Justification of My Existence, Continued

Some of you may know me, and many others will not.  I am a writer of lyrics, music, poetry, and stories.  I'd like to think that I'm a craftsman, having always used my hands in artistic expression, whether by writing music and lyrics, building gardens and landscapes, designing and building my own pedalboards, or the many projects I've been forced to logically figure out because of my too long career working for men with much more business sense and far less common sense than I've ever had.

I wrote an essay titled "Justification of My Existence" almost ten years ago when I was finishing my degree in English at the University of the Incarnate Word. It was published in the UIW literary journal, Quirk.  A lot has changed since then, and much hasn't.  It's strange to think of how much time has been enjoyed, wasted, or trivialized in all that time.  I have thought of  my mortality a lot in the past ten years, and a lot about regret, resentment, and all of the adventures that should have been.

The worst conclusions I've come to are about the ways in which society as a whole is run, the methods employed through which humanity is forced to "buy into" the way the world is run, into politicians, into business owners, and into the grind itself.

So why now?  After all, I'm forty years old, and I've spent twenty years in the same industry, all the while trying so hard to be creative in so many other ways outside of work.  All I can say is that I feel a sense of urgency more than ever, and not to do the job I do all day, though I always do the best job I can do, every day of my life.  I feel the need to be creative more than ever, to be able to show the world what I can do, in music, film, writing, even hand lettering and drawing, which is probably the smallest of my many interests.  Is this the definition of a midlife crisis?  Perhaps.

Why on Blogger?  Frankly,  the people's attention span sucks.  Blogger is the one place I know of that people will come to read at their leisure, apart from one day perhaps publishing my own book, which I don't spend enough time writing to accomplish any time soon.  The digital sphere has been good and bad to me.  However, what I'd really like to do now is express my artistic/creative nature, something integral to my "soul" that I should've been cultivating far more carefully and aggressively than I have done in the past thirty years. 

This is where I circle back to "buying into" the way the world is run.  I've spent a lot of years distracted by the pursuit of my objectives the wrong way, apparently.  I've always "worked for the man," thereby shafting myself and all of my personal creative pursuits the whole damn time.  You see, when you work in a field like mine, which has always been in "construction," you are exhausted by the end of the day, both mentally and physically if you're the one running the show and feeling responsible for every piece of the puzzle.

Now, that being said, I currently play in two bands, Wulfholt and ManEaters of Tsavo, and I also try to write as much music on my own as I can, as Ardentbold.  I play my instruments almost every night; rarely do I not.  However, Wulfholt practices once a week almost religiously, ManEaters of Tsavo less so, but we've also been playing together for almost fifteen years.  There isn't ANY money in doing music the way I do it.  Yes, both bands have merchandise which sells, and it's easy to get the word out for shows, but ironically hard to get people out to the shows.

In this culture of not having to leave your comfy couch or even get out of your comfy pants, people rarely go out anymore, and if they do, it's because they really enjoy getting drunk.  So most of the time, ManEaters of Tsavo's audience is usually a group of silly drunks.  With Wulfholt, Michael Lopez--my drummer--and I have put so much effort into everything we do that we've been able to open for a lot of national and international acts lately, including Jinjer, Sumo Cyco, The Browning, Upon a Burning Body, Nita Strauss, Sacred Reich, Sworn Enemy, Whitechapel, Dying Fetus, Superjoint, Battlecross, and Child Bite.

So, the music being what it is, probably the thing that comes most easily to me in life, I will continue to do it for a while.  If anything, since the digital sphere is what it is now, I may eventually give up playing live shows and just do everything online, which brings me to what's going on here.

Ardentbold is an idea, an ideal on how to live one's life, which I intend to henceforth cultivate carefully and aggressively.  The name itself comes from James Joyce's Ulysses, but I'll leave that at that.  I intend to produce art.  It's that simple, but it's also very complicated, and only because there's so much I still want to do.  I am fairly confident that if I can spend fifty hours a week working for someone else to put money into their already silver-lined pockets, I can probably do a hell of a lot better for myself than I ever have previously.  Stay tuned for more details on what, how, and when.  We'll just have to see how all of that works out.  So I circle back around, yet again and finally, to "buying into" the grind. 

Grind for yourself, doing what you love.  Don't buy into the idea that you can't do what you love and make money at it.  I can tell you definitively that the person who is ultimately responsible for building the place where I recently worked had a great vision, and that he spends literally all of his time working on making money, which is what he loves.  Now, because of that love of money, a lot of craftsmanship was sacrificed to the bottom line, and that's where my disagreement comes in, real hard. If you truly want any place or thing to be great, greatness must be cultivated and the price paid for it.

Regret is strong in me, and it's no secret to those who know me that I've made a ton of horrible mistakes.  Now, while it may be true that mistakes are the ways in which people learn best, I'm an idiotic repeat offender.  My greatest offenses?  Not giving myself enough credit and selling myself short, academically, musically, and artistically, all in the name of "getting by."

I feel ridiculous now, at age forty, looking back, seeing how so much regret could've been avoided, but I also feel very driven to make it right.  I may falter several times throughout the rest of the journey, but at least I've got my course plotted and I just have to weather the storms.  I intend to live Ardentbold.

wulfholt.bandcamp.com

maneatersoftsavo1.bandcamp.com

ardentbold.bandcamp.com