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The rains have come. Spitting in fits and spurts, spluttering out downpours. Our little yellow house has become a submarine. 

The weather is strange this year. The mustard is blooming two months early, and the rains were almost two months late. Odd, my friend, the vineyard manager,  told me that he's curiously clean this year... he should be coming home covered in mud. 

Is there anything poetic in being stuck indoors with a couple of sick toddlers? I think to Cosmo's enormous eyes, calm in the midst of his illness - deep, dark, infinitely sweet. Or when I opened the door to get a smoke and the rain came crashing down - soaking me in the wake of an easterly wind. Pure moments like this - when the mind is caressed or slapped into visceral awareness - these were once a source of inspiration. 


It's been over a year since I've written anything, in part because I had to throw everything into keeping my family together and safe, and in part because I lost faith in the act of creation. If you spend enough time online, you get exhausted with the constant shrieks and groans of the web, the millions of voices howling at you to click them. Why add to the cacophony? What I can I say that hasn't been already said a million times over? No one notices the perfect snowflake when they're clearing the snow drift on the driveway. 

And lemme tell ya, my snowflakes are far from perfect. 

I think a year of silence has done me good in some ways. There's no need to make things more than they are, or less. You lose the urge to manipulate, to emboss, to anoint. You do what you do because of what it does for you at the moment, not because it will bring others to fulfill your ambitions. Whether or not this makes good art is really a moot point... to me, anyway, it's been making the process of writing bearable again. I guess we'll find out in the next month or two if it worked.

So why Stormcrow now? A fresh start, in some ways. And the old tag Mercutio doesn't describe me anymore... really never did. I've become more crow-like as I've gotten older, but I still love the thrill of the storm. Ehh... just making up excuses now... it's what came to me, so I took it, ok?

Put an old work of mine up, 38 Geary. It's a seminal work for me, in that it's the first work I did where I began to understand what's really important in life. It's been published on WP since near the beginning, and the place wouldn't be quite right without it. Speaks of a different time... weird to think the 90s are almost two decades away now. 

I'm not that person anymore. Fatherhood has a tendency to reverse one's perceptions of what's important. The "better to burn out than fade away" meme really looks pretty stupid when you have kids. And it's a lazy, stupid idea anyway. "I'd rather have an early death than risk being forgotten". How freakin' insecure do you have to be to accept that? 

I think, in many ways, it's a statement of hopelessness, one that I actually understand quite well. Given the psychic underworld in which an artist must live, finding an artistic life that's compatible with our society is extremely difficult. Perhaps this is more a symptom of my own experience as an underground artist, but even those who have "made it" have a hint of it - that crazy undermind that sees the marionette strings, and the shadow of the puppeteer's fingers....

Says a great deal about the state of our culture, n'est pas? That those that etch light and thought on the world are inherently outlaws, because they know how darkness bends the soul. You need to understand the dark of things before you can wield light.  But that's not really why we're outlaws. We're outlaws because despite the depth of the shadows we play with, we still manage to hold onto the purity of our hearts, the ideal that what we're doing, in some small way, is lighting the world.

Small wonder so many artists choose to end their lives - to be an artist is to be condemned with a sentence of permanent cognitive dissonance. 

And nowadays, gawd, the NOISE! Too many people talking, no one listening, everyone has to be the center of attention or nothing. It makes one want to walk away from the whole mess. And we're told that somehow we've gotta claw our way to center stage and dance and sing and if we please the farting masses we'll be lucky enough to have an opportunity to do it again.

Maybe something is permanently burnt out in me, but if you tried to make me a celebrity like that, I might very well punch you. The pleasure I get now is in creating, not in how other people interpret my work. To the straight world, I'm a geek who takes care of his kids and does his job, and is really rather boring. And, I'm glad, because I know the straight world will beat the shit out of you the moment it found out I was a freak. Especially if a creative freak.

My mind is taken back to Kerouac, his Subterraneans... the poetic underground. I think what I'm looking for in this place is a poetic overground, a place so high they can't touch us.

And if they do, they'll be overcome with the desire to fly.