thoughts

My life of eight years ago was much simpler, but not in the way you think. I’m not grumbling about working at a start-up, having a child, or owning a house. Those all complicate life, but that’s not what was so different about my life of eight years ago.

I’m talking about consumption.

Eight years ago this is what my consumption looked like: I listened to tons of new music on my iPod on my commutes. We had a three-at-a-time movie plan from Netflix. We had just started watching DVDs of Supernatural. I read an occasional book and subscribed to Rolling Stone and The Atlantic. 

That resulted from a conscious decision to give up TV, watching football, playing internet games, and going to all but the most major of movies.. Even with the Netflix, when I got home from work, I usually had vast gulphs of time to fill with writing and arranging music. I could create just as frequently as I consumed. If I had money to spare, I spent it on gear so I could create even better and more interesting things.

Now, I feel beholden to all the media I consume – not just by consuming it, but keeping it all straight. I listen to more new music than ever and keep careful track of release calendars and critics scores to know what to buy. We have streaming content from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, constantly checking for new things to watch along with my handful of ongoing TV shows and a few YouTube channels, so I need to know when there are new episodes. I read more than 70 ongoing comics, and it takes almost as much time to order and organize them as read them. I play one internet game that can eat a few hours each weekend if it introduces new content. And, in an attempt to be less beholden to screens, I’m suddenly reading more actual books and playing board games (plus, again, devoting time to learning about and rating and organizing those, too).

Predictably, my creative output has fallen to close to nill, aside from the awesome month of blogging I just did. Frankly, the effort of keeping up every day exhausted me, and I went into an even more consuming-heavy month as a result.

Recently, a comic from The Oatmeal about “Fear of Missing Out” circulated in my social media circles. Basically, when the author was younger he never wanted to miss a social event. (I’m not linking to it because I don’t actually like The Oatmeal. Oooo, blog drama!) That’s not what I thought it would be about! What is there to miss about social events? They’re just filled with people you can enjoy elsewhere in less stressful settings.

Clearly, I am that person who answers, “I prefer books to people” on the Myers-Briggs.

What I’m afraid to miss out on is all that other stuff. Missing shows means you can’t be in the dialog about them. Missing albums means you can’t chat about critic’s best-of lists each year. Missing comics means you might have to pay hugely for them once their collections are out of print.

In that way, weirdly, I am at my happiest right now. I’m not missing anything I don’t want to miss! I have every LP, movie, and comic I’ve ever wanted and I realize how privileged that makes me. I love being a recommendation agent for my friends and being able to jump into any conversation on media with a well-formed opinion. It makes me feel incredibly content. Yet, I’m actually missing something really important. No, not people – again, major self-centered introvert here, this is so not about people other than me.

That’s what I’m missing out on. Me. The thoughts and feelings I have that might be worth documenting or exploring, writing or singing about. Books written, albums recorded – missing out on all of that. And the more I consume, the more my creative output becomes just an echo of what’s going in – it’s all critique and response, and little genesis.

That leaves me paralyzed. I want to consume all this stuff and get that dopamine shot of contentedness every time I reel in incrementally more of it. I don’t want to stop now and get behind! Then I wouldn’t have the completeness in my possession, even though with every new cohort of music or comics that arrives the chance that I’d have the time to re-read an old one grows less and less.

I’m not sure how to balance this. Maybe it’s months on and months off, so I add a programmatic ebb and flow to my consuming and creating. All I know is that for as drained as I felt after a solid month of blogging, I also felt really awesome.

I’d like to find a way to do the contentedness and the awesomeness at the same time, and maybe also do some exercise that isn’t carrying gear and lifting longboxes full of comics.

 

“I know gifts are officially not a thing,” Lindsay said to me last night, “but when I saw this I had to get it for you.”

She disappeared up the floating stairs to her bedroom loft and returned with this. It’s a painting by local Philly artist Frank Kolbmann that was created live at the 2015 Winter Doldrums music festival.

It’s…. me.

I mean, clearly it is meant to be evocative of David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane era, but it looks just like me – chin, nose, hairline and all. It’s uncanny. I had to quiz Lindsay repeatedly to ascertain that she definitely did not provide my photo as guidance to Mr. Kolbmann.

No, it just came out this way. Me + David Bowie. This photo is not the entire canvas, nor does it do it justice, but I’m sure you’ll be able to see the likeness.

Oh, heck – since it’s my birthday, you can listen to a super-ultra top-secret never-heard other than on my laptop early mix of Arcati Crisis’s first ever full-band studio song. It kinda goes with the painting…

Tonight I am tired. Not physically tired, but emotionally tired. I’m tired of people, and the next three days don’t look like they’ll be offering any respite.

Despite all public opinions to the contrary, I am a decided introvert. It suppose it’s hard to look past the playing in a band, working with clients, being loud, and having massive hair. When I took my first Myers-Briggs test back in college and my type started with “I” everyone was surprised but me. I felt suddenly sure. This piece of paper with its little lead-filled ovals had confirmed something I had intrinsically known for 18 years.

What I knew was that I always preferred a book to other people. That was one of the questions, actually, “Do you prefer to read a book or go to a party?” I thought. “No contest! The book. Obviously.” What I didn’t completely appreciate at the time was that a spectrum of introversion and extroversion isn’t measured purely on an interest in reading over talking, but in where you draw your energy.

I do not draw my energy from other people, which makes my chosen professions as client guy and band leader a little suspect. Aren’t I exposing myself to people by definition in both of those settings. Well… yes. But, it’s important to remember: I never meant to be an account man! I was obsessed with communications, and the next step was managing creative projects, and those projects had clients, and I had to talk to them, and the whole thing just snowballed until I was overseeing hundreds of clients. It’s the same with the band, really. I wanted to write music, and then I wanted to play the music I wrote, and then I figured I had to play it in front of people to know which songs were good, and now I’m in a cover band that plays five hour sets.

The distinction is that I don’t really draw energy from the clients or the crowds. I draw energy from the problem solving and from bettering my own last best solution. It’s a lot like yoga, actually. I’m in it just to deepen my practice.

Which brings me back to today. I’m out of energy. I’m like an electronic device with a desperately blinking “charge me” light, hoping to be plugged into a wall. It’s hard to find enough non-sleeping time to get that charge back, even by expanding my bubble of introversion to include E, EV, and even some of my bandmates, colleagues, and close friends. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and then your weekend is parties and shows and rehearsals and dinners, and then it’s right back to the energy depletion again.

As I look forward to my birthday next week marking another year of introversion, I think I might need to learn some new techniques. I know there are major music stars who are introverts, but what about business leaders? CEOs? Media darlings? If I want to keep leveling up in this life, I need to figure out how to recharge better and faster, and how to run near empty longer.

Hopefully I can learn that all from reading a book, and not from going to a party.

Watch as Jeff Lemire (who I genuinely really love as an author) undoes the past three years of progress in X-Men books in his first issue of Extraordinary X-Men by returning us to a pre-Avengers vs. X-Men “no more mutants” situation that is the fault of the Inhumans. To be fair, this has been rumored for months as an editorial directive, and if anyone can make it palatable it’s probably Lemire (or, you know, Gillen).

Here’s my reaction when I read this page last night…

 

Looks like I’ll still have plenty of hate reading to do in All-New, All-Different (but completely the same) Marvel!