I Am Truly An Artist:

I was just so focused I forgot to eat the dinner I'd just cooked!

Telescope

I think God made me a songwriter to give me a way to figure out what I'm feeling. It wasn't until recently that I accepted that I possess these feeling things and it's perfectly normal, even if I'm not. Funneling and filtering all these experiences, observations and imaginings down into something catchy and clever is the creative focus of each present moment I remember to truly live.

There's no way I could say it better than Bob Dylan did in his book, Chronicles, Volume 1:

"If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library - everything laying around on all the tables. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right." ... "A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true."

My college-years journals have lately been opened more and more in my quiet time and it's funny - all the lines I wrote back when I thought I had no clue what was going on were pretty accurate descriptions of that particular reality.

I look at what I'm writing today, which I'm now able to do from different perspectives or from outside myself entirely, and maybe I can draw the same conclusion -

There's my self-deprecating side:
This is such a metaphor/deja vu, seen it before/such ironic play on words/white and black come back for thirds/here I go but I digress/it's so silly but I must confess/it's my quest to impress someone else without sounding like I'm pleased myself.

My old guy sitting in a rocking chair outside the barber shop chewing bahaya grass with his hat tipped and arms crossed side:
Sow your oats before you come back home cause oats don't grow down here.

And I have my cynical, defeated side:
I don't care/but I could/I'm willing to see/if I would/but in all likelihood/he won't be anything to me.


?

Label Whore

Hi my name's Haylee, and I'm a Label Whore. ("Hi, Haylee")...

Was practicing (on my Martin D-18) guitar last night and decided to upgrade my yellow guitar-string-and-body Fender fleece wiper rag up to Gucci (the big one with the fabulous colorful bugs design I bought on sale, 40% off, at Saks last year for $97.50 in white - and just HAD to buy Audrey the one in black) Then thought, or maybe Pucci (a blue and yellow classic pattern bandana that Dennis bought me for my birthday). Went and got the Gucci.

This is coming from the same person who cut things off with a guy because his driveway went Porsche, Tahoe, Mercedes and he had too many fireplaces. That kind of materialism really turns me off. :)

My List of Reasons Not to Like Him grew so long I had to start another page!

Have spent more time reading old journals lately, and last night found The List that got me through the worst heart break of my life (which, as I've said before, was also the most valuable experience I've ever had). Was having trouble getting over the douchebag I guess (for the record, we're buds now), so began jotting down all the bad things he'd done to me and general flaws to help me stop focusing on the way he looked at me, the way he looked in rugby shorts, etc. HAHA. The List began with things like this:

1. doesn't like baseball
2. chews gum
3. sometimes acts 12

But with time, it got much more substantial:

1. slept with one of my teammates (apparently I "drove him to it", according to one of his friends. huh)
2. not all about his truck
3. chews gum (for some reason it's okay for me to chew gum in athletic situations but it looks stupid when guys do it)
4. doesn't like baseball (this is still a big deal, it's basically like not having a soul)
5. ripped my heart out ON PURPOSE (in fairness, I was trying to do the same thing to him the whole time - oh the maturity!)
7. brought another girl to a party at my house (this was his checkmate move - just didn't have anymore countermoves left in me at that point, jeeeeez this was SUCH an F-ed up situation)
9. he'll be fat and ugly when he gets old
14. sometimes acts 12
15. never said he was sorry (not that I had either...)
16. not as good at music as me (this one isn't really fair, haha)
17. ruined several great songs for me (such as Comfortable, which we never were, but "ruined" came to mean that the situation helped me experience some songs on a deeper plane, like Don't Think Twice, It's Alright)
18. BAD dancer (you have no idea)
19. he's ANNOYING (this might go back to the "sometimes acts 12" one - and boy did it annoy me that I couldn't stop thinking about someone who annoyed me so much...)
21. doesn't get it (I was expecting a 22-year-old male to "get it"! - what was I thinking?!?!?)
25. HE MADE ME HATE HIM (this was probably the nicest thing he couldn't done at that time)
26. we brought out the worst in each other

So yeah, I left some out, but you get the general idea. This is another one of those many things you want a lobotomy for but laugh like crazy about it down the road. But this wasn't the last time I employed this tactic! There was another dude I'd crushed on forevah and wanted to cut him out of my head/heart like a tumor, so I made The List for him too:

1. lives far away
2. alcoholic, or getting there fast
3. has potential to get fat
4. has probably slept with lots of hos
5. not a Christian

As you can see, I'm still kind of shallow (look, I don't want to wake up next to a fat guy when I'm 60), but whatever works! He ain't the right one, so whatever I can do for self-preservation's sake, I'll do, because the subject my consciousness devotes time to had better be more valuable than some clueless slag in little shorts. Thus, The List of Reasons Not To Like Him has been very helpful for me with that whole moving on bit, and consequently getting back into fruitful thought processes, so I highly recommend it! If you ever find yourself liking someone you don't want to like, just grab a pad and pen and focus on their flaws - be brutal!

myspace boycott

I HATE myspace. I used to have an account but canceled it, mostly because I was a musician on there and couldn't ever get my songs to play correctly and I got tired of people posting on my wall "did you know your songs won't play? I can't hear them!" Oh thanks for the info! I'd never heard that before!!

My friends were all, "dude, you canceled your myspace account, is everything okay?" Yeah, I'm freaking fine. Oh excuse me, I'm less of a person now that I don't live my life through freaking myspace! I hardly even exist anymore!

Facebook is bad enough, but there's enough people I care about with whom I'd never stay in touch if not for that website. When facebook started it was this elite cult thing solely for college students. Now everyone can join, even pimply-faced high school creeps. But it's still classier than myspace, with all its advertisements and pedophiles. Ugh.

I'm getting to the age where I'm rejecting new technologies like iPods (which I'd probably enjoy if I weren't too cheap to buy one), iPhones, Wiis, Blackberries, and other freaking nonsense we're conditioned to believe we "need", such as new-skool communication methods like social networking. Kids don't talk to each other or even make eye contact for long because they're too busy watching their stupid cell phones for updates on how one of their 673 "friends" they've never actually met had her relationship status downgrade to "it's complicated".

It's just like Jessica said about computers in Kissing Jessica Stein: "They're numbing and obscuring our humanity." Not to mention turning everyone's grammar into CRAP with their freaking texting language - 2=to, u=you. I guess when you're trying to save time and space phone-to-phone it makes sense, but hells bells! I've seen these shortcuts show up in letters to the editor in newspapers and on blog posts and so forth. If you've ever read 1984 by George Orwell, you'd know that one way Big Brother maintained control was by reducing language people used ("doubleplus ungood") to deplete their ability to articulate thoughts and express themselves.

Alright, maybe I'm paranoid, but these are just a few reasons why I HATE myspace.

Prolificity

pro·lif·ic Pronunciation[pruh-lif-ik]
–adjective
1. producing offspring, young, fruit, etc., abundantly; highly fruitful: a prolific pear tree.
2. producing in large quantities or with great frequency; highly productive: a prolific writer.
3. profusely productive or fruitful (often fol. by in or of): a bequest prolific of litigations.
4. characterized by abundant production: a prolific year for tomatoes.
[Origin: 1640–50; < ML prōlificus fertile. See prolicide, -fic]

My creativity tends to ebb and flow with the seasons. It's surging right now and it's almost freaky. In the past a wave like this would be a side effect of serious neurotransmitter party and I'm almost surprised that it's happening now that I'm taking balance pills. But I'll take it! I got really scared the other night but a calm voice inside my head (it's always nice when the kind voices speak up, haha) gave me a pep talk, told me not to second-guess myself and let me know it's okay because this is what God stitched me together to do! It's natural. It doesn't make me cocky as long as I acknowledge that the songs are gifts from God and just a method of telescoping ideas and feelings into something other people can enjoy.

Last night I finished a song I wrote the chorus for at least three years ago. Then I just started playing a new chord progression that I might match up to old lyrics or make new ones for. I don't know - that's the cool thing. I'm going through my old journals and have found at least 10 songs that are 75-90% finished and just need for me to pick up my guitar or sit down at the piano with a fresh, blank mind and play through to decide how it'll be. I try to let the song decide what it'll sound like in the final analysis. I hate for anything to be too crafted or contrived.

The last thing a songwriter wants is to fall into a rut of writing with the same meter or theme. I'm writing a song making fun of myself how I always try to be ironic and clever in all my lyrics. A songwriter's greatest fear is having the well run dry and thinking "is this all I've got?" Hemingway commented on that in A Moveable Feast:
"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. . . . If I started to write elaborately . . . I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline."

In a conversation about being creative with someone who doesn't have it in him, I said an artist can't help it. You don't have a choice. You create whatever it is because you have to because it's what and who you are. So call me crazy - I'll never be normal by any conventional standard so I'm just rolling with it.

It's getting to be studio time again. I almost have to lay it down and then memorize it from there because I'm not one of those poets who go around with the ability to spout their own crap from memory unless I've been playing it for years. But it'll be my fourth record and I'm looking forward to it.

Boy Hall of Fame

I'm less and less impressed by the boys I meet. No one stands out against the members of my Boy Hall of Fame, which goes like this (for now, it could change in twenty minutes - it actually just changed four times as I was typing it):

1. Bobby Hill
2. The C-Word
3. Lloyd Dobbler/Dreamboat (Tie)
5. Chicken Legs

You could actually hear the clicking sound of the bar being raised when I hung out with these kids. Some have similar characteristics - sincerity in sweetness, long legs and brains, an air of mystery, three of the five wear glasses, and all but the Dreamboat are rugby players. I dunno. Maybe if I analyzed it more deeply I could identify a pattern. Whatever.

I haven't really dated much but realize that the whole process of elimination we go through to find a mate is basically just trial and error. So it isn't a complete waste of time. These jewels of experience produce memories that I hold close in the back of my mind. And I can honestly say that if I don't find one that outshines all of them, I'm satiated.

I Guess It's What You'd Call Maturity...

It's ironic - as I'm getting older and my biological clock is ticking, I feel less urgency to get with someone than I was back in my prime!

One thing I've noticed lately about my prowess with the fellas is that I don't require immediate gratification anymore. Man, back in the day, I'd be burning up to get next to somebody and it was considered a failed play if I didn't get to right then and there. These days I'd rather wait it out to see if the dude is worthy of spending time even talking to.

Maybe that's arrogant. Yeah, it probably is. But the most precious thing we have in this life is TIME, and the last thing I want to do is waste it. So I guess on one hand you could say "I may never see this kid again! Carpe diem!" and on the other, when you aren't sure if he's boyfriend material but has potential, you just kinda get set on offense, make plays on defense, and let the game come to you. I prefer the latter these days and am just less aggressive in general than I used to be.

So I reckon it's safe to say I'm getting further down the road on the way to Grown-Up Town, which is probably a good thing.