I often find music to be good inspiration for writing. I'm not sure why this is, except that music, most music, makes me feel strongly, and I am then driven to release those emotions. Because, although impassioned lip-synching may serve a cathartic purpose, I still cannot be on the stage releasing the words into a mic, surrounded by the instruments and the chords and the collaboration of the band. I have to take whats been given to me by the music and transform it to words, any words, and give it to you . . . even though no one has looked at this blog in weeks - but that's not the point. The point is that I write, and that I write with an audience in mind. Without the prospect of an audience I can't put much together other than the bursts of lonely or self-depricating journalling that come when I've held too much in for too long. Like a nocturnal emission, and just as messy.

I don't dream anymore, you know. I still have the dreams of sleep, I'm not talking about those. I mean the the dreams of possible futures, the dreams of my life. The ones that used to comfort me and give me hope, ambition, purpose, - those are gone. I mourn for them, I want to rage against their loss.
After I tried to kill myself in 2002 (two months after I graduated from college) they began to dissipate like smoke. Or maybe it started before then. Maybe the two are related. ...That was a rhetorical maybe.

I still have the urge to create, though. And I'm still using the D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) campaign I run as a pretty thorough creative outlet. I've got pages and pages of world-building, plot development, character concept, and, of course, big bad monsters. But, don't get the wrong idea, it's not adaptable into a novel, unless it was the kind of very bad fiction that makes-up a lot of fantasy novels. No, these characters belong to real people, and I serve as the author of an interactive book in which they get to escape the disillusion of their lives for a little while and become something more imaginative, more fantastic. A place where if they make a bad decision and release the bad guy from a haunted crypt and subsequently get themselves killed, it becomes something we can laugh about afterwards as we fill-out a new character sheet. It is not necessarily the sitcom complex, where all of this week's problems are wrapped-up in half-an-hour. It's more like finding a safer place to exist, while still knowing adventure and drama and challenges, and having fun through it all. It's a place that exists in the mind, yet is shared by a group of people, a place where dreams are created and realized. Because the older I get, the more difficult dreams are to come by, and they have less and less to do with real life. The reality of adulthood is shit compared to the dreams of (the hopefulness of) youth. Dreams are a part of being human, and if I'm living a life that seems to be killing my dreams, then I need something else with which to make more. That is why we meet around the table every other Saturday with dice and maps and a vivid imagination.

But the dreams of youth, the ones about the real life that you live, are still gone. They are from me, anyway.

At least the music still moves me.