A few things have been on my mind recently that I'd like to share with the one, maybe two people who view this blog:
Is creativity a trait one is born with, or is a skill that has to be cultivated and worked at until perfection is achieved? Can everyone be creative in some way or another, and it just needs to be discovered under the right circumstances?
As long as I can remember I've possessed an obscene passion toward music. The passion sometimes bubbles up to the surface in the form of euphoric tears. Music somehow touches my soul, but not in some metaphoric way. I can literally feel a warmth burning somewhere in my chest that spreads throughout my entire body. It's crazy, and I'm pretty sure it isn't normal. The first love affair with a song I ever I had was when I was 3 years-old and the song was Neil Diamond's "Heading for the Future." It's kind of a lousy song, but I loved drumming to it in the back seat of my Mom's Hyundai so much that the memory of it has stubbornly refused to leave my mind. Then it seems the floodgates opened and I was falling in love with songs all around me. "Enjoy the Silence," "Even Flow," "The Audience is Listening," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Black Hole Sun," "Amish Paradise," "Closer," "Gemini Dream".... All before I was... 9 or so. The strongest memories I have of my childhood all involve music (and to a lesser extent, films and video games ha ha).
So in retrospect it seems I was destined for some sort of musical greatness. I had some singing talent, chops on the piano and I understood the theory well for my age. And yet nothing ever really happened. I sang in a choir, took piano lessons, the usual stuff that musically inclined children engage in, but nothing ever clicked like I wanted it to. After years and years of loving music to death, there was still an itch that I couldn't scratch-- the itch to create. Yet whenever I sat down on the piano to plunk out something unique and catchy, the only tune going through my mind were the ones I constantly listened to on my Walkman. And that is pretty much the rest of the story.
I stubbornly refuse to give up, going so far as to hoard as many musical instruments as possible in hopes that one of them will open up some magical conduit to my illusive creative center. It has yet to happen. And yet I soldier on, in the meantime obsessively scouring the web in search of better music, trying my best to keep the itch at bay.
I mean is there truly a more transcendent and pure form of art?! Even this guy, undeniably over-the-top as he is, creates something that finds a place in my soul and firmly roots itself there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IrWyZ0KZuk
