steam.

Everything feels off limits right now. Things need to be written about, but they can't be written, or I can't write them. A friend told me last week that I'm a private person. I know this, but I also forget. I so value the transparent, genuine people in my life - I forget that I am not always like that myself.

I think about all the creators - the people who choose to make something out of their lives and experiences. We put a slab of ourselves on display. We sing it, we write it, we paint it, we draw it, we photograph it. Private and public mix. But so often, at least in my experience, these creators can be intensely private people. Still, something inside stirs them to use their private lives as some sort of fuel for their art.

I went through a brief phase where I thought I wanted to write songs. I didn't think I was going to be a musician or anything like that, but I felt strongly that the best way I could express myself was by writing rhyming lyrics and putting them to a tune. I wrote a handful of mediocre-to-bad songs that I strummed out alone, on a guitar, late at night. Incidentally, most of these songs were tied to heartbreak, which has a way of bringing out the mediocre poet in all of us.

I can't tell you where this is going. I haven't been writing and its making me feel crazy. Its making me think of terrible analogies to describe my crazy feelings (which I have written and deleted just now). Its making my shoulders tight and my fists balled up and I can't sleep and when I do have crazy dreams filled with alligators and college acquaintances. So I decided to show up here tonight and let out some of that steam.

More to come, friends. Big things, too.