I’m flying my kid to Texas this week, then flying right back to savor the umami flavor of 8 whole days of humanhood.

I opened a folder on my external and was reminded of my last creative marathon NYE 2023 -- all the songs and poems that were written and recorded but never finished -- and felt that familiar effervescence. Creative potential is a lot like ovulation. I mean, ovulation is literal creative potential.

I’ve always struggled with the creative demands of my body -- that familiar hunger for the transcendental merge -- but I’ve never mapped the parallels before. How the slick tongue becomes a portal to the celestial spiral where I consent to the falling. I forget my body by remembering it. The dormant nerve-endings awakening from the shadows of my geography.

Poetry over grammar. The Daddy Octavio Paz said it best:

When I feel a difficult emotion or desire, I figure out where it lives in my body. What I used to romantically, poetically, naively, and idealistically attribute to love or fate, upon closer reflection, is just my reproductive organs whirring along. Someone tall and strong stands close, fanning their own chemical desire, and I feel the ferris wheel illuminate.

Nerve conduction is an electrochemical process, which means that it uses electricity made with chemical molecules. So the mechanics that fire up the ferris wheel are the same that start my engine, and yours, and the parallel is unparalleled: the prospect of creation, whether it’s in the form of sound or flesh, are navigated by the same physical mechanics. It’s no wonder, then, that I crave the act of creation in all forms -- an experience of bending the sublime spiral of time that cradles me as I fall -- whether I am alone, with you, or my microphone.

Simply put: opening this folder gave me a boner.

Followed by the existential pang of knowing there is only so much I can get done in 8 days.

The marathon above was accompanied by the recording & production of “Adult Papers” Szn 2 in its entirety. (Don’t Be Poor b4 it was Don’t Be Poor.) Accomplishments were made. But when there’s a Szn 3 to be revised and recorded, and full albums worth of songs to find a voice -- in addition to the requisite sleeping -- inevitably something will be left behind.

As a single person, ovulation is a time of struggle similar to the act of opening the folder above: pupils open in a longing gaze, the electrochemical conduction, the acknowledgment that there is no body to share electrons with, just as there is no time to launch the DAW.

Disconnect.

dis- 1. a Latin prefix meaning “apart,” “asunder,” “away,” “utterly,” or having a privative, negative, or reversing force.