort who often writes intellectual/emotional poetry set to guitars and drums. I am what I am. I have my “catchy pop tune” moments and I know them when I hear them, but they’re the exception rather than the rule so I have become used to keeping a lot my music to myself and avoiding putting people in the position of having to respond in real-time to my face. I prefer to record and release, thereby allowing the listener to engage with what I make on their own time and on their own terms without my awkward presence standing by.

It’s not as if I get a lot of negative responses. I’m happy to say that I’m objectively pretty good at songwriting. I’ve written some songs that are excellent and I know it. I’m a lifelong student of music of all genres and eras, I know the difference between good music and bad music and I’ve written both, but I’ve written more good than bad, which is nice. Writing music is a tough thing to do and it’s good to know that I’m good at it but that doesn’t help with the whole awkwardness thing when it comes to presenting it to other people.

It’s now 7:15 in the morning, I’ve been up with my coffee since 6:00, and most of that time has been spent writing this post. It’s the Tuesday after the long Memorial Day weekend and I need to be back at my job today, doing technology things, the work for which I have been paid in the filthy lucre of the realm for most of the last three decades. Most of my three day weekend was spent doing work around the homestead. I dug out and replaced a broken fence post that supported an automatic driveway gate, which I also repaired. I filled some gaps in a few retaining walls. I did some photography and developed and scanned a few rolls of film. And I composed drum parts for the new song I played for Esther last night. I’ve recorded two demos of it since I wrote it and I think I now know it well enough to attempt to track it for real this week.

I need to post this, jump in the shower, put on some clothes that aren’t pajamas, get a warm up of coffee and then I think I’ll head out to the studio and take a crack at writing another one before I turn myself back over to the world of corporate America. You never know, I might get lucky and catch a big fish before the morning stand-up meeting. A kid can dream, can’t he?

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– Your time and attention are valuable and rare, only share them with corporate interests on rare and valuable occasions.

– Regular intake of news is bad for your mind, your body, and your spirit. Consume just enough to be an informed citizen but no more.

– Prefer physical experiences to digital facsimiles or fantasies. Engage all five senses. Move. You will remember more, feel more, live better, and perceive time at a slower pace.

– Use digital media for consumption and publication but prefer physical media for creative work. Physical items will last longer and will not fall victim to changes in formats or media or the whims of cloud providers.

– Spend some time every day reconnecting with the previous days thoughts and feelings and contemplating the day ahead but spend most of your time in the present moment as much as you are able.

– Be aware of the influence of capitalism on your activities, especially those activities that matter most to you. Monetization is what they used to call “selling out”.

– Prefer food that is green, fresh, and unprocessed but a pizza now and then is good for the soul.

– Consider that you are a part of the animal kingdom and that the other animals are your actual relatives. Let that reality inform how you treat them.

– Stay out of internet flame wars. Fighting with strangers makes you feel good in the short term and feel bad in the long term. Fighting with family and friends just feels bad all around.

– Be offline by default, online with intention.  Don’t keep your phone on your person all the time.  Mute most notifications.  Use it only when you really need to.

– Go outside, especially when you don’t think you feel like it.

– Your actions have far more power to change your thoughts than your thoughts do to change your actions. Decide what you wish to change about how you think or feel, start acting as if you think or feel that way, and you soon will.

– Avoid multi-tasking. First do one thing, then do another thing, the total time you spend will be less than if you tried to do them at the same time.

– Make time to actively and intentionally listen to music. Don’t relegate it to a background soundtrack all the time. Sit down, stop doing other stuff, really listen. It’ll help.

– Try new things. Go to new places. Meet new people.  Eat new foods. Listen to new music. Read new authors.

– Read books and long-form essays and articles regularly, tweets/feeds/listicles/news infrequently (if at all).

– When you spend money with a business, don’t give them any further rights beyond the current transaction. Don’t sign up for marketing emails or grant them permissions to monetize their relationship with you. You already gave them your money, don’t give them your future time as well.

– If the gas station has pumps that play ads at you, go to a different gas station, unless there is a mute button.

– When you do work with digital technologies, prefer open-source, non-proprietary, and community based to the corporate alternative.

– Be patient with other people. Be kind to them. Apologize when you step out of line. Hope for the same in return but if you don’t get it, do it anyway.

– And as Steve McQueen once said: Attack life, it’s going to kill you anyhow.

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The Nuclear Gopher recording studio started life in the basement at my parent’s house where I spent most of my formative years. We moved into the house when I was 7 and I lived there until I was 19. One particular room in the basement was always “the music room” and contained a drum kit and various instruments that my siblings and I used extensively to learn to play instruments and make and record music. It was, frankly, a great way to grow up.

We started making music in the basement almost immediately after the family moved in. By the time Rhett and I finally purchased a four-track to improve our recordings we had already made the first four Lavone albums on stereo equipment and tape recorders. When we bought the four-track, we decided to call it a Studio and chose the name Nuclear Gopher Original Electronic Stereophonic Recording Studio, a bit of a mouthful but it was still the same old basement room, just with more instruments, microphones, and equipment. That christening was in 1989, almost a decade into our time there and the good old Nuclear Gopher continued to be the place we recorded our albums through the end of The Lavone era, around 2003, giving NG a lifespan of over 20 years. It went through a couple of names. When we decided to start a label we called it Nuclear Gopher Cheese Factory, which was great, but we went online in 1994 and people thought we dealt in dairy products so after a while NGCF became Nuclear Gopher Productions, NGP. But through the name changes and all the rest, it was still Nuclear Gopher. Sadly, all good things come to an end and once all the kids were out living adult lives, the room was reclaimed by parental units for more mundane usages like exercise bikes and storage.

Honestly… It wasn’t a great space. The floor was some sort of 1970’s vinyl tile, the walls were cinder block painted white, the only furniture was an ancient gold couch, but magic happened there and it’s embedded deep in the heart of a lot of my friends.

My adult life in general didn’t present me with obvious ways to record music in my home. I always wanted to but I was a 20-something who was raising a kid and I lived in a series of apartments where setting up a drum kit would have been cause for eviction. This didn’t stop me from trying to make music. I would write on a guitar and set up time to meet up with Rhett and we would go into the Gopher and track new songs, but it was a far cry from the first part of my life when I could make music almost any time I wanted to. I’ve never been great at combining organizational skills and creativity so this time period wasn’t a particularly productive one in terms of musical output. The Lavone went from 1-2 albums of new material per year to a six year hiatus and one final album that we put together in a final spurt of creativity before everything came to a screeching halt with my departure from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the end of the Nuclear Gopher record label and then Rhett’s unbelievably shocking and tragic death.

In 2003, just prior to the big changes, Rhett and I were working on a new Lavone album, untitled, and had two or three songs tracked. I decided one day to setup a little recording rig in my apartment. Not a studio, per se, but a simple recording system with an iMac, a copy of ProTools Free, and a few basics like microphones and a guitar. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I made a little album called The Message Will Be Kept that I didn’t really share with many people. It was more of an experiment than anything.

It was successful enough that I decided to keep working with those simple tools but switched to Garageband and moved down to the unheated garage in my apartment complex where I could at least have a little privacy. Drums were out of the question but I couldn’t play them anyhow so loops would have to do. With that arrangement I made my third solo album, The Context, and the results were pretty good. I released it under a new label, Tasty Rerun Productions, and I started pondering how I could get things a little better while still stuck in an apartment.

I tried a few things. Amp modelers were pretty new technology but they allowed me to record loud guitar parts without playing loud guitars. I picked up an electronic drum kit that let me drum without getting the landlord pissed (although I did manage to get one nasty-gram about a neighbor complaining about the kick drum making pounding noises through their ceiling… oops). With that modest arrangement and a weekend spent at a vacation rental in Duluth to record some of the songs, I managed to finish an album called Songs of Bo Redoubt, which was my first really ambitious solo album. I finished Bo Redoubt in 2006, the same year that Esther and I got married and bought our first house in Apple Valley. We moved into the house in September and by the following February, 2007, I finally had a proper basement studio setup that was at least something like the old Nuclear Gopher. There was a proper drum kit, all my Bo Redoubt gear, a computer setup with a 16-track audio interface, it was really thrilling. With all that power I managed another album in the space of a month with a band I formed called Trumpet Marine. The album was called Louder, Longer, Lobster and I was really happy with the result. Tasty Rerun had three albums in the catalog and for the first time in my adult life I had my very own recording studio.  I called it The Nuclear Gopher Too.

I would love to say that joy and rapture followed but the truth is that the subsequent years were challenging for a number of reasons, none of which really had anything to do with music. There were family struggles and work struggles and Trumpet Marine didn’t turn out how I had hoped, lasting all of two years with only that one album and a handful of gigs played to show for the effort. I made another record in 2008, The Legendary Adventures of Prosciutto Pig, but it wasn’t particularly good and I was disheartened on many fronts.

This was the start of a period in which I wrote some, recorded some, and tried hard to find a groove but failed repeatedly. Music just seemed too hard to do, to be honest. The hours I would spend in the studio would have flashes of the old magic but mostly it was lonely and I was sad. I cobbled together a set of songs I had been working on (and a couple of retreads from earlier albums) into an album called A Man Could Get Tired and Other Songs and released it and in 2012 I recorded a strong album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, I did a set of mostly Lavone covers called lavoneloveletter but I just couldn’t get the sort of traction I longed for. It felt a lot like it was pointless.

In 2014 I took a Sunday and setup a micro-studio in the coal room in the basement, tracked half a dozen songs in a single session, and put out an EP called The Coal Room around Christmas time and that, as they say, was that. I had ideas, lots of them. The Coal Room was going to be one of a quartet of EP releases, but the other ones never got off the ground. I started working on different albums with different titles, The Universal Thump and The Wolf Is At The Door, but I just couldn’t manage a coherent piece of work. I have so so so many sessions and songs from that time period sitting on hard drives and backup discs, but none of it ever seemed to feel like I was doing what I wanted to be doing. It was really frustrating.

In order to be doing something with music, I joined a band called Robots From the Future. They had me playing keys, an instrument I could barely play, but I thought it might shake things up a bit and as a bonus I would get better at keys. Plus, it had been a few years since Trumpet Marine and I missed collaborating with other people. But, as it turned out, Robots wasn’t entirely right for me. I struggled with keyboards, I liked the songs but the style of music was such that I couldn’t see any option for contributing creatively with any of my own material, and I left the band after a while. I shortly joined a new band formed by one of the members of Robots and his wife. It was called Fistful of Datas and it was a 90’s cover band. Playing covers every once and a while was fun but playing in a dedicated cover band was something I had sworn I would never do. I shocked myself by saying yes and I had a blast for a couple years. I initially played bass, which is probably my favorite instrument to play, but when the song called for it I also jumped over to keys. I truly hated some of the songs we played but I truly loved some too and it was a great group of people. Still, I had to step away from the band for a couple of months, they had a few gigs and needed a bass player, they brought in the bass player from Robots, and when I returned I was stuck as full-time keyboards again, which was about as much fun for me as a root canal, especially when we played songs I didn’t like. I stuck it out for a bit but then I left. I had enjoyed it for a bit but when I started to dread the thought of playing another show or practicing another song by the Spice Girls, I knew I had to leave and I did.

I told myself that I would now be able to start getting serious about recording my own material again but a funny thing happened. I bought a different house, moved up to a former-farm property in Hugo with a bunch of trees and land and something I never dreamed was possible: out buildings.

I began to dream of a dedicated recording studio, outside of my house but on my property, where I could go late at night and feel completely free to do whatever I wanted to do. Maybe that was what I needed to get my creative life back into a groove. There was only one teensy problem: none of the buildings was suitable in the state I found it. There are four buildings on my property that are not my house. There is a small garage with a root cellar in the back which is detached from the house at the bottom of the hill, a very large barn that has been partially finished inside with several garage stalls on the lower level and a big open second level, there is a large shed (or small building) with around 400 square feet of space that we call the Cedar Cabin, and lastly there is a heated and insulated large garage with four and a half stalls. Where should this studio go?

The obvious choice was the barn. The barn has the most space, it’s close to the house, and there isn’t really any other obvious use for it. The problems with the barn were that it was home to a few barn cats, when they weren’t there it was a target for nocturnal raccoon raids, and it was neither insulated nor heated nor cooled. It seemed like using the barn for a studio would be a massive undertaking.

The big heated garage building was a non-starter. For one thing, it wasn’t sell suited in terms of layout, for another I really wanted to use it as a garage so I could tinker with old cars, do maintenance on the mowers and tractors and the like, and (of course) work on our cars.

The little garage with the root cellar was likewise a non-starter. Too small, not heated, and much more useful for storing gardening equipment or roots than for making music.

This left the Cedar Cabin. It was small enough to heat and cool for not too much money, big enough for a studio, and seemed like a good possibility. There was just one snag… It is on low lying land, things get very wet around here, and it doesn’t have a cement slab floor, it basically has paving stones on dirt. No matter how I sliced it, I couldn’t imagine storing computers or guitars or anything else that would be sensitive to climate in such a building. I started planning to use the space anyhow and came up with quite a few elaborate plans. I was going to build a solar heat box to provide a heating boost in the winter without cost, I bought a small standalone kitchenette, and I brainstormed and brainstormed how to deal with the floor. I came up with a plan that involved pulling up most of the “floor”, installing drain tile around the perimeter, and building a subfloor over the top of it with a moisture barrier and foam panels and sand and the like. It was going to a big project but I thought I could see how to do it if I tried. In 2018, when Scott Homan and his crew came out to the property to film a live video shoot for the movie Witness Underground, we converted the space into a performance space/studio and did, in fact, have pretty good success. Still, I couldn’t use the building year round.

And it wasn’t as if I didn’t have a studio, I still had a basement setup like I had back in Apple Valley.  I guess you could call it Nuclear Gopher 2 1/2?  I could still make music, but I felt really uncomfortable working in the space because it is located directly below the bedroom where Esther and four dogs might have opinions about me making noise at 2:00 AM or even 6:00 AM for that matter.

It felt less like having a studio and more like having a room to store all my gear.  My musical productivity improved exactly 0%.

I joined a band called Awkward Bodies, and we got a practice space in Minneapolis. With that space I started to think that maybe I just didn’t need the studio I kept planning. If I really wanted to, I could go to the Minneapolis space, bring gear, and record. That didn’t really work though because it’s a building filled with bands practicing. There is usually a lot of bleed of sound from the others. Besides, it is a 30-45 minute drive to Minneapolis from Hugo. Not conducive to impromptu or routine studio work.

And that’s how things stood for the last few years.  I wasn’t making much music on my own but I was having a good time with Awkward Bodies and playing bass and cover songs were few and far between (we played a Flaming Lips set at a bowling alley once but that was just cool). I started to just consider that maybe I would never get the studio setup I had been dreaming of. Which is dumb. I have buildings for god’s sake. I have recording gear. Clearly there must be an option.

This week I finally figured it out. The barn had been the right call all along, I just hadn’t seen it.

The penny dropped for me three days ago or so. I was writing about this and I suddenly asked myself what Rhett and I would have done back in The Lavone times. The answer was blindingly obvious. We never made plans, we didn’t wait for a good option, we just started working with what we had available and we would gradually upgrade and improve things until they got better. When we first wanted to make music, we didn’t have a drum kit so we built one out of ice cream buckets and cardboard. We didn’t have a guitar so we enlisted a friend who had one to join our band. Our earliest recordings were done by putting a tape recorder with a built in microphone in the middle of the room and pressing record. We replaced that with a cheap stereo and when we need a microphone we accidentally discovered that a pair of headphones could be plugged into the microphone input and you could sing into one of the ear pieces and it worked as a microphone. We iterated. We were agile. We did the best we could with what we had and we never let circumstances stop us from making our albums. It is the same DIY “just do it” ethic that made the Witness Underground shoot a success, the same ethic that made all of Nuclear Gopher happen, it’s what I do for a my day job for god’s sake; leading agile, iterative, software engineering teams. My entire experience in life in creating anything ever has been based around the idea that you start doing the work first, you figure out how to do it better by accumulating experience second. If I would just take the agile DIY approach to the recording studio instead of indulging in analysis paralysis and daydreaming, I would likely be in a much better position to get where I want to go.

This train of thought was really triggered by a couple of things. First, I got COVID and I had good reason to believe that I was going to struggle very badly with it. I have a long medical history of severe lung related illnesses and so I have been a virtual hermit for the last two years. As soon as I started returning to “normal life” and going to an office a few times a week I got COVID almost immediately. But, because I avoided it for two years and got all my shots, because I take daily lung meds, and because I was eligible for the new anti-COVID pill, I learned that COVID is something I can handle. After the last two years, surviving COVID felt like a new lease on life. The second thing is photography. A few months back I returned to film photography, something I haven’t done in close to 20 years but also something I greatly enjoyed back in my teens. I decided to learn to develop my own film and then I decided to setup a home dark room. At first I set it up in the bathroom but it was too cramped and unpleasant. My results were poor. But, I figured out a way to black out a few windows in the basement and make a workable darkroom space. After a few sessions down there I started to evolve the setup based on experience, moving things around, figuring things out in response to actually trying to work in the space. The post-COVID high and the fun of solving the problems of learning film photography, developing and darkroom process really made me feel inspired to finally make writing and recording music a part of my regular routine again, not just something I manage to pull of when the stars align.

So, Ryan, the obvious question is: which building is good enough, right now, for you to start working in? The answer was clear. The barn. Right now the ground around the Cedar Cabin is wet, the interior is too damp to consider working there, whereas the barn just needed to be cleaned out and might be too hot or muggy, but if so I have a portable air conditioner and a portable dehumidifier so, it seemed feasible.

I decided to just go out there, bring my work laptop, and spend the day working in the barn off of a hotspot and getting a feel for the place. I cleaned while I was on calls and meetings, which is something I do in the house too, so, no big deal. I can easily attend meetings while tidying up at the same time. It was a bit warm, as I suspected, but the lower level was quite cool so I decided I could just put a fan next to the stairway, pull the cool air up, and survive. It was quite comfortable. There was raccoon shit and some old straw and blankets that the barn cats used to use (they are long gone, I wish them well, haven’t seen a barn cat in years) but on the first day I was able to make half of the upper level of the barn into a usable space.

I was so excited I could barely believe it. I resolved to keep momentum and to bring some musical equipment out the next day. The following morning I grabbed my old cassette four-track, an acoustic guitar, a couple microphones and some cables. I started toying around and before I knew it I had an inkling for a song. An hour or so later and I had a new song, with lyrics, and a tape demo laid down. And it was a good one. And it came to me easily. Songwriting has become a struggle because it’s so hard to get into the right head space for it but when I was finally in a space of my own with the most basic tools of the trade at my disposal, there was a song just waiting.

That was Thursday May 12, 2022, the birthday for my new studio which I’m pretty tempted to call the Nuclear Gopher Hay Factory as a callback to the old Cheese Factory days. I have upgrades and improvements to make, but it’s a usable space as of now. I finally have this studio thing figured out. Hell. Yes.

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I have COVID.  It’s something I had managed to avoid up to this point because I have a history of chronic bronchitis and pneumonia as well as asthma.  A killer lung virus was not high on my Christmas list.  The good news is that I managed to avoid a COVID infection for over two years and in that time the medical treatments for COVID have advanced to the point where my case is so far been manageable.  I was quite sick on Friday afternoon and by Sunday I was quite worried about developing severe complications so I did the smart thing and went to the Urgent Care.  The doctor agreed that I needed intervention and prescribed the new anti-viral for COVID, paxlovid.  Since I started taking it I have noticed a trend towards getting better rather than getting worse and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve missed three days of work so far and I’m really tired and taking a lot of meds but I don’t see an ICU in my future if this holds.  Knock on wood.

Anyhow, one of the side effects of being laid out sick for a few days is that I tend to catch up on media.  Shows and movies I’ve been meaning to watch, books I’ve been meaning to read, games I’ve been meaning to play.  The last few days have been no exception.  I binged all five Dirty Harry movies, watched the second season of Russian Doll, read the final book in the EXCELLENT Noumenon trilogy (Marina J. Lostetter is maybe my new favorite sci-fi author if she can crank out this level of work consistently…  wow) and spent some time playing Beneath a Steel Sky on my new MNT Reform Linux laptop, reacquainting myself with the world of non-corporate computing and open-source in a purer form than I normally use.

What I haven’t done is make additional progress on my new album, but that’s OK.  Awkward Bodies is in the closing stages of recording our new album, which has been a ton of fun.  I still have some bass parts to re-cut and some backing vocals to lay down, but there is an album tracked and getting ready to go out in to the world.  This is very exciting to me as it represents the first album I’ve made in collaboration with a band in more years than I care to mention.  My solo album will be a nice follow on.

I’ve had some time to ponder while laying around for the last few days and one thing I’ve pondered is the fact that I am almost constantly making things, fixing things, restoring things, writing things, but at some point in the last decade or so I stopped aiming to make larger projects out of the smaller things.  On any given day I usually start and complete one or two small projects.  I write a journal entry or repair a piece of technology or build something.  So why, then, am I no longer trying to write novels, develop software applications, make movies, record albums, build businesses, or any of that?

I’ve never lost the creative urge, but I’ve lost the ambition to try to make anything coherent, larger, more meaningful.  I have many theories as to why, and I have written about them in many a journal entry.  I haven’t always even been particularly sure it was actually a problem.  So what if I am no longer trying to do anything big?  It was never really necessary in the first place, if I’m honest with myself.  I just always thought that “making a dent in the universe” had a nice ring to it.

But something else has been going on, something less about big intent and more about small habits and patterns and over the last two years I’ve become more and more aware of those changes as underlying causes.  I can’t, and don’t, blame everything on the culture or technology, but I am a person who has spent most of my adult life living in close symbiosis with technological advances in computers and communications.  It’s my job, and something I’ve been interested in since early childhood.  With each adaptation I have made to technologies (home computers, the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, social media, etc.) I have changed my habits and daily patterns.  I have very much been both master and servant to my devices and their needs.

I have finally learned that my actual thought patterns, my levels and lengths of attention, my capacity to absorb and retain and use information, my sleep cycles and physical fitness, all of these are shaped by my habits and activities throughout the day and those habits and activities are shaped by my relationship to communications technology.  I have also learned that it is possible to intentionally reshape that relationship, to regain control of it, even if my career is based in those very technologies.

I learned a long time ago from Buddhist teachers that it is very difficult to change your mind and from there change your self.  Your mind is the core of your self.  Waiting for a change of mind or thought before making changes to action is a lovely way to stay mired in your thought patterns for all eternity.  The best way to change your mind is to change your practices and behaviors and allow your mind to change in response to the new stimuli.  Ergo, if I want to have more attention span, if I want to regain the capacity for long-form creative work, if I want to redevelop the ability to be present and focused and to be ambitious with my intentions, the first step is to change the behavior patterns and practices that are creating that mental state.

So, that was what I set out to do.  I made a conscious effort to rearrange my relationships to the technologies that have mostly shaped my life for the last 30 years.

I would like to say that I had a clear plan that this was what I was doing, but that would be giving myself too much credit.  I just knew I had some unhealthy patterns that were creating negative mental states and I hoped that altering those patterns would lead to changes of mind.  I wanted to stop being tethered to screens, stop responding to a constant influx of updates, messages, and notifications, stop chasing an endless flow of information, just stop.  I wanted to start to live more like when I am backpacking.  One foot in front of the other, present with the trail, not half-connected to some fake meta-universe.  I decided to change my tech in order to change my patterns so I would change my brain.  I won’t go through everything that happened, everything I tried, but I will summarize by saying that I decided I needed a divorce from the endless feeds of social media, podcasts, and the news.  My smartphone needed to stop living in my pocket.  My computing, whenever I chose to do it, needed to be rigorously controlled, with me totally in control of the experience and nobody else’s agenda pushing into my space.  No ads, tracking, or reselling of myself to data brokers.  And last, but certainly not least, I needed to find and learn how to use disconnected creative tools so I could be creative again without depending on the devices that were disrupting my brain.

Hence, a return to typewriters.  Hence, a return to vintage, pre-internet “retro” computers.  Hence, fountain pens.  Hence, film photography.  But the retro-analog thing wasn’t even really the point. It was more important to my project that I adopt technology that was disconnected than that it was analog.  The goal was to return to focus, disconnection, presence of mind, concentration, not to make a fetish out of old gear.  So, I also adopted two very modern solutions: I acquired a standalone 32-track digital multi-track recorder so I could record music without using a computer and I acquired a computer that is entirely free of proprietary hardware and software and which has nothing on it or about it that I did not choose.

I ordered this computer a couple of years ago.  It was made by some hackers in Germany as a “free as in speech” project that was crowdfunded.  No mega tech corporations involved in making the hardware or the software.  It’s called an MNT Reform and there are only a few hundred of these machines in existence and it took over two years to get it delivered.  It was worth the wait.  It’s a symbol, sure, but as an artist I’ve always honored the power of symbols.  It’s also a tool that makes me feel free when I use it, rather than making me feel as if I’m being guided along by some invisible hand whose motives are beyond me.

I’m kitted out.  I can write, shoot, record, edit and publish without giving over my control or agency.  My communications patterns are radically altered.  I feel healthier than I’ve felt in a decade.  I don’t yet know what I’m going to create, but I can report that the changes in my habits and patterns over this stretch of time have started to create the hoped for changes in my thoughts and feelings.  I may not yet be spending extensive hours in the recording studio, but I have been enjoying spending extensive hours in the darkroom and behind a typewriter or a camera or playing a guitar.  I may not yet have written a novel, but I have found new joy in writing and spending focused time doing it, indeed I’ve developed several new types of writing practice for myself.

For many years, as far back as a decade, I’ve felt unglued, unmoored, as if the world was flying by at a pace that removed all joy or even the opportunity for it, like every day was an endless feed, nothing really mattering for more than a minute or two, nothing could really stick.  Everything was one little dopamine hit after another and nothing really made a dent.  I wondered if that was just a side effect of aging or my career or other events in my life, but the fever really took hold and broke through the Trump presidency and the pandemic and the overall insanity of world events during the last few years.  I came to realize that, yes, the world is an endless feed of events happening and, no, nothing inherently matters for more than a moment or two, if you always move on to the next thing.  And there is always going to be a next thing.  You cannot ever catch up, you cannot ever win, you cannot ever make it change.  You can, however, change your relationship to it.  You can stop being addicted to it.  You can detach from the streams and services and corporations and media outlets and technologies that thrive on your attachment to them.  You can choose to live fully in the life you have on a daily basis rather than vicariously through the ambient intimacy and perpetual thirst trap of the modern digital culture.  Sure, it might be an over-correction to replace your 5g smartphone with a quill pen you hand carved from a found turkey feather, but maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s exactly what you ought to do.  At least for a while.  Give your brain a chance to catch up, slow down, chill out, and reconfigure.

At least, that’s how it’s looking to me.  Look at that, I just wrote over 1900 words.  It’s working.