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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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Letter to You

At an abandoned lot Meagen pulled out a picture, which she had glued onto a card. In the picture it was the two of us looking six years younger; though her face is covered in a raggedy cloth elephant mask, and mine is wearing a home-cut eye mask with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. In the picture (though it is hard to tell) it is also two nights before Halloween, and we are spending our last night just as friends.

Inside the card it said happy anniversary.

Zach and I spent the last month mixing the EFFORTS EP. We kind of have an unspoken rule that the weirder the idea, the more we should pursue it. That’s kind of how the EP started as 3 songs and ended up being just 1 long track. If we a have a genre, I would have to call it ‘Spook Punk’.

It should be debilitating working on so many different music projects, but at this point, they're all feeding into one another. It’s taken the pressure off of my so-called perfectionism; something that has nearly threatened to destroy me at all times. (I wasn’t even meant to be writing a blog today. I came to the library to ‘fix’ the next Spell Saga deck--and was surprised to find nothing wrong with the thing. I’m getting better at catching myself.)

I can’t tell you how many times Zach has had to put up with me asking if we can “redo” a vocal. Our most this is a single song, May You Absorb All Evil took almost two years to get finished because I am a fucking idiot. But it’s done now, because Zach spent weeks fixing and mixing it through a giant board.

It’s on the EP, along with some other songs that I felt worked well as a warning. And that’s really how I’m choosing to think about the whole thing--our EP is a warning to those who are not prepared to hear 33 years of pent-up frustration. It was not fun growing up in a musical family without knowing I could do it. (A reverse Potter/Dursleys scenario, I can assure you).

I am the muggle. That’s a good song title.

But it was equally horrendous spending two decades in a city known to the rest of the world as “Music City”. Every person here looks and sounds the same. Everyone born here thinks they are chosen/deserving/special, or they just showed up from the midwest hoping some other band would find them (and their talent) like a black hole pulls in light.

Making art to get fucked or get attention makes me feel like I’ve just witnessed an assault in some parking lot. I want to break windows and arms and scream at people. “Don’t ever come back to my wal-mart!” but this is music city, and everyone around me is assaulting each other in a circle jerk while I just stand there wondering if someone’s going to help me carry these groceries. “You are ruining Black Friday!” I might scream, or “you are ruining the basis of the very institution you are attempting to crawl down into.”

I mean, make that money. But fuck.

Anyway the EFFORTS EP “May You Absorb All Evil” will be released in the (season to be determined) of next year. The full length album “I Bought You a Coffin” is already recorded and will follow shortly thereafter.

One of my other projects, Beset., is nearly finished with the DEMOS for our first LP “There Are Places They Can Get You.” You can actually listen to some of those HERE.

The Weapon and I try to get to these every Monday, so by year’s end we should be ready to start recording the actual tracks. We just need to fix this latest one--we did that thing where you start recording ideas before ever playing a finished song, and you end up with a mess--but hopefully “We Brought Weapons” will shine as bright as the others once we crack it.

And I’m really excited about the only song we haven’t recorded, “Make Peace With The Promise of Failure”. Not only is this the first thing he has brought to me first on guitar without me showing him lyric, but the chorus is fucking amazing (he thinks it’s a bridge, but I got a reallllll good feelin’ on this one).

Geoffrey W. Osborne and I are trying to finish and release the first ever DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP EP for a New Year’s Day release. Which is a fitting day actually, as the last song on the album is called “Baby New Year”, something I wrote while listening to an old keyboard piece of his.

when I conquer death

when I have nothing left

I was Baby New Year

so drink and be of cheer

good times were never here

middle of the road

new teeth and broken bones

I’ve known every fear

the end is almost near

when I mend my bones

they will call me home

I was Baby New Year

That’s something about Geoffrey’s playing that I like, it’s easy for me to write lyrics to it. We did the same thing on the EFFORTS EP with a little interstitial song called Ringtone Money.

How we gonna leave

When we don’t know where to go

I got that ringtone money

And it sounds like solid gold

When you look at me

You look like you saw a ghost

How we gonna leave

When we don’t know where to go

For me, writing lyrics or changing something at the last minute is one of the best parts about making things. It’s like pushing a piece into a puzzle quickly while the puzzle is being framed. We did it again for a weird hidden track on the May You Absorb All Evil EP

wait another minute

I’ll get my revolver

you can be a skeleton

just give me a holler

I have one more musical project now. So far it’s just a name, an album title, and some demos. Also I made a cover because that’s how I do ma shit.

Meagen’s out of town for Thanksgiving. I spent the entire day playing Spell Saga and it meant something to me. Four years ago I was lost and sore; I had just failed to get the game funded on Kickstarter. I felt a sense of real shame about the whole thing. Like I had returned from a war I had single handedly lost. Maybe that’s insensitive. But after a year of planning the thing it was a real blow. So to be holding the prototypes four years later and playing through it one final time before it goes to print was really special.

But wait--you ask. Didn’t the Kickstarter succeed a year later, in the year of our lord 2014--and haven’t the cards been printed and are even now waiting in a Hong Kong warehouse?!

Yes.

But it’s been three years, so I took my own money and printed the next Deck so everyone could have it for free (Spell Saga is a game of multiple decks, like chapters in a book). Also I redid the packaging, because I am, in the end, a perfectionist.

So I spent all day playing through Deck 2: The Forest, making sure no problems could be seen upon them cards. And next week I tell the good people of Panda Game Manufacturing to go for it, set that shit to print. Here is a lot of pics I took of the play through.

Making things often means you are filled to the tips-of-your-toes with a sort of psychic horror--the unending logic that you are doing your best to prove on a chalkboard in front of the entire world that only you can solve an equation that proves you yourself are a fucking hack.

I often stare off into the distance like a farmer hearing a gunshot in a world where only he and his daughter were left alive.

The other day I was struck by the sort of thinking that makes all those bad thoughts go away.

My deepest concern was that while playing through Deck Two, I had a problem. Most of the cards I drew were of no use to me. Now, if you design a game, and while playing it, you DON’T use most of the pieces, that is a fucking issue. Except...because I am ME...and by that I mean WEIRD (see any paragraph above) this is not useful play test information.

I don’t play games well. In fact, if someone plays against me in a game--even one that I MADE, I am bound to lose. The one exception I can even remember is winning a round of dat classic Mario Party at Cousin Lauren’s apartment, three years ago, while she was busy illustrating the very cards I was now concerned about.

Anyway, I stepped out of the shower the other morning and finally pinpointed what was causing the astral sand to be pulled out from beneath my feet--what the current was that I was stuck thinking about:

In Deck One: The Highlands the cards are meant to each do a specific thing, almost on their own. Some are necessary and some are fun, but they each sort of help you in their own weird way. In Deck Two: The Forest, this is different. There are several cards that need to be combined for the rules or effect of them to take place. That means a lot of time you’re left with a bunch of random pieces you don’t care about<-----my concern. Now, if I was GOOD at games, I would play with the cards I was dealt, instead of stubbornly waiting for the ones that I want. I know that. I understand it. And though that knowledge does not help me play any better (for I am indeed stubborn) It does help me tremendously while designing. Because I can imagine how other people will play, and how they will react to the pieces I have given them. In this instance, with us about to go to print and there being NOTHING I can change too drastically (the game is, after all, designed, and the deck itself was already redesigned almost entirely from the digital PnP version we released three years ago), I was definitely feeling a bit shaky. Until I stepped out of that shower, and realized the solution lay in how I treated the next part of the game, Deck Three: The Caves.

I won’t go into it further. But playing that DECK is going to feel REAL GOOD.

I will not talk about my day job--which is a night job. But the hours are horrendous, and I see myself now as a chain anchored to my home and swinging in a circle until I can destroy everything or fly off into space.

My childhood was not as bad as some, and it was worse than others. I chose then to believe I was suffering, so what difference is it if I’m now working hard to make art generated by those younger woes? Life continues.

The Novel.

I didn’t start playing music until i was 30 years old. But The Novel I started even years before that continues to surprise me more than anything else.

It is a terrible cost, a novel.

I fear it will continue to consume me, like a star going supernova in my head and eating up all the time I could spend on other ideas. And I fear that I would let it.

I have been sober for about eight months now. And I often feel okay about it, but the desire is there; a nasty trick of the mind that makes me feel like I was never an addict, and that it would really be something, almost a performance piece really, if I drank now in front of those that know me as a ‘survivor of The Thirst’. I wake up from dreams where I drink and can’t stop, and that disappointment I feel upon waking is pretty much the battery of my unexpected willpower. But I feel that desire, and I feel it with the novel as well. Destroy Everything and let it wither in ruin, so i might survive. And most days I kneel down and say “yes. Of course.” and “nothing matters but the ten year slow motion orgasm of making you.”

I had decided after years of start-stopping a second draft to just Do The God Damn Thing. I started on New Year’s Day 2016 and rewrote from the beginning to what I hoped was the end. But I got lost. A lot. I got stuck redoing the same things over and over again. Parts of the story changed. Good. Now it was a 2.5 draft, right? That’s fine. It’s for the best.

But I continued in my toil. And time passed. After a year I resigned myself to whatever life the novel would let me live; often sneaking away for just an hour a day before or between some grueling job or errand of adulthood.

This past Summer something clicked. It was that thing that always happens, where I’m worried about something until I realize only I can fix it, and the worry was only me being smart. Less a warning and more like a ...pre...answer?

I wrote a new beginning to the story that night I think. Clicking in the dim light of the living room like someone who had just discovered words. This led to other unexpected turns in the story...a brand new sixty page interlude in the middle of the thing...a whole section of plot points and chapters was also added--things and moments I had culled from a side story written years ago that I felt sort of circled the novel. Now it was part of it. Everything began to take shape into something that...I started writing this story in some form or another a decade ago, and the shape it became was something Unknown.

Then I kept getting stuck again--still moving forward I became unable to push through the white snow of blank expanse before me.

The whisper that was not a warning was there again. I would have to break the entire rule of the rewrite, and go back to the beginning and start over (madness) and not only this, I would have to change the entire tyle I was writing in (horror).

But I did it.

I looked at my life and it’s work and realized I was not writing the way I wanted to--the way I was meant to. I was living and dying in the predefined alignments of those who had come before me. Nothing I make is normal, why should my writing be any different.

I went back to the beginning and began a process which has led to work I truly feel terrified and sure of. What more could I ask?

Now the cards are going to print somewhere in Hong Kong.

I will have four separate recording projects throughout December.

The novel continues and will be finished sometime next year.

And I don’t think Meagen and I have ever been better.

I cannot enjoy any of it. Not the way I believe someone should. I am not normal. My enjoyment comes from everything spinning, and the sound of myself whispering a thousand little would-be-warnings as I navigate through it all.

And I have become good at it, maybe. I have done this a long time. I have mastered the act of handling some shit. And now it’s time for a new sort of thing. The plates and whispers are starting to combine into something else, and there is a something Unknown on the horizon...

Unknown but for a name: SUB(URBAN)HEATHEN.

-mE.

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