Update: Coming to you Live From a Bag of Winds (2022)

A lot has changed since I’ve posted an update on here. The person you’re hearing from is not of the same mind. He's someone who honestly lost a lot and is finally attempting to rebuild. In my last update from over a year ago, I talked about a Riley 2.0 coming, and it's safe to say he's here. Often times, when I have an opportunity to give him a good look and take inventory, there's really a lot of work that needs to be done. I don't mean "work" as in "oh, I could be better at the piano," I mean work as in "he needs to learn to do basic sh** again." New doesn't instantly mean better. Sometimes you need to dismantle a lot of your core fundamentals to become your next self. With that, there's re-tooling involved. It's so much like starting from level one with a new character in a game. Tutorials aplenty, basically.

At the very least, I’ve reached some semblance of a normal life. I’m working full 40 hour work weeks now like a good little commuting American. With an impending wave of bills, I had to act and capture something to offer me complete financial security, and I’m not ashamed of doing that. As much as I feel the reins of corporate servitude tugging at my jaw, I can find some solace in the notion that I’m behaving as what most would deem a “contributing member of society,” which I could not call myself for the longest period. What’s more, I am financially stable for the first time in a long time, and I’m equally not ashamed to use those funds to treat myself. Concerts and sporting events, some of my favorite outlets that haven't been consistently accessible until recently, have been big magnets pulling in my hard earned coin. It's a worthwhile recovery measure, for sure. I’ve also been engaging in a lot of comfort media to try to work my way back into familiarity with myself. I’ll opt to listen to my favorite albums on repeat instead of newer ones and then go to watch episodes of SpongeBob that I’ve already seen a hundred times. I desperately need to reintroduce myself to that creative kid that I’ve become estranged from.

Creatively, I had been steadily working on some more light-hearted and fun baseball content on my old Riley Wood YouTube channel. I had some unfinished business regarding an incomplete video from that page that recently got taken care of upon release. I’d also started a Tiktok page to hopefully create a new means of getting my poetry out there. I haven’t posted in a good while, and that’s for unknown reasons, I guess. I’m still really proud of those videos and go back to them often because I just love how they come together. I just think they’re super effective. I’d love to say “hey, don’t expect me to fully stop with those,” but it’s hard to be certain about anything anymore. I don’t feel like the guy I used to be.

I’ll be somewhat transparent with what I’m currently working on, but don’t expect much. I don‘t want speak to soon or jinx anything! A couple years ago, when I first came on here and announced book #2, I underestimated how much of a rabbit hole I was diving into with such an ambitious project, as well as how horrible life would soon get for me. That book has not been cancelled, but I am in no position to face the trials it holds. Hell, I don’t know if I will be for another 10 years. I’ll put it this way: I need Riley at nearly 100% power to do that, and we’re sitting at a comfortable 5% right now. I’m not even kidding when I say I sort of forgot how to be good at what I do, and if I haven’t, then I definitely lost the confidence to do it. We are basically starting from scratch and I have to teach myself how to love making things again.

To put it in perspective, I’ll use a SpongeBob example. In that one episode where Squidward is trying to impress his rival, Squilliam Fancyson, with a fancy restaurant, he asks SpongeBob to empty his mind of everything but fine dining and breathing. As a result, SpongeBob becomes a hyper-efficient five-star waiter, but collapses mentally when he discovers that he forgot his own name. He sacrifices basic individualism for pure functionality. That’s about where I’m at. There was no getting through this “hyper-focused on working” stage of my life without selling my soul, so to speak, and I knew it was coming. If you read The Circuitry Might, there’s realizations about this very thing all over the text. The train was coming and I either had to get on it, or get run over by it.

With that explanation out of the way, I’ll say candidly that I have a plan involving a few new projects in the works. I may also just have to push book #3 up in place of book #2. You’ll see why that’s a much more realistic outcome as time goes on. Something of equal significance will definitely be coming before either of those, though, and it will be sooner rather than later. That’s all I feel I can say, right now. I’m at a point where I’m gaining comfortability in my new “day-to-day,” and I’m getting more acquainted with structure. Working life has brought me stability in the place of free thought, but to be honest, it was either this or nothing. I was absolutely about to get left behind entirely. Still, I want to make it very clear that staying at this regular-ass life of mediocrity that I’ve finally achieved once again is not part of the plan. I’m hoping I have earned the hilt of a sword that I will soon learn to wield, if that makes sense. The number one goal is to figure out how to continue making things again with what little I have in the tank. I have a long way to go to rebuild after the desolation of 2020 and 2021. It’s very depressing to think about how much more I felt I was capable of before that time.

Even now, I feel like I’m not doing a good job at communicating my whole perspective on here like I should be. This is an update, after all. Sigh…Since using SpongeBob as an extended metaphor is apparently all I know how to do here, I’ll also say this:

Rest assured, I am in my bag. It’s a powerful bag of winds from the SpongeBob Movie that is making it hard to communicate from. But soon enough, I will use it to take me home. Be on the lookout this summer for (hopefully) some big stuff. Until next time, best wishes.