Changing the World with Whatever Comes to Mind

It’s been years since I’ve listened and paid attention to the Beatles. So long, in fact, that I had somehow forgotten how much I love them. When I was growing up, we had Beatles cassettes, then in 2000, upon its release, we had a Beatles compilation album, entitled 1, which I recommend highly. I believe it’s one of the best compilation albums ever to have been put together. I listened to that album every chance I could get, and I would with a ravenous, fanatical intent, start the album over a millisecond after the final beat had played. I loved the Beatles’ music. I loved everything about every sound they produced. Every word they ever wrote. Every story they ever told. And to me, that’s what it was all about. Their albums were like short story collections to me. It is quite possible that it is their work that helped push me along to being a writer, and a big part of why I like it when my writing feels musical. “Paperback Writer” spoke to me in ways I can’t quite explain, but it’s something the best songs do. It’s beyond inspiration. It’s finding a missing piece of yourself and realizing it is, in fact, a part of you.

Around the start of high school, I decided I would get in with the musicians and the artists and the outsiders. When I had worries, I could listen to the Beatles’ 1, and all would be well in the universe again. I was enticed by every note, hooked by every chord, and reeled in with every riff. “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Yesterday,” and “Hey Jude” were three of my favorites. I then started taking guitar lessons.

Thanks Jon. You’ve been a part of changing this life and helping me realize my dreams.

I still remember how to play jazz. I still remember the first songs he taught me were “Back in Black” and “Hey Joe.” At some early point I took to singing “Hey Joe,” while playing it, a trick that I still occasionally have trouble with, singing and playing at the same time.

I kept learning with Jon, I kept learning more songs on my own time, I kept pushing my interests. I also remember how my fingers felt cut into as the calluses built up over the hours of practicing, every day, to the point of bringing my guitar to school and practicing at lunch. Across many subjects, I cared more about music than classes.

Except literature. Especially writing.

I’ve been a writer since I was about 7 years old. I might be off, one direction or another, by a year or less. My parents will remember a time I rewrote the entirety of one of the first Pokemon games by memory, into a story several pages long, hand-written in pencil, stapled three times along the middle because some things are best done in threes. I learned to write by rewriting the stories I loved. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Spider-Man comics. Video games. All from memory, as close to best summation as I could remember, adding in extra attention to the details that interested me most. Then, miraculously, my own stories began to come out on their own, in various ways and with various meanings.

I fell in love.

I fell in love again when I was learning to play music, slowly teaching my ear to understand the difference between notes. The slightly off vibrations of a note played against a flat of the same note. The tweaking of strings as you twist the thin knob to adjust the tuning. The tension that seems to jump from the strings up onto me for fear of breaking the string and feeling it snap across my face, like what happened to Owen Wilson’s character in 1999’s The Haunting. That always looked painful. It’s a well-directed and well-acted movie all around. Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones were particularly amazing in it, not to detract from the performances of any of the other actors who were in it. I wouldn’t mind reading the script one day.

We’ve come to the next love of mine: films and television.

One of my earliest vivid memories is early 1997. The Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition released. Back then, there was only one trilogy. I can remember there only being one trilogy. I can remember all the wonder and imagination the mind conjured the first time I heard Ben Kenobi mention “the Clone Wars.” I remember sitting small in my chair, the big screen looming over me. Text flew up the screen, words bigger than any I’d ever seen, and all promising the adventure of a lifetime. I watched the words disappear into the distance above me, and for a short moment, space sprawled out so vast I felt like if I leaned forward too far I might fall into it, and those mysterious, whimsical musical notes played, as if tempting me to lean forward and find out. My not-yet-five-year-old self watched along, heart slow and steady, arms and legs sat still, curious in a Zen-like state—which I wouldn’t yet realize was Zen-like, until years later—as the Tantive IV came into shot, fast enough I wondered how they were doing on fuel, and then the laser shots flew across the screen in clear green and red, like Christmas. They were clearly running away from something. I could go on and on about my love of Star Wars, maybe I will sometime. I could take a page out of Kevin Smith’s book, make what I want to make, and love the things I want to love, and make what I make about the things that I love. That’s a solid goal.

My love of writing and music and movies and games has carried me a long way so far. I now sit at my desk, in my office, in a house my friend and I rent out while we attend an MFA program at Eastern Washington University. It is, excuse me, a damn fine MFA program—I wonder how long I can make it if I try to sneak in a Twin Peaks reference into each of these posts. My roommate and I spend time with friends we’ve met in this program, talking about writing and music and movies and loads of other things. I have friends outside the program who help scratch the itch for video games, though that is by no means the only reason we’re friends. We’re all friends because we love each other. Same goes for the friends in the MFA program. Love + Care = Support, which then turns to, one day, realizing your dreams.

So what dream have I realized recently? This blog. Ten or eleven years ago, I was writing a movie review blog for a bit. I was in my early years of undergrad at East Tennessee State University, another amazing school that has helped push me along the way, and that movie review blog didn’t last very long, but it was a formative experience in my life as a writer. I enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed finding reasons to pick specific movies so that each movie had something in common with the previous. An actor, a director, a writer, a genre, a series. Anything I could find. Each review led into the next. It was fun. I didn’t recognize at the time how much that experience pushed me on this path.

Until rather recently.

Two weeks ago, I had a head cold. I was put out for a bit, stuck in the house, disappearing into my quilt on my bed, reading and writing as much as I could stand, but finding it hard to focus properly. I needed something to watch. On a whim, I chose the Peter Jackson-directed Get Back docuseries on Disney+. Watching this part in the Beatles story unfold with the perspective this documentary allows began an incredible resurgence in my life. It was like hanging out with my friends playing music again. I felt like I was right there in the room with them. The same jovial air that came from watching them jam out some new tunes and joke around with old tunes took me back to a point in my life when all my days were filled with music and I used to hang around friends’ houses, practicing tunes, working with friends to put a band together. I remembered what it was like to love music, to hear the beats and the notes and be able to pick up an instrument and have a go at learning songs by ear.

Since watching Get Back, I have listened almost exclusively to the Beatles. I then, this past week, have had an assignment for a class that has led me to writing about the Beatles. I don’t know what it is exactly, maybe just a fulfillment of an assignment, maybe something worth publishing one day. I don’t know what form it will take if it is worth publishing, but it has served an incredible purpose already. During the writing of the assignment, I noticed how happy I have been doing a deep dive on the Beatles’ history both for research purposes and personal pleasure. It’s felt like meeting back up with an old friend.

I realize now I might want to write condensed biographies. I want to write about the geography of music. I want to write a discussion of how bluegrass and folk music from a region that has been one of several homes to me, had influenced skiffle music, which then, in big part thanks to the Beatles and the ways they used past genres together to make new sounds, influenced rock, and changed the world.

Maybe I want to move to Liverpool?

I want to write this blog. I came up with the idea for this site during this reinvigoration of my love of the Beatles. I have felt the waterwheels of creativity turning at the flow of inspiration, and found in the turning a brilliant Zen state that I have not felt in a long time. A presence I’ve not felt since…you get the idea—I think I picked up fiddling with my beard from Ben Kenobi, which would be some deep level influence—after all this time, the words are flowing out onto the page rather than getting hung up in the interrogation room in my mind, questioned of every possible meaning they could ever have. I find this post one of the easiest things I’ve written in a long time. Creativity, like a certain James Bond theme song by Rita Coolidge, is at an all-time high. Yesterday, I picked up my guitar again and played “I Feel Fine” and “Help!” and “Get Back.” All from memory. Somehow, in the dense fog of travelling through life and doing everything I can to make ends meet and working weird part-time jobs that, mostly, never meant much to my career as a writer, I’d forgotten I’d ever known these songs. Recently, they found their way back to me, or I to them.

And I have fallen in love all over again.