Back in the days of yore, there were easy ways for me to clear my head completely. Void of any conscious thought, image, face, emotion, I would usually only let myself yield to sound. I had some very simple ways to do this - call them rituals if you will. I suppose that's what they were, after all.

I would get a hold of a guitar and I would start playing. It seemed very simple, very effective. You see, I wouldn't play anything of my own, but always some technically demanding or "fun" song. Take John Petrucci's "Damage Control", for instance. Kind of intricate, on a relatively rare augmented fifth scale. Cool licks. A bit fast in tempo. Demands your recall, your muscle memory. And then there was the stuff that is essential to guitar playing. Coordination. Devotion. Focus. When you sit down and try to reproduce a song, there's no mid-section where you're free to think. Remember what I wrote - "reproduce". Reproduction requires you to stick to predefined forms, unlike improvisation. In that context, who had time to think? I just had to get the song right! Often, while playing, I was so into the playing that I'd frequently forget to swallow, or sometimes even breathe.

What my teachers never told me was that learning to play the guitar is a great, if not the greatest, way to start the descend into hell that is your psyche. At first it's just a cool way to impress your friends or the ladies, even a way to learn to impose discipline upon oneself. Then, inevitably, you learn to express yourself through it. By virtue of modern day recordings, this is by far the most destruction I've ever brought upon myself.

You see, inspiration goes hand in hand with misery. I don't know why [just yet], it just does. Creativity and depression are also linked [there's some book on it the title of which completely escapes me]. Suffering, unhappiness and sadness we all [well, almost all] want to offload onto something else, or onto someone else, although not rarely enough. Inevitably so, you find romanticized echoes of misery throughout humanity's greatest works of art. Not only that, but we have created so many of them, that every single failure, heartbreak, loss, betrayal and anguish someone else has written about long before you experienced it.

Now back to me. Not only are songs we hear bound with their musical evocation of misery [the minor scales - the bane of my existence] but also laced with past experiences; even happy past times we now miss and yearn. Because memories pass and fade, but music comes back and will remind you any and every moment. I've recently started playing the guitar again; I'd practically stopped for about a year before that. I still played, just not a lot and didn't practice regularly or at all. Can't fit two loves in one lie [what an ironic slip of the tongue, I meant life], you see. I vaguely remember the last time I could pull off Shadow Gallery's Storm solos, often so absorbed into it that I drooled a little. :-) My hands stubbornly refuse to play along even simpler tunes anymore. The memory is still there. το μεν πνεύμα πρόθυμον, η δε σάρξ ασθενής. I'm having a particularly persistent difficulty doing successive bends with the 3rd finger.

Describing stuff never did it for me. I could never put things into words, in order, in rhythm or even rhyming. I couldn't even express them without any of those things, like Son House did. I similarly wouldn't get it if they were put in a picture, drawn [and quartered] or otherwise visually represented. Sound is my vessel of choice. I started writing catchy stuff as exercises in theory - I threw all of them away, and boy that was a lot of paper. After a rejection from a member of the so called weaker sex that I found particularly magic [combine low standards with a three day long hangover and you'll begin to get it] I wanted to say something about it. I couldn't, so I wrote parts of a song and waited until somebody could put words onto it. Nobody ever did. Who could, right?

Every time I grab my guitar I leave it down for the same reason. After a while the anxiety becomes unbearable. Back when my band and I played live a song of mine for the very first time, I felt like I was going to snap halfway through the second verse. Like, physically snap in half. I have no recollection of how I finished playing that one. I'm not aware if it should or shouldn't, but coming back to playing the instrument feels a little better and a lot worse at the same time. This time it's a little bit worse because the depression is a lot worse. The betrayal is a lot worse. So I thought, maybe this whole thing is a process, and every hurdle and hoop you have to jump over can be done in little steps or giant leaps. So maybe I'd try that. So I sat on my couch, and I promised I wouldn't get up until I've written a song. And it starts like this:

it is raining outside

and I'm all out of everything