—Interpretations of your dead-of-night stagger through my darkened, suddenly evil apartment: First, the scene could be read as a metaphor for growing older. Stumbling around in the dark with inexplicable/existential threats behind you and within your path ahead including a closed door, and your heedless, bullish rush forward because having what’s behind you catch and overwhelm you would be worse, knowing that someday—maybe today—there will be a final door you cannot open. Probably a stretch. I think a BETTER reading is specific to the career arc of a musician, especially within the context of the discussion of your dissatisfaction with music and my emboldening suggestion to give writing a shot. The old saw, particularly in music—though it applies to any artistic endeavor, given culture’s thirstful lust for new/young voices—is that a band’s “best” or most popular records are almost invariably produced within the early part of their career. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but there’s a sizable nugget of truth within the canard, and it correlates to your terror-walk through my apartment. Check it out: the new band/writer will plow recklessly though the darkened room, if not without fear, then putting that fear to use to absorb and ignore the stubbed toes and mashed noses accumulated on their way to finding an original, beautiful path out. With each stumble through concurrent rooms, the creator grows weary of the bumps and their barking shins and will stay upon the same path they’d worked so hard to forge and hesitate to take chances with other painful maybe even dangerous ways to escape. Or the creator obsessively returns to the same room over and over. Or, if the creator dares continue to explore new rooms and tread new paths, ones that threaten to become a maze, ones impossible to follow without having to absorb too much of the honest pain and difficulty of the experience, and the creator’s listeners/readers—I will not use the word “consumers” as vampirically fitting as it might be—eventually balk, as they would rather remain on their favored path, the easier one to remember, the one they were originally led down.

Doodle!