notes from the kelp

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…about the music

Finding out. And in.

Everyone has their own reaction to the end of the year. Inescapable holidays. Unstoppable chronology. Opportunities gained, and others lost. Family, friends, loneliness, or just peaceful solitude taken at home, while the rest of society swirls in a mad dash of annual tradition. I start and stop with Thanksgiving; beyond that, no other holiday captures my time or heart. I count myself among many who view Christmas with a cynic’s raised eyebrow (I’d say jaundiced eye, but mine remain brown and my besotted liver still functions remarkably well, thank you very… hic!… much). Some people truly adore their families and anticipate the yearly holiday gatherings with delight. For others, the odd discomfort of being artificially thrown into a food-infused petri dish with people simply due to a shared a strand or two of DNA, speaks only to the absurdity of social expectations.

While I have little emotion for what December represents, I do love January. I love the new year. I have a birthday soon after. I love getting older, racking up more experience, filling my life with more emotions and people and musical discoveries and mistakes and joys. It’s all real and it’s all vibrant and passionate. Each New Year’s is my time to hope and envision and dream and plan. And and and. There is always more that tugs and invites.

I hate tax time because I resent having to look backward. Even in a year that’s gone reasonably well, my gaze turns to flaws and errors and misjudgments and disappointments. You’d think the start of another year would create the same uneasiness in me, but instead, it’s always been filled with light and happy anticipation. I guess I’m blessed with either good brain chemistry, or the daftness of being the local village idiot. Either way, it’s rather pleasant.

I see this time of year as a series of paths and windows. Directional choices made and yet to be determined, and views to external and interior landscapes defined by my heart and its frailties. This is what has meaning to me. To the rest of the commercialized, media-driven fakery, the President and CEO of Notes From the Kelp, Inc. says: Bah! Humblog!

…click to listen:

…about the music

Jam. No peanut butter.

I admit that I have a tougher time making time for certain things when my time is being spent in places other than the place I spend most of my time when I’m home: my studio. For as much as I get done in several realms at once, there is always much more that I want to do that just follows me around from city to city, waiting patiently for my attention like a deranged stalker, while my internal taskmistress takes care of nagging me mercilessly. In general, we all agree, there is never enough time. Even though we are the ones supposedly in charge of making time for what we need and want to do.

So from time to time there forms a logjam of many diverse things needing to be done, and of course one triages activity choices and responses based on urgency and abject fear that were one not to accomplish Said Seemingly Important Task within an imaginary, self-deluded time period, well then, the Earth would cease to spin on its axis and, most importantly… we would not be loved. Perish the thought.

So here I sit in Manhattan, on an island merely half the size of the one on which my studio sits, and having taken momentary refuge from the cold and wind, I am attempting to pry apart an impressively expanding logjam of work-and-life-related things. And one of those things is right here in Kelpville, where my heart is, despite my body being elsewhere. I offer this friendly note to tell you that my hands are itching to hold a camera in front of a scene containing no buildings, cars, traffic lights or cement. And when they do later this month, you’ll be the first to know. All in due time. Minneapolis, and then Chicago, await!