I had to reread many of your paragraphs, realizing you're sharing some deep thoughts I want to grasp. I will come back and read it all over again.
You're a thinker in a world we're supposed to gulp down what we're fed. It can feel like walking in another realm... lonely and odd.
This planet can drive thinking people to doubt their sanity, to want to numb themselves. Add in your relationship situation... I get it. In 2020, I stopped my thoughts with booze--harming myself and my brain. After Ian's stroke, being mentally unavailable wasn't an option.
I've since found inner peace by ignoring, as best I can, the chaos of the outer world--news, politics, popculture, the anger and hate--with nature, meditation, exploring deeper inside. Focusing on how I feel rather than over-thinking the carnival of chaos. Doing what I can to share joy. I believe that's important.
We're all hardest on ourselves. We're human. We fuck up. But as long as you're still walking around this kooky planet, be forgiving with yourself.
Thank you for sharing your powerful thoughts and experiences.
Great piece of writing there Jonny - so many are looking inward and out in the world for answers. There's only one true way to find peace and joy that really counts and I'm glad you found it brother!
It's interesting to me that with all you went through, you didn't lose your voice or ability to write. You came out of all you went through with a strong hold on the style of writing (and speaking, I guess) that I've always known you to have. That's impressive to me. When I went in and out of reality and drug and alcohol use, and also through aging and different experiences, the content & style of my writing changed (frequently for the worse). I had no anchor. So you must have had something that kept you steady and centered -- didn't you?
Thanks for such a well considered and favorable comment, Diane--very pleasing since I hold you, literary wise, rather in some awe (as I know you are passionate wordsmith/reader and, frankly, librarians have always had an inscrutable mystique to me [yes I know you've kicked the habit!]).
If all this had adversely affected my ability to write, I'd've ended up in the rubber room def but def. In this case, which necessarily involved taking comprehensive stock of everything flying around my inside my head, it was critical to not only inventory but explicitly catalog all of it--maintaining that grasp was all I had left, so it allowed me to emerge with an equally holistic narrative (if not a true understanding) of these assorted, ever so tortuous processes and to set all stuff down in writing.
Of course what kept me steady and centered was my faith--I hate organized religion and I love God. I actually gently resist using Faith and favor Belief, which, in truth, also is inadequate. I'm not a Believer, I'm a KNOWER, both through my spiritual life and the myriad, unassailable historic, verified factual trail of recorded and archeological evidence explicitly backing up events in both the Old & New Testaments. The Tower of Babel, the Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, and the multiple, purely secular roughly contemporary accounts of Jesus (the earliest pre-NT Gospel Christian accounts were made within less than a year of the resurrection, essentially a breaking news flash in terms of ancient documentation; the Apostle's gospels appear within approx 30 years; Alexander the Great's biography, the first written account of his exploits, appeared 400 years after his death yet no one disputes his existence!). See Gary Habermas' "The Verdict of History: Conclusive Evidence for the Life of Jesus," and/or Grant Jeffrey's The Signature of God: Conclusive Proof That Every Teaching, Every Command, Every Promise in the Bible Is True." Cuz they iz! Cheers, Diane!!
Stuck with the most magnificent writers block on Earth, nervously walking the streets because of hate mail I'm getting for playing in a rock and roll band whose job, name, mission and avocation is to remind everybody from whence they came in order to be realistic Americans, I started sliding down the rabbit hole myself.
But these words qualified and validated me. And I am again tonight writing that book again.
"Surfing through a quasi-psychedelic blur of extra-dimensional, quantum mechanical theorizing and cosmological entropy."
On this chapter :
Beyond La Bamba & Sabor a Mi: "Adventures in Sociology, Politics, Agitprop, Rock & Roll and Mixed Race Ideology."
I had to reread many of your paragraphs, realizing you're sharing some deep thoughts I want to grasp. I will come back and read it all over again.
You're a thinker in a world we're supposed to gulp down what we're fed. It can feel like walking in another realm... lonely and odd.
This planet can drive thinking people to doubt their sanity, to want to numb themselves. Add in your relationship situation... I get it. In 2020, I stopped my thoughts with booze--harming myself and my brain. After Ian's stroke, being mentally unavailable wasn't an option.
I've since found inner peace by ignoring, as best I can, the chaos of the outer world--news, politics, popculture, the anger and hate--with nature, meditation, exploring deeper inside. Focusing on how I feel rather than over-thinking the carnival of chaos. Doing what I can to share joy. I believe that's important.
We're all hardest on ourselves. We're human. We fuck up. But as long as you're still walking around this kooky planet, be forgiving with yourself.
Thank you for sharing your powerful thoughts and experiences.
i appreciate this very much, MMG. Ditto your admirable aspect/attitude. Cheers!
P.S. I am so happy you're content now. Contentment is so underrated.
Great piece of writing there Jonny - so many are looking inward and out in the world for answers. There's only one true way to find peace and joy that really counts and I'm glad you found it brother!
WOW. My favorite of yours so far. I'm so glad you wrote this and shared it, it took real guts.
It's interesting to me that with all you went through, you didn't lose your voice or ability to write. You came out of all you went through with a strong hold on the style of writing (and speaking, I guess) that I've always known you to have. That's impressive to me. When I went in and out of reality and drug and alcohol use, and also through aging and different experiences, the content & style of my writing changed (frequently for the worse). I had no anchor. So you must have had something that kept you steady and centered -- didn't you?
Thanks for such a well considered and favorable comment, Diane--very pleasing since I hold you, literary wise, rather in some awe (as I know you are passionate wordsmith/reader and, frankly, librarians have always had an inscrutable mystique to me [yes I know you've kicked the habit!]).
If all this had adversely affected my ability to write, I'd've ended up in the rubber room def but def. In this case, which necessarily involved taking comprehensive stock of everything flying around my inside my head, it was critical to not only inventory but explicitly catalog all of it--maintaining that grasp was all I had left, so it allowed me to emerge with an equally holistic narrative (if not a true understanding) of these assorted, ever so tortuous processes and to set all stuff down in writing.
Of course what kept me steady and centered was my faith--I hate organized religion and I love God. I actually gently resist using Faith and favor Belief, which, in truth, also is inadequate. I'm not a Believer, I'm a KNOWER, both through my spiritual life and the myriad, unassailable historic, verified factual trail of recorded and archeological evidence explicitly backing up events in both the Old & New Testaments. The Tower of Babel, the Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, and the multiple, purely secular roughly contemporary accounts of Jesus (the earliest pre-NT Gospel Christian accounts were made within less than a year of the resurrection, essentially a breaking news flash in terms of ancient documentation; the Apostle's gospels appear within approx 30 years; Alexander the Great's biography, the first written account of his exploits, appeared 400 years after his death yet no one disputes his existence!). See Gary Habermas' "The Verdict of History: Conclusive Evidence for the Life of Jesus," and/or Grant Jeffrey's The Signature of God: Conclusive Proof That Every Teaching, Every Command, Every Promise in the Bible Is True." Cuz they iz! Cheers, Diane!!
Stuck with the most magnificent writers block on Earth, nervously walking the streets because of hate mail I'm getting for playing in a rock and roll band whose job, name, mission and avocation is to remind everybody from whence they came in order to be realistic Americans, I started sliding down the rabbit hole myself.
But these words qualified and validated me. And I am again tonight writing that book again.
"Surfing through a quasi-psychedelic blur of extra-dimensional, quantum mechanical theorizing and cosmological entropy."
On this chapter :
Beyond La Bamba & Sabor a Mi: "Adventures in Sociology, Politics, Agitprop, Rock & Roll and Mixed Race Ideology."
Gracias Hermano.
🙏🏻