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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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Letter to You

Meagen and I used to walk around the neighborhood a lot more, back when we had a dog, and before that, when we lived a street over, both of us crammed into one shitty bedroom at a friend’s house. We would walk around in the middle of Autumn, just trying to escape the stress of surviving work, life, and a relationship that had claimed more parts of our psyche than either of us could have known. It was a dumb thing to do, walk around our own temporary neighborhood hoping to find a home (we were both as it turns out, much younger and inexperienced than we thought at the time).

Hope can look a lot like madness.

We moved in a street over after a month of searching. She came home to our shitty bedroom for the last night ever, and I walked her over to our new life, in a place that was so big (compared to a bedroom), we found ourselves overwhelmed with it all.

And like I said, we don’t really walk those roads together anymore. Not since Ellie The Dog died last June. Meagen goes running down the street all the time, but I still don’t like walking without the dog, or turning down what we once called “poop alley”.

But we were walking the other day, almost half a decade since we were twenty-eight and searching for a new place to live. We were talking about prose and narration. She’s a poet, and I’m a weirdo, so I often try to pick apart our brains, and see how they fire differently. Part of that is an unconscious desire to be safe (something she realized early on in our relationship) but it’s also because the idea that minds work differently in every person is very exciting for me. I think it makes me feel okay that I’m weird, and also special. I have ideas that other people don’t And some people like them. That’s the sort of revelation a kid like me needed growing up.

Here’s what we talked about:

When I’m writing a story, it’s because I see things. It comes in flashes of sound and vision. It’s a lot like watching a movie trailer. But since it’s a movie that no one can see except me, I end up trying to pull it out and show it to people, inevitably spending a decade trying to piece it all together and force it into a presentable package.

That’s what writing is for me. Figuring out what I saw that first time, and then letting my brain find the rest of the story, one agonizing thought at a time.

The problem is, once I figure out what the story is, I have to believe that deep down, somewhere else, all the stuff I saw truly happened. Because if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn't be able to spend a decade writing about it. It would sound bad, like I was making shit up.

This method of make-believe/make-real becomes a problem when you have to change something in the story. And that shit happens all the time. It is necessary for thing to change while writing. A story needs certain things in it’s plotting, and what those things might be grow and change as I rush (for ten years) toward the end of the work.

Part of my growth as a writer has been learning how to believe the moments of the story occured in real life (just someplace else, in the unknown universe inside my head), while learning how to bend or even ignore the truth of them happening. It is nothing less than controlled madness.

I’ve had to do this several different ways, like pretending I didn’t “see” part of the story correctly (ie the events happened but I was squinting, or looking in the wrong direction), or pretending there are many alternate realities, and I was only looking at one of them (ie the thing happened just as I saw it, but the universe of my imagination has infinite realities, and I need to zoom out in my consciousness and dive into another).

It happens all the time.

Recently I was writing about this in middle school, and I had to change it to a kid in high school. That is not a huge leap to make.Surely I myself was not so different between seventh and ninth grade. But to change the story, even by that little flick of a memory, was excruciating.

Doing something like this always causes a slight panic in my head; the same primal warning that reality has shifted, and that true madness might occur if I can’t remember what is real or not real.

I’m getting better at it though. The novel is one of several gods in my life. My time and thoughts are a welcome sacrifice.

It has been unexpectedly hard to write about this kid in high school. After all, he is, for all intents and purposes, very much like me when I was his age. And that was not a fun age for me to be.

For me, good writing means I gotta delve on down, and pull up some real emotions to work with. But it also means knowing when not to go that deep; when to hold back the barrage of truthful thoughts, and make sure the vibrational energies of my theme and style are coming through correctly.

Make it fun to read. Simple. Some days it’s impossible, but it’s simple, really.

Writing about this kid means I’ve had to do a subconscious dive into my childhood, a place that for me still very much exists. It may be the past, but that world is just as real as the ones I make up. That means I can go there again, if I want to. I can walk those halls and be in that place. I can smell the vinyl seats of the bus and hear the noises of the road and the other kids who were excited to be in a place I considered a warzone. I carry that world in me wherever I go.

Those thoughts are part of the weight of Who I Am, the roots of my life which almost destroyed me.

When I look back at school, at the kid I was, I see trauma.

I see a child from an emotionally unstable family, forced to swim through the burgeoning expanse of his own mental illness, all while learning how to navigate a jungle-like prison filled with other kids who hated him for seeing it as such a place. And if I were to try and write about the things that happened to me, even just for one day, you would think it was fiction.

So that’s just what I did.

It was surprising to be in that world again. The daily repetition of constant fear and hatred eventually formed something out of me. It was a bomb-drop which caused the rest of my life to explode outward just the way it did; unliked and unloved, until i was good at something.

Damn, that’s almost too much to write, even for me. Too deep.

But I spent a week inside that world. Living a past life while forcing myself to pull up and stitch what I saw together into a cohesive plot, to shape it all just correctly to fit into the story I first saw flash before me eleven years ago. And one day, while I’m stuck in this other, painful world, time-travelling by myself in a library, my phone buzzed on the table next to me. It was my mother. The message was unexpected, for a thousand reasons. But she just wanted to tell me that she had seen all the things I’ve been doing with my life, the music, the writing, the games and whatever, and she thought that I was courageous for just putting myself out there and doing things that I wanted to do.

It’s hard to write that down and not go into some wikipedia length explanation of how my family does or does not work, depending on the definition of the word. Or to not explain how we don’t talk really all that much, that I wasn’t understood growing up and it led to years of unnecessary medication, public fallouts, and painful memories that will never be healed. But they are there for me when I least expect it, and I’ve spent years trying to rebuild the damage caused by the echoes of two stunted family trees crashing into one another.

But to hear those words from her, just at that moment, when I was trapped in the painful world of my childhood, meant a lot to me.

Three years ago my brother Asher sent me an email saying we weren’t brothers anymore. It was in the midst of a flurry of text messages. I had called him out on something, harshly, and he reacted about the way I expected. He was living in an asbestos lined closet of a bar he worked at in NYC. And he was mad as hell that Summer.

It got to the point where I would have a small panic attack every time he texted me. It was like his texts had the ability to explode in my hand if I wasn’t careful in my reply. And since it was the same Summer I had started writing songs for a band that would eventually become EFFORTS, I wrote a song about it all, and I played it, every time he texted me, before I responded. I would play the whole thing through by myself on the couch, quick and angry-like. You can play the whole thing while sticking your middle finger up. So it’s helpful.

Asher’s been in town the last month. We got better. Mostly. But I still have the song. He asked if he and a friend might stay at our tiny place. But I said no.

Addiction is a word that I don’t like. It brings up the wrong color. It used to mean blue--and blue was bad. Blue was a way of explaining or condemning the stark raving mad among our lot.

Addiction could mean the color green, if you let it. And green would be shared among many words. It would be a normal human function. Like intelligence or charisma.

Addiction should be a character trait in Dungeons & Dragons. Because the human mind, everyone’s palace of thought, is partially constructed upon a solid and necessary foundation of addiction. In some people, that trait is higher than others, sure. But the word addiction just sounds wrong. It sounds like junkie.

Now, I’m not someone who fears words. My youngest brother Ben used to be really afraid of certain words, and it would worry me. We grew up in a family where thinking or doing certain things would inevitably start the paved path to Hell. So I’m not sittin’ here, typin’ on a wobbly table in a coffee shop preachin’ that we should not Use This Word. I just don’t like it as a descriptor.

(Some words are wrong. They should not be said. Some are universal and some are just based on if you belong to the culture that spawned or adopted said words. That’s how I feel).

I love my family. We don’t talk. I have no idea what’s going with their lives, and I love them.

“Addiction Green” runs pretty hard in my ancestry, probably more so after the Michaud’s (ma’s family) and the Rogers (Dad’s family, originally Roge´, till my French ancestor changed it) met down in Florida and created me and five other chitlins.

Dad was the first to figure it out. He traded Christianity for AA meetings, but he was just as addicted to the circle and bad coffee as he was the alcohol and Thy Lord. It took me years to pull myself out of a tailspin of OCD, panic attacks and substance abuse--to figure out that my mind is many things, but it’s mostly an underwater minefield of addition-based behaviors.

It’s hard to be around my siblings. I think about them all the time, and I miss them a lot. Or maybe just the way it cold, or should be, based on traditional thinking of How Families Should Be.

I’ve seen a family work, once, in the wild. They galloped away before I could take a picture.

Everything is an addiction for me. Writing. Coffee. Going to the same places. Talking about myself. If it can be repeated, it would consume me. Complaining. Skittles. Cheesecake. Ice Cream. Airplane bottles of alcohol. Celadon American Spirits. That one good Murder Jerk of my dick at 1:00 am each night.

I have done my best to control it. To force it like some addiction-based Waterbender, to turn the tide of horror into something useful, productive, and beautiful.

I make projects and try to finish them. A decade is a long time for a thing to take to be finished, but I’m getting faster. I make plans and say I can’t do tham until I finish the things I started. I cut out the things that are harming me and try my best to learn from my mistakes.

(I’m six or seven weeks without sugar, as of this writing. And those first two weeks were so bad I ended up shaving my head like some sort of monastic living-room-rehab monk.)

So it is scary for me, and emotionally treacherous, to stay in a constant communication with my siblings. And I’m not saying it’s because I’m fighting my own wars and their not. I’m sure they are. They would have to be. But it’s painful because when they get what they want--when the younger kids I once held in my hands are happy, surrounded by the substance, people, or lifestyle they crave, they are so wonderful, and loving to be around. They tell me they love me. They hug me. They engage with me and ask questions about my life...

It’s like seeing someone come back from the dead.

But when that thing goes way...the substance, the people, the lifestyle, the high of getting whatever it was they wanted at that moment, the mood comes crashing down. And I’m nothing to them. They’re dead again, and I’m dead TO them.

And it is debilitating.

I was a very late bloomer. I assume it will be the same for them. So I reach out every once in awhile, try to remain safe but available in the distance.

It is possible I am a coward. And I don’t like that thought. But certainly if addiction has different hues, than cowardice does too.

The plan is to finish the EFFORTS album and self-release it in October (it’s a very Octoberish album). So Zach and I have been getting together most every week, trying to mix the album down so it’s ready for us to master. It’s the tail-end of three years of work.

Mixing for us means more recording though, whether it’s vocals (“I can do that better, punch me in”), or adding strings from a $3000 keyboard owned by some guy in New Zealand neither of us have met. (Zach has a lot of weird stuff in the studio. It’s great).

But it’s been just the two of us, really. Geoffrey might have been the bassist but he sort of disappeared from the project sometime last year, if he was ever really part of it to begin with. It was equal parts him being busy, a possible midlife crisis, and a partial and partly imagined falling out.

That was a hard thing to go through, for me. I think of my friends as siblings, in an effort to create the safe and similar family I always needed. Which isn’t to say that’s far to the parties involved. You can’t make someone be your brother, a lesson I never took to.

Abandonment issue smake for great songs but not a great band dynamic.

It was a welcome surprise when Geoffrey showed up in the studio to help us finish mixing the song I had written about my brother all those years ago. Between the three of us we make music that I find truly astonishing, and by the time we reached the end of the night (now technically morning) we had a finished track that I never could have expected. It’s called Ash to Dust.

I don’t know what will happen with EFFORTS. It would be nice to play out again. But I know that we will finish this album, and print up vinyl copies, and give the digital version away for free.

Music business is a joke. It doesn’t work, at least not for the type of music I want to make. Hanging all my hopes on the “Big I” industry is something I learned the hard way with my game, Spell Saga. And so it only makes sense to do things my own way with the music.

I have, as of right now, five various bands/projects/endeavors.

I have EFFORTS with Zach and Geoffrey, the side project DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP with Geoffrey, I have Beset. with The Weapon, Noah (and more?), DEATH.GIF (just me), and possibly a new thing called Gender Scouts with my buddy Carminati.

We’ll see on that last one. I have a album cover and we’ve been sending each other demos. It could be great, so fingers crossed.

But the plan is, so far, pretty simple: send all my music to everyone who purchases the game, and film music videos when we have the time and money. Same goes for physical printings of albums. Who cares when the songs hit the internet? There’s no rules anymore. I’m just trying to make shit and do things my own way. And I’m very grateful to have people who want to do this with me.

The day after EFFORTS reunification, I had to wake up early (for me anyway) and drive down to the same multi-million dollar studio Beset. tried it’s best to record in.

It is a damn shame to be given such an opportunity (for free mind you!), and have it fall to pieces under the weight of a band who was not ready to be there to begin with. I cannot fathom a world where such a band would get a second chance. But we did. Thanks to The Weapon, our guitar player, who interns at the studio.

I was nervous. And I had every right to be. The last time we didn’t know the songs and had to play the same one twenty-one times just to get something unusable. Our violinist walked out and quit during a take and we all left feeling mildly concerned that our haphazard music was perhaps a sin against some unknown religion.

As I drove to the studio (a quite literal wooden castle hidden out in the country) I was forced to take a different route than I expected, which brought me past not one, but two familiar places. The first was the very school I had been writing about. The middle school building where I had been punished for being born. I craned my head as I passed, tryin to soak up as much of the horror as I could.

After that I ended up down a road I had not been on in many years, it was the back entrance to the first home we ever had in Tennessee. This was where we had arrived after driving cross country to a house we rented sight unseen in 1995. It was the place where I first turned twelve. Where my father spent his nights in the living room, trying to make music in a homemade studio, trying to make it in music city. It was also the place I discovered (but was forbidden to play) magic: the gathering, if I’m not mistaken. (though that might have been a news report in Spokane Washington, warning of the dangers of cards and modern witchcraft (“see!” I showed my parents excitedly, “It’s evil! Can I play?!”)) It’s also the place we got our first Super Nintendo (I’m listening to the Donkey Kong Country OST as I type this) and where my brother Asher ran away from home for a day.

But the most surprising thing about driving down that old road, and I must have known this at some point, but the name of the neighborhood we lived in was The Highlands. And not only that, but as I look at a map, it seems we lived on Highland Rd.

How could I not have known that? I must have.

For those of you wondering why that would matter to me, Spell Saga (my one player game/bane of my life, available now!) is split up into several decks of playing cards. The first the one I Kickstarted at least twice, the one that people around the world hae translated and played, is called The Highlands.

When I got to the studio I was no less nervous. Last time we didn’t know our songs, but The Weapon, Noah and I had been practicing almost every week for two months and we had two down real solid. It should have been a easy thing to knock both out in a day’s time. But we decided to do it the hard way, and had invited four other musicians to come and join us that day. None of them knew the songs.

I wasn’t worried about the bassist. Zach and I have been doing music together as EFFORTS for a solid couple of years. I was surprised when he agreed to join us, but I had not reservations he could pick up and play with any weird thing we might do.

For strings we had Evan on cello (he had played with us once before, and we practiced quickly upon a wooden turret so he would know the songs. But the violinist was new. He was young, and kind of like if Peter Pettigrew was a feminine festival kid. He was also technically proficient with an omega-level of ADD that put the rest of us to shame. But he was very gifted.

The last piece of the puzzle with this kid named Trey. Noah and The Weapon insisted on bringing him in for a second guitarist. I told them no, but he showed up and plugged in anyway. He was real nervous. But man, he was the find of the day.

It takes a long time to set up a recording session. We were very lucky to have Gavin the Engineer with us once more. Brave kid to go at it again with us. Gavin looks like a Viking and constantly vapes clouds of grape bubblegum scented chemicals throughout the room. He feels like part of the band now.

I drew out some reallllly crude “song maps” of where the changes were in the first song, and then Evan left (it takes a REALLY long time to set up) and then we went at it.

The main room o the studio is huge. It’s wooden, and it feels like some sort of Norwegian travelodge. Gavin sits in the middle, between a thousand cables and operates the machinery. At the far end of the lodge is a windowed drum room. Noah and The Weapon play in there, the amps for both guitars down somewhere in a room on the floor below us.Just outside the room sat Zach with his bass and a bemused look on his face. And beside him stood Trey, nervous and staring at me like a deer caught in a band’s headlights. The room behind him was windowed, and the violin player set up in there, moving so quickly he looked like a spider trying to wrap up a meal. And at the far end of the room was me, by myself, watching everyone, including my wife Meagen, and Noah’s girlfriend Corri, who sat together on a leather couch, supportive but unimpressed.

We could talk to each other through a confusing machine that sat next to each of us, and hear ourselves through headphones. “Play more like the lower deck passengers of the Titanic, but while it’s sinking” I said, trying to slow the violinist down and encourage him. “I can’t hear Todd.” said The Weapon. “You control the mix for your own headphones!” we reminded him after every take. “God Damn it!” I yelled when Noah dropped his sticks after the best intro I’ve ever heard in my life. “Keep that one.” Zach told us.

In the end we left with both songs recorded in about two and half hours. Which is insane. While they cleared the gear at the end I commandeered the speakers (imagine the soundsystem a billionaire might have in the seventies, only nicer) and Zach and I listened to the EFFORTS song we had recorded just the night before. It sounded good. Real good. And everyone seemed to notice. The Weapon walked up to me and stood in the center of the room (best place to listen to the monitors). “Todd, in a few years, I think you’re gonna be underground famous.”

“Thanks man.” I said to him, real stern-like, just the same as when my family talks to one another. The way someone does when they just want to stay safe.

I pieced together some of the takes a few days later. We sound good. Real good. Even without effects or mixing, and with rough “sang like this just for tracking” vocals. I played it for Zach in his studio, and I think he likes it too. Noah concurs, and Trey has joined the band. It turned out his guitar parts on the second song were my favorite part of the whole thing.

Spell Saga should be here, at my doorstep, in about two months. That gives me roughly enough time to finish half a dozen projects, so they can all be ready to launch at the same time.

It will be the Summer of Subheathen. A year long feast to celebrate the culmination of so many years of hard work. The Beset. double-single of “Where is Your Ocean” and “Psychic Loan” should be out this July, EFFORTS in October. The first DEATH.GIF single “Peasant Water” sometime between them.

Even The Novel should have it’s second draft finished by the end of December. And throughout every month, more Spell Saga news and packages then you could ever imagine.

I’m just relieved to have plans, for the repetition of familiar things to work on for a set period of time.

A of this writing I have been sober from alcohol for one year.

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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP - BUGS ARE IN THE HOUSE!

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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP PROMO

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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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Letter to You

The New Year pt. 1

Illness & Injury kept me in repair for most of the new year. And even when I was feeling “just okay enough to survive” I was held down with by the uncaring caress of whogevesashet, the goddess of exhaustion. I can still see her in the ceiling if I look up from the couch for long enough.

My brother Asher showed up in town to haunt his ex-girlfriend. When he arrived he told me a story about the beach:

This is recent. He’s with our Dad, and they both go to the beach. They both walk into the public restroom and find two metal stalls to change into swimwear. And then the same thing happens to both of them:

someone walks in with a boombox, and pushes it up against the wall of the changing stall, just to force them both, separately, to listen to some blown-out ringtone length snippet of song. When they open the doors, the sonic assailer is gone.

When they finish changing and walk outside, my Dad turns to my brother and shares the following truth: “I don’t think I believe in God anymore.”

We don’t really get along, my brother and I.

Sometimes I think it’s because I have a better memory than him. I can remember the way the sky looked above our hands, as we held a tall net up to an orange tree, my father’s band practicing in the garage.

Other times I’m convinced it’s him who has the better memory. Because he can’t seem to let go of shit as easily as me. Anger and sadness are worn like a scarf around his neck on a hot day.

We had, I think, one good day while he was here. The rest of the time he was knocking himself out with various substance-tial abuses, asleep on an air mattress and awaiting his flight home. Meagen and I spent 1 holiday without him, and then another. Christmas and New Years passed us and he chose to spend them passed out. But we had one good day.

And if I’m lucky, and if I’m as good at letting go of things that I claim to be, it will eclipse the rest of the visit, enough to forget about the dubious reasons he was in town, or when he told me I had ruined the family, or how hard it was to see someone get fucked up all day, every day, until it’s me watching him die in slow motion.

Years ago I wrote a song about him. I ended up putting them in a song about Meagen, which became a song about other things as well. And it was during this trip I got to sit with him in my car and play it for him, while he listened unimpressed and oblivious to what the lyrics meant. That might not be much to you, but when I wrote it, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again.

I’ve been reading about cosmic horizons

And I think, you and I are separating faster

Dark matter does not matter

Turn around and see the light of space

Reflected off of my face

Those lyrics are from the song “Never Getting Better (Does. Not. Matter.)”, which is on the DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP EP Geoffrey and I released on January first.

This was a big deal for me. We had stopped working on the project almost an entire year ago, and I would find the idea of it just walking around in my brain, peeking around walls and “pssst”ing to me. Songs do that I think. Maybe all projects do. “You’re never gonna finish me. And even if ya do. You won’t know what to do with me. Pssst.”

But we did it. Thanks to Geoff bunkering down, and me being very adept at pestering people.

Here’s a picture Meagen took of us together in his room, on New Year’s Day, the moment we released the EP.

And somehow, even though I could not get off the couch most days, it was not the only thing that Geoff and I released together that month.

EFFORTS is the first band I ever started. We were called Jesus Destroy Them! at first, and it was just me. Then Zach appeared. And Geoffrey followed. We played our first show in February of 2017 and our last in March. The next ten months were spent wondering if Geoff was in the band and trying to smooth some damaged sails as we finished recording the album. I think--and this is just what I think--but I think that Zach and I will always make music together, and that it will always be called EFFORTS. And if we’re lucky, Geoff will join us. Or he won’t. I think we were lucky to have him when we did and that Zach and I need to start playing live again.

It took a long time to finish those songs, and ten months after our so-far-for-now final show, Zach and I finished mixing our debut EP (we have a full album recorded too, but we wanted to do this thing first).

The EP is sort of a warning shot into the dark. There is a vast unseen ocean of enemies out in that night, judging from the pitch and waiting to be destroyed. We are here. We are coming.

May You Absorb All Evil isn’t jus the title of the EP, it’s the first song I ever wrote, in a silent plea for my siblings to become more than we were.

When Zach and I finished mastering the EP in the middle of the night, we chose to release it right then and there, through the wonder of the instantaneous internet. It’s on bandcamp for now, and it’ll be other places when we get around to it. Here is a pic his wife LE took of us the night we uploaded it.

It’s been 11 months without smoking and ten without drinking. But I poured a bottle of Nyquil down the toilet last week after whispering

“help me red jesus” one too many times.

There’s too much. Too much to write about. So many awful moments that they blur into other things. I remember trying not to break my hand against a wall in the middle of the night, my body filling with a level of agony that begged for me to focus it, like a weapon against myself. I remember wondering if my other brother, Sam, had killed himself and spending an evening tracking him down. And I remember Meagen and I, fighting on the street like children, as she nervously played with the engagement ring on her finger.

January was basically an entire month of me writhing in so much pain I forgot what real life even felt like. It was as if a demon was inside me, asking his dark god if he could “world-birth through the child”. I can count two separate times where I could not sit or stand without having a professional masseuse break me in my own home. And let’s not forget the horrific amount of money I lost when my car broke down (twice)(each time while driving). Or the awful $$$$$ it cost to get meds when my body finally gave up (I thanked them, paid for the bottle, and stuck the rest of my unpaid for merchandise in a bag as I walked out the door).

But between the flashes of a life force leaving me , there are memories worth staying awake through it.

New Year’s Eve as a holiday is really special to me. It wasn’t before. Not until I met Meagen Crawford. Our first was January 31, 2011. She fell asleep on me that night. Me. The happiest person in the world.

And if I think back on the beginning of this year, I can see that same girl smiling at me as we play Scrabble in our living room. Six years later.

Another improbable but good thing that happened: My whirlwind brother came back into town--AGAIN, and brought a sister I had not seen in years, not since she had changed her name to that of a stranger’s.

New Name and I had more in common than I ever knew, and we drove around in the night listening to my EP, and played video games while bonding over being the kids who “ruined” a family.

When February hit the physical pain grew worse, but everything else changed.

Meagen and I drove to a casino for Valentine’s Day, and spent the month making up for a dumb day lost fighting in a street. And I remembered how to write for the first time in weeks, and that alone eclipsed anything else that could go wrong. The Novel is my life. And banging my head against a locked door to get back inside had left a wound.

The New Year pt. 2

4 out of 6 siblings, Valentine’s Day 1995 in Spokane Washington.

((interlude))

When she left she was named Madi, and now she was Joy (though I do still call her Madi-Joy, in an effort to reconcile both realities).

I think there’s a lot of that in my family. Seeing double: I can see the family that abandoned me, and still see the family that I love. I can see the brother who didn’t show up to my first wedding (who gives a shit now) and at the same time I can see the ten year old kid who “pretended” to find my lost allowance after emptying out his own well-earned pockets.

We have another sister. She lives far away. Sometimes it’s just a ten minute drive, and other times it’s an hour. But it’s always too far to visit, or get a call from.

It’s not on purpose. The rest of us siblings do it too. Everyone is always in our thoughts, it’s just our actions that are lacking. But we are dreamers. We were raised to be dreamers. And so our actions don’t really matter, anyhow. Unless we are proud of them. Or want attention.

Brother Whirlwind and New Name piled into my car and we drove the hour it always takes to see our sister. I’m glad we did. We sat in the room of an old country house and laughed as kids cried and ran around us. I always wanted to be a Dad or Uncle. It is confusing to be confronted with a reality where I am neither.

A few weeks later the sister from far away called me upset. I met her at the hospital and we watched her youngest kid, Violet cry on a table as an Elvis Presley song played on repeat (it’s the only thing that calms her down). Violet was born with some complications a year or so ago. I’ve never talked with my sister about it, and even that fact is confusing to me. My sister sat on the edge of the hospital bed and told me about her life and how she wishes I was in it more. “Yea. Me too.” I said. Then I got her some food and we talked about Violet. I asked her all the questions I had been afraid I wasn’t welcome to ask.

I gave her a hug and I left.

((end interlude))

There more to write about. And though I wish a succinct tell-all would suffice, there’s simply too much oh That Goddamn Bullshit to write about.

Beset. Is a third band/project I started last year with a friend named Giovanni (The Weapon) after a particularly bad Independence Day. After seven months we had almost an album’s worth of material with no real plans other than to pursue whatever came next for it.

Noah is a guy we both knew separately, he’s a drummer who’s good enough to be sponsored, and more importantly I hated him the first time we met. This was a good sign. I hate everyone who ends up being a close and personal friend (when you grow up hating yourself, fear of similarity becomes comforting). Noah was going to be our drummer, but he moved away for a better job in the vape-capital of Colorado. This was a major let down and the entire project felt derailed. We had at least recruited Evan, a cellist, but his schedule being in an actual fucking orchestra meant it was merely an agreed upon idea.

So it was generally a surprise when people started running up to me one night. “Noah’s back!” they shouted. “Noah’s looking for you!”. I found him surrounded by a bunch of his festival friends, each of them dressed like a Nickelodeon martial artist. “Which one of you bends fire?” I asked.

Noah told me he was back for good and wanting to drum for Beset. When I asked him why he had moved back after only three months, he told me it was a long story. When pressed, he mentioned a roommate, a ritual involving femininity, and her body’s “moon blood” all over his kitchen and covering his synthesizers. Then he sat there in silence.

“Man.” I said, “we gotta Play. Them. synths!”

Our first practice as a band was in The Weapon’s living room. Noah was not alone. He rarely is. That time he brought a violinist friend who plugged in and started playing with us; the result was a shocked look on every one of our faces (to say nothing of The Weapon’s horrified neighbors). We sounded great. Better than great, actually. And none of us really knew how to process it without stepping outside and standing around mumbling something about “plans” or a “much needed bassist”.

The next practice we were forced to play outside in a fucking park. We sounded even better, and crowds of confused adults and disturbed children craned their necks to see what the fuck was going on. It was freezing cold, and I was dressed in beetle-length reflective sunglasses and the head of a stuffed tiger, which was worn tied around my head like a hat.

We had a third practice and then suddenly, due to some sort of magic involving The Weapon and unexpected realities, we ended up in a studio space out in the country. It was our fourth week being in a band together, and suddenly we were recording (for free?!) on about a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment. Noah’s drumset alone had sixteen microphones on it. We had two engineers, and all day to try and get something down. After take 21 we had the following: two solid recordings of the same song (“where is your ocean”), an entire studio of people sneaking in to listen and friending us online so they could be involved, a bass-player who played along and tried to join (nope), and an open position for a violinist, as Noah’s friend had become overwhelmed with nerves and walked out, never to return.

Several weeks later we rejoined in The Weapon’s living room. Violinist girl was invited, as well as Evan, but the former ever appeared and the latter’s schedule made it impossible. By the end of that night we had an album cover for our first release: (A double-sided single) the text upon which as culled from a six-screen long message Noah received from a violin player having a breakdown. It looks like this:

We also rented our first practice space, and made plans to meet up the following Monday.

The storage unit we now call home has been decorated with lights that accidentally give off a psychotropic flicker if you stare at anything moving. But it’s far enough away from suburbia (and out by the county jail) that we can be as loud as we want for as late as we want. Evan joined in with his cello for our initial break-bottle maiden voyage, and it turns out our tin can hideaway is gonna work just fine. We are putting together our sings, several venues are available for us to play in, and Noah received a tentative offer for us to play in Norway. So. Something is happening.

Speaking of new spaces, my living room has been transformed. It always sort of doubled as my art room (though I make most of my things in the same coffee shop and university library that I have haunted for almost a decade), but now it’s also a studio where I can record music. A place called “Studio Jank Bat +”.

It is not hard to write a song, or record little ideas for them, or to Photoshop an album cover. I can do all these things a lot faster than the time it takes to put a band together. What did take awhile, for me anyway, was reconciling the fact that I needed to be working on many different pieces at the same time.

A dumb name or image and I’m off and running. Qui-Gonn Jinn Death.GIF became DEATH.GIF in about a month’s time, and the idea to do 1 lo-fi LP became 3 ep’s during a shower spent fixing imaginary problems, my standard start to any day. Here’s the cover to the first one.

I bought the same brand of interface Geoffrey has used for everything we recorded as EUTH GROUP, and was surprised to find most of what I needed to make an album I already had lying around.

((interlude))

When my family broke into pieces it was slow. I was the first to be cast out, or cast away (the ancient texts don’t say which happened first). By the end it was just an empty house on Covington Drive. Well it was empty of people, there was still all their shit. Everything no one took to California, or Philly, or New York. Decades of things had amassed. My sister Olivia and I were given the bulk of it, as was our eldest son and daughter birthright. She sold what she could, and I carried out everything from a World’s Fair Piano to the very desk, amp, speakers, and guitars that are now cobbled together in my living room (having an understanding partner at home is good, having one you gave the art room to years ago is better).

((end interlude))

It’s odd, my little studio. The sound is running from these newer and nicer electronics and down into the frayed wires of a 80’s amplifier. It impossible for me not to remember that these were the speakers my own Father and brothers used to record on, using the very same guitar and microphone.

The first day it was up and running I had Evan the cellist come over to record over a phone demo of guitar. It’s for a song called Peasant Water. Meagen sat on the couch with me and watched as this kid and I figured out what he should be doing, and how best to make it sound with my limited set-up. It was like having a concert in our living room.

I always give people the same advice when their trying to play along with me: “play it dumb. Play it like you’re playing piano and you don’t know how to play the piano). Everyone except Zach has received this speech or a variation from me (Zach knows when to play smart and dumb, it’s his secret talent).

And when it comes to recording, I really don’t know what I’m doing. I was lucky to sit and watch Zach and Geoffrey or the last 2 years, and that’s helped, but in the end I’m just making smart choices and pressing buttons, telling people to play dumb. One thing I was excited about it we doubled the cello (“you don’t want to do that.” said Evan)(but we did it anyway) and then I panned the takes to either the left or right speaker (“Don’t pan them all the way.” said Evan)(and he was right that made it better). Now the song sounds like something I can’t believe happened in my living room.

I will continue recording with several people through March to get the first DEATH.GIF EP done, and then I’ll be working on the next two in a slightly different setting, as the studio expands (See below) and my wife and I get ready to let hundreds of boxes of Spell Saga finally arrive to roost in our home.

Here’s the cover to the second EP. I wish I could show you third one, as I was thrilled to get the art from an artist whose work I find to be extraordinary. But the contracts ain’t signed and you know how all that goes.

The New Year pt. 3

Michael Carminati has been my brother for about twenty years now. My mother almost adopted him at one point. Kevin Tetuan is a guy I lived with twelve years ago. He’s close enough to my family that it’s not uncommon for me to find pictures of him hanging out in New York with my brothers. We had a falling out a few years ago but it wasn’t for lack of love.

I got a text at 2 in the morning from Carminati. It as his birthday and he was standing a room away from me at a bar I didn’t want to be in. He was with Kevin (he and I had buried both a metaphorical hatchet and a copy of the YA reader Hatchet a long time ago).

We talked about my family, which in many ways was their family too. We talked about the brother who had visited, and all our friends who had given up on music, or got lost wandering toward adulthood. I told them about my studio, and that we should do something together (Mike’s the best guitar player in town, and Tetuan went to engineering school for the last decade).

“I have an entire storage unit filled with gear.” said Carminati. “Can we keep it at your house?”

After I demanded every last piece of equipment be brought to me I took them outside and played them EUTH GROUP & EFFORTS in my car. They said some really nice things. I won’t repeat them. I tried writing it three times and it’s just not meant to be written.

(interlude)

In February of 2015 I started writing a song about my life, and how my depression was shared and (hopefully) only seasonal. It was about Meagen and living together and really was just a reaction to our time together almost ending the previous Fall.

In October of that year I played it for my new friend Zach, who came up with a rhythm whole we drank together one night. I think that was probably our second get together. I mean band practice. That’s what they call those. And I’m not sure if he would remember (I’m sure his wife does) but the song was a burden for me. When we started EFFORTS, I couldn’t sing, or maybe I just didn’t know how to--but I clearly remember redoing this song over and over again, screaming into a microphone while having a panic attack at 1 in the morning in a basement near the airport.

An entire year later we had re-recorded everything twice, from drums to vocals, and the guitars were done by me sitting on my knees pulling screams out of the amp while I made faces as if I could control it. But it still wasn’t right. Even with Geoffrey’s new additional bass.

Another year later. The last night of January 2018. Zach and I had finished the EP and moving onto the album proper. “Let’s work on that one song.” he told me. By the end of the night we had added synths and made some pretty crazy changes, including back-up vocals and what not. Bu the biggest thing for me was knowing how to do what i wanted to do. “I can do that better.” I said, pointing as the old chorus played. “Punch me in real quick.”

“Eh. I dunno.”

“I can do it!”

“Not the end of it though.”

“No. We’ll keep the last two words. I can’t growl like that again.”

It took five minutes and a few mouse clicks and the chorus I had screamed for years ago was done.

It took a very patient Zach two attempts at mastering the song (it’s got some weird shit going on, without the right mixing it would sound like it was drowning under wool), but we released it on Valentine’s Day. Here’s a video I made for it:

youtube

(interlude)

I have spent Geoffrey’s birthday with him for three years straight. It always takes place in East Nashville, he is always worried about this new age, and he always talk about plans of leaving forever.

The first time I barely knew him, and he had just sent Zach and I a bass demo. The second time was his thirtieth birthday, and I brought him an armband to wear to our first show. This year we sat in my car and talked about the music we had made, and if we would continue the EUTH GROUP shit. He mentioned wanting to be there to mix EFFORTS, a big win for me and anyone with ears. Then I played him “It’s Only February” and he freaked out and made me rewind it before it had even finished. More demos followed.

It took a long time for me to realize that for a lot of people, it’s hard to hear what a song could or should be just off a voice memo. Geoff and Zach can do it. I am lucky to know them every day that I do.

Case in point: when I played Geoffrey the DEATH.GIF stuff he confirmed something I had been terrified about for weeks. I couldn’t re-record the phone demo guitars. They would have to stay, and it would be okay.

It took 9 years to finish the first issue of WHYLC, and it took 9 months after I started the second one to continue working on it. But I’m doing it. I’m getting faster. It was hard for me to let go of wanting to rewrite the whole thing. But it’s happening. Here’s the first three pages.

February ended with two more moments that stand out for me (besides how much more I can fall in love with someone after six years ((sobriety!)), going to a doctor and masseuse to heal my body ((that was big))...and the drunken enlightenment I have received from The Novel opening up all it’s secrets to me).

I got a text out of the blue from my Dad. I wouldn’t say we don’t get along. I WOULD say that for most of my time on this Earth we did not “get” in general. But I got a text from him about the EFFORTS song we had released on Valentine’s Day. My Dad was a songwriter, a lot of my instincts were inherited from him. So when told me ow much he liked the song I had to go stand in a corner and listen to it on my phone, pretending to hear it through his ears. It was overwhelming I think. I don’t know why.

A day later I received another text, this one from my brother Asher; the same guy who had just swung into town twice in one month so lost and drugged up I thought I had lost him forever. He sent me a song. A new one. It was good. He’s still making shit. And to me, that’s what I get to have in common with him. That we can try to fight back whatever person we were supposed to become, that any human transforms into when they are subjected to the horrors of being alive. I sent him the cello recording.

We get along pretty well, my brother and I.

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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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Ladies and lads! "MAY YOU ABSORB ALL EVIL" (the first ever EFFORTS extended play) is now up at bandcamp! Thanks to Zach Grace & Geoffrey Osborne for making music with me. This ep will be up on spotify in a few weeks, and we have an LP nearly ready to tomb-walk right out the door. https://effortsefforts.bandcamp.com/…/may-you-absorb-all-ev…

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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

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Letter to You // SUBHEATHEN ANNOUNCEMENT!

Holy Shit. It’s 2018.

Time continues to teach it’s lessons, and I am finally beginning to learn from things like repetition, growth and accidental clairvoyance. I started a pattern three years ago this month, during a moment of my life where I feared for what little was left of myself. A person can be a lot of things in their life, but I’ve been mostly lost.

One thing that continues to shine in the darkness is the light of what I Am Meant to Do—like the last rays of the sun blinking across the wish on a coin, as it flips slowly through the water to the bottom of a fountain.

I am meant to make.

But how I go about making things, and how I treat those who care about “What I Make” are things I need to start paying attention to. Having an idea does not a genius make. Promising something means nothing.

The Patreon is going away. I think it’s an amazing platform but (for right now at least) I am not wired to make art on a subscription based level. I would really like to thank everyone who gave me money to survive and faux-florist over the years, but it’s not me. I’ve tried podcasts, videoblogs, and all the other stuff, and in the end. I fucking hate it. When you start making art, you copy what has come before. I did the same thing with social media and self presentation. I’m not so ashamed of it, but I know where I’m at now. You can still see me make things on instagram and my website. I’ll be around.

But I would like to quit the bad habit of announcing projects before I even start them—it’s selfish, I do it for my own psychic high but there’s a better ways to psyche myself up for something (y’know like…making the thing).

Other things are going away too.

French Toast Gaming Co. is dead. The funeral pyre will be seen as hundreds packages ship out to everyone who waited so patiently for Spell Saga to arrive.

And yes. Of course. yes. yes. yes. Everything from the original KS is still being made and shipped. All the promises, three years later. It’s all still happening in the next couple of months*

*I just spent the last several days exchanging meticulously detailed emails with our manufacturer. Everything that hasn’t been printed (new packaging, deck 2) is about to go to press in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, sometime in the next week or so.

But FTGco is Dead.

And yet, Be ye not afraid!—that fire will light other things. And the games—at least those I designed (Spell Saga, EPIOCH, And Away) will go on to live a new life. If 2018 is going to be different (and good god-i-don’t-believe-in, it is!) then my choices, patterns, and artistic mutilation of the self need to be different also.

Spell Saga needs to become something better. It deserves it. Not because I made it—but because it’s good. And because Lauren and I worked so hard on it. And maybe even more importantly, because really like it. And if I’m going to drop the ball on something I would rather it be something else, like my diet (LOCAL GAME DESIGNER AFRAID TO CLEAN SHAVE FOR SHAPE OF FACE!!!).

So FTGco burns, but the things I made continue to live a new and better life, in an artistic paradise called SUBHEATHEN.

SUBHEATHEN is short for Suburban Heathen. It’s sort of joke (just for me, so…a BAD joke) but everything I make is something that, growing up, my parents wold have condemned and banned as evil from our home. Now they text me with pride and share my things on the internet. (that’s character development!).

SUBHEATHEN will be my castle, and my weapon; my shield when need be. But SUBHEATHEN will be where all my music and games and thingamajigs go. Anything I started in the last ten years will be finished under that black banner. (Except in the circumstance of someone else might like to publish something RE: the novel or my band, EFFORTS).

Spell Saga turned eight years old last month, and everything else continues to age unfinished as well. It has taken me years to crawl out of every hole I made for myself, and these bruises ain’t even done been’ collected.

But I’ve been moving forward, spending a all my time, money, and energy to bring about my endeavors. And it’s time to let everyone know.

SUBHEATHEN.com

it’s just a link to a blog right now, but the store will be up shortly, as soon as everyone has the things I promised them (including the WHYLC rune boxes!).

In the meantime, the first SUBHEATHEN release of 2018 has already occurred:

Me and my buddy Geoffrey released an EP on New Year’s Day. It’s up on both Bandcamp & Spotify. I’ll write more about what it is and how it came to be soon, but I hope you’ll check it out if’n your so inclined.

Happy New Year, everybody. Please expect a lot of wishes and promises fulfilled, a ton of new music, games, and stories, and probably an embarrassing blog post or 30.

-mE.

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toddmichaelrogers · 7 years ago

Text

Letter to You

At an abandoned lot Meagen pulled out a picture, which she had glued onto a card. In the picture it was the two of us looking six years younger; though her face is covered in a raggedy cloth elephant mask, and mine is wearing a home-cut eye mask with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. In the picture (though it is hard to tell) it is also two nights before Halloween, and we are spending our last night just as friends.

Inside the card it said happy anniversary.

Zach and I spent the last month mixing the EFFORTS EP. We kind of have an unspoken rule that the weirder the idea, the more we should pursue it. That’s kind of how the EP started as 3 songs and ended up being just 1 long track. If we a have a genre, I would have to call it ‘Spook Punk’.

It should be debilitating working on so many different music projects, but at this point, they're all feeding into one another. It’s taken the pressure off of my so-called perfectionism; something that has nearly threatened to destroy me at all times. (I wasn’t even meant to be writing a blog today. I came to the library to ‘fix’ the next Spell Saga deck--and was surprised to find nothing wrong with the thing. I’m getting better at catching myself.)

I can’t tell you how many times Zach has had to put up with me asking if we can “redo” a vocal. Our most this is a single song, May You Absorb All Evil took almost two years to get finished because I am a fucking idiot. But it’s done now, because Zach spent weeks fixing and mixing it through a giant board.

It’s on the EP, along with some other songs that I felt worked well as a warning. And that’s really how I’m choosing to think about the whole thing--our EP is a warning to those who are not prepared to hear 33 years of pent-up frustration. It was not fun growing up in a musical family without knowing I could do it. (A reverse Potter/Dursleys scenario, I can assure you).

I am the muggle. That’s a good song title.

But it was equally horrendous spending two decades in a city known to the rest of the world as “Music City”. Every person here looks and sounds the same. Everyone born here thinks they are chosen/deserving/special, or they just showed up from the midwest hoping some other band would find them (and their talent) like a black hole pulls in light.

Making art to get fucked or get attention makes me feel like I’ve just witnessed an assault in some parking lot. I want to break windows and arms and scream at people. “Don’t ever come back to my wal-mart!” but this is music city, and everyone around me is assaulting each other in a circle jerk while I just stand there wondering if someone’s going to help me carry these groceries. “You are ruining Black Friday!” I might scream, or “you are ruining the basis of the very institution you are attempting to crawl down into.”

I mean, make that money. But fuck.

Anyway the EFFORTS EP “May You Absorb All Evil” will be released in the (season to be determined) of next year. The full length album “I Bought You a Coffin” is already recorded and will follow shortly thereafter.

One of my other projects, Beset., is nearly finished with the DEMOS for our first LP “There Are Places They Can Get You.” You can actually listen to some of those HERE.

The Weapon and I try to get to these every Monday, so by year’s end we should be ready to start recording the actual tracks. We just need to fix this latest one--we did that thing where you start recording ideas before ever playing a finished song, and you end up with a mess--but hopefully “We Brought Weapons” will shine as bright as the others once we crack it.

And I’m really excited about the only song we haven’t recorded, “Make Peace With The Promise of Failure”. Not only is this the first thing he has brought to me first on guitar without me showing him lyric, but the chorus is fucking amazing (he thinks it’s a bridge, but I got a reallllll good feelin’ on this one).

Geoffrey W. Osborne and I are trying to finish and release the first ever DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP EP for a New Year’s Day release. Which is a fitting day actually, as the last song on the album is called “Baby New Year”, something I wrote while listening to an old keyboard piece of his.

when I conquer death

when I have nothing left

I was Baby New Year

so drink and be of cheer

good times were never here

middle of the road

new teeth and broken bones

I’ve known every fear

the end is almost near

when I mend my bones

they will call me home

I was Baby New Year

That’s something about Geoffrey’s playing that I like, it’s easy for me to write lyrics to it. We did the same thing on the EFFORTS EP with a little interstitial song called Ringtone Money.

How we gonna leave

When we don’t know where to go

I got that ringtone money

And it sounds like solid gold

When you look at me

You look like you saw a ghost

How we gonna leave

When we don’t know where to go

For me, writing lyrics or changing something at the last minute is one of the best parts about making things. It’s like pushing a piece into a puzzle quickly while the puzzle is being framed. We did it again for a weird hidden track on the May You Absorb All Evil EP

wait another minute

I’ll get my revolver

you can be a skeleton

just give me a holler

I have one more musical project now. So far it’s just a name, an album title, and some demos. Also I made a cover because that’s how I do ma shit.

Meagen’s out of town for Thanksgiving. I spent the entire day playing Spell Saga and it meant something to me. Four years ago I was lost and sore; I had just failed to get the game funded on Kickstarter. I felt a sense of real shame about the whole thing. Like I had returned from a war I had single handedly lost. Maybe that’s insensitive. But after a year of planning the thing it was a real blow. So to be holding the prototypes four years later and playing through it one final time before it goes to print was really special.

But wait--you ask. Didn’t the Kickstarter succeed a year later, in the year of our lord 2014--and haven’t the cards been printed and are even now waiting in a Hong Kong warehouse?!

Yes.

But it’s been three years, so I took my own money and printed the next Deck so everyone could have it for free (Spell Saga is a game of multiple decks, like chapters in a book). Also I redid the packaging, because I am, in the end, a perfectionist.

So I spent all day playing through Deck 2: The Forest, making sure no problems could be seen upon them cards. And next week I tell the good people of Panda Game Manufacturing to go for it, set that shit to print. Here is a lot of pics I took of the play through.

Making things often means you are filled to the tips-of-your-toes with a sort of psychic horror--the unending logic that you are doing your best to prove on a chalkboard in front of the entire world that only you can solve an equation that proves you yourself are a fucking hack.

I often stare off into the distance like a farmer hearing a gunshot in a world where only he and his daughter were left alive.

The other day I was struck by the sort of thinking that makes all those bad thoughts go away.

My deepest concern was that while playing through Deck Two, I had a problem. Most of the cards I drew were of no use to me. Now, if you design a game, and while playing it, you DON’T use most of the pieces, that is a fucking issue. Except...because I am ME...and by that I mean WEIRD (see any paragraph above) this is not useful play test information.

I don’t play games well. In fact, if someone plays against me in a game--even one that I MADE, I am bound to lose. The one exception I can even remember is winning a round of dat classic Mario Party at Cousin Lauren’s apartment, three years ago, while she was busy illustrating the very cards I was now concerned about.

Anyway, I stepped out of the shower the other morning and finally pinpointed what was causing the astral sand to be pulled out from beneath my feet--what the current was that I was stuck thinking about:

In Deck One: The Highlands the cards are meant to each do a specific thing, almost on their own. Some are necessary and some are fun, but they each sort of help you in their own weird way. In Deck Two: The Forest, this is different. There are several cards that need to be combined for the rules or effect of them to take place. That means a lot of time you’re left with a bunch of random pieces you don’t care about<-----my concern. Now, if I was GOOD at games, I would play with the cards I was dealt, instead of stubbornly waiting for the ones that I want. I know that. I understand it. And though that knowledge does not help me play any better (for I am indeed stubborn) It does help me tremendously while designing. Because I can imagine how other people will play, and how they will react to the pieces I have given them. In this instance, with us about to go to print and there being NOTHING I can change too drastically (the game is, after all, designed, and the deck itself was already redesigned almost entirely from the digital PnP version we released three years ago), I was definitely feeling a bit shaky. Until I stepped out of that shower, and realized the solution lay in how I treated the next part of the game, Deck Three: The Caves.

I won’t go into it further. But playing that DECK is going to feel REAL GOOD.

I will not talk about my day job--which is a night job. But the hours are horrendous, and I see myself now as a chain anchored to my home and swinging in a circle until I can destroy everything or fly off into space.

My childhood was not as bad as some, and it was worse than others. I chose then to believe I was suffering, so what difference is it if I’m now working hard to make art generated by those younger woes? Life continues.

The Novel.

I didn’t start playing music until i was 30 years old. But The Novel I started even years before that continues to surprise me more than anything else.

It is a terrible cost, a novel.

I fear it will continue to consume me, like a star going supernova in my head and eating up all the time I could spend on other ideas. And I fear that I would let it.

I have been sober for about eight months now. And I often feel okay about it, but the desire is there; a nasty trick of the mind that makes me feel like I was never an addict, and that it would really be something, almost a performance piece really, if I drank now in front of those that know me as a ‘survivor of The Thirst’. I wake up from dreams where I drink and can’t stop, and that disappointment I feel upon waking is pretty much the battery of my unexpected willpower. But I feel that desire, and I feel it with the novel as well. Destroy Everything and let it wither in ruin, so i might survive. And most days I kneel down and say “yes. Of course.” and “nothing matters but the ten year slow motion orgasm of making you.”

I had decided after years of start-stopping a second draft to just Do The God Damn Thing. I started on New Year’s Day 2016 and rewrote from the beginning to what I hoped was the end. But I got lost. A lot. I got stuck redoing the same things over and over again. Parts of the story changed. Good. Now it was a 2.5 draft, right? That’s fine. It’s for the best.

But I continued in my toil. And time passed. After a year I resigned myself to whatever life the novel would let me live; often sneaking away for just an hour a day before or between some grueling job or errand of adulthood.

This past Summer something clicked. It was that thing that always happens, where I’m worried about something until I realize only I can fix it, and the worry was only me being smart. Less a warning and more like a ...pre...answer?

I wrote a new beginning to the story that night I think. Clicking in the dim light of the living room like someone who had just discovered words. This led to other unexpected turns in the story...a brand new sixty page interlude in the middle of the thing...a whole section of plot points and chapters was also added--things and moments I had culled from a side story written years ago that I felt sort of circled the novel. Now it was part of it. Everything began to take shape into something that...I started writing this story in some form or another a decade ago, and the shape it became was something Unknown.

Then I kept getting stuck again--still moving forward I became unable to push through the white snow of blank expanse before me.

The whisper that was not a warning was there again. I would have to break the entire rule of the rewrite, and go back to the beginning and start over (madness) and not only this, I would have to change the entire tyle I was writing in (horror).

But I did it.

I looked at my life and it’s work and realized I was not writing the way I wanted to--the way I was meant to. I was living and dying in the predefined alignments of those who had come before me. Nothing I make is normal, why should my writing be any different.

I went back to the beginning and began a process which has led to work I truly feel terrified and sure of. What more could I ask?

Now the cards are going to print somewhere in Hong Kong.

I will have four separate recording projects throughout December.

The novel continues and will be finished sometime next year.

And I don’t think Meagen and I have ever been better.

I cannot enjoy any of it. Not the way I believe someone should. I am not normal. My enjoyment comes from everything spinning, and the sound of myself whispering a thousand little would-be-warnings as I navigate through it all.

And I have become good at it, maybe. I have done this a long time. I have mastered the act of handling some shit. And now it’s time for a new sort of thing. The plates and whispers are starting to combine into something else, and there is a something Unknown on the horizon...

Unknown but for a name: SUB(URBAN)HEATHEN.

-mE.

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toddmichaelrogers · 8 years ago

Text

Letter to You

Nashville is small, but it’s not THAT small.

I walked into the coffee shop I used to frequent, it’s where a lot of early Spell Saga was designed. I ordered my coffee and too much food and walked into the main dinging area. The first thing I noticed was my old neighbor (we were never close/ I treat neighbors like strangers (there is something wrong with me)). but he lived next door in the tri-plex of my late adolescence, he heard the sounds of the crumbling marriage, unaware of the silence of a young game designer piecing idea together for a one player card game. I looked past him and found The Table—a solid beast of stained blonde double the size of anything else in the room. It’s where I sat for hours, for years, as I took my ideas for Spell Saga and made them presentable on a computer. There was a kid sitting there, I didn’t recognize him at first—but I worked with him until just a few weeks ago, in a restaurant job I started just to pay for the printing of the card game. He asked how my game was doing, and that he still wanted to try it. “you mean the game I created while sitting at that very table for several years?” I asked. Then I went out to the car t grab him a copy (I had an extra one in my piece of shit Hyundai) and as I walked out he door I passed yet another face of a familiar stranger. “Hi.” he said, nodding past the person he was conversing with. “Hey, man.” I replied. I am bad with names and even faces of strangers often look familiar (there is something very wrong with me). And I should have remembered him better—he interviewed me nearly two or three years ago for a podcast about how I designed the game. I walked back into the shop and handed s copy to the kid sitting at the table where I made the game.

And then I drank my coffee, ate too much and walked out the door to go make more stuff.

-mE.

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toddmichaelrogers · 8 years ago

Photo

I have been stuck on this book for a few weeks now. And I’ve done my best to walk away and think of other things, and then come back and change little bits of it. But it’s been an uphill sort of climb. Today I sat down on such a horrible anniversary (16 years somehow) and remembered a thought I had last night as I watched Game of Thrones and drifted in and out of consciousness. I really like watching the show but it’s filled with what I think are some real missed opportunities in it’s structure (something the books have no trouble with, they are amazing/I used to rip pages out and tape them doors and walls, in the hopes of learning their secrets through either osmosis or repetition). It started to get me thinking about The Novel and how I have split it into books, chapters, and parts, and yet if I was being honest, the cohesion and symbolism in each contained sector was barely scratched by my own fumbling hands (I should start taping pages to walls again, I guess). So anyway I sat down and wrote out the contents of the book and tried to figure out what was going on in this, the third section, in an attempt to pin down what might be missing in the chapter I am stuck upon, or what could be polished a bit more to help me connect the part I do know to those mysterious empty pieces I can’t seem to find.

here are the chapters:

part 3 - out among the echoes

10 - magician’s monthly

11 - the child

12 - in the home of the hollow

13 - whispers in the dark

14 - the return of the hax

and my findings:

july searching to become a magician, lots of flashback, mostly flashback

the child being selfish, think a lot, not sure what to do, makes a choice that propels plot

july flashbacks, set up dark world in novel, makes a choice that propels plot

mostly plot…set up relationship…catching reader up on what’s happened, waiting.

14 become a magician, flashbacks, set up their greed….propels narrative, waiting in the dark.

chapter 14 is the one i’ve been stuck on. And writing this out made me realize that what all these chapters have in common is the idea of waiting/hope. Each of them is waiting for something and hoping for an outcome.

-a girl named July Hollander is waiting to become a magician, and hoping to find enough magical magazines to win a contest where she is interviewed in them

-a child in ninth grade is waiting for the end of a terrible day to go on a filed trip, and hoping to sit next to a girl that he likes, while at the same time, waiting to find out if the gun his friend brought to school is something he should tell someone about, while hoping his friend just brought it to scare people (he didn’t).

-back to july again, she’s now reading magazines with a broken leg, waiting for it to heal and hoping she is safe from a man she calls the hunter (she is not).

-this one was the hardest to pinpoint, because it’s already 20 pages too long and meandering as hell. It involves the martian and the elf sitting on an asteroid in the dark, waiting for their magical slipstone to transport them away, while hoping the stone works it’s magic soon, because they can hear noises, and they know their not alone in the dark world.

-which brings us to the viking known as the hax. who is standing astride her own asteroid below these two, listening to their conversation. she is also waiting for the stone, and as a magician, is hoping to learn more about the strangers above her and their bag of spells, which they have dropped below to her feet.

And hey! I write weird stories and I really like them. I gotta go write now. thanks for being with me as I figured some of this stuff out.

-mE.

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toddmichaelrogers · 8 years ago

Photo

The first Beset. photoshoot. I need to give credit to the Sky image but I ain't on a computer with the info at the moment !

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toddmichaelrogers · 8 years ago

Audio

via facebook:

IT"S BACK. Last year Geoffrey W. Osborne & I released a song for Halloween (& thank god Dave Stewart was there to assist!) I took the song down while I figured out just what the project was. But now we know. So here you go, it's DEATH WISH by DAMNSEL & THE EUTH GROUP. And stay tuned for news about the forthcoming EP.

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toddmichaelrogers · 8 years ago

Text

Letter to You

It comes to me that I have two choices; I can either go back and delete everything that needs to be destroyed, cutting the entire thing into the shape of the it’s necessary form, or I can forge ahead and continue writing towards the end.

With great trouble, I decide to move forward.

I have two chapters that need to be worked upon, both of them half-written as it turns out. So another two choices; do I start with July Hollander and her stack of Magician’s Monthly Magazines? Or do I talk about The Viking finding the emerald Egg of Eden? I am tempted to join The Viking. He’s further in the book than July, and he’ll be joined by the continuing (main?) plot of The Elf and The Martian, both who have been hanging onto an asteroid in pure darkness for months now.

I decide to go with July. It is best not to leave any more pieces unfinished behind me. I can delete the overlarge chapters when I reach the end (the one that exceeds itself four times over has me both worried and oddly relieved. It is a strange thing when your mind knows something needs to happen but doesn’t tell you clearly. Perhaps if I knew myself better. But how can I? Just this morning I had to decide whether I was a young girl named July, or a Viking named Robes.

I took today off. Usually Monday’s mean I put on a Hawaiian shirt and sail down to a former trap house to make music with a kid I call The Weapon.

The idea was (after a particularly bad Fourth of July) that I might start a new project, a lo-fi band called Beset. The rest of the idea grew quickly. I knew a kid (The Weapon) who had already asked to join my band (EFFORTS, I declined), but I loved playing him the tracks as we recorded, and I knew he was building his own studio (because we live in Nashville).

I picked him up in the middle of the night not 24 hours after my horrible holiday, and he brought me to the most fucked up place anyone has ever lived. There he played me the most beautiful music anyone had ever played in such a place, and the plan for an album was agreed upon.

As I said, the rest of it all came together quickly. Beset. Would sound like wizards shipwrecked on a tropical island. Unlike my other musical endeavors, I would not write on a guitar. Instead, full of myself and the power granted to me by make-believe gods, I would write the lyrics with a melody in mind, sometimes hearing bits of a full song in my head. The Weapon and I would figure out the rest together.

It’s been three sessions so far, and it’s working. We have two demos and plans and promises from others. We will be recording in special robes that I made, wearing masks made of cracked mirrors. Two separate photographers have already asked to film us. We will place a projector of 1950s tropical footage over our forms as we create. We have a cellist and an opera singer, a percussionist and a drummer, all waiting for us to ask them over.

But before any of that can occur (or perhaps, just as likely, none of it) The Weapon and I will continue to grant each other power each Monday, and finish all the demos for an album called “There Are Places They Can Get You”.

Just not this Monday. I needed a break. I needed to write.

I’ve been writing a lot. The novel is changed. And Destroyed. And Bettered.

It all started one day in June, when a butterfly landed on my hand and wouldn’t leave. It brought with it, or was drawn to (I cannot say for certain which) an idea.

The idea was the fear my mind had been telling me for all too long, finally given form as I stared at the creature on my hand. The Novel had the wrong beginning. There was another waiting to be seen and written. Filled with an amount of limitless power I stayed up that very night and wrote the new beginning. Finishing it some days later. It started a new trend of me reading parts of the novel to Meagen each night I had something finished. Because the new beginning brought with it more than a satisfied solution to my silent fear, it brought with a whole new form of the story, and a sixty-page middle section that never existed before.

After this it became apparent the final form of the novel was revealing itself, to me, a fucking idiot. This is the rarest of moments in my artistic life. Hen months, and years of working on something explode open the doors of eternity, allowing me to see past the foundations of earthly ideas.

Now I know what to delete, or at least, where destruction needs to occur. And now I know what’s let, and how to get there. It’s all written out with chapters, numbers, and notes.

I just have to stop writing this letter, and join a young girl named July, who has a broken leg on a bed, in a place called The Hollow.

Much else has occurred. After over a year of working, worrying and wondering, SpellS aga ~ Deck Two: The Forest is ready to be uploaded to the manufacturer. There is so much to write about it but for now I’ll leave the tale alone.

There’s a lot of thoughts about EFFORTS as well, and a return to the idea of DAMNSEL & The EUTH GROUP, a solo project which seems ready to crawl upon the shore once more.

But for now I will leave you with this: things change a lot, and sometimes you will change with them. I know I have. Three years ago Spell Saga was a failed fundraiser, my novel was stuck in a first draft that I couldn’t move past, I had my father’s guitar but didn’t know one note, and Meagen and I were, in her words, over.

Now there’s three different musical projects spinning around me, Spell Saga is being ravenously and patiently awaited for around the world, the novel should be finished by New Year’s Day, and as for Meagen and I, well we have lunch everyday together, and each night ends with kisses and hugs.

Also I’ve gained weight. So there’s...there’s change in that too haha.

-mE.

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