I have been working my way out of a stubborn cold for a while now, the kind that comes with the shifting seasons, where the days range from a whisper of summer to a cold reminder of winter. 

Yesterday, with my boss’s encouragement, I took the day to rest, removed even from my own apartment with its distractions of painting projects and musical instruments, and read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.  New ideas came to me in the stillness and I approached a centering that has evaded me in the news cycle documenting this country going down the toilet. 

A major point of Odell’s manifesto is to reclaim our attention in the era of social media alienation, to live life geared not toward optimization, but presence absent capitalistic productivity.  That a retreat, even as brief as the one I had yesterday, shouldn’t be seen as a way to re-charge as to return a better worker bee, nor to escape the world like a hermit, but to better resist within this world with all its flaws and potential.

Every day appears to be an exercise in cultivating and protecting this attention or creative energy.  What I go to bed hoping to conquer the next day will be foiled by dread, depression, or an undisciplined desire to play online backgammon.  This inertia derails starting the task at hand, forget about the concentration necessary to make any headway on it.

I have been practicing with my band Childless since November 2023.  We booked our first show for March 11 at Purgatory and the last two months have been all about putting our set together.  So far, we have written five original songs, most of them written since I started the band, including one that we wrote two weeks before the performance to round out the set.  One song, Springtime, has been with me for years now, long before I thought I would be in a band again, much less was taking the steps to actualize such a dream.  The lyrics and melody came together easier than most writing, opening with “rich girl, rich girl, who bought your lingerie/ was it your wife, or your daddy?” and the chorus “springtime, springtime, springtime/you bloom and you fade, as fast as you came,” but everything else remained dormant.  It was worth the wait to find this song a home, to let it shape into its current form, as I had to grow to meet it, as well.

There was such a high of excitement to play this first show and the afterglow was electric, as well.  My dad, with sincere enthusiasm, asks for recordings of our stuff and I send him shitty phone voice memos that I take during our practices.  “When will there be a better recording?” he asks, while also telling me that, “that one song (Springtime) is a real earworm.” lol

But, as it became clear in a zoom call with my bandmates in lieu of showing up for practice and getting everyone else sick, we need to write more songs before investing in a recording effort.  We need to play out more in order for the songs to mature into a more finalized form.  In short, the process continues, making something from nothing, facing the void and creating within it.  I write down some lyrics and, despite years of morning page practice to shut up my inner editor, I can’t help but think they sound pretty stupid.  I avoid the task at hand and lose a couple games of backgammon.  Why won’t this damn cough go away?  Can I even sing with this sore throat?  If you can call it singing?

I express this doubt to my bandmates and they remind me that our songs come from collaboration and I’m not alone in this effort.  I carry around a notebook and jot down lines and themes as they come and go.  I pick up a guitar and find something that I want to bring to rehearsal.  I put on my painting clothes and devote some time to a portrait.  There is only one ultimate end to creating, and in the meantime, one can only have faith in and show up for the process, without being attached to the end result.  I am not so much pushing my Sisyphean rock up a mountain, but kicking it through an ever-changing landscape, looking around while I catch up to it, resting when needed, and remembering to have fun while doing it.