8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 4 – When Nowhere Clicks

The aging self and what each stage of life might teach us about making things. The life of creating stuff.

Chapter List

  • Trek Blurbs

    Back in grade school I had a million ideas, and no filter.

    Of course, following through on any of them was not my strongest suit. After all, I was in class all day and doing extra curricular activities in the evening and, heck, those computer games were not going to play themselves.

    But I do recall something that I did with a kind of dedicated passion: I wrote Star Trek blurbs.

    See, my friends and I (gasp, you’re shocked I can tell) were very much nerds. Such nerds were we, in fact, that our lunch hour passion was discussing the detailed nuances of Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes (which at the time were freshly aired on television.)

    One of the ways I took this a step further than my friends was to pull out a blank sheet of paper, sketch the Star Trek logo on the top half of the page, and then write a one hundred-ish word plot outline for a dream episode of my own creation.

    I admit now, those plots I wrote were pretty derivative and simplistic, but over the course of a couple years of school I made about thirty, brought them to show my friends, and dreamed of sending them into the writing staff for the obvious fame and fortune that such an effort would bestow.

    I never actually wrote an episode (nor have I since done anything in the realm of fan fiction, for anything) but I can’t help but be struck now, nearly forty years later, by the raw enthusiasm of kiddo-me not giving a single whiff about what others thought and the joy such a creative pursuit brought me.

    Oh, to be fourteen again, huh?

  • Afternoon Nap

    Maybe it’s getting older (or maybe it’s because I gave up caffeine six months ago) but I find my batteries drain shortly after lunch and a thirty minute nap is in order.

    I admit it. I’m going to be fifty this year. Yikes.

    (Not that you couldn’t tell from guy still writing a blog in twenty-twenty six, but  I ain’t a teenager anymore.)

    I spend a good chunk of my mornings working on creative brain work, getting the important stuff off my plate, and being all professional. 

    Then I eat a (usually) healthy lunch.

    And by one-thirty. Ugh. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open.  If life allows, I’ll close the lid of the computer and close my eyes, too. 

    I suppose it’s a universal truth of a sort, but if you can swing a nap to recharge your batteries in the middle of the day then do it. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t begrudge the sleepyheads. Don’t frown at someone who can use an extra half hour of rest. 

    Sleep is not wasted time. It is how our brains rejuvenate. 

    I always knew I’d get older some day. Heck, as they say, aging is a privilege and a monument to surviving this crazy universe.  And if I can experience it a little more clearly after a few extra winks then all the better, right?

  • Confidence Boosts

    I bought yet another book of sheet music recently.

    That’s what musicians probably do, right? I assume so myself. Going to the music store makes me feel like how I used to feel going to the bookstore or the record store (way back when that was a thing) and I spent hours browsing through the stacked pages of a million potential adventures through grand ideas or creative expression.  Sheet music still seems to hold that grip on me.

    I bought a book of sheet music that is probably too hard for me to play.

    Precisely, it was a thick book of classical standards, two and a half centimetres of paper bound up with literally hundreds of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and a couple dozen more mostly-famous composers. Intermediate piano music.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I can read music. I’ve been playing some form of instrument for about forty-five years, most recently going on a music journey with the violin.  But having delved in a serious attempt to learn how to play the piano this past year I would still neatly categorize myself as a beginner. 

    And now I have this sheath of music for intermediate players. It’s probably, almost certainly, too hard for me to play… right now.

    Confidence is many things, often immeasurable things, but sometimes I need to remind myself that I must have a least a little bit of it: I invested in my future self this week and I bought a book of music that is aspirational, too difficult for me today, but some part of me must believe that tomorrow will be better, huh?

  • Post Conformity

    The funny thing about semi-retirement is that while one is still not completely decoupled from the workforce, I have noticed there is a marked volume of indifference that I am able to cultivate and nurture with regards to the performative creativity that I once did when I was younger.

    I can paint for the sake of painting.

    I can sketch things that are interesting to me.

    I can take photos of curious and interesting things.

    And I can do all these things not worrying that it somehow doesn’t fit perfectly into a portfolio or a personal brand.

    The ironic thing, this dismissal of external validation and approval, this refusal to fit into a box for some generic employer evaluation that might skim through these works in the future to see if I’m a good fit for their open job, means that I am probably producing better—or at least more authentic—art.

    It’s one of those lessons that takes a lifetime of creative output to learn and embrace, and once discovered is probably something that would have benefited me vastly more than I realized at the start of my career.

    Honed skills are great, but voice and authenticity are the work of a lifetime, after all.

  • Vibrato Know

    It’s no secret to those who know me that I took up playing the violin late in life. 

    I was about to turn forty and feeling this deep void in my life with regards to making music. It was palpable. I would go to concerts and wish I would have learned an instrument, or stuck with the one I briefly played in grade school. I would see my kid going to her piano lessons and feel a pang of jealousy for her privilege that we were able to give her this opportunity to learn. So I bought a violin and signed up for lessons.

    Ten years later I am pretty okay at the violin.

    I play in a community orchestra, though, and I am surrounded by dozens of other musicians of varying ability, many of whom learned to play when they were younger. I can’t help but compare. And here’s the rub: sitting among a dozen other violinists each week at rehearsal has highlighted something to me. I call it the vibrato problem.

    Vibrato is an important aspect of playing the violin. The finger presses down on the string to shorten the length so that the resultant note can be played. But watch a violinist and you will see that they don’t hold that finger steady: they wiggle it, subtly altering that string length like a sine wave as they are playing the note producing a gentle warbling of the tone. This is vibrato.

    Vibrato is still something I struggle with after ten years of playing the violin.  My fifty year-old fingers never learned early and are fighting to this day to learn it still. Having a young plastic brain would probably soak this up and it would become second nature, but being an older learner has left me to consciously think about it for every note when there is already a dozen other things to think about while playing.

    Extrapolate this to any other art form, any other skill. There is always a vibrato problem for older learners: and I’d like to believe that recognizing it is the first step in knowing how to overcome it.