2023-04-08: almost there

i've pushed music lessons, haven't touched my instruments at all. i can't play when other people are here. that sort of smothering feeling that people are listening, maybe judging. i'm good enough at guitar; weak at the rest. i have monday off, and this will help, but the day is mostly spoken for already. plans to swap snow tires, get an oil change, all the boring adult stuff that needs to get done and eats away the chance to work on all the things that don't.

i spend a lot of time working on things for an audience of none: this journal, some stuff in geminispace, poems that i complete and never send out, music i learn and gradually forget. i'm scrambling to figure something out on guitar, that i can have done for thursday. in my piles of music i found an old photocopy of tablature for vestapol. i worked on this probably thirteen, fourteen years ago now; it's a classical american folk/blues piece, open d. i would've worked on it back when i was doing a ton of slide work and writing my own blues. maybe stereotypical for a white guy in his late 20s/early 30s. but it was fun. and it'll be fun to relearn. i'm looking forward to getting started.

i don't have kids. at this point, i won't. i try to avoid tv as much as i can (apart from my weakness for baseball), so i spend my time working on my writing, my music, putting in the hours that matter to me and no one else will ever see. i tell myself it matters, all this time focusing effort and love into a strange confluene of interests that others almost never get to see.

i wonder what other people do. if they think about these things. or if the days play out like mine have for the last week, stringing together what's necessary to make a good life for their kids, flopping next to their partner for an hour on the couch, and telling themselves as they go to bed that they'll figure out the rest later. that the flame still burns. that they'll still have time.

journal