creative outlet

I write.

We know this. I'm writing right now. I've been writing for as long as I can remember--longer than I can remember, because once, I remember, we were cleaning out some shit back at my parent's house and they found what was basically Junie B Jones fanfiction that I had apparently written at the age of five or six. So writing, as a whole, is something I love and have loved for forever, but it's not exactly...

I mean, I try hard. I work hard at it. I spend a lot of time. I write and I rewrite and I revise, but it's something I know how to do, you know? I know how to write. And if I need validation, I know I can just slam out a quick fanfic, post it on AO3, and bam, there you go, look at all those hits, nobody can ever know I write this. I've got friends I made through my writing that I've had for longer than I had friends in my real life (okay, one, but hi, Emma), and I can always send her stuff I'm excited about. And I do love writing.

So I picked up guitar.

I bought a shitty electric guitar off of eBay. And I'm talking like, real shitty. I'm talking one of those 'starter packs' that you can get for like ninety bucks that has a shitty fucking guitar, a shitty fucking amp, and like, some picks and stuff. It came last Friday. I've been working at it, playing around with it, naturally the first fucking thing I did was look up how to play the intro to "Sanitarium." First thing. First time I've touched a guitar that wasn't a hot-pink acoustic children's guitar, and I decide, this is how we're going to start.

To be fair, I'm doing pretty good. I theoretically know how to do pretty much the whole intro, even if it's definitely not like, tuned right, and also it's real sloppy for most of it, but the harmonics at the beginning, I swear to God, once I figured out how to do that (which is, admittedly, pretty fucking easy) all my neighbors heard was the first three notes of "Sanitarium" over and over and over and over again. Grinning like an idiot.

The thing is, this is fucking work. I mean, obviously I like music. But I don't have that 'I've been doing it forever' like I have with writing. It's not just second nature to me. And I fucking love it. I love it so much. I actively have to not let myself touch the damn thing unless (a) it comes up on my to-do list, because I added it because I wanna be good and I looked up videos that were not just teaching me how to play the intro to my favorite song, or (b) I am done being productive for the day and I can just run my way through the intro to "Sanitarium" forty million times. Because the thing that I've realized is, I will say, "okay, one more time" and then I'm starting over again because I can't stay away from the first three notes. I can't do it.

I love it so much. What I'm saying is pick up some weird artistic thing that you've been vaguely interested in but have zero experience in and annoy your neighbors with the intro to "Sanitarium" every night over and over and over and--

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