Musings: It's All About Community

This is an older post I drafted some time ago that for some reason has never been  published.

Until now. 🙂

It's sort of a placeholder while I work on something really big (see below). Meanwhile, I thought this was interesting enough (I hope) to share. So, follow along below after the jump.

This is going to be a different kind of post from the usual fare here at Cass's Casa. Or at least the most recent fare. 

First, per my nephew C's suggestion, here's a quick primer for any newcomers who might read this one. I'm the Cass in the Chronicles of Cass, and this is my blog. It's essentially about by my journey to this person: 

From this person: 

There's also the occasional (OK, more than occasional) detour to one of my topical cul-de-sacs - such as, well, my nephew C (this is from his teen years, and my pre-Cass era),  for instance. Oh, and music. Lots and lots of music.

With the preliminaries out of the way, follow along below the fold for the main body of the post. :c)

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned previously that I used to draw my own comic strip. I had a regular cast of characters, and probably drew a total of 125-150 strips, not counting the occasional strip I would draw as a gift for a friend. 

I started drawing them when I was at the bottom of what I now know was one of the darkest periods of my life. I'm almost certain I wrote a post about this, but the short version is as follows. My twenties hadn't been particularly enjoyable up to this point, but this started a stretch that took that bleakness to another level. 

I was laid off at the beginning of one of the coldest, snowiest, most relentless winters we've had here in the Boston area. I would sit alone in the dark with all of the lights out for hours at a time, trying to figure out what I had done wrong, and how I had wound up in this position. But I had no answers.

One night I reached rock bottom, and knew I had to do something drastic to pull myself out of the downward spiral in which I found myself. And I settled on teaching myself how to draw my own comic strip. I'd always loved comics, and spent countless hours drawing characters from Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, and Doonesbury, purely for fun. But this was different.

I had no idea how to start; I knew nothing about how to lay out a strip, the type of pen and paper to use, or other logistical details, let alone how to create and develop characters. All I knew was I had to start. Immediately. Or else.

And... I did. I wound up drawing 30 strips over the course of the next 4-5 months, It wasn't easy; I made a lot of mistakes. But I kept working, and didn't stop until I met my self-imposed goal. Without overstating matters, the work I did those 4-5 months saved me, and got me through the bleakest period of my life. 

I didn't tell anyone what I was doing, and didn't allow anyone to look at any of the strips until I was finished. When I showed them to my best friend F, he offered his usual incisive analysis about what he liked, as well as areas that would benefit from more work. 

"This is really impressive, just in terms of the amount of work it obviously took," he said. "Let alone the creative side. What made you decide to do this?"

"I don't know," I replied. "Somehow I just knew that I had to do this. It gave me a purpose. The best part was exploring the different characters and discovering what makes them tick. After a while I wanted to gerup each day and sit down at my drafting table just to see what they were up to."

He nodded.

"It's all about community," he said. "You felt you were all alone. And those characters, and that place,  gave you somewhere where you felt welcome, where you belonged. And that made all the difference."

***

"It's all about community." Those words have stayed with me ever since that conversation. Really, it's the reason I started this blog, and continue to post to it after all this time. I know from checking the blog's statistics that there is a small but dedicated audience for it. I also recall how important the blogs I discovered early on in my transition were in helping me feel I wasn't alone, that there were people out there just like me. 

The past year-plus has been another dark time, thanks in large part to the pandemic and its ripple effect on my personal and work lives. I'm a loner by nature, but not being able to see colleagues, friends, and particularly family (specifically my nephew and my sister) has taken a cumulative toll, the extent of which I only now think I'm beginning to understand. 

The subject of this post, however, is the show that has been my lodestar each week since it began in April 2020:

Steven Page's Live From Home series.

This is the song that introduced me to Steven Page's music, back in 1994:  

Jane:

It's one of a handful of songs I can remember the first time I heard it. It's one of those perfect pop songs that are indelible once you hear it. It's actually from the second Barenaked Ladies album, Maybe You Should Drive. I was intrigued, so I went back and checked out their debut album, Gordon. And when I did, this was the song that cemented my fandom:

That's "Brian Wilson," written by Page, one of BNL's founding members. It was inspired by the life of Brian Wilson, the tortured genius and creative force behind The Beach Boys. 

It was the following lines that literally stopped me in my tracks: 

So I'm lying here

Just staring at the ceiling tiles

And I'm thinking about, oh, what to think about

Just listening and re-listening to Smiley Smile

And I'm wondering if this is some kind of creative drought

There's quite a bit packed into those few lines. I know it took me more than a few listens to really appreciate what they, and the song, were really about when I first heard it. It's about more than Brian Wilson (to me, at least); it's also about Steven himself, and the process of being creative, and its cost. I'll write more about the song, and about Steven, a bit later. 

But for now, suffice it to say that those lines did the trick. I'd been going in circles the past few weeks trying to get this post started in earnest. What did I need to do to get out of that loop? 

What the song said.

Think about what I've been thinking about.

When I would catch myself in one of these seemingly never-ending spirals, I would think of that line, and remind myself to step back and simply... be.

Taking that time - typically only a few seconds - would do the trick. I plan to write more on this moving forward, but for now this gets the ball rolling. Stay tuned for more...

***

A few tunes to wrap this up. Here's a lovely acoustic version of "Brian Wilson," performed by the Steven Page Trio (he's been a solo act since 2009):

Next is a terrific song from his most recent (excellent) solo album, Excelsior - "Xylorimba":

One more. This is a lovely song from BNL's 2008 children's album Snacktime! The song may be on a children's album, but as this song attests, children's feelings are every bit as complex as those of adults. I think everyone wishes they had a father like the one in this song: 

That's all for now, folks. I'm working on a really big post, both in size and scope, that I've needed to write for a decade or more. Well, I finally started to tackle it, and am making great progress. I hope to finish it by the end of next week. I'm writing it by hand; my thought process works better for complex subjects like this when I do so. I then simply have to type it up in Blogger. I think I'm going to have to break it up into several posts, lest its size bring down the entire product. Anyway, it will hopefully be worth the wait. "Til next time, then...