The Cellar Full O' Noise - Endless Summer and New Beginnings

It was always kind of a let-down when things started up again after the summer.

Despite what the people selling alcohol and commercial time for ball-drop Rockin' New Year's Eve Specials would have you believe, the year actually began the morning after Labour Day when you grew up in the part of North America that I did. The year was reset from wherever it had been. As I got older and went to university away from home, it was the same. When I had graduated and started to work on my own, things didn't change much. This is something that seemed mirrored by most governments and economies and the people who made those things happen as well. It was a time to shake off the liberty the summer represented. All those sensations and visual images that were specific to time-away-from-the-grind - sensations and memories that seemed to be specific to Summer.  The smell of the cold air around an ice cream cone, that frostiness coming closer to your face and nose just before you got some into your mouth; wearing shorts that were cut off castaway jeans and sandals and slippers outside, if you had anything on your feet at all - walking barefoot as much as possible anywhere for any reason. Weekends at a cottage or afternoons at a swimming pool, sitting wide in a lawn chair on a dock or beside a pool, no thought of work on your mind at all. The increasing noise as you got closer to the location of the annual exhibition or county fair and the almost quaint seediness of that whole thing. And now that was over -  and as much as you were looking forward to seeing your school friends as you may have been (and that was odd for me, who always seemed to like school more than the people there, but I had friends there, too), you kinda wanted to reach back and touch those sensations and memories and the music and the sound of fading rock music from the Tilt-A-Whirl or Bobsled ride as you drove away from the exhibition that closed the day before you had to get back to reality. To work. To not having the time anymore.

For a good deal of this summer, I've spent a lot of time thinking about where I've been going and what I've been doing and when I was happiest and what had me feeling that way, and why I had retreated from people the way I had over the past few years. I've decided it's time to get back to sharing that with people. For almost all of my life, a lot of people have known me as someone who either had music to share, or something funny, or something visual I had found where I was working - wherever I was working, and they've been asking me when I would get back to it,  and, unfortunately, I hadn't been in a place where I was ready for that. Well, I am now. Here's a new beginning. A new day after Labour Day. Here's a "stealth New Year" that allows me to start to post about the things that make me happy, and the things that make me think, and the things that let me take my mind off of thinking, if only for a little while (I've always thought much too much). I also want share the wealth of the creativity of the hundreds and hundreds of people that have made themselves my friends over the years - so if someone has something they'd like to shout out, well there may be room for that as well.

Ze Frank is something of an inspiration to me lately (or he was, anyway, when he was posting more of his own ruminations rather than the funny-but-feeling-fairly-formulaic "True Facts" series he seems to be stuck in these days).  Here's what Ze had to say about beginnings - I think there's something we can all take away from this.




What makes you feel invigorated to start over again? Go ahead and tell me in the comments.