Very few people are writing tutorials about how to just have fun.

If you have been reading from this collection you will long since know that my creative adventures into 2026 have swirled around creating music. I have played an instrument for forty years, but stretched my musical explorations more and more for just the last decade, taking up the violin about ten years ago, joining a community orchestra, and lately getting into synth-based audio explorations on my own. I’m a novice, but one with a big range: a large puddle, but not one that goes very deep—if you take my meaning.

In attempting to deepen that knowledge I have been seeking instruction, often online, and what I find is that most everything leans into the idea that the end goal must be perfect: polished, honed and uniformly refined to gold standard. 

For example, I have been looping: recording layered loops of sound (and noise) and voice and rhythm into all manner of interesting audio recordings. Some of them I’ve been publishing as a kind of podcast on this very site. They are rough. They are gritty. They have sharp edges. They are imperfect.

Yet according to every piece of advice online my work has no value unless I strive for perfect.

Use a DAW.

Quantize your tracks.

Set up your recording booth just so.

Imperfection is the enemy… apparently.

But I don’t want that: I have merely been jamming. Exploring. Feeling my way through the tools and making things that echo with a kind of imperfect delight in their moment of creation. 

So here’s a piece of advice online: strive for imperfect, too. After all, it’s human.

I’m not trying to write cozy aphorisms to make you comfortable in your creative pursuits. I want you to squirm a little when I tell you that your skills might not actually be as important as you think they are, that gates are not meant for keeping and that responding to market forces, meme-culture and focus groups are at best vapid and hollow, and at worse patronage to a soulless master.

I want you to object. I want you to rethink. And then I want you to adjust your perspective a little bit even if you roll your eyes at my presumptive arrogance on the topic of your skill.

If you take away anything from reading these posts or listening to my podcasts you should be a little irked that some random guy could have the gall to call your boardroom-style pursuit of personal brand and textbook-grade art and commercially viable chord progressions anything but magical. 

Comfortable is complacent. 

Clean is boring. 

Perfection is the pursuit of the placid and flaccid.

Following the rules is the domain of algorithms and what AIs now seem to do best. Not you, tho, do you?

Wrong is more right than you want to admit, and I’m willing to punch you in the creative gut if it helps you realize that simple notion for even a few moments.

I get it. I really get it. No. I really do get it.

You just gotta push publish. You just gotta climb up on that stage and share your voice. You just gotta, gotta, gotta!

It’s February and as I publish this post I have no idea yet if the Groundhog has seen her shadow, but whatever the outcome I suspect I have a couple more months of weather too cold to be outside doing creative outdoor things like sketching or nature photo expeditions. (I mean I could and I will, it’s just uncomfortably chilly.) That is to say, I suspect I have a couple more months of indoor time to write words and play music and dabble in code before the allure of summer tempts me away from those projects.

I need to share something before the end of February. I gotta.

The turning of a calendar page can be a motivator to step over a threshold, to overcome a mental obstacle. Deadlines, are great motivators. 

Perhaps this one will serve to help step over the performance threshold. It oughta.