#I spent forever on this but it got quicker and he's so fun doodling

[omnxnom]

Gemerl! ⸜(｡˃ ᗜ ˂ )⸝♡⋆⭒˚.⋆ I need more of him...TT

tehehehe

[toddmichaelrogers]

Letter to You

All in due time

I am obsessed with the concept of time. When I read an article about light moving across time and space to reach us from distant galaxies, and how...what we are viewing in those distances may have already passed into death thousands of years ago, it gets my dick “Super Mario 2 (Japanese Version) hard”.

I think about equations of time v.s growth on a nearly daily basis. I am obsessed about it.

Some may feel possessed

I myself obsess about it

My youngest brother was born twenty-two years ago. His name is Ben. This week, he came for a surprise visit by telling me he would be here and then allowing me to forget. The added bonus was we got to celebrate his birthday together. That night, I drove him and his friends and Kelsie around (they may all be kids to me, but Kelsie’s been my brother’s partner for longer than I’ve known my own). We spent the night at a false speakeasy, and a giant championship pool hall, empty but for a few of us. As the night ended I drove the kids up to a hill called love circle, where a year ago I had imagined killing myself (I had a concussion, it’s cool).

In the car Michael, this kid I had not seen in a decade, popped in a song that maybbbbe three people in the world might have known. It’s a B-Side which could only be known to someone such as myself, someone who cares entirely too much for a half-forgotten Scottish 1980s group. 

“Is this fucking Big Country?” I asked. And then both parties continued asking in astonished voices if the other if they enjoyed the same band, until Michael ripped his shirt open to reveal a 1986 tour tee. “What the fuck?!” I screamed. And then preceded to tell him that Spell Saga was inspired by this band’s music; there was no need to explain what Spell Saga was to the kids in the car, they had seen the card game and its stacks of packages sitting in my living room.

The game has continued to haunt me. The rest of the packages will be sent out sometime in the next 30 days, and the manufacturer will be paid up for services rendered in the next week. That is about 1500 days since I decided to pursue the project, and over 800 days since the Kickstarter worked and we knew it was going to go to print. 

Sometimes people write very frustrated messages online wondering where their packages are, but the comments that mean the most to me are the ones where people are nice hahaha. No, I shouldn’t laugh, it’s haunting. Trying to do something right and trying to handle your own mistakes in public is about as nerve-wracking and humiliating as anything since 7th grade.

In the meantime I’ve taken all those worries and embarrassments and pushed them into the next Spell Saga release (Deck 1.5 The Under Sky) which may or may not work, we’re about to find out in March. The concept and design are so ridiculous and in depth that I’ve been forced to finish the entire thing before playing it at all--something I have not done since Spell Saga 4.0 was finished to show at Gen Con back in 2011. The whole thing could be rendered nearly pointless if the game isn’t fun to play--but then again, how can you know? Countless hours of Photoshopping and weird little doodles for an unknowable outcome. If that isn’t the official theme of Spell Saga, or indeed, everything I make, then I don’t know what is.

Speaking of time, games, and 7th grade (and as was mentioned in previous correspondence) this Autumn, after twenty years of waiting, I will be releasing a card game I started making in 7th grade. The illustrator is my friend Weshoyot, who just sent me the final pieces this past week. This is after we began working on it together 9 years ago! My god, I know this blog has a sort of theme running through it but even that takes me aback, (it also takes me a-straight-back, to 2009, when I was getting married to my first wife, designing EPIOCH instead of planning a wedding, and about to start work on both The Novel & Spell Saga...what a fucked up year…)

The novel I started still continues, and work goes well, actually. Yes it’s been 8 years, but after forcing a second draft on New Years day of 2016 I have now arrived, one year later, into new territory. Most of last year was spent agonizing through a muck of the same few chapters. It was almost nerve wracking to pick it back up, after a month’s rest, and knock-out another two new chapters without a hint of friction.

I was talking to my brother while he was in town (we always have the same talk and he hates it, but I always push it) “why aren’t you making things” I ask him every visit. I know he wants to. And I can’t speak for him, or rather, I won’t but I think there’s this perfectionist thing that hits in varying degrees. (I’m speaking more about myself then him, right now) I’ve read that  perfectionism is linked to depression, and alcoholism--this idea that things need to be a certain way, or they aren’t worth it--when really, that’s not true at all. 

Things just need to be as good as you can make them at the time, and then finished. I spent most of last year stuck on the same songs, and the same chapters, unsure of how to move forward, yet sure they had to be brilliant or cool.

But, I’m not either of those things. I don’t know how many passes I think will bleach the uncoolness out of something, but it doesn’t work. There’s something to be said for taking one’s time--and of course putting something away and rewriting it is definitely in everyone’s best interest...but still, finishing things as best you can is important.

I was talking with Meagen the other day about this, about how we as human beings tend to think if something is not hard or time consuming that it must not be good--that a novel should take ten years and not, say two. See? I even wrote the word “one” there and had to erase it. A novel? In a year? How drab.

We as artists don’t believe in ourselves, and pretend that putting time into a project will make it that much more special--or even better, waiting forever to start it...Fuck the fuck outta that. Make it and be embarrassed and move on. Just make it as best you can.

I am afraid of many things, including the new chapters I just wrote, because they happened quickly. But that is how art appears! It boils up like feelings because that’s what art really is. The craft is in getting past yourself to sit down and start the thing past your own fears. The craft is in making it sound good. the craft is in finishing it. I hope my brother starts making things, and I hope I start making things quicker.

The last day he was in town, I put on the pants I bought when I was 22. They were my favorite pants to write in for years, lasting through a full marriage and into a new one. A pair of 2005 women’s jeans so old the crotch is ripped out (my dick hangs like a cotton bulge). I looked at myself in the mirror, decided against them, and picked out another pair of pants for the evening. It was President’s Day, and my band EFFORTS was about to play our first show.

I had spent three weeks wanting to vomit every time I thought about it. But the date on the flyer appeared and with it, our last practice before loading our gear. By the end of practice I was too hungry to be nervous, and Zach, Geoffrey and I arrived at the venue to drink.

Meagen appeared, worried about a friend of ours. We stood in a parking lot across the venue and I tried to console here, it had been a rough couple of days for the both of us.

Last week was Valentine’s. I spent the night before the holiday of hearts holding our dog, Ellie, as her heart began to fail. It had been three years since the doctor told us she would die any day, and now it seemed the curse had come to claim her. I whispered nice things into her ears as she melted across my chest, and then we both feel asleep. 

I dreamed she could talk, and she told me she was hurting. And then she transformed between a young girl and grown women, back and forth again as Meagen and I held her. At the end of the dream she told me to look up at the ceiling to see what death looked like for dogs; it was a dance of shadows and light that made no scientific sense, but I understood all the same. When I awoke Ellie was staring at me, alive and well, he heart has since settled to normal.

So Meagen and I were already wound up when some really bad shit went down for a friend. I tried to console Meagen across the street, minutes before the soundcheck. I was already hot in my leather jacket, but I kept it on because the homemade arm band was tied around my right limb. The arm bands were an idea I had floated by Zach months ago and, black for mourning, with our logo, the crucibolt emblazoned upon it. I had sat down sometime between my dog trying to die and the show to make the both wraps at home using ribbon, velcro patches and iron-on sheets cut carefully and branded by my wife’s straightening iron. (i. have. never. been. cool.)

Meagen asked if I was nervous, and I said yes. Then, we walked into the venue to smoke and drink some more, Geoffrey and I both having quit tobacco except for rare occasions and the first-show-ever exception.

I waited 32 years to perform music--it still feels like a daydream that was never actually supposed to happen, but at the same time, if I’m being honest, events were always leading to this. It feels like I pulled off a miracle that was always going to happen.

On stage we were surrounded by a dimly lit room, filled with lots of people we knew. I didn’t know what to do so Zach instructed me from his drum kit on what to say to the sound guy. Then we launched into our newest song, “6 pack, nice abs!(stinence)” and I immediately heard my own vocals for the first time ever. It was an awful shock. But that feeling was overwhelmed by the rush of sound screaming out from behind me as I stared down at what my fingers were doing and sang as well as I could.

It was Zach’s idea to start with “6 pack”. I had spent two years planning for this moment, certain (god-damn-it, certain!) that when I got to play this shit live, the band (whoever that would be, there was no band, barely any songs, a pipe dream), we would start the show with the opening track of the album “everyone will leave and you”, but two hours before the show Zach said we needed to open with  6 pack, it, and it was agreed. Plans are just plans, sometimes real shit needs to happen.

Here’s a video of it.

We got through the first pre-chorus, and then I was almost smiling as we launched into the second verse

Some may feel possessed

I myself obsess about it

By the end of the song I was already sweating from the stage lights and the leather jacket; and the way I was screamed, stooped with the guitar strap across my shoulder, I felt myself nearly black out several times, a moment that would continue throughout the show.

It occurred to me afterward the opening lyrics were written while driving down the very same street the bar was on, near-as-exact to a year ago as I drove to buy airplane bottle liquor while texting my Father in an AA meeting.

Dad’s on his way to a meeting

I’m on my way to the store

And there I was, holding the guitar I grew up pretending to play, the cherry-red-heavy my Father let me borrow as he left for California, a son who had never written a song, asking someone he didn’t know very well for a guitar they never used anymore. 

He used to write little songs

He don’t write nothin’ no more

Then, the song ended and I heard people yelling and applauding. without looking up, Zach clicked us into the next one and we slammed through another two minute punk song about feelings (the boys and I recently decided to call our genre mid-punk, as we are so damn old compared to ‘dem kids’). It was during this one my head started to get away from me, that I began to realize I was, somehow on a stage and not in my imagination, and I had to grip the guitar pick tighter and focus on what I was doing. That is how insane it felt. And then, at some point during the set, stage lights started to jump and bounce everywhere and the surreality lifted into some sort of mega-dise of everything I had ever wanted.

My favorite part of the entire show was turning to Zach & Geoff between songs and laughing before we launched into whatever was next. Here was the set list, lest we ever forget:

6 pack, nice abs!(stinence)

everyone will leave and you

may you absorb all evil

the bridge song

better off without you

I saw a pale horse

west coast

ash to dust

word waster

vera

Everything ended with me singing a song I had written about a time 5 years ago when Meagen and a friend--the very same one I was consoling her about--were playing Super Mario 2 (Japanese version).

I’ll never be as happy as I was

On those Winter nights

After the show ended, Ben walked up on stage to give me a hug and congratulate me. “I can’t believe you just watched me play a show!” I shouted. I hope he noticed how perfect it was not, as I sure did.

It is so important to just go for things, and fuck up, and not be perfect, and then try over, and over, and over again. When it comes to art, you can do anything you want (if you’re meant to do it). And why would you want to do it, why would you dream about it everyday, if that dream wasn’t meant for you?

Work hard. Fuck up. Fix it. Let go. And finish.

That’s my plan, over and over again, and somehow, it looks like it’s starting to work. If you’re waiting for a package, I hope you have it by the time you read this. And if you’re ever in Nashville, I hope you can see EFFORTS play a show.

-mE.