Moths.

Earlier today, I posted a page about the release of the comic tattoos book - then I made the mistake of looking at the white pad I'd left on the table, the one that I'd scrawled all the things I still have to do before the end of the month and simply fell into a black hole of depression. Well, not so much depression as a clinical professional might have it but it felt pretty damn low all the same. It started with some errant thoughts of 'however much you do, there's still another bunch of stuff waiting around the corner to busy yourself with' - which more or less means that no matter how much you really think the last thing you did was great (or at least as fine as it could be at the time), there's no time to appreciate it because (if you're like me) your next project has to kick its ass from here to the edge of the planet. And so the circle continues. This could well be the story of my life though if I asked around, it's very likely that a lot of people feel like this.

Back when I was writing songs, when I really hit my stride with it, I wrote so many - maybe 60 or so - over a three or four month period, that I look back on now as being damn good that I'm just pissed off at myself in hindsight that I never did anything with them. It wasn't that I was scared of failure (or success) - in my opinion they simply weren't good enough and thus spent the rest of their lives sitting on old cassette tapes or scraps of paper. Having a job that forces you into a pretty harsh schedule for writing (the mag comes out every four weeks) a lot of that mentality has disappeared based on the fact that if you don't do it and do it good, you won't have the job for very long.

It hasn't disappeared altogether though. Which is my round-about way of saying I'm having doubts about The Family Of Noise - more than the story itself, I've made it difficult by trying to say something within its pages. I can feel it there but man, it's buried deep at the moment and I'm digging in all the wrong places. Which - given all I said above - makes me feel like throwing it in the trash and starting again.

Except, this time I won't because I've done that too many times and been sorry as hell afterwards.

It's times like this I wish I had some kind of mentor kicking around or a writing group, anything that would prop me up for a few days and tell me it will be fine if I work through it one word at a time - but right there, I've already told myself the only sensible thing available. On the plus side, that's a lot of time saved for both of us.

If the tool of choice was a guitar, I'd smash it up tonight just for the hell of it. Somehow, smashing up a pen seems a rather hollow gesture.

So instead I did something I don't do very often (or often enough maybe) and took to the bath with three unfinished boos to read. It's still pretty hot here today so the window was wide open. The darker it got outside, the more moths came in until finally, there were at least twelve of them in there and I thought I had better get out before it got messy. There was a fine looking one which I believe is called a 6-Spot Burnet (not a geek - I looked it up for the sake of the post here), some regular looking beasts and finally, there was the one that dive-bombed the water after I'd pulled the plug that I rescued and left on the side of the bath to dry out.

Somewhere in here, there is a lesson.

When you see the light, fly towards it, then: shine like a diamond, be a regular joe or drown yourself because you're not paying attention to what's going on.

Or maybe it was just moths in the bathroom.

With my frame of mind tonight, I think it was just moths but my soul knows better...