For lack of a better way of saying...

When I was much younger I remember that I hated to read because it always took away from my television programs. But my parents always told me that it was essential so my mom would sometimes have me sit in a room and read. Then I got to about second grade and I figured out that I could get Book-Its which meant free pizza for every book that I read. So I scrambled to read as many books as I could. I've read so many books, from Redwall and Lord of the Rings to Star Wars EU books. Around that time I started reading comic books too, mainly due to my older cousin Jeff influencing me. So basically, my path down Literature Lane, so to speak, is because of free pizza.

Now that I'm older, though, I have a greater appreciation for literature and the depth of it. Whenever I go into a library I see it as shelf after shelf of creative minds. For every single book on the shelves, there's an imagination to go along with it. You have to appreciate something that big. Bookstores and libraries BREATHE creativity. It's a good place to be. Especially if you're a writer and you know how deep that imagination runs firsthand.

I was thinking back to my creative influences and what had initially made me take off and want to pursue art as not only a hobby but a means of expression and a way of life. I could make a list like this:

Music: Billy Joel, John Lennon, Paul Simon, Brandon Boyd, Andrew McMahon, etc.
Writing: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, etc.

...and so on and so forth. I believe that everyone has an influence from something. The band Brand New has an album called "Deja Entendu" which is Latin for "already heard." And it's an homage to their influences, I think. Not everyone is influenced directly from the same medium, either. I've been known to draw inspiration from films, paintings and things like that when I make music and write. It's actually extremely healthy to keep your mind rounded out in that sort of way because it enables you to process and interpret the world around you much better.

Lately, I've picked up Elliott Smith and Incubus as far as music that I've been listening to. Elliott Smith is in my opinion one of the greatest songwriters of this generation and Incubus is just a band that is full of completely talented people to the point where it's absolutely mindblowing.

And I've actually just been listening to music like that for the past few weeks or so. A lot of obscure indie bands that were never picked or appreciated by anyone because they make music for the fact that they love it, not because they're willing to crank out a bunch of hits so that some greedy record label can rip them off and make more money off of them than they earn. Most of these artists started out with nothing and played DIY shows. One band used to set up shows without a PA and the vocalist sang through a practice bass amp. They worked hard to make the music that they did because it's their art. When a painter paints a picture, and he loves it he shows it to the world by any means necessary that he can. A seventeen year old boy in the middle of Nebraska with nothing but a guitar on his back writes songs and plays them for the same uninterested 12 people at a bar on a nightly basis because he feels the same way.

My poetry lately has been lax. I posted 3 new poems on Photographic Memory Loss that were a few of about twenty that I felt were adequate enough to post. So read them. Please?

Lately my heart has been smiling. There's an amazing girl behind that.

This is all that I have to update with. So... keep reading I guess? If you even do on a regular basis to begin with.