I hate the month of August.
Well, hate is a strong word that suggests lingering bitterness through the other eleven months, which isn’t the case. It’s just that every August the weather is hot & dry, most of my guitar students are on vacation, so the finances are a bit more challenging to keep afloat. It’s the best time to go on vacation, seeing the free time in my schedule, but you don’t get paid when you’re self-employed, so taking the time off when most of the students aren’t around to pay you makes for limited options
But that’s not why I hate August!
I hate it because my creativity takes a vacation when I have the most time to exploit it. See, all year I fight for free time to pursue something artistic. Having the teaching practice along with a mortgage and bills cuts into the dream scenario of simply making music all day, uninterrupted. And dating? At some point you gotta let that cut into the schedule too. How else are you going to find inspiration for your sappy love ballads?
So August rolls around and I’ve got all this free time to write some new songs, polish the old ones so I can fill my narcissistic well, posting them online. I sit down to work and…
Nothing.
Creative burnout. Not sick of playing…I still practice every day. But creating? Time crawls almost as slow as a day in my final months of sixth grade. Don’t look at the clock…don’t look and the fifteen minutes will pass quicker to recess. Don’t look! I look…surely ten minutes have passed…nope. Two minutes.
I’ve come to accept the August burnout for years now. Batteries need to be recharged, so I go to China, Burning Man, camping. I’m typing this blog in Dorrington, a beautiful mountain town in Calavaras County, CA. No street lamps, the stars are bright through the trees, which rustle after advance warning from the winds coming from the mountains. It’s beautiful, peaceful, calming. I can even hear crickets in the distance–and it’s not sound editing for my movie. They’re real, dammit!
And it fuels my depression.
Because I’m closing in on 40. Still a number of years off, but I can’t help wondering about this musician thing I’ve so passionately pursued since high school. The love is still there, I get up each morning to practice (or blog about it, as I’ve been doing lately), but…what’s the point?
The point has always been to do it. What other reason do you need? Join a band, rehearse, chase down gigs in crappy dive bars on weeknights. Haul gear to creepy neighborhood to find said dive bar. Play to a couple friends, go home, sleep and repeat. Then the band breaks up, creative differences, can’t get the record deal that you know is a scam bank loan from the record label and don’t really want it.
But I’m fighting for the place where I can make a decent living (I don’t have to be on Mtv Cribs–just a decent house with my own yard!) so I start or join another band and repeat the experiment with different variables. Make a demo, make a website, post on MP3.com, start a Myspace page, beg the world through various scams & spams to visit said webpage and spread the word about my band’s genius. A few great gigs here and there to packed clubs and street fairs, but nothing with any consistency. Band gets burned out on the lack of payoff for the work invested, a year or two and another micro era passes.
I haven’t been in a band in two years now. Not that I don’t want to perform…I just can’t get motivated to pursue the rehearsal, ass-kissing promoters grind for something that isn’t a sure thing. Or join a band with meglomaniac songwriters or singers who want me to bring my twenty plus years of experience to THEIR ideas without returning the favor. Because they’ve got “connections” you see–even though I need to work for free in the meantime. I’ve got stacks of CDs of what I think are really cool songs, so why not start my own band? I’m not a cute twentysomething with an acoustic, singing about her asshole ex-boyfriend? My stuff is not “appropriate” for the clubs in town…too rock, too electronic.
Release more CDs? Christ, I’ve spent upwards of twenty grand over the years, recording music, paying some engineer with the ears to make it sound professional. Pay the session players, pay Oasis to press CDs…and pay them extra to make 1000 instead of 500 CDs because it’s such a good deal…until you realize you have six boxes of them sitting in your closet. Yes, the tunes sell online, but nowhere near what it cost to make them. Not to mention Apple/iTunes taking their 30% off the top.
Not to mention the culture of entitlement that feels music should be available to download for FREE. Because it should be about “the music”, not recouping your investment and expenses. So everyone gets paid, many others get freebies…I make a little Slurpee money here and there. I love Slurpees, but this deal ain’t looking so hot.
God, what if I had a chance to go on tour? Never pursued that myself. That would have meant giving up my teaching practice for an unknown future. Perhaps it was a mistake to take on the mortgage eight years ago, but the finance advisors said it was a good idea for the long term. Start saving for retirement NOW, get the compound interest happening. The grownup gene kicked in and made me practical–but in a mutated way…
Mutated because despite the need for financial stability I’m still obsessed with pursuing the most unstable career in the arts. I keep writing music, scored my first short film recently. Creative satisfaction is found regularly. But what the hell do I expect to accomplish at this age? Mtv? HA! I’m well past the 18-25 demographic fence they’ve insisted on reinforcing. I can’t rehash sexually provocative dance moves, don’t have washboard abs.
I’ve got some cool, blue eyes, though.
Mainstream media wouldn’t touch me unless I achieved commercial success in that early twentysomething window. Then, maybe, I’d be allowed to pursue the career into my 30s…maybe 40s if I’m Madonna.
Stardom??? Jackass photographer mobs standing outside my home at all hours, my face slurping a frappachino in People Magazine? People I don’t know wanting all the details about who I’m dating? Fans CRYING and losing all composure when they see me (Hey–I’d appreciate the respect, but come on…) Could there be a worse hell?
I’m writing all this music, swimming in the satisfaction of CREATING. But then I look at my friends building lives and families. I think about the relationships I might have inadvertently squished, the girlfriend not wanting to be involved with a guy who doesn’t already have a “professional” paycheck coming in. Christ, he’s in his 30s and he’s still thinking he’ll be a rock star? A film composer? And he’s not even in Los Angeles?
But I’m in Marin County, I argue. It’s sort of close to L.A.
Maybe the real issue is that I’m considering the need for grownup things. Marriage? Kids? I’m not so desperate that I’d jump into the first available opportunity in that department. But when more than one person suggests you might be damaged goods if you haven’t been married by 40 you can’t help being a little worried about whether or not your focus has been out of whack this whole time.
Even though I think I’d enjoy settling into the grownup things most of my friends have attained I still worry. Would I still have time to pursue this dream? Or would the responsibilities of supporting a family require me to find a better paying job than my current teaching practice could offer, one that involves long hours and no passion?
What is there to change direction to? Pursue a whole new career? Sure, if I could find something that brings equal or greater happiness than the things I’m doing now. But even though I’d rather get paid to create movies or music all day I take enough satisfaction in teaching guitar and developing my mini business of guitar schwag. Still…there’s this tiny (so tiny I’m not sure it’s there) part of me that wishes I’d wake up tomorrow and say, “A doctor! I need to help sick people!” Then I’d suffer through medical school, run up six figures in bills, but I’d have a cool salary in my specialty waiting for me when I graduated.
I remember that line in The Breakfast Club where Emilio Estevez asks, “Are we going to become our parents?” I’m in my thirties, my parents had me in their early twenties. I feel like I’m fighting to avoid becoming my parents without really knowing what I’m so afraid of becoming. I mean, my parents are cool! I should be so lucky to turn out like them.
Anyway, this is what I do every August. I’m so damn happy the rest of the year pursuing creativity when I hit this month. Then it suddenly feels like a massive, lifelong exercise in futility and I wonder what I’m doing it for. Fame? Might be cool at a few moments, a miserable prison the next. Money? Of course. Happiness? I think that’s what predominantly drives me. But as I approach 40 and the lack of a, I don’t know, mainstream validation fails to kick in I worry about whether I’ve made the right decisions.
Or maybe the problem isn’t with me at all…I’ll continue this rant in a blog next August.

