I’ve been making music again. It feels really good. I’ve also finally entered the digital recording age, so I am better prepared to collaborate with a long lost musical soul mate who remains separated from me by a slight, but still significant, geographical divide. However, I have a hard time diverting the creative river inside me to multiple channels. So, the prose writing suffers when the music writing flows. We’ll see what happens.
All posts by sean
not really off the wagon
Posted by sean on January 26, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/26/not-really-off-the-wagon/
redemption
Yesterday, I decided to salvage what I could of the day and left the house, observing curiously as the late afternoon blossomed unexpectedly before me. As fate would have it, during its period of disuse, the chain on my other bike (meaning not my commuter bike) had achieved a patina of rust and gunk that prevented it from making a successful circuit around the drive-train. So I crouched next to the back door, generously oiling the links and massaging them back into working order, until one of my neighbors arrived home next door. I hailed her, and we spoke pleasantly at length. When she went inside, my neighbor from the port side hailed me and we engaged in a discussion of a less sprawling, though just as neighborly, nature than the previous one. It is good to be friendly with the neighbors, I thought to myself, and I am lucky to have such affable and considerate ones! With that, I was off on my bike across town to my old birding and exploring haunt where I spent a couple of happy hours tromping through the woods, restoring the waning energy levels of my soul and communing with the natural world. As the sky darkened, then, and I wound my way reluctantly forth from the woods, the sweet ethereal song of the Hermit Thrushes rose surprisingly from the forest floor and carried through the trees, as if to ease me ever so gently back toward the main road, and harsh traffic, to that which I always must return.
Posted by sean on January 16, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/16/redemption/
random
Nicest day we’ve had in weeks and I’m stuck inside waiting for a tardy contractor. As I wait, someone intermittently uses a loud drill next door. Sometimes homeownership sucks. Muggings and robberies are up, in both the neighborhood and the city at large. This depresses me on an epic scale. Drilling next door probably indicates installation of new deadbolts. Bars on windows, steel doors, quadruple locks, where does it end? How safe can you be? Muggers lie in wait looking for opportunities. We really have no control over it. The problem is systemic: the haves and the have nots forever divided. No reconciliation possible. Only solution is to take to the woods. The cities are doomed.
In 1960, John Steinbeck traveled the United States with his dog and wrote a book about his trip. At one point he notes, “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.” Since then, we have happily continued to destroy all the natural places, with the exception of a select few that are so overrun they project a carnivalesque atmosphere. We have built a society so spread apart that most people see the automobile as the only way to traverse the uncomfortable distances between point A and point B. To not own a car is anathema. You are branded a freak and possibly un-American; at the very least, you are suspect. Similarly, to eschew the consumerist lifestyle that is so red-bloodedly American is also viewed with suspicion. Why wouldn’t you want to buy all the latest greatest stuff? You saw it on TV, after all, and it looked totally awesome. And everyone who had that stuff looked really happy. So why wouldn’t you want to be happy? Get out there and shop, sucker.
Often I think I was born in the wrong century, perhaps in the wrong country, possibly of the wrong race, and maybe even on the wrong planet altogether.
I just got back from a work retreat that I had been dreading for quite some time. During said retreat, I spent some late night hours carousing with a few coworkers who I hadn’t really gotten to know beforehand. I found them to be decent and fun to hang out with, at least in my inebriated state. I’m sure they were surprised by my sudden bout of gregariousness. I’m not a mean drunk, but I can be a saucy one. During the work sessions, I was surprised to sense a tiny flame of enthusiasm ignite somewhere deep below the layers of cynicism within me. But I know better. We can talk grand and eloquent away from the office, but reality is grim. Knowing how long it’s taken to get this far (still a sad state of affairs) makes it impossible to expect that even a quarter of our lofty ideas will ever come to fruition within the next three and a half years. And that is not cynicism talking; that’s just pragmatism.
The place where we stayed was a Bavarian-styled inn that was the type of place where the Griswold family would’ve roomed during one of their epically disastrous vacations. My bathroom had a disused-looking bidet in it and a space heater mounted in the wall that smelled like burning dust when turned on. Still, the king-sized four-poster bed was comfortable and the vaguely shabby past-its-heyday look to the entire place was preferable to the sterility of modern hotels. Not a good place to be a vegan, but I got by (barely). I wish I had photos to share, but the camera was left behind.
Posted by sean on January 15, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/15/random/
why, yes, i should’ve finished painting that wall by now
When we bought this house I made a list of things to do/fix soon after moving in. I think my idea was to get it all done and then kick back and relax. There were certain things, like painting, that I just knew if we didn’t finish before moving in, they might not get done for some time. Well, I was sure right about that. As I sit here at my desk, my eyes wander to the pile of switch face-plates that have yet to screw themselves back into the wall, probably because they are patiently waiting for me to first slap on that final coat of paint. After so many months of living with half-finished projects, you become dangerously ambivalent to their incomplete status. In all fairness, I did complete some things. But there’s still a list and I still look at it regularly and sigh. I am quite adept at avoidance, wasting colossal amounts of time daydreaming and mindlessly surfing the Internet. I could blame this on the cold winter, and my desire to hibernate. Really, I could blame it on a lot of external factors. But mostly it’s because I just don’t feel like doing it. I guess I am a slacker at heart.
Posted by sean on January 10, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/10/why-yes-i-shouldve-finished-painting-that-wall-by-now/
early reading
Yesterday, the leafless trees etched achingly across the blue sky, and where the clarity comes from all of a sudden I do not know. Like the right lens finally passed across the eyes and the details sharpened into focus. Today drinking yerba mate and feeling okay. Working out, flexing muscles, living outside of the mind; indulging the physical senses, where the grit of life grinds against you, polishing the brittle edges of your psyche smooth. Time to cast aside the shell game and dive in the fray. So far, so good.
Posted by sean on January 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/early-reading/
halting the aversion
The holidaze has come and gone, a blur of mostly family and some friends, a lot of eating, a touch of music with an old compatriot, some reading and sleeping, and a long, luxurious respite from work. I traveled by train and car, but have been off the bike for far too long now. Worked out at the gym, tried my hand at pedal steel guitar, cooked and ate with some of my favorite people. I received an unexpected gift intended to enhance my birding, which I haven’t done in about a month now, besides car birding, and some very meager backyard birding. Christmas Day did unexpectedly bring to the yard jays, cardinals, doves, sparrows, and even a junco or two. We’ve seen glimpses of a hawk (probable Cooper’s) in the trees across the street. Meanwhile, with the close of the old year and the dawn of the new comes the inevitable reflection. I don’t make resolutions, but it’s hard not to stare ahead at a blank slate of 365 days before you and not scratch around in your head for some ideas of what you want to see rise up from that expanse of time. Personally I know I need to stop treading water and start making headway on the changes I yearn to see in my future. No more averting the eyes. My passivity knows no bounds and the time to corral it is way past due. I need to spend the afternoon, as Annie Dillard says, because I can’t take it with me. There is a path that I am supposed to be on and I will claw my way through the brambles to get to it.
Posted by sean on January 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/halting-the-aversion/
something different
My back hurts:
Epic Baltimore snowstorm shatters existing record for December! We walked through white-out blizzard conditions on Saturday to purchase the second-to-last snow shovel at Rite-Aid. Then came home and played Scrabble and watched movies. We spent much of today digging out. I wish it would snow like this more often; it made me nostalgic for all those childhood snowstorms I lived through (and played in!). Of course, next time let’s make it happen during the week, shall we?
Posted by sean on December 21, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/21/something-different/
3:33
Wake up uncertain, through blurred eyes reach out, unmask the dread box full of time: 3:33 AM. I am untethering; I feel this, yes, I do. I float above myself all day, drifting, occasionally deleting Russian spam, wondering when this gossamer thread shall fray, then sever, to release me. I remember being young, staring at the ceiling, imagined walking on it, stepping over door frames to enter rooms; it seemed better up there. My thoughts upside down, always, then and now; my records all broken, need to melt them down, re-groove with new sounds and words.
Posted by sean on December 16, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/16/333/
far corners
In motion, we are immunized against lassitude. Working muscles open the vessels for more oxygen to enter. Don’t want to stop, don’t want to sit still. When you do, extremities lose their warmth; thoughts dull to a sluggish tempo. But outside, even as the wind wipes the smile from your face, the crows revel in it, swooping and soaring on currents we can’t even see. Later you glide on one of those currents in your mind, as the mood pendulum swings in your favor, without the benefit of active motion, but this time with the slow warmth of drink and easy talk. But when all that is over, quicker than you’d like, you still can’t stop the mental projectiles shooting off in every crazy direction, moving too fast to follow, all with holes burned through like the strip of caps you carried in your jeans pocket as a kid, one after another spark-cracking under the strike of a rock, as you watched and inhaled the acrid plume of smoke drifting up. Reach up quick to snatch them down with inked lines onto bleached white paper, but they are too elusive, having turned to vapor, damp and transparent like late night fog hanging over an empty field.
Posted by sean on December 13, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/13/far-corners/
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