Moving past the crap

My past is what it is, and no amount of shuffling the pieces around on the board will change that. I cannot dig those pieces up out of my past and make them go away. Those are the pieces that are on my board. I need to find a way to play those pieces that will allow me to get the shit done that I need to do.

I need to move past the “therefores.” Shitty things happened to me, therefore I am damaged. Shitty things happened to me, and therefore I am strong and resilient. Screw the “therefores,” especially the ones that result in conclusions about myself. Therefore I am A. Therefore I am B. You know what? Fuck “therefore I am.”

“Shitty things happened to me, therefore shitty things happened to me,” is as far as I need to go. My past is damaged, and I need to build a fence around it so that it doesn’t bleed forward and soak into — and fuck up — my future.

My past is damaged, yes. Well guess what, I still need to get shit done — the shit I am going to badly regret not doing because I’ve decided that it’s the shit I was put on this Earth to do.

I also really need to stop swinging my fists at people who haven’t been in my life for twenty years, and hitting the entirely uninvolved people who are standing right next to me in the here and now. Somehow, I have to stop doing that. I don’t know how. I think it involves just not doing it.

It also involves going away for a while and just getting my work done a la Steven Pressfield’s “do the work.”

Down periscope. See you all in a bit.

AGH

I’ve got so much left to do. One thing on SoundCloud, not even in what’s really a final, polished form. A whooooole lot of other pieces still to go into the woodshed for refinement, or what little refinement I can give them since to be blunt, I am not a concert soloist.

This isn’t even step one. This is step 0.0000000001. Step a zillionth.

I’ve got a long row to hoe. I almost wish things were like they were in the very distant past, where the sheet music was the final finished product.

And in other news, I really have to stop swinging my fists at people who haven’t been near me for twenty years, and hitting the perfectly inoffensive people standing next to me in the here and now. The bursts of short-tempered biliousness are beginning to annoy even me.

Slow-mo practice is so …

… clearing of the mind, productive, reliable, useful …

… boring as hell.

It’s almost hard to trust it, because it’s almost like what I thought practice was as a kid — a way to just do something and have it get better by magic. Now, I get the neuro-wah-wah behind slow practice, but it still seems like magic on some level. I’ve had the experience of playing something painfully slowly with total focus a few times and suddenly experienced mega-leaps in my ability to play it. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do, but it still somehow strikes me as mysterious joo-joo on some level, like those times when you’ll have a flying dream and it will suddenly feel incredibly self-evident that if you just have the right attitude and hold your body in the right way, you start to float and then swim in mid-air or fly. Well, of course!

Magic.

Now in a dream, there’s no voice of reason that tells you, “You’re going to wind up on the floor, you.” In waking life though, there is. And I need a way to shut it up.

I also have to keep a lid on the power in my left hand again, or else I end up in a sort of arms race (*hyuk hyuk I said arms race* <—- points at the pun) where my left hand starts drowning out the right, and then I have to pound harder on that side, so my left arm responds by getting heavier, and pretty soon I'm exhausting myself and it all sounds like a mortar barrage. How many f's are in fortississississimo anyway? I think that's another thing I need to pay attention to with the Magic Joo-Joo Slow-Motion Practice™, just letting myself occasionally play something pianissimo and presto at the same time.