For Christmas, I took some much deserved time off. I got to relax a little. I even read a book. The cool thing about my little vacation was that I didn’t check e-mail much and spent almost no time online. I even forgot a password to a site I visit often! I couldn’t keep from recording some tracks, but that’s the only work I really did last week.

As I started to revisit some of my routines last night, I had occasion to view some sites that I’d been away from for more than a week. I found that my perspective had changed dramatically. Facebook was suddenly more boring than I had ever realized before and looking over my page, I discovered in fairly short order that absolutely nothing of any interest had occurred there since I last fired it up. Every vapid status entry I read, despite their limited character count, was a struggle to get through! I couldn’t read Facebook status posts without hearing in my head, “Whatever, man.”

What a fantastic event! It never took much consideration to deem most online activities a waste of time, but having been away from them for a week, my brain went back into a more productive and authentic pattern. Monitoring posts had become more unpleasant and stressful than I realized. I was subconsciously seeking mental stimulation. Without knowing it, I was starving my brain with internet clutter!

The closest metaphor I can conjure for this is fast food. If you’re hungry and you grab fast food, it seems like you’re responding appropriately (despite the health hit). You’re eating, which is what your body is telling you to do. You are chewing. A short while later, the hunger pang dissipates. However, you’ve gotten very little in the way of actual nutrients from the food. You haven’t truly given your body what it required. You were only faking it out by putting it through the motions. If you eat enough fast food, chances are that you’ll wake up eventually and notice that you just feel terrible. With any luck, it’ll occur to you that maybe you should just stop eating such lousy food.

I woke up last night to find that in a certain sense, with internet activity, I was eating really lousy brain food. Reading blogs and monitoring the updates of my friends in my down time became a habit, but while I wasn’t watching, I started to feel a certain level of stress. Not getting the mental stimulation that I was really after had the effect of winding me up. So much so that I started to feel cross when engaged in that activity!

We all know that fast food is garbage. However, it always tastes the same, and the experience is quite predictable. Learning to cook is better. Facebook and stuff like that seem like you’re interacting dynamically. It too always tastes the same, and the experience is quite predictable. It might feel as if you’re watching the lives of your friends as they unfold. As an observer and contributor, you might even feel like you’re achieving some level of connectedness. But that doesn’t happen online in a sustainable way.

So what am I really doing? What am I really thinking about? What’s worth sharing? What isn’t? I feel like the initial phase of online social interaction is over. I’m now convinced. It’s been proven to me over and over that the mundane is a part of life that makes us all the same. I don’t need any more reminders. We don’t have to talk about that anymore. I want amazing. I want inspirational. I want to experience the true energy of being alive. I want to hear about that. That’s what I want to share. Even with the more methodical and organized online contributors, I can spot “content” a mile away. I’m done.

It’s great to be silent until you really have something to say. How can anything be extraordinary if it’s expressed on the same humming party line as everything else? Facebook and online life has become decidedly black and white. I’m ready for color.

I once pursued an actress romantically. I don’t know why I was so taken with this woman. She was a stunner, but she was also a severely disturbed and conflicted individual in more ways than I could count. I managed to rise above the numerous red flags, or so I thought, but my inability to interpret her mixed signals kept me up nights for a little while. I had a friend in the theatre at the time who wasn’t the least bit surprised by all of the confusion she created in my head.

“She’s an actress.” he told me plainly. He might have had a point. Regardless, I thought that if any man could scale the walls of her mania, it was I. I was less experienced then.

I could never understand what motivated this woman and our “relationship” never happened. Maybe the attraction was rooted directly in the fact that she was a mass of neuroses. I have since shed my penchant for the “unsolvable psycho-sexual Rubik’s cube” type.

The last time I visited her place in New York, I was perusing her library. (I mean that literally.) There were lots of books about theatre and biographies of actors. Near the edge of one shelf was a paperback with a colored binding that didn’t seem to have been cracked: Who Would I Be If I Weren’t So Afraid? It’s funny how I’ve always remembered the title, even though I never read the book. At that time, I had not yet been introduced to the atom bomb of anxiety disorders with which I’m now an expert, but I interpreted the title on two levels almost immediately.

The first seemed to be the obvious meaning. “What is fear keeping me from becoming? What would I do with my life if I wasn’t afraid to change it?” The second is a bit deeper and could be applied to most anything in life. “Because I have so long defined myself as a fearful person, and spend my energies and abilities from the perspective of and in the maintenance of that identity, what opportunities have passed me by?”

With the second interpretation, I think of how a person can spend years or even a lifetime devoted to something he believes he is. I’ve known more than a few “career” neurotics who despite their regimen of prescriptions and years of therapy never seem to improve more than a little. I’ve long believed that these types have simply settled on the identity of a neurotic. Their rituals and relationships all seem to hinge on the management of their neuroses. For them, being a troubled person is like a comfortable old shoe, a lifestyle choice. Often they aren’t even aware of it.

I had a thought this morning that though I don’t define myself as a neurotic, I have lived most of my life in the identity of a musician. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hot on the trail of some lofty goal with music and records. Learning instruments and writing songs aside, the lifestyle is one of watching for angles, trying to get the inside track, making your own way despite the rejections and heartache and trying to get just one more person to listen to the sounds you seem intent upon making with all of these devices you’ve acquired. Like cops surround themselves with cops, musicians surround themselves with musicians, all nursing their own particular take on the identity. Like the career neurotics, so often things don’t seem to change for musicians. The constant reminders of the unlikelihood of success and the sacrifice of a “normal” life that becomes more burdensome with each passing year finds a good many of them just as stuck.

My rituals and relationships hinge on being a musician. Since I’m constantly occupied by the business of my music and have been for so long, I find that I skip a great number of things that other people seem to prize. I never think about vacations. I seldom think about money. I have no idea what’s happening on television. I haven’t seen a new movie in years. My dreams consist of songs I hope I’ll remember in the morning, in between curious animations involving hot dogs and donuts.

So who would I be if I weren’t such a musician? I have no idea what my life would be like. What the hell would I do with myself? What would I obsess over? What would get me up in the morning and keep me up at night? Being an artist colors my every perception. How would I see the world if I were suddenly relieved of my artistic duty, for lack of a better word? I wonder, but I don’t want to know.

I’ve decided that being a musician is not something that I need to change. However, it’s not all fuzzy dice and bongos. There are plenty of ways to waste your time and talent as an independent artist. I’ve identified a few of mine and have decided to change things around a bit. For instance, I have a bad habit of drinking from the geyser of poison that is the internet when it comes to staying informed about the independent recording industry. It masquerades as useful information, but it’s a black hole. I feel that I should know what’s happening all the time, but so little actually ever changes amongst those who’d rather talk about music than make it. I’m a musician because of what I do. I should not do things because that’s what a musician does. That’s a comfortable old shoe.

In a couple of weeks, many people will be starting their resolutions for the new year. I’ve read that a new year’s resolution is almost designed to fail because it puts the starting line at some meaningless chronological event. Any change you want to make in your life must be made because you’re ready to make it, not because you happen to be buying a new “Serial Killers: Day-by-Day” calendar. But far be it from me to discourage the value of convention if it happens to work for you. What I’m proposing is this: start a resolution now. Now is a good time to get into a new habit (or break an old one). Try it on for size. Call it a dress rehearsal. If you screw it up, you have a couple of weeks to try again before the actual starting point and you won’t have to go through that – Oh well, screw it. It’s January 9th and I’ve already blown it - sabotage move. Forget the Mardi Gras approach to life change. You don’t have to wait until January 31 to get it all out of your system. Whatever you’re changing probably needs to get out of your system now.

I’m gonna miss those music business bloggers. Maybe in the time I normally waste on them, I can write more songs. Nice!

Over the last last year, I’ve posted articles here fairly consistently. I think I heard it said once that it takes 6-10 repetitions of a particular activity for it to become a habit. Or was that how often you have to give a child a new food before she takes a liking to it? Can’t remember. Regardless of the statistical support, I’ve made my blog a habit. When Tuesday or Friday rolls around and I don’t have something new up here, I feel that I have an unsatisfied responsibility hanging over my head.

I’ve received some surprising comments on my posts this year. I’ve mentioned the Bacon Brothers, CD Baby and Nimbit, the company I use to distribute my music, and in all three instances, I’ve received responses from those parties in fairly short order. Am I so widely read that my words ripple across the Internet like seismic aftershocks? No. I think those responses have probably shown up on my site because Google Alerts actually work.

Google Alerts work a little like feed subscriptions for a blog or a podcast. However, instead of using Google to interrogate the feed files you’ve subscribed to for the presence of new content, you set up an alert that gives you a link every time your search phrase appears somewhere. Marketing people use alerts all the time to monitor the online image of their products and services. I gather that’s why I can write about the Bacon Brothers and Michael Bacon knows about it. Chances are he’ll get a link to this piece too.

On a lark, I tried to set up a couple of alerts myself. One for New Aquarius, my creative umbrella moniker, and one for Chris Preston. All I seemed to get were links to my own blog posts, to the sites of people selling fish and aquarium supplies and to news stories about footballers in the UK who have the audacity to share my name. Oh well, so much for my effect on pop culture. :~)

The reason I say that alerts are cool, kinda, is that they do get more people to know about my blog. However, when they draw readers who primarily are interested in what I’ve written about them, they have tended to stir things up unpredictably. Michael Bacon seemed pretty upset. Kevin at CD Baby offered to help me personally, which looked good, but in following up with him, I didn’t get very far. (I’ve finally been able to transition the bulk of my distribution to Nimbit.)

I thought my Nimbit interaction here was cool, but then I found out this week that unbeknownst to me, they chopped the photo from my site into a headshot, took quotes from my blog and added me to the “Customers Rave About Nimbit” section of their Press page. They liked my quote, and I appreciated that, but I found being an unwitting endorser on the Nimbit site a little unsettling. I can’t even say why. It just felt odd. Not my style, I guess. They apologized for not having cleared the use of my likeness and words and took me off the page.

Nevertheless, I’ve learned some valuable lessons though blogging. The first and probably most important one is that regardless of the seemingly wild west and infinite nature of the Internet, you never know who’s listening. Another is that if you write more, you seem to swing a heavier ax. I have to admit that I find that encouraging, since I have this blogging habit pretty well established. The last is that interactions with all the people who read my blog are authentic ones. They are not as faceless and impersonal as I originally imagined they’d be. It’s great when someone takes the time to read about what I’m thinking or experiencing. It’s even better when they take the time to comment and validate what I’ve written. Thanks everyone!