Something to Keep
“I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.”
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
A Second Look
One of the goals I had when I started the website was to think more clearly. I wanted to share what I was learning, of course, but I also wanted to organize the ideas in my head in a way that sounded articulate. I have my bullet journal in front of me as I write this, and I’m looking at a smattering of notes. Having a bunch of notes of seemingly unrelated things might sound counterintuitive, but it works for me.
See, writing has to be one of the most uncomfortable things you can do. It forces you to organize things in your head and express them in a way that makes sense for others. It reflects how you think, and our thinking isn’t linear or clear. Whenever you read something eloquent and neat, it probably didn’t start that way. The author (I included a Bukowski quote at the top of this article) probably spent a long time polishing that idea until it came out that way. I don’t write because it comes easy for me; I write despite the fact that it doesn’t.
Art can be messy and disjointed, but not because the artist cut corners and took the easy way out. I like to remind myself of that whenever I sit down to do something difficult.
Something I Liked
During the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to learn both American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown in their entirety. This project has been a lot of fun, even if some of the songs are really hard to learn. At some point, I decided to do some research about those albums, and I learned a lot about the production side of them.
I also found this interview on YouTube, which mainly focuses on Green Day’s latest album, Saviors. I really liked the interview because it discusses everything from the legendary punk venue, 924 Gilman Street, to the vulnerability of writing lyrics.
