Welcome Back, My Friends

It’s the show that never ends.

Testing, one…two…yep. We’ve still got the keys to this thing. Welcome back to Down the Pipes, the weekly newsletter blog that took a hiatus because, well…all kinds of things. Life! You’ll get the details soon enough. Those of you who have been reading me a long time know that my output always comes in waves, sometimes I can’t help but write and other times I can’t help myself write.

More on that in a bit too, but if you’re new or new-ish then welcome, this is a semi-private place for just classic blog fodder content that once had a home in places like LiveJournal or Xanga. Most of the posts are paywalled for people I know or people willing to pay for them, subscribe for the free tier if you wanna try your luck with me recognizing your name and or email address and adding you to the comp list.

Well, it’s been a minute…sorry about that. As my oldest standing friend and long time Pipes supporter Matthew Koma’s newly produced single Are You Awake by Lauren Mayberry (it slaps, check it out) suggests, “hometown hero is a poisoned chalice choice. If they all love you then you’re just destined to disappoint.”

It’s a familiar feeling for creatives of all stripes. When you start making good shit that people start recognizing you for, a pressure starts building. Don’t mess it up, make the next one better than the last one, people are counting on you for another banger post, song, look, take, TikTok, whatever. You can physically feel the weight of your audience at every step of your creative journey, whether that’s dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions. Every time you add more audience, it can feel like you’ve added more invisible expectation to succeed.

Couple that with the sense that once you start getting a certain amount of critical acclaim (or even just acknowledgement) from the people who weren’t always rooting for you (like the people in your life you look up to, complete strangers who have happened on your work, or even the icons you dreamed of becoming), a sense of imposter syndrome is likely to sneak in. That stinging voice in your head that drives you to make your work the best it can be is also capable of convincing you that your best is never going to be good enough, and anyone who says otherwise is either tasteless or lying to you.

How you handle this as a creative person is entirely up to you, and ultimately the difference between people who are creative and people who create. Everyone is at least a little bit creative—we all have the capacity to imagine—though most folks don’t have the gall to push through the self doubt and external hurdles to make something imagined into something real with that creative energy.

It’s hard! A million things will get in your way if you let them, but finding ways to push through those distractions and get back to your work, that’s where creation flourishes. And it’s those creatives who keep going who wind up being successful creators. Seth Rogen explains this well.

A number of creatives I know do a thing called morning pages. It’s a practice popularized in the book The Artist's Way, but it’s effectively just daily journaling. Not for any particular reason or any particular rhyme, just a free dump of whatever is at the front or back of your mind, a kind of daily stretch for someone who needs to spend their days making creative output.

It seems kind of obvious…if you want to write every day, it’s best to start your day with writing. Trey Anastasio has a version of this as well, though for him it’s if you want to make music every day, wake up and start making music. You can see the childlike joy in his morning routine:

treyanastasio

A post shared by @treyanastasio

But that’s actually not the brilliance of morning pages. It’s the commitment to a routine; that’s the secret ingredient most creatives miss out on.

The perpetual motion of a daily ritual that fits in a pattern of other daily rituals that give you the meditative space and time for creation. Wake up, coffee, meditate, write, eat, work, exercise, eat, work, play, eat, watch, sleep, repeat. Something like that. It’s seldom that simple, there’s meetings and trips and family stuff and friend stuff and the endless distraction machine that is the very phone you’re glued to instead of engaging with your family on Thanksgiving (unless you’re my family, in which case hi, I’m sorry I haven’t called, I’ll be home soon).

It’s how you prioritize the routine, the commitment to the bit that you are a person who creates things; that’s what sets apart the people who manage to keep it going and those of us who just manage to eke out erratic bursts of creativity followed by long spells of seemingly nothing (I feel you, Andre 3000).

But it’s never really nothing, is it? Or is it always nothing? I guess it’s both and neither. When creatives aren’t creating, we don’t cease being creative, we’ve just stopped giving ourselves an outlet for the creativity. Sometimes we stop creating because we’re just burnt out, nothing left to say. Other times it’s because we’re afraid of what we have to say and the response it may generate from the faceless and faced people who we suspect expected something different from our work.

Most often though we’re simply distracted by our latest infatuations, be that a person, a crew of people, a job, an artist, a project, or even more sinisterly, a vice. Lots of times these wind up being interconnected and competing distractions! My job is managing a crew of artists that I adore and we’re working on a project, sometimes we drink together. See how quickly all that stacks?

Creatives are prone to states of limerence, a sort of involuntary daydream (okay, they’re invasive thoughts) about a particular subject, human or otherwise. When we become limerent, it kind of becomes hard for us to focus on anything or anyone else. It is as annoying as it is blissful, and can either propel great work and relationships forward or leave you spiraling in circles and ignoring some of the people closest to you (in a sense that was me the last few months, my apologies to those of you who felt my lack of presence in your life recently).

But I’m not actually here to apologize. I’m here to say thanks. Thanks to those of you who stuck around while I flitted off to do what I do, and thanks to those of you who flitted off with me. Thank you to my family I’ve been absent from for letting me go be absent for a bit. There’s an old saying writers remind each other of when we’re procrastinating: A piece that takes you 6 months to create really takes 2 weeks to write and 5 and a half months to live. I’ve been out there doing some living, and I’m thankful to be able to come back home and tell you about some of it.

So! Here’s the kicker, if you’ve made it this far you’re clearly invested here, and I too often take that for granted. Because I’ve been consumed by work and play the last few months, I haven’t had much time for my own writing. That’s not so much the case this weekend, so we’re going to try something a little different down these here pipes.

For the next few days, I’m just gonna blog. Perpetual morning pages, all day and night long, baby! Sometimes it’ll be long heady shit like this, other times just screenshots from my phone. Free posts, subscriber only posts, a note or two, maybe even an impromptu podcast or late night chat if we’re feeling daring. It will be fun, because blogging is fun, and if you like fun blogging then keep checking downthepipes.co throughout the weekend for the latest fun.

I’ll be taking requests, go follow me on the gram if you aren’t already and/or text my ass if we know each other like that and tell me what you want more of here, I’m feeling immense gratitude for your support all of a sudden and I honestly don’t know how long that’s going to last, so don’t squander it. Also don’t be offended when I don’t respond immediately either, please appreciate that this entire post was an attempt to tell you that my focus is finite and fungible.

Lastly, don’t worry, I won’t be flooding your inboxes with my bullshit (your inbox belongs to the retail gods this weekend anyway), instead you’ll get a daily round up in your inbox for the next 4 days of the previous day’s posts, so if you want the real time feed you gotta pretend it’s 2008 and smash that refresh button (or keep an eye on my Instagram, I’ll be posting links there too).

If it goes well maybe we’ll bring it back for 12 Days of Pipesmas, who knows. Happy Thanksgiving, buckle up. lol, unintentional dad-level Pilgrim joke.

Until the next one!