Hi Y’all,
This year has been very intense for me. Why? Because every year is fucking intense. For everyone. My personal intense shit rocked me really hard. It wasn’t all bad. But a lot of it was. Fast forward to a trip I took to Northern New Mexico in early June. It was my first real journey since lockdown commenced. As someone who, during non-pandemic times, typically takes up to a dozen trips annually, I was more than a little ready for my adventure. By the time I hit the road I had become, I feared, as mean and rotten as all the people around me who were being mean and rotten.
While I am embarrassingly excellent at being mean and rotten, those are ancient parts of me I had, I thought, done a decent job of taming. Until, like apparently roughly 98% of people, I just caved in and cunted out . Oh my dog I was so fucking grumpy.
Happily that trip did the trick and prompted a reset. I spent a week at Ojo Caliente then a week at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch, where I took an oil painting class with Natasha Isenhour. I am not practiced enough yet in painting to have even risen to the level of rank amateur. I signed up because I love learning, and the less talented I am at something, the more I get to learn and the happier that makes me.
I learned A LOT. What stuck with me most though, was something Natasha said when we were talking about clearly recognizing our talents and using them. Like me, Natasha knows how to do a whole lot. But she reminds herself that first and foremost, she is a painter, to stay focused on that.
I took that message home with me. I thought about it. I sat down at my keyboard. I wrote another book. I really didn’t want to write a book. Writing is exhausting. But I couldn’t not write it. I stayed very, very focused. I allowed myself to dick around with my ten million craft projects, but only after each day’s writing session was done. Everything else, I told myself, could wait. Because I am a writer.
My leap into substack is an experiment. I’m contemplating serializing the book here. I most certainly will be posting my punk rock poetry. I might dig through the archives and pull out some of my old B-Jo conversations. Whatever the case, I will write. Because I am a writer.
Many posts will be free. Some will not. I’m playing with this subscription thing because I’m telling myself it is okay to do so. I create a shit ton of free content—google me and see. But now I want to ask those of you who dig my writing to please support me. Subscriptions are cheap. And don’t let the title fool you—you dudes can join in, too.
Even though I have been writing since I was eight—so, yeah, fifty years—I am experiencing some butterflies composing this post. Possibly this is from the Delta9 caramel corn my thirtysomething roommate excitedly offered me for breakfast. But I think it’s more like, well I feel like that trip to New Mexico opened up this whole other thing inside of me that I’m ready to explore in words.
Fucking Namaste. So glad you’re here.
Love, Spike