Dreams, Interrupted (Part I)

They fell like a giant tree: what at first might appear as a slow heavy descent, eventually came crashing through the understory, clearing everything in its wake before colliding with earth.  It was messy, and it was final.  My dreams of Santa Barbara went down with a reverberating thwack.

It was hard to understand what was happening in the middle of it all, but I learned awhile ago that staying with confusion is not such a bad thing, and conversely, putting ducks in a row isn’t all that it’s quacked up to be.  You kind of just have to go with the chaos, until it wends its way back to calmer seas.

This blog post only covers one aspect of the fall: The Music (Part I)

If you start pushing against resistance, you’re going to struggle.  Moving to Montecito Land provided the perfect petri dish for my revisit with struggle in my music.  Where else can you find the juxtaposition of countless millionaires and boatloads of unpaid musicians in one place?

Somewhere in the middle of four gigs in December , the push-pull became a tug-of-war.   I was fighting against my fear of humiliation, big time.  I had to go through it.  I made myself go through it.  Down to the dregs of it.  Otherwise I knew I’d take it to the stage and sabotage myself.  I’ve done it many times before.  When I popped out on the other side of the fear, I had lost all desire to do this.  Though I kept to my obligations until the very end, despite the escaping helium in my dream balloon.

By the time I hit the last gig of the month, December 17^th at the popular Cold Spring Tavern in the mountains, the only gig that paid anything ($50 a “man” plus tips), I already knew the dream had died.  The night was supposed to yield a crowd, but it turned out to be the first night of that weeklong west coast torrent that flooded California.  I carried my keyboard from my car in the rain, in the mud, grateful I had the foresight to wear my old tennis shoes rather than nice gig shoes.

I don’t want to linger too long on describing the night, so I’m going to reduce it to one metaphor, which pretty much says it all.  While I was setting up my keyboard on the stage, I hit my head on the cow skull that hung on the back wall.  Other symbolic clues have not eluded me, but this one was a hammer-on-the-nail reminder.  After two and a half months in pursuit of being a performing musician in Santa Barbara, the dream was dead, and so was my desire to live here.

I’m moving, my fastest turnaround in history, except when I was on the road.  (More about my busted Santa Barbara dreams later.)  I decided I wasn’t going to struggle with blog posts anymore either, keeping them to about 500 words from now on.   And I’m steering this blog towards fiction, and towards the process with my novel, which I have sorely missed working on.