entropy and purpose..

Hi my name is John Linnell and this is my bio. ~ 2006

I’m writing it from a bedroom in Redding. It’s a beautiful fall day outside and the dying leaves make a fitting backdrop for the decaying junkyard across the street. Fall.

Autumn is my favorite time of year. Everywhere. Even back home in Santa Rosa where there is little distinction between the seasons: autumn is my favorite time of year Perhaps this is because the fall reminds me of the sunset: the beautiful death of another day or another year. A chance to look back- to . look out across the pacific and see gallons of beauty mixed with regret.

I was born in July but I still love autumn. Even when I was young, the Autumn sunsets were sober reminder that everything loses it’s leaves eventually. The body goes cold. The air grows dark. The fall. I kinda grew up all over: Santa Rosa, Garden valley, Redding, … I think I’ll always call California home

Lately writing and music have been my compass: it’s neither the map, nor the road but a steady constant that can help me make sense of the both. Most of the time, the things I write are more honest than I am. Sometimes I don’t share certain writings with people because I’m not ready for that sort of honesty.

I don’t write many happy writings, at least not lately. Which is odd because I’m a fairly upbeat guy. So I’ve got a few theories as to why this might be the case

It might be because life wears down on you. And you lose that part of yourself. Or it could be because the writings are the only place where these types of ideas can find a release- like a dream where your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Or perhaps I don’t write when I’m happy. You know, a celebration requires a few friends and depression requires solitude. Either way writing has become my way of finding beauty in the midst of chaos and the pain. It’s a way of finding redemption for mistakes and regrets that I have.

In this way I feel like the creative process brings me closer to God. As a creator of phrases I get to take all these broken fragments of failure and chaos and weave together something beautiful and meaningful. Decay. Death. Pain. Fall. And if God is a writer then these fallen leaves of mine can be redeemed

A part of me wishes I could say that my writings are formulated and planned out by a brilliant , methodical mind who structures writings out of themes that are independent of anything anyones ever thought of before. In reality most of these writings are simply spontaneous ramblings of a broken man with a laptop who cant sleep. Trying to make scence of a world turned upside down. In many ways these writings mirror the melodies in my own life; relationships, fears, hopes, insecurities, Some of these are melodies. Melodies that haven’t been written. But it makes scence that these honest phrases are the ones Im proud of ; because whether it’s, Steven King, or Stevie wonder, or Edger Allen Poe or whoever, the honest ones have always been my favorite.

So perhaps when our time is over we will only have one song the sing. One very long , rambling, eclectic song that touches on life, death, love, pain, anger, sex, joy, peace, politics, God and the other elements of a searching soul in the twenty first century. Trying to find meaning in this beautiful broken planet. Finding themes that are a way of therapy in the hopes of better understanding this existence we call life. Either way, the bitter struggle for meaning and truth in this post modern world is a subject matter that I don’t think I could ever exhaust.

So in all of this entropic ramblings I hope there is an echo. An echo of our creator. Calling us to be honest even with these broken pieces. And hopefully my redundancy will be explained much clearer when life is touched upon in a new way, and we begin to see our world through his eyes. ~ John