When it's no longer fun, it's time to call a halt...
No, I'm not closing my journal: wipe that smile off your face, you there at the back! But certain aspects of it have become a little tedious and so I just want to explain what's happening with
This began, back in March, as an idea to namecheck and pay tribute to some of the more famous and/or deserving of mention who passed away over the years in the music world. For five months I combed the entries, checked the names, found the videos and posted the tributes, but in the last two months I realised that the amount of work involved had led to me beginning to dread writing this feature, and as each month turned into another I began to think to myself
Oh no! I haven't done “Lest we forget” yet! Better get on that! and so it would become a chore, something that had to be done, a deadline that had to be met, every month.
Nothing else I do follows this strict aderence to a monthly entry. My journal is generally freeform and I post sections as and when I like. Sometimes months can go by without my featuring one section, sometimes I might feature it twice a month. On occasion, it may be posted once and never again, though that isn't to say it won't be in the future. But that's all up to me. It's my call, and no-one is going to force me or impel me to do anything I sort of really don't want to do. But “Lest we forget” was quite unforgiving. I have no-one but myself to blame for that of course: I decided to start the section, and knew it would be tough, but I thought I could handle it, thought I could manage to put time aside every month to research and write the entries, while still doing all the other things I did with my journal.
But now, particularly with a second journal to update, it's become clear I can't. Or to be more honest, I can, but I don't want to. Someone once noted that they stopped updating their journal because it had “become like homework”. I don't ever want that to happen to me, but with “Lest we forget” it has become very close to that. Sometimes I sit down and think, yeah, I want to write a review of a new album, or I want to focus on AOR or Prog or Metal or whatever this week, but if that becomes too much I can change my mind: no-one knows what I have planned, so who's to know and who does it hurt? But this section has been running now for nearly half a year, and although the likelihood is that not even one person reads or appreciates it, much less looks forward to it and god forbid would miss it, I still felt I should explain why I'm not doing it any more.
So that's it: as a wise man once said, “When we stop enjoying it we'll stop doing it”, as I sort of paraphrased as the title to this short article, and I've stopped enjoying it so there won't be any more. Hopefully that won't upset anyone (oh yeah, right: I can see the complaints flooding in even now!) and I wouldn't want it thought that I was disrespecting or not caring about those who have died in August-February, but the joy and interest has gone out of it and I just don't want to do something that feels too much like a job. Freedom and self-expression is the name of the game, not being trapped in a box or forced into a cubicle to hit a deadline every month. You do that, you sure as hell better be getting paid for it! I did that for almost thirty years, now it's time to relax and do things on my own terms.
That's it. You can go about your business now. Oh, and as for “As the years go passing by”? (What?) Yeah, that's out too: what was I thinking?