If Your Heart Beats Like a Hammer, Find a Nail
Blessed be the shed builders - they create the spines of our artistic skeletons.
“He was what we call in the music trade ‘a shed builder’.”
- Justin Hawkins, describing the style of Oasis’ first drummer.
Oh, Hammer of the Gods, heed my hymn-ble call, my song of frantic soar, my melancholic melody of rhyme. This heart, my hard-hatted, big-band heart, kneels before you, hungry for your beatific blessing. With your tender match grip hands, strap the toolbelt of hard yakka to my gently trembling riser. Urge this heart to beat beyond the infinite paradiddle of rehearsal, to tap its metronomic mind onto the pegged-out earth this day. Raise it, I implore you, to the Hot 100 sky.
tl;dr: Oh, Lord of the Lick, build my shed.
Dear Heart, Legally Permitted and Zone-Approved shed builder, set the rhythm of the thing. Simple and constant, reliable and true, create the structure for my brain to lay its sheetrock and insulation and parquetry to the firmness of your frame. Beat beat beat. I yearn for thee to become the scaffolding of my purpose, the skeleton of my body (of work). This idea, this art—my art—animates and thumps to life with cold stethoscope to chest. Can we fix it, Bob? Yes, we can. Praise be to the soundcheck.
In this, we pray: May the chorus of its nail-thwacking reverberate and echo in the valley of the done. Siren to the sailor, the beat beneath my wings, I adore you.
Behold the blood of my foundation surging to my soul as it waits patiently at the edge of the empty. Build the shed, oh supreme tub-thumper, time is ticking and winter is coming and my soul is out and seeking the rhythmic center of my world. The universal art of the something, or nothing—or both. With a backbeat, I can’t lose it.
Oh, architect of me, I am apprenticed. Hallelujah! No blueprints bar the ones on the one, held on the beat, weaving through air and time. My shed-building heart, twitching with the rebar, throbbing with the underlay, underlay, underlay. I dance to it with vigor. My foot taps in time with gratitude most rude.
The heart thumps in another nail and the planks and beams take hold. The brain circles the structure to find comfort in the support of it all. A future roost, an eagle’s nest for dreamers. With the shed builder on deck—the heart at the heart—my brain stays in tune. My brain will find its way to the stage. My brain will be free to strut and prance and swing its microphone to the rafters. In this, I trust and prostrate myself before you, my shed-building president of the union of my art. My little Ringo heart. My ratatat rapscallion.
Take your grip—your traditional, your jazz, and even your death—and drum the life back into me. Into the ribcage of my art, that great chasm of hope. Fill the space with raucous percussive power until the overflow takes hold. Flam me, drag me, tap the tempo, swing the swing of my construction on the plains of the possessed.
Become a wall of sound and fury, pure scaffolding and frame. Oh heart, hear my prayer—a one and a two and a. You are the little drummer joy, kicking at my skin. And the beat goes on, tipping its hi-hat to Sonny on the dusty floor of up. Rhythm to the brain, you are going straight into the mix at the cement of my foundation.
With the structure whole and construction complete, only then will my soul swan in for final inspection and an encore featuring all my greatest hits. All spiritual and mystic, talking feng shui and visualizing future decor. This is where we’ll put the dream catcher. This way sexy spirits lie. Comfortable furnishings, I will lay my body down and soak in the creation until my skin turns to prune. Groupies go here. Oeuvre over the mantle. One giant interior, insulated against the sharpness of unasked-for criticism. Cocoon me, wrap me, shield me from within.
This is the Tao of the shed.
Amen-addendum (amendum?) for good measure. Maybe three measures? Let’s say at least two bars. Once built, Lord allow me to blow the roof off my shed. To lift the masses into a surface surfing frenzy. To blow the speakers out and eardrums in and melt the minds of somnambulant crowds. May they long to hear my beating, throbbing, ricocheting heart bedded beneath them, keeping time, pushing them to the stratosphere where the roofs of many other sheds reside.
In closing, let my cymbals ring loud!
Find me in the pocket of my art.
Seek me out in the time.
Beat that drum.
Hammer that heart.
Build that shed in the back garden of my dreams.
Yup.
Count me in.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“Upon publishing the comic, two things happened:
The first is that I won an Eisner Award. I know awards can be frivolous, but it was deeply meaningful to me. It showed me that it was okay to take my time. It was okay to write in complete sentences and digress into paragraphs and speak with a deliberate, thoughtful cadence. It was okay to ignore the internet's meme-driven appetite for sparse, cheap comedy and to tread in deeper waters.
It showed me that it was okay to stop chasing the dopamine rush of "going viral."
It was okay to take a break from drawing relatable comics that made people shout OMG SO TRUE while I gorged on truckloads of likes, shares, and retweets.“
- The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman)
From this EXCELLENT Oatmeal series called “Eight Marvelous & Melancholy Things I’ve Learned About Creativity.” I cannot recommend it highly enough. I feel like he says everything I’ve ever wanted to say about it, but better, and with pictures.1
I also feel so VALIDATED by the chapter on brainstorming. Everyone who has ever worked with me knows that I despise brainstorms. Mostly because folks don’t know how to run them in a productive way, but primarily because that’s not how my brain works. I sit there fuming and thinking “this is eating into my thinky time, you Dry-Erase-wielding Time Vampire.” I can’t just enter a room and POW! thunder and lightning and here comes the flood. I like to get my temperature up and brood steamily on the horizon in a dark and menacing manner until the afternoon comes and I can no longer contain my creative rage and I explode and oh shit suddenly the earth smells incredible and alive. Or something like that. “Now everyone choose their favorite idea by drawing a star next to it!” No. Off you trot.
“Brainstorming is a great way of raising questions and a terrible way of finding answers.”
Yes. A thousand times yes. And some people should not be let near Post-Its or whiteboards. There. I said it. I effing said it!
Via The Oatmeal’s mailing list
Speaking of drummers, while you can’t call Buddy Rich a shed builder, he’s most definitely an advanced architect. He built some pretty wicked cathedrals.
On Rotation: “The Beat Goes On” as performed by the Buddy Rich Big Band with Rich’s daughter, Cathy Rich, on vocals. “Big Swing Face” album (where this shortened version is taken from) is here.
Silly little time waster. Try to guess the year each photo was taken.
My self-loathing is always incoming. Gotta stop doing that.