Dichotomy

I have never been able to resolve the battle of brain hemispheres…there are creative endeavors on one side (mmm….just like crack!) and being Billy Biz (mmm….just like crack!…only with the extra added bonus of grinding tedium thrown in).

I have been waking every morning this September with the intent of exploring my new found love of writing…my creative half always gravitating to a medium that absolutely will not pay any monetary dividends. I spent the last three years playing Beethoven locked in my house on Bourbon Street as a perpetual party raged nightly outside my living room window…and somehow, I failed to notice.

Just like waking up and digging into the “Hammerklavier”, recently waking up and answering the siren call of my computer keyboard and finding this outlet of creative expression has been….joyful. Possibilities have been unfolding, projects have been materializing, and my brain has been firing on all cylinders…and of course, whilst in the throes of a creative burn, I have totally ignored any real life concerns, such as:

1. How am I gonna pay the rent?

2. How am I gonna eat?

Every once in a while, my good friend and muse LB buys me a sammich, but man cannot survive on one sammich per week (or less, depending on how far into the hills I’ve driven her, screaming).

So for the past few days, I’ve been immersing myself in the “Bizness” of “Little Georgie”…which has always been interesting to me, but the sheer volume of time and creative energy involved to administer that business crowds out any
drive to sit down and write another installment of “Lake Boy”, per example….and I’m in “Lake Boy Mode”, so having to forcibly extricate yourself out of it to have a three hour co-ordinating meeting with marketing mavens who frankly can’t do it as well as yourself…..sucks.

I have always dreamed of being in a position to delegate some of these business duties, but every time I try to do so, it results in a debacle of epic proportions (I’m not naming names, but this last attempt at “resurrecting Little Geo” was a true cluster fuck on the “Bizness” side of things….and a personal success on the creative and spiritual side).

And so I have to once again wrench the reins out of the hands of incompetents, and be the administrative captain of my ship.

So if you don’t see a lot of activity in the blog, it’s because I’ve gone to the Dark Side, Luke.

Strategical marketing plans, business plans, projections of profit, bookkeeping, internet whoring, etc….all result in tangible outcomes.

You do the work, the numbers rise and fall according to how much and how well you execute that work.

But none of those avenues of exploitation would be possible if I didn’t allow my brain to freely traipse about the Universe, tra-la, tra-la, picking random daisies…and I just cannot do both simultaneously.

So the cycle begins…create/sell, create/sell. But there’s a time inequity involved…it takes a whole lot more time and effort to sell than it does to create….and I can’t shake the feeling that I would be a whole lot better at creating if I didn’t have to fuck with spreadsheets all day.

Perhaps this situation is a by-product of my bi-polar mind…a good friend who administers the Music Business program at Syracuse University told me once, “Of all the musicians I’ve dealt with in my career (which was considerably long and storied, BTW), you are the only one who had a firm grasp of the business side of the equation”.

A grand compliment, but the unspoken reply? “Thanks, but I DON’T WANT TO BE THAT GUY!”

So the battle rages, and both sides suffer great loss, and a considerable amount of collateral damage is unduly created in the fire fight.

“War….what’s it good for? Absolutely Nuthin…”