Period Great.

When dear friends from Academy ask me how life goes in the city, I invariably tell them the same thing. "Great." Not exclamation-point-great, that's the great that comes with a record contract, a book deal or a gallery show, or at the very least a car that doesn't squeak from every joint (Kay knows this dude's girlfriend). But period-great is the kind of great that goes with playing multiple gigs per month, writing in one's spare time, and knowing that your car could still smoke 95% of cars on the road, noises nonwithstanding. Usually, each November, I get sunk in an "I'll never be an artist" or an "I'll never do anything that matters" stink, where the very act of thinking calls forth mental groans and huge gaps of the existential variety.
It's December, and I still have the wintertime blues a bit. Too many of my days are spent writing for way less money than is OK and watching shows on Hulu, not enough of my days are spent building things or writing for free. But by and large...
The band has been writing new songs at a surprisingl voracious pace, and they are sounding better and better by the week. I'm finally writing the songs I want to, getting to lyrics that exorcise the year's demons, and garnering the much coveted praise of my often-more-prolific bandmates. Recently, when those "you're not amounting to anything" devils raise their heads and taunt me about that novel project I still haven't written, I push them aside to start hashing out lyrics. I'm letting my creativity flow where it may with the knowledge that thats all I can ask of it. And I think that's what a lot of it is about. I hope.