Playing for Keeps

I regret the rarity of my blog posts. I am going to try to share my thoughts more often.

This is a New Year's post of sorts, but first, let me summarize the remainder of 2018 (my last post was in September).

One reason I sort of "dropped off" blogging in 2018 was because the last few posts felt so solid that I didn't have much to follow them up with. Anything too frivolous didn't make the cut; I'm a busy man, and I'm just barely able to make time for keeping records of such things in my personal journal and on Facebook. When I do have the time for it, I lack the inclination. And so, brevity becomes my friend here today.

We've been continuously overwhelmed by the mire of home repair projects, work, health insurance fuckery, and residual anxiety of everything else in recent past.

October. Last year, October was all about Juliet's melanoma, thinking this time, for the third real crisis, she might actually die. This year, however, finally, I was able to have some levity. I watched a lot of horror movies and drank a lot of seasonal beer. It was what October should be, except I didn't get to watch baseball. I also finally got to upload my fan soundtrack project for the old PC horror game Blood. I'd actually finished it over a year ago, around the time of the game's 20th Anniversary, and was planning on posting in time for Halloween 2017, until Juliet's diagnosis snuffed out all such frivolity and pleasantries.

I have two local friends who are former coworkers from our days as security guards. They love Halloween as I do, but one of them had recently moved away. So, it wasn't as fun as it should have been. But I did have the unexpected free time to take Liam to two fall festivals: Sweet Berry Farm in Marble Falls, and then to the Elgin Christmas Tree Farm. I am obsessed with pumpkins and corn mazes in particular, and I do enjoy shaping my toddler's future nostalgia. Passing the torch, so to speak. I also got to take Liam trick-or-treating for the first time, with a couple of his cousins, right after my last Halloween gig ended.

Also in October, I had my sweet revenge on BGSU, albeit something of a sleeper hit. I would have written a glorious blog post about it, but essentially it was a rerun from June's post to that end. This October, I took to the Twittersphere, pulled back my dark hood to reveal my true face to my enemies, and rained down punishment from ashen clouds above. The technical term is "Tweetstorm," as I had spent days revising to perfection a thread of 120 tweets, including links to Unfinished Fever Dreams on YouTube, telling my story, naming names and shaming shames.

But, as I had already said in June's post, I was going to reprise all of it for the BGSU New Music and Arts Festival in October. That's exactly what I ended up doing, and it was glorious and empowering, but technically I had little new to add since the blog post "Maelstrom, Part VIII: Scourge."

Perhaps the most intriguing element was that one Per Broman, a professor and prominent figure in my personal experience at BGSU, liked a tweet. There's a feather in your cap, warrior bard.

Henceforth, it's open season on BGSU Maelstrom Mode in my mind and in my free time. On an as-it-comes basis. Before, I would postpone and procrastinate "BG Mode" because it was so draining for me to try to address unfinished business, but I now have infinite HP/MP for this.

October was, despite everything else, a good time.

November. Nostalgia and getting a head start on Christmas occupied my thoughts. I was also replaying Final Fantasy VII, which came at the expense of blog time. A classic, and it had been a while. I ended up finishing the game right before going to Missouri for Christmas, which was appropriate, since I was planning on starting Final Fantasy VIII after New Year's.

Really, there's little to say about November. I could have made a brief blog post int he spirit of the old days of blogging, with a list of top soundtracks for the month to encapsulate the tone I'd set for myself. I hope to get back to such 2007-style posts this year, but Facebook has taken over everything.

December was more of the same. We made our trip to my parents' house, then hit Springfield on the way home for Juliet's dad. As we do. The trip was shorter this year. We actually drove back on New Year's Eve, rather than a few days after it.

January 1st. I had finally succumbed to the cold that Liam had been enduring. I started the new year by sitting on the "pause" button. I am not happy about being sick for the first few days of the year.

But, here's looking at 2019.

2015 was a true crisis. 2016 was an introspective, weary recovery. 2017 was a Goddamn nightmare. 2018 was all just so much hardening scar tissue.

This year, I'm playing for keeps.

I have goals throughout the year. But for now, I am focusing on that early spring feeling. Last year, a lot of January and February was about hiking and exploring with Liam and the complete, extended, and unreleased soundtracks to the Pirates of the Caribbean series and Final Fantasy VIII, both of which always feel to me like an optimistic romp to go find new places and maybe even meet new people.

This year, I am coming back to that. I could write a whole blog post about the Final Fantasy VIII connection here (I have before), but for now, let it suffice to say that I am going to actually squeeze in the time to play the game, as I did with VII in the fall, rather than just reminisce about past explorations. This year, I am going to feel young and vibrant again.

I want to take Liam (and sometimes Juliet) hiking at least once a week until it gets too hot. And we'll go exploring lake country, even beyond the wealthy areas where we often get hired for gigs. And find new restaurants, cafes, playgrounds, everything. I am very pleased about the ability to be spontaneous. And at the center of it all is good music that makes me feel light.

Spring comes early in Texas.

I want to get back into correspondence with key players from past chapters. The last blog post was about that, though it was about the failure to reconnect with an entire group of people in my life. I want to get some things back. I don't accept that life means we all drift apart and stop caring. I know we're not going to be party members again, but we can still be each other's NPCs. I especially want to get into video calls We have the (imperfect) technology now. Let's use it.

I want to get old friends back and keep them.

I want to visit Kansas City for the first time since I moved to Texas in March 2010.

I want to read books, compose music, learn to dance, fly a kite, watch baseball, play high-fantasy board games, and be a fun and witty companion like I used to be.

I also have a placeholder website for my music. The next step is to draft program notes for everything. I will have a tab for each category of projects. I could lay out my plans for that, but that's another blog post altogether, and it's premature at this point.

I want to blog more often. Maybe once a week or even more, like I used to do. Back in the day.

My motto for 2018 was, "Make every day count," which didn't end up being all that successful. My motto for 2019 is, "It's time." Time for all the good things that I postponed, all the things I wanted to do but couldn't (or wouldn't). Time for that old "light at the end of the tunnel" to simply become the sky around me, and for the tunnel to be a speck in the distance, far behind me.

More on this later.

Talk to you soon.