Storms of a Clouded Mind

Alright... I promise after this one I'm gonna talk about something more comprehensive, okay? lol... I didn't plan on talking about this until today, but I had one of my "storms" today, so I thought I'd write about it.

Anybody that knows me knows I have brontophobia--- fear of thunder. It's something that resulted from a bad experience I had when I was little; I didn't get struck by lightning, but it was close enough, lol. Anywasy, I mention this just to clarify that when I say I had "one of my storms" today, I'm not referring to literal storms.

This is a strange phenomenon that 's been happening to me for a while. It's rare, or rather far-between in occurence, so I never think about it. But having an episode today and having this blog to record it, I can finally etch it in concrete for myself to see. Every so often, I get really bogged down; today, for instance, I woke up dying to create something, ANYTHING! I thought I'd try to write something, but nothing came. Then I spent the majority of the day trying to produce music, but all I could do was chip away and chip away at pre-existing works with no major progress.

By 6:00pm I was in my room with 15 windows open on my PC screen. I had papers strewn all over the place. I had ripped my shirt off and flung it across the room because I felt trapped in a hopeless state of unproductiveness. Every time the phone rang I'd just get more and more irritated; and it rang a lot today. As a dude I have no right to say this, but it kinda reminded me of labor pains; I was dying to pull something wonderful out of me and it just wasn't there yet.

WHAT WAS IT? WHAT WAS I SEARCHING FOR? I knew somethign was up there, but I just couldn't find an outlet. Not my writing; not my producing. I thought I was gonna die. The only thing I could think to do was put on some soft music and lay into my guitar; she's acutally pretty comfortable to rest my head on. I began to strum to the music...

Now, for those of you who've read the previous "Team" entries, I'm gonna give you another tidbit about my friend Swim really quickly. Swim is a musical genius. Just like I have a knack for writing, he has a knack for music. We're partners in the music scene, and to help in our production we both bought guitars about a year ago. He picked it up right away; I struggled a bit.

But today, I began to strum on the guitar to an instrumental of Sleepy Brown's "I Can't Wait". And something clicked... the guitar just began to start making sense to me! And for the first time I was able to create my own chords at random, just like Swim! And I made use of all six strings instead of sticking to particular ones like I usually do. I had found my outlet, and my hands danced up and down the strings for an hour or so until I got sizable blisters on my fingers.

As I played, I realized that this wasn't the first time that I had experienced this mental turmoil followed by an "enlightening". It's not quite the same as a brainstorm of random thoughts; the result of these "storms" is always something special to me. In the past it has been one or two high-quality music productions created, mixed, and mastered in a single night. Sometimes it has been a lyrical masterpiece devoid of fillers, full of meaning, and displaying avid technique. Tonight, it was understanding the guitar, followed by application of that understanding.

As for why I have these storms, it's hard to say. But I hafta say the possibilites intrigue me. Imagine: what if these "storms" are sure indicators of a profound product on it's way? I've been praying for any kind of guidance God can give me in my pursuits; maybe this is an answer. Or maybe it's a spiritual thing happening. Or maybe great ideas and thoughts are pre-existent and they can cause "contractions" in our "mental birth canals" before they get here, lol... I'm laughing, but I'm dead serious too. It's possible, right? I mean, I'm sure we've all heard of artists with bad tempers that create works of genius out of their anger; we discussed artists of the Renaissance who had that problem in class just last week.

If these "storms" are real indicators of great ideas to come, maybe I should forget that I wrote this blog. After all, if I recognize the storms I might control my emotions and interrupt the process, lol. Then again, maybe the storms would make good guidelines for my work. I dunno, but it's interesting. Maybe I'll do some research and see what I come up with. In the meantime, I'm just gonna squeeze this storm for all it's worth with this curvy guitar.

All LoveB-)