Aiming for a creative life

I Am Santo

Fiction, poetry, music and mindscape pictures by creative artist Jason Santo

And the Flowers Are Still Standing

50. There’s never been a more daunting birthday than this one. I lost a lot of sleep in the months leading up to this milestone, and my mental and physical health have both felt burdened. I’m not sure where to go in life at this point. There are no real goals. There are no real […]

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Things Continue to Transition

I’m in an unexpected state of transition. After eleven years of consistent, steady employment, I jumped ship for a cool company located about 25 miles south of me. Having commuted 45 miles for most of those eleven years, I figured this would be a walk in the park. Yeah, I was wrong. It wasn’t just […]

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The Pains of a Slowing He[art]

My heart’s been acting up, in more ways than one. Life’s been busy, chaotic with a new commute and challenging from a friends-and-family perspective as I try to juggle the time I spend with those I love. The kids are growing remarkably fast, and I’m struggling to keep up with changes in their personalities and […]

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Carnivorous Musings – Winter 2024 Mix (20240102)

The first of many archived seasonal playlists which, sadly, have become my only consistent creative expression these many, many years!

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Yuletide Smash – Special Winter 2024 Mix (20231221)

Yeah, I’ve been using the same Christmas music playlist for about twenty years now, maybe adding a song or two every few years. This year, inspired by a buddy of mine, I decided to go ahead and find a whole playlist full of new Christmas tunes. And what resulted was this blue bit of yuletide […]

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Things Can Change

I write this having moved this fledgling – and now rather aged – repository of creative work to yet another webhost, having grown sick of the setup I’d had previously which had me annually forgetting the process to renew and install the security certificate. Now the host does it automatically and I can breath easily […]

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Kicking the tires

So begins three months of nothing but what I want to do. I’ve worked diligently for well over thirty years, and now – finally – some time off to concentrate on things I want to do. It’s an incredible feeling that I’ve been writing about or describing in conversation to people every day since I […]

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What’s Ours, What’s Theirs

We’re crafting big Hells
In little packages,
Gift-wrapped by hands
Aching with pride,
Bones undone by the delicate task
Of inviting suffering
Where tenderness was required.

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What’s Poppin?

And why wouldn’t I start a journal entry some two years after the last with a borrowed title from a TikTok-famous rap track? Truth is, not much has been poppin. Since 2020 was an anguished blur for most of us, it probably isn’t worth recounting. What can be said is that we made it through […]

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When the last thing becomes the only thing

I started this random site about two-and-a-half years ago to get myself up and running on WordPress again after many, many years of using other CMS solutions. There was interest at my day job in it, so I fired up an instance and wrote a couple entries, focusing more on moving old material from various […]

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