This Is My Rifle: Remembering How To Dream Posted by Jason James on 02/19/14 | Filed under Opinion, This Is My Rifle

Right now it's 9:30pm and I'm sitting on my couch watching Fresh Prince reruns. Well, I'm not so much watching as I am staring into the screen and trying to untangle a mess of fuzzy thoughts. My eyes are burning and my muscles feel like heavy Jell-O pulling down on bones made of rotting wood. I have so much to do still but I just can't find the energy to push through another hour of work. At this very moment I'm exhausted and I have to accept my limitations.

All I ever wanted to do was make music. As a kid I would stand in the rain for hours freestyling into a Talkboy and then listening back to find rhymes that were good enough to keep. I had recently discovered Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Creepin On Ah Come Up" EP and I was entranced by it. As far as I was concerned, as long as I put in the effort, I too could someday masterfully command the English language with the same authority as the group's lead baritone, and my personal favorite, Krayzie Bone. I spent most of my early years dreaming of the day I myself would have an album of my own that I could share with the world.

When I think about all of the years I've invested into my music I feel bittersweet about it. Some days I look back and marvel at the ways in which the universe has warped in order to get me to where I am. Every event, everything that has ever occurred in my life, has one way or another pushed me towards my destiny. Every dream, every opportunity accepted or passed on, every flicker of light that has shot through my eyeballs has motivated and inspired me to keep creating.

Then on other days I sit behind my desk at my 9-5 job and suck back the anger and hatred I have towards what I ultimately became. I'm an artist on the brink of failure. I've been drowning for over a year and I can barely get my head above water long enough to take a shallow breath. I'm speeding through life, watching days and months spin away from me at the same pace as the numbers that are sliding across this spreadsheet. I'm surrounded by astronauts, teachers, scientists and doctors, who at some point or another accepted their own limitations and settled for an alternate fate. These are all great people who allowed the curtain to close on their dreams in exchange for a safe place in reality.

"Fuck, I need to quit this job so bad".

Those words keep rolling through my mind like a monster truck through soft sand. I've spent many days building the courage to get up and leave from here forever but my financial responsibilities won't allow it. If I cut off this lifeline, I will be putting a kink into the money flow so desperately needed to fuel my creative ambitions. I'm lucky- my engineer is one of my closest friends. But he is also one of the best studio engineers the world has to offer and he needs to be paid- even if it is pennies in comparison to what he usually charges. If I lose him then I lose everything. He is my second set of ears; a set of ears that are the most important in the room and absolutely necessary in every aspect imaginable. Without him we have nothing.

Those are the teeth on the massive steel trap that I'm in. If I quit my job then I can't afford to pay my engineer, but the album and the EP that are sitting in idle can be recorded, mixed and mastered in a matter of a month. Everything is written and ready to go. If I keep my job then my engineer stays and it will take the better part of a year before these projects see the light of day, but they will be of the highest quality and refined to the best of our collective abilities. I have to choose between time and money, and I'm in a situation that calls for both when I have neither.

Why didn't Jason ever make it? Is he still making music? How come I never hear him on the radio or see him on MTV and MuchMusic? He should've been Drake.

These are all questions and statements that haunt me on a daily basis. Every time I hear them they enter the permanent record in the most accessible file of my memory bank. I always want to reach out to those people and fucking strangle them until their lungs are on fire and their arteries explode from the pressure. Why didn't I make it? I don't know, could it have anything to do with the fact that I'm from Canada? A country whose “industry” does absolutely fucking nothing to support genuine creativity and promotes D grade replicas of American artists 6 years too late? Could that have anything to do with it? Or maybe I just fucking suck. Maybe that's my problem. I'll tell you this though; I would rather suck sore infested donkey dick than be photographed in a bubble bath and smoking a hookah for some magazine cover. But I digress…..

Until recently, you’ve probably noticed my absence from RefinedHype during the past few months. The truth is, my entire life was spinning out of control and I was running around the basement of the Titanic with a box of band-aids trying to keep the ship from sinking. But even if my existence weren’t a spider web of total chaos I probably still wouldn't have written anything. I needed time to rediscover my reason for being a part of all of this. I needed to figure out why I was here again. I wanted to look back at my path in astonishment rather than forward with resent. I had to take a break from the shitty rappers, conspiracy theories and social injustices for a while. Life is far too short to not touch the ground and feel reality on your fingertips, and I had lost connection with my purpose. I love writing and I love being a creator- I just felt like a lot of what I was doing was out of spite for all of those people who thought that my dream had passed me by on the universal railroad.

I'm currently working on finding a way to bridge the time and money gap. There are some government grants that I am applying for and there’s also the rob a bank option (just joking- smiley face, smiley face, winkey face). My friends have suggested that I do a Kickstarter campaign to fund the album, but I'm not sure that's the right direction. In my opinion it just feels like it may cheapen the overall perspective of the final product and I can't afford for that to happen. It would be nice to have this album out in Spring 2014 but I would rather push it to late Summer and give everybody something they don't feel like they have to appreciate just because they helped pay for it.

What I can promise is this; Rodney and I are hitting on all cylinders this time and we are making no exceptions in terms of material. We are determined to make up for where Marvelous World Of Color and Pyramids In Stereo fell short. There will be no interludes and no filler songs on this album. We have adopted a shorter album, all killer policy with absolutely no room for mediocrity. If a song is just “ok”, it hits the cutting room floor and will not be revisited at all, under any circumstance. For the first time since we started working together 6 years ago, we have a complete album that we do not need to compromise in any way, shape or form. Rodney’s production is now, and I say this in all honesty, on a level that most producers could only dream of and my lyricism and flow are the tightest they’ve ever been. In short, the music we are making today is the chiseled out remains of the previous two projects.

Hopefully soon I will find some sort of balance and finally reach the horizon I’ve been running towards for the past decade. I don’t have the money and I don’t have the time but I will not stop until I get there. Despite my frustration and lack of access to the finance I need in order to achieve my goal, I’m going to build as many popsicle stick bridges as are necessary to cross over into happiness. I refuse to die and I refuse to accept defeat. If I end up burning out in the process, I’ll just have to find another way around the mountain.

Wish me luck.

(Jason James is an artist, freelance columnist and writer for RefinedHype.com. You can read/download his free eBook, "This Is My Rifle" and listen/download his most recent album, "Pyramids in Stereo". You can also contact him here and here.)