Oops, pow, surprise!

Yes, I'm an amateur, because it's been so long since I've updated with anything good in quite a while. (For those of you in the peanut gallery, next time i'll change "quite a while" to "ever".)

So composition has been the main focus in my own obsessive little musical dreamworld. I've been tied to a guitar and/or my composition software by choice for the past little while, trying to dig out songs for another musical project I’ve been working on. The tentative name of the group is "Stokes' Aster". Any good?
Shifting topics quickly: Inspiration really does happen to me, but not in the idealist, romantic sort of way very often. I'd say I’ve only been inspired to create something exactly during a particularly 'special' moment in my life maybe 3 times, and those ideas have yet to come into full bloom. (They will soon however.) I'm much too busy just trying to live and experience the moment.
I don't go and sit in the grass and look at the stars and try to write something, and I don't look at a damn sunset either. I don't have to take some epic journey to write a song called 'Astronaut Food'.
It's funny how this seems to happen to me. I’ll be driving to work at 4am, and I’ll see a sign that says "half off original price" and then the mouse that’s sleeping on the wheel up there will start to run. And yknow, I think I like it that way better, because I don't feel that I should have to put myself in an environment that’s slightly foreign or different than usual to get something original out of myself creatively. Granted, being in a new or foreign environment can be inspirational in and of itself, but that's not exactly what I’m talking about here because I don't/can't write songs as events happen in my life. The challenge is trying to capture it later in a snapshot that makes the memory of what I’m writing about come alive and inhabit a song. It’s like inserting a soul into a robot body or even a human one. (We'll let the guys who write prog-rock have the robot bodies here.)