Kind of crazy to think that I still have 280 songs to go just to hit the year milestone. The sad thing is when you back up and look at 85 songs from a distance, it's only 6 hours of music. I've got maybe a week of radio show playlists. I'm the world's slowest DJ.

When I lived in San Diego five years ago (really?) I spent a lot of time alone. I had no real social contact with anyone outside of my job for about a year, but I also discovered that I liked writing fiction and I wrote a small amount of it that is somewhat painful to read now, but the ideas are strong and the feelings I had when I wrote it were phenomenal. It actually felt like that over the course of one day, a whole story was playing itself out involuntarily in my head, which I later wrote down after rushing home at ninety miles an hour down the 805-S.

I guess it was because I was alone so much, my head had nothing better to do than conjure up twisted fiction. Once I started spending time with people again, the spark I felt to write faded away pretty much completely. A couple times over the last couple years I have gotten very lonely and ended up writing something fictional, but never too seriously.

Does my muse only visit me when I am completely alone? Is that my curse? That if I want to write well, I have to seclude myself from reality? Am I that tortured artist, who has to tell people, "No, sorry, I can't be close to you, I must write, it is my calling!"?

Fuck that. I've been trying to shed the teenage feeling that what I do should come naturally and be completely easy from the start. Sure, there's the creative spark and sometimes inspiration strikes and it flows from you like wine from a cask, but it's foolish to think that it isn't any work at all. It was foolish of me to think that I could just do whatever I wanted without any discipline.

It's easy to become discouraged when you just assume you'll be good at everything. I think a lot of people are victims of this, and either they spend their lives trying to do things they never become good at because they quit when it stops being fun, or eventually they just become supernovas of low self-confidence.

A few people on SongMeanings claim that this song is about just this, that songwriting isn't easy, and it's easy to sit around and feel bummed out that it's not coming around naturally. You've got to force it, sometimes, and chase down that muse and grab her by the throat.

Part of the reason I am doing staires_!_ is just for this reason. I need to learn discipline, to learn how to write something interesting on command, how to force creativity when it doesn't just come around on it's own. You can get good at anything as long as you stick to it. Maybe one day I'll be good at this.