Nigh Fidelity

I’d hardly say that I came crashing out of the gate with last week’s first letter in, oh, um, two years, but I felt pretty good about it and could sense a tiny bit of momentum building beneath my feet. Or fingers, as it were. This week, though? Not so much.

I’m not one of these people insistent on sucking the creative and productive marrow out of this particular moment. I mean, I’m doing my best not to feel like I’m just abjectly wasting all this free time, but I’m also not apologizing for the time that I do. We’re all just trying to be, aren’t we?

All of this to say that while writing is one of the main tools I have to help me make sense of the world and myself, right now I’m still feeling a bit blunt, a bit rusty. Of course, yes, do it more, get better. Hone, sharpen, polish, repeat (man, that Brad Leone knife video really got in my head…)

Back in the earlier incarnation of this letter, I wrote quite a bit about habits and routines and practice, and I’ve been re-reading that work to help get me in the zone, and, in a way, to remind myself that I actually have been in that zone before. Building and running my business necessarily consumed most of my creative energy, which is why sending out weekly missives kinda fell off the to-do list (until now). And while I didn’t (and don’t) always have the mojo for conjuring ideas into words, music has since stepped into that space.

Maybe it’s a kind of mid-life crisis, maybe it’s just the timely reboot of High Fidelity, but making playlists has become my latest grasp at journalism. As my own words have been struggling to make their way to surface, I’ve been instead fervently finding and stringing together songs that, when taken together create a kind of personal narrative, a soundtrack-as-diary-entry. Or, I guess, more to the point, I’m just “using someone else’s poetry to express how [I] feel.”

But so what, who cares. I’m doing what I can these days to engage the muscle memory that helps me keep my ideas moving around, getting limber. Whether it takes twenty-one or 244 days to (re)build my writing habit, I’m going to use whatever resources I can to keep telling myself stories in order to live. And while I drag you along for the ride, you can at least have something decent to listen to.

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.”
- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity