Waking up as it were

Thanks for stopping by my journal. This space is important to me because I’m having a difficult time finding a place for myself in this world. It was like that when I was young, and also as I pulled Danielle and I into our abyss, and it’s moreso now that we’re emerging into our actual selves. Waking up as it were. There are so many metaphors that describe this feeling, and they’re all accurate. It’s comforting in the sense that one knows they are no longer dreaming, and/or that they realize the lucidity of the dream they are in. The discomfort and confusion come when learning how to live in this new, lucid-dreaming state of affairs. Nothing is the way it was and everything has to be re-learned, starting from pre cogito ergo sum because who is “I” anyhow?

And while that meditation and cogitation needs to happen, the bills become due, right? Money is still a thing (for some reason), and resources and time are scarce. For me, this is aggravated by symptoms of acute mental illness that manifested younger than I can remember and emerged as I woke up and … well, saw it all for the first time. Becuse of this, interactions with people are always awkward, introductions to new situations are strange, and there’s a kind of peering-into-a-fishbowl feeling that I get when I’m out and about. I’m not a part of the scene as much as observing it unfold and then forgetting I have lines … we’re too isolated, clearly … but it’s not like that when I’m playing or we’re jamming together. It all makes sense, then.

Because music — delightful enticing sweet sweet music and song — has been instrumental (right?) in helping us to stabilize and re-orient ourselves towards a new future within this newly-understood lucid dream. It’s what my new album is about, in a personal way: the slogging through confusion and finding the way back to the way. But it’s still weird. And it’s incredibly lonely to have these barriers between us and the world and nobody else to scale and/or raze them with right now. I know there are people out there, but it’s been difficult for us to venture forward while still in survival mode. Here’s a beacon. Lit now.

I’m being awuflly honest here. I hope it’s okay. But it’s taking me an awful lot of words to communicate something very simple: I feel awake in a sleeping world and it’s confusing at best, lonely all the time, and sometimes quite hellish. The reason we founded it and the concept behind Midheaven is an attempt to do what we can with what we have to transform that dillemma into the foundation for others who may be going through something similar, to give out to others what we needed at our darkest points in our journey, what we need some days still. It’s slow going, but we’re dedicated to it. We’ve made a lot of progress on our first public area: the front sun room.

We plan on holding personal gatherings, D&D sessions, informal jam sessions, and readings there and it will become the foundation for musical experiences further in the house. All of the music we’ve released has also been recorded and produced here, and we’re hoping to have more than just us be involved with our next project.

My new album — “Simultaneously Alive” — is meant to address a lot of what I’m talking about and beyond. A hint to the story can be found in the tracklist:

1. Flying with new wings
2. This isn’t how I used to be
3. Dance with me tonight
4. 318-420 blues (Prayer for green)
5. Who are you?
6. Something more than coffee
7. Motherless child
8. The lifted weight
9. Never made me lose
10. Saving me
11. If you don’t mind
12. That’s all that matters to me now
13. The king think

🙏🏼🎶💜