I am having a difficult time trying to find a reason to continue this work. Having tightly tied so many aspects of my life to music, I’m not sure what to do now that I feel those parts falling away.
If I do end up putting the camera down, I am pretty sure that I would stop going to shows entirely. As an experiment to see if I could do it, I tried to go to a show recently as a spectator and it was fucking awful.
I no longer have the ability to stand there and watch a show. The main vocal mic was cutting out and I had to fight the urge to start chasing cables to fix it. I failed miserably at the simple act of standing in a room while a band played.
Being amongst the crowd was unpleasant and unbearable. I never knew how much I needed the separation that I have when I’m working or shooting a show in order to be in the room with that amount of people. I’m either on the periphery of the stage or retreating to the back of the room. I am rarely ever in the mix of it with the crowd and that’s not the place to be for someone that’s usually an observer that also has a distaste for most forms of human interaction.
My motivation and interest to keep going to shows and taking pictures is waning. It’s starting to feel like it’s become another thing that I do out of habit, for reasons unknown, and not something that I receive any fulfillment from.
Dealing with shows that unexplainably get pushed back by an hour or so. Putting up with drunks that don’t know how to act when they’re out of doors. Bands that don’t know how to use their equipment and can’t figure out how to set it up in a timely manner. Leaving my house is starting to lose its appeal.
I never went to shows to socialize or to hang out. It was always about the music and when the last band was done I would disappear into the night in search of food and coffee. I started taking pictures at shows because I figured that I was in the room not talking to anyone anyway so I may as well put myself to work documenting these things because no one else was.
It was also my way of pushing back against the creeping dread of a “normal” life. I needed a creative outlet and something more than the meaninglessness of a day job. Starting this thing because of my own social awkwardness and out of spite was probably not the best of motivations but most of the things I do are done out of spite or in spite of.
Part of me wants to see if there’s a local writers group that meets up from time to time to encourage and push each other's work. My fear with that is that the group would be super pretentious and not be self aware enough to find the humor in the pretentiousness. And the chances they’d admit a rapidly aging punk with a low tolerance for bullshit and the ability to use the word “fuck” as if it were a comma into their ranks would probably be minimal.
I could go the DIY route with it and start my own writers group but it feels like there would be too many logistics involved for my brain to handle right now. And it has the potential to be one of those things where people would say they’ll show up but then don’t. I may as well try to find a coffee place that’s open past 6pm and work quietly by myself.
I am definitely starting to feel the loss of what little community I had. I have no sounding board to bounce things off of. No one around to say that there’s absolutely no reason as to why I shouldn’t take a risk in doing something.
I am feeling very stagnant and instead of trying to make the next thing happen and moving forward, I’m resigning myself to stopping altogether. I could force myself to take a break for a while to stave off the burnout that I’m feeling. Working myself until I fall over might be detrimental to my health or so I’ve heard.
Over the course of 2023, I shot sixty-three shows for a total of 212 sets. Along with the time put into editing the photos, writing, putting together a podcast that no one listens to, a day job and a life that is generally in the shitter, I am pushing myself harder than I ever have to get things done. I’m not necessarily burning the candle at both ends as much as saying, “Fuck it,” and throwing the candle into the fire to see how quickly it would melt.
Occupying every moment of my day to keep the depression monster in its cage normally works until I start getting to this point of exhaustion and being unable to maintain forward progress. There has been too much awfulness this year for me to be able to easily break away from the tiredness and the sadness.
The other side of that coin is that I was able to do a lot of things that I didn’t think I’d be able to do over the course of the past year. I made a massive dent in the long list of musical heroes that I was able to take pictures of. But I lost focus on all of the positive things because of one massive heartbreaking loss and one stupid mistake that was completely avoidable and entirely my fault.
I’m not sure what to do next, if anything. Taking a break from music and falling back into the writing has been helpful. Since I haven’t been able to bring myself to be around other people in any meaningful way over the past several weeks, the solitary act of writing has been comforting. At least I’m still creating and moving my brain forward. The television has been off and the turntable has been spinning so I’ll take that as a win.
