09/15/05

September is moving fast.

My first entry, took me a while to pick the locks. Not really sure how to approach this venue. When the YGP first proposed online diaries, I had intended to back-post the journal I started in March, but now that seems too much, and maybe a little too personal. This format will likely push content in different directions. Not feeling much like a creative writer; maybe that's a good thing.

Much happening with the YGP, but since this is largely a means of communicating amongst the YGP, no need to enumerate here.

Practice with jefe felt very productive last night. He even volunteered to meet for a second practice tonight. Something organic about "Junkie Stir" is at once very simple and very challenging.

Work is hectic, but I do walk out dutifully at 5PM. Good enough. I don't draw any lines with regard to intensity, so I know I'd better draw one with regards to duration/ availability. You never actually "finish" the day job, after all. Well, hopefully...

Sitting, check. And no better time than now: left hand.

09/16/05

Burnt out Friday. By this point in the week it's tempting to just ignore the stream of incoming e-mails. But that would be suicide.

jefe canceled last night, arguably for the best. He got some rest; I got some focused acoustic guitar time in.

Sitting this morning - something new. All of a sudden my legs reveal that they can be as conscious as the rest of my body. I've always had trouble w/ sleeping feet and had meant to embark on a "campaign" of sittings focusing on legs and feet for the full 30 minutes. I never did, and then this presents itself, not unlike remembering someone's name by giving up on it first. I hope this awareness recurs and persists.

Out of the blue: Per a recent physical, I am officially obese. Resuming an old idea of shaming myself into weight loss via semi-publicity... 220 lbs. Go.

09/17/05

Up at what qualifies as an early hour, for me, on a Saturday. Shower, sitting (legs still wide awake, maybe for good?) Housework and lots of e-cleaning on the home PC in anticipation of a long overdue backup effort. Some guitar practice - more needed.

09/19/05

New pets: chinchillas. I questioned the practicality/ necessity of this, but Tzu would not have been happy otherwise. They are adorable.

Excellent movie on Saturday: Kung Fu Hustle. Weak (not terrible) movie on Sunday: Man On Fire.

This felt like the first proper weekend in a very long time. Not that it was especially good (or bad), just that by Sunday night I felt adequately disconnected from the previous work week. Not much sleep last night though, so I'm not quite connected with this one yet, either.

09/20/05

Very bad night last night.

215 lbs. And when that's the good news, you've got some work to do.

09/21/05

By yesterday afternoon Monday's "very badness" had transformed into depression and exhaustion. Rushing dutifully back to an empty house felt, well, empty to me, so I stopped at the pub for a Guinness. Walking to the car afterward I had what I guess you'd call a mild panic attack.

Connection with guitar practice: tenuous. Connection with domestic circumstances: slightly worse than that. But a quiet nght of cooking and cleaning and going to bed without incident was achieved.

Sitting this morning. A large moth immediately enters the room and makes a beeline (mothline?) for my face. This recurs several times, then one of the cats begins her hunt. Much noise all around. That I flinch and my breathing is affected when the moth approaches doesn't concern me too much; in the absence of a committed decision to let moths bounce off my eyeballs I can write this off as merely functional. That I begin to have a personal, emotional response (anger) at the bad luck and imposition on my sitting seems to warrant more attention. So I pay some attention. 30 minutes later, my feet are sound asleep.

09/22/05

Long tedious day. Steady influx of nearly meaningless yet nearly insurmountable challenges. Nearly meaningless e-mail trail to document all of this.

Tired, feeling hollowed out in terms of passion, creative impulse.

But the YGP has a challenge this weekend: 4 of us will perform two 20-minute sets, some of the material unknown to us as a group, several months since our last performance. So, creative or no, much guitar practice tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday.

09/23/05

Minor (so far) gout flare up. Hopefully I can starve/ hydrate this one out prior to the YGP performance on Sunday.

Mood and energy level are improved today. Guitar practice last night consisted, more than anything, of staring at unfamiliar pieces of music on paper, and trying to come up with ways to best organize them. Seemed best not to disturb the quietness at home, except as absolutely necessary. I will have all day tomorrow to prepare the hands.

09/24/05

Badness breeds (brews, broods... has not yet broken.)

I sit in imagined white light, but the pain in my left foot proves too much after 15 mintes. I am distracted by the impact this attack may have on tomorrow's gig, and the more general implications of being stricken at random.

Time to practice.

09/26/05

09/26/05

Woke up feeling much improved yesterday, informed the YGP, and set off for our preparations and performance in Yorktown, NY.

Throughout our practice my sense was that we were, at best, tenuously connected with a majority of the setlist. I know that an audience and an event will generally inject energy and potential if the performers allow as much, so I was struggling between feeling under-prepared and feeling as optimistic as possible. It wasn't necessarily that we'd bitten off too much; Tim described it best as "a highwire for us".

Then, the show as a whole was choreographed a bit loosely, and half our set (or one of two sets, depending) was cut. I didn't know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. Sound was mostly problematic (in fact I have no idea what the audience heard, if anything.) But the boomy near-feedback was occasionally inspiring, as during the fade out of Columbia, the clouds of Asturias etc. Asturias and Unbound felt very good to me. Havre de Grace: we pressed on courageously and with consistent rythym, but that was all that separated it from a train wreck. A relentless procession of errors prevented its being musical.

I don't know how to feel about the performance and event as a whole. We didn't rise to the commitment as I had foreseen it, but neither had the venue given us the opportunity to rise to said commitment. That it was a benefit performance and we were alledgedly to receive pay makes this all the more confusing.

Home, still a confused/ confusing place.

This morning - gout has moved to the ball of the foot with a vengeance. Pain medication is required just to make getting out of bed possible. Sitting on the floor, out of the question. Sitting in a chair should be possible tonight.

09/28/05

Wrote yesterday, but only in my head. Much of the day on Monday was wasted in waiting rooms, after I'd requested a doctor's appt. to acquire a script vs. the gout. I couldn't get a return call no matter how much a pest I made of myself, and was finally advised by a receptionist to arrive in person. I arrived at 2PM to find out I'd been scheduled for 3PM, but no one had deemed to inform me as such. One hour is an awkward length of time when you are far from privacy, tools, toys, etc. and you are hobbling at approx. 0.00001mph. 3PM came and went and then 4PM, and when I finally saw the doctor she sent me off to a pharmacy where 5PM came and went. I only post all of this minutia because, well, that was Monday.

Work for two days now has been of the sort that inspires a career change. Also, I have acquired 3 parking tickets in 2 days. Cakewalk has masterminded a flawless schedule of releases and upgrades and bilked me out of hundreds of dollars, by contrast with all the deals that cleverly and marginally do not apply to me. Minutia, annoyance.

Bigger, neglected news, a friend I had not seen in about 15 years visited this weekend, wonderful. And a debtor settled a considerable sum with me which I will pass along to a very patient creditor.

Gout all but entirely beaten. Sitting on floor resumed this morning. I felt some distinction today between looking for tension (whereby I introduce new tension almost as fast I can address the existing tension) and just looking.

Things nearly back to normal at home, but there is something lost in me and it feels permanent. I pray that that permanence is illusory.

09/29/05

Wasted a considerable amount of time last night trying to reacquaint myself with my looper, the vendor having upgraded the firmware per a couple of my suggestions. But as much as I like this unit in theory, I can't seem to get anywhere with it. At first I thought it was merely non-intuitive, and it would come in time, but increasingly I suspect that the unit is defective. If it's not, then there's an even bigger problem.

Hope and 28 bars. Surprising how challenged I am by cross-picking-intensive pieces outside the YGP repertoire now. My right forearm has become vague and lazy.

Good productive day of work, surprisingly few interruptions. The plan for tonight is to throw on some running shoes and jog a bit.

10/03/05

I wish I had written sooner, much since Thursday.

Saturday was the most notable day of the weekend. Sitting in the morning was profound, bearing the spirit of "help is available." Sitting outside in the perfect October air, I could almost feel something/ someone pulling my body in various directions, lengthening muscles, opening tissues, injecting clarity. One of those exciting passages inside the microcosm of an apparently utterly mundane process.

On Saturday night we trained to NYC to see Robert Fripp/Porcupine Tree. A perfect night for a stroll through Manhattan. On the way to meet Alan etc. for dinner before the show, we stumble right across Robert, greeting friends/ fans on the street, his back to us. I pause with the uncharacteristic intention of saying hello - I would like for Tzu to meet this person one day - but his attention is elsewhere and the timing is wrong. The same awkwardness, an old friend who scarcely knows me and whom I seldom feel I have any business addressing.

The RF performance was warm, personal, on account of a montage of photography projected on the screen behind him. I especially loved the black and whites of him sitting at the piano with Peter Gabriel, and walking down a sidewalk in New York circa 1977(?) I do not feel at all qualified to critique Soundscapes. In this instance I found myself distracted by my enjoyment of the photos, and distracted by some too-familiar Roland timbres.

Then Porcupine Tree took stage and distraction became all the more distracting.

The front man's appearance - his hair and attire, the bare feet being the final straw - so reminded me of myself at approx. 20 years of age it was visceral. This look, which regrettably, I can no longer pull off, was more than an aesthetic for me then; there is something in the presentation which, for me, was/ is "Right". Seeing it 15 years after the fact, on another man at a distance, (and notably while he received the adulation of an audience) was unsettling, almost violating, as if something had been plucked right out my head. This set off a collection of emotions, memories, musings and regrets best summarized as:

"Wah! I wanna be the rock star!"

This put me in a state of living-in-the-past not unlike the one in which I lived continuously until around 2002, and I did not recover fully until today. But I managed to peer around the effect on Saturday night, sufficiently to recognize that PT are a very good band. Unlike, for instance, myself at age 20, they have a strong body of work and the balls to present it. (Objectivity, not self-loathing, is my intention in this.) I was not sold for the first few songs - the immediate impression was "Incubus on Steroids", rather safe pop songs w/ cool, odd time signature moshes interspersed. But later in the set the harmonies etc. began to reel me in. And these guys can get heavy.

Re: the vocalist's pretty hair etc, and in the spirit of "Turn a seeming mind-f*** to your advantage", I will continue with the recording of the new Means material with renewed vigor. As I've noted before, to the extent that I embrace my own fate as a musician, however small or large, I am able to experience the performances of others without being consumed by these damning, petty perspectives.

10/04/05

Spent most of my practice time last night, working on tones: tinkering with bridge height on guitars, tinkering with Guitar Rig settings, getting footcontrollers configured, and playing along with old Means stuff, channel/timbre switching intact. This is something I haven't done in a long time - instead sitting at a PC and working with one tone at a time. Getting back into the groove of making channel-switching part of the performance, and optimizing/ learning what to expect from the new gear, is critical. It disappoints me that Guitar Rig cannot act as host for any of the softsynths I want to use, nor will the foot controller send MIDI to another host, as this little battery powered unit, complete w/ preamp is so elegant otherwise. Suddenly there is a glut of cool new bus-powered keyboard and mixer-type controllers on the market, but no one has paid much attention to advancing the foot controller for years, it seems.

In a dream state this morning I misinterpreted my alarm, wacked snooze too many times, and slept through sitting time. That will make my evening 30 minutes shorter. I do feel well-rested, though, which has its value.

Starting in on the South Beach Diet per Dr's recommendation; she diagnosed me w/ something called Metabolic Disorder during my last gout attack.

10/05/05

Very little to report today. The South Beach Diet, if last night was any indication, will have me spending much more of my time focused on Kitchen Craft, not to mention Grocery Store Craft. (How to interpret/ best use and/or change this perspective, which arose while staring at racks and racks of spices, looking to buy Paprika: "This is my life, going away...")

So no time for electro-fiddling last night - instead about an hour w/ the acoustic. I feel like I could spend a lifetime learning/ playing Intergalactic Boogie Express, and enjoy every minute of it.

10/07/05

Didn't have time to write yesterday what I'd written in my head, and in fact I don't really have time today. The gist of it was that I'd spent some time recording based on new song ideas, and came to the familiar realization that I have no idea how to write a song. I bring something to the table, a few words typically, fiddle about with some gear in hopes that something generous will happen, and typically, it does not. The fingerboard is a minefield of things already done. An undertone of despair in yesterday's sitting was easily revealed to be an after-effect of this experience.

Work was supposed to (LOL) taper off as I neared my vacation, but instead, two crazy days. A vacation is needed, so I am hoping that these days off will qualify as one.

10/17/05

Vacation not quite as planned.

YGP on Saturday. NYC on Sunday to return visiting sister-in-law to NYU. Depart for Block Island on Monday with intention of returning Wednesday. Inclement weather docks all boats through Saturday and we are "stranded", although this word implies more hardship than can be found on Block Island. Forced resting, but much less time to put the house in order before returning to work today. Diet in ruins following extended holiday. It'll be... just like starting over...

Attended Cirque du Soleil performance last night. Quite impressive.

10/18/05

Again, slept through sitting (half) hour this morning. Hard to admit that dragging myself out of bed is so difficult. I will sit tonight, which meets my commitment in the exacting sense, but there is an awareness that I am indulging a weakness by not fully committing to a schedule. This has always been a difficulty, except on course, where other Crafties/aspirants provide an audience.

Practice last night = electro-shred. Fun, and productive. In this instance, the playing addressed technique in a way that crossed electric-acoustic, OST-NST boundaries, and at the same time I realize that breaking ground with the electric instrument satisfies a part of me that must be so in order for me to properly move forward with anything else. I went to bed feeling happy.

Woke up feeling very positive, then a brutally timed sequence of e-mails and phone calls - which otherwise would have been merely annoying - frustrated me nearly to the point of tears. The workday has persisted as such, but I have my head back together again. Now, back to it...

10/19/05

Emotional incident last night. I should have been at a funeral in the morning and, having misjudged my place, I did not attend. This hurt someone whom I care for a great deal, and when I was made aware of this I was devastated. Nothing is worse than a mistake you can't unmake. Thank God, Tzu came home and gave me the right advice, and helped in setting things right with this person.

10/20/05

Does it qualify as news to say that work is insane? I think not.

Acoustic into Sonar 5 during practice last night and I am impressed with this software. I recorded and worked with some of the harmonies in Blackjack very quickly and with minimal fuss. One upshot of this was that my mind was racing with ideas when I went to bed, and I slept very poorly. Yawn.

10/21/05

Practice last night by way of playing along with the HVFG performance while I ripped the DVD into the PC. (And I played like shit.) I converted all of these to MP3, having intended to put them on the website.

I had noted when Alan first presented the audio, then the DVD, that one listens much less critically when giving attention to a visual accompaniment. If that is so, then at the opposite end of the spectrum is the way one listens when mastering audio for publication. I didn't have the luxury of editing/ mixing, so for the most part I just gave up on these one by one. Levels during format conversions lent much difficulty as well; hours were consumed.

Finally, I put Witness up, warts and all. I couldn't bear to have invested the time with nothing in return but a dose of perspective.

Started working on a web site for the New and Improved Means (TM) during my lunch break today.

10/25/05

Good work with the YGP on Saturday. From the very subjective position behind my guitar, I sense that the group is making considerable progress on a week-by-week basis now. I hope this translates to improvement in performance. November will be telling.

We are angling for the "house of our dreams" at the moment, while at least half of me struggles w/ the question: was owning a house ever a part of my dream? If so, then this is the one, but I'm quaking at the notion of taxes as high as the rent I've grown accustomed to. Oh, and an additional detail called a "mortgage". Still, taken as a whole, I do hope this happens for us. Maintaining sufficient funds to be a part of Mendoza will be much more challenging, but remains a top priority. We should have a clearer sense within 24 hours.

10/26/05

The "clearer sense" regarding the house did not come in the expected time frame. Heading over to have another look, with three days worth of perpective added, in a couple of hours. Things have been uneventful otherwise. Tinkering with music and a new website for the still-slightly-imaginary Means.

4:59PM - Looking at the journal entries of the other YGP'ers something strikes me: they write what they do, whereas I typically write what I do that seems relevant to me. I see a very big red flag in this. There's a fine line between context and denial...

10/27/05

Well, if I were to turn over a new leaf today, and begin writing exactly what I've done, it would be difficult to see a difference. Left work, saw the house we'd made an offer on, ate dinner - during which we received a counter-offer. For the remainder of the night we talked about the pros and cons of the house and the corresponding mortgage. That's it.

Today, we retracted our offer. Initially I had very contradictory feelings about this: disappointment, uncertainty, stabs of anxiety, accompanied by relief, and, as the morning passed, an increasing sense of well-being. I liked having the decision behind me, and I liked that all of a sudden I felt like a rich man. Then the sellers came back, apparently quite surprised by our decision, and offered to sell per our initial offer. Now I'm back in limbo, taking virtual tours through the house in my brain, and trying to imagine being broke for 30 years. Sigh.

El jefe is coming by tonight, to work on music, whatever that means. Looking forward to it. Need to get my head together on short order.

10/28/05

Having made the decision one final time (this one more grueling than all prior), I am not a homeowner. Per this decision, I do not expect to become a homeowner for at least another year, likely 2+. Fine by me, but turning away that particular house and those sellers left a sadness somehow, as if I had paid an insult to something I quite admire. Even if it is just a house...

So... No sitting yesterday. Worked, did the dishes, cleaned the chinchilla cage (long overdue this time), showered, made dinner (and ate it), did the dishes again... Hmm, perhaps some measure of context is in order after all.

After the above, I resumed working on the second of the all 2 new Means songs. (Well, at least they're not hard to keep track of.) No jefe - he had canceled. Sorting out takes, moving content from Project 5 to Sonar 5, and editing in an effort to keep as much of the initial performances as possible. They have something that no subsequent recording will likely capture, so my preference is to work the glaring flaws out of them and leave them be. In truth, this process is much, much more work than just singing or performing a passage again properly. I used to think that there was a measure of dishonesty in using pitch correction tools etc, but it occured to me this week that sometimes the botched take is the most honest one in spirit. If you can make it listenable, all the better. Not to say the power of autotune can't be used for purposes of evil. I guess we're all on the honor system in the studio.

10/31/05

209 and falling. A rather slow and circuitous loss of 11 lbs since I first reported on 9/16. Here's to a more direct route to my next checkpoint at 200.

Something I will try to interpret as karma ruins weekend plans and much of the weekend along with it. Will Marc ever leave the house in a social capacity again? Must karma always paint in such broad strokes?

Lots of housework, yardwork. Though strictly speaking it is not our own, making this house habitable feels more constructive than throwing gobs of monopoly money at a new one.

11/03/05

Two days slipped past where the right moment to post here just never came along, or so it seemed. The usual.

The second of the all 2 new Means songs is beginning to feel more properly like a song now. Focusing more on playing and singing these "live", rather than fiddling with the recordings. This led to an interesting consideration: the pieces are very simple, almost primitive, and for me the magic comes largely from the challenge of singing and playing them at the same time - minding the syncopation and counterpoint between voice and guitar while maintaining a natural quality with both. But to what extent is the audience privvy to this quality? If another performer took over the vocal, would something be lost or would something be gained?

11/09/05

Haven't written in days. It's strange how, sometimes, just the idea of writing here drains the life out of me, even when nothing in particular is wrong. Other days I'm happy to say a little something, and on still other days I focus too much on what cleverness I will share here, my verbal centers spinning in a frenzied edit/ rehearsal mode. Last week this condition reduced a couple of sittings to mere placeholders in time, and on those days I never wrote what I'd rehearsed anyway.

TV taping on Monday night was informative, more specifically alarming. I experienced one of those complete catastrophic time-traveling misteps, the likes of which were more common when I would become paralyzed with stagefright. Except this time, no palpable fear, just a catastrophic error right out of left field, then, a heartbroken grimace captured to tape before I could realize what I was doing - an even greater mistake than the one I had performed with the guitar.

Mistakes like this have always been a great mystery to me. They must carry some profound meaning(s). Where can all of this arbitrary behavior arise from?? But wait, it is never quite arbitrary - it typically feels more like an informed piece of misinformation inserted right into the stream of consciousness. It's not like I drop my pick or wet my pants or play chopsticks or anything completely out of the blue. No, generally more contextual - 4 becomes 8, something like that. That this always arises at the worst possible moment can presumably be attributed to anxiety, but my condition of anxiety has become far less obvious in recent years. Silly boy, I took that to mean I wasn't anxious.

11/10/05

Sleepless night last night. Room became an oven, opened the window, opened the door, spent the rest of the night escorting trespassing cats out of the room. They know better but don't much care. Slept late out of necessity and am now wondering where I will squeeze my sitting in tonight, amidst practice and my ambitious plans to clear out the half of the basement I need to finish (even more ambitious plans.)

11/11/05

Last night not unlike the night before. Much unrest. Best sleep always comes right before the alarm goes off, second best sleep in between hitting snooze.

Very nice sitting last night, and looks like another evening sitting tonight - except my wife and my mom will be shuffling about preparing for a tag sale. Perhaps a midnight sitting.

Looking forward to practicing and performing with the YGP tomorrow.

Means website coming together nicely. Now, about the actual band, songs, gigs, etc...

11/14/05

Quite a weekend. Friday night: cleaned out basement and attic in preparation for a tag sale.

Saturday morning: helped set up the tag sale, ran some errands, headed for Yorktown.

Arrived exhausted. Immediately on beginning the work with the YGP, I picked up on an intensely bad vibe the likes of which I have never felt in this circle of players, even during obvious outbursts. I had a very precise interpretation of where it was coming from, and why, and although my mind was allowing for the possibility that this was mere invention or projection on my behalf, and largely exacerbated by fatigue, the rest of me wasn't really buying it. In retrospect, it seems my mind had it right. But for the moment, I took my error in judgement and made something very large of it. It became one of those rare moments where I question my commitment to Guitar Craft, such as it is, altogether. I can only count three such events prior, one of which sent me spiraling "out of the loop" for many years. Happily, the necessity of the upcoming performances pulled me forward and past my fixation. I struggled through the first hour or so, then things began to loosen up. It was clear that we were prepared for this performance.

We had some dinner together, and I drank hot tea to combat the first signs of a cold. Halfway through the meal I felt completely renewed - then I continued on to eat too much, and felt a bit sleepy again when we left. Tedious, but a point for future reference. The team seemed in high spirits. Relaxed.

It will be interesting if I see the recording of our performance and it is terrible, but I will write the following all the same. Discovering a sequence of crappy notes wouldn't change it anyway:

Our performance was profound. As a whole, I believe it was the finest performance I have ever been a part of. I give pause only in deference to the work with the Berlin Guitar Ensemble during the Performance Project of 2002. But even then...

Mistakes were made, sure, but throughout there was consistency in intention, tempo, dynamics between all six of us - an integrity and musicality we have never achieved before. Playing came effortlessly - including Growing Circle which was new for us. Kevin and Mark, in turn, played wonderful solos through Columbia, and the rest of the group met with their dynamics to transform the piece into something new, but soundly appropriate. The sound system favored us, as far as I could tell.

Eye of the Needle was very important for me personally. This has always been a sacred song - my earliest memories in Guitar Craft include those arpeggios bouncing around in wooden practice rooms at Claymont Court. When I went away from Guitar Craft in the 90's, that and Asturias were all I took with me, and I tinkered with them through the long dry spell. In Germany, during my first performance of the course, I was asked to play the high lead - which includes a solo introduction - for arriving guests including several experienced Crafties. I botched it, and Shinkuro was called on to take over for me. That was a painful loss (and my first introduction to one terrifying guitarist.) For the rest of that Summer, I performed the introduction to Eye of the Needle, addressing my fear, but never quite reconciling the confidence I was told it required with the sensitivity I thought it deserved... On Saturday night, I did. And the rest of the group was right behind me. It is a big deal for me to say this: I believe we honored The Eye of the Needle.

We played our full set, and Mark announced our intended encore, Asturias, without any pretense. This was perhaps a mistake, in as much as his brother then demanded an encore (!) and we had nothing in the pocket. We had to end an otherwise coherent performance with a bit of slapstick - our trying to wing Blackjack. (Let's call this version "Crapshoot".) I didn't really mind that so much as this: when we were finished Mark went straight to the board to address a technical matter, and the rest of us followed suit, scrambling like chickens before catching ourselves and reconvening. Gobs of positive energy went *poof* in that instant, for no excusable reason. A (re)learning experience for me.

We cleaned up and the team went off for beers. I wish I could have joined them; I'd have loved to hear the conversation following that show, but I wanted to get home to Tzu. During the drive home I had a very specific feeling - the same one I have when I'm driving home from a Guitar Craft course. Turning on the radio and disturbing my reflection seemed an insult, so I drove home in silence.

Sunday: a day of rest in the truest sense. I wanted to play some electric, actually, but decided against it - the previous day's work had been a bit much for my left, tendonitis-prone wrist. Tzu and I watched movies, did a jigsaw puzzle, played with the critters. Aside from a few dishes, I did pretty much nothing. It rocked. What's amazing is how incredibly productive the weekend was, even having "let go" of Sunday.

And today, so far... Today is one of those days where I wake up feeling perfectly well rested, then an hour later realize I should have stayed in bed another 30 minutes. Yawn.

Many heartfelt thanks.

11/15/05

Data madness at work yesterday, really exhausted me. I left work after hours of frustation, feeling like maybe I had pushed the boundaries of professionalism with my increasing crankiness per all the crappy data structures I've inherited. I felt really disconnected walking away from the office. Other. Then, at a grocery store, one of the employees gave me a generous little smile. I meant to return it, but my face did not cooperate. Instead, my eyes went to the floor and I marched past her. A small kindness shot down by way of autopilot.

Uneventful evening. Tzu in good spirits. Sitting brief but sufficient. Practice with NST electric degenerates into wank-fest and I turn in early.

Walking from house to car this morning, there is a dark complexity in the grey November sky. This and the smell of fallen leaves wet from the morning dew make me very content. As I pull out of the driveway my cat runs into the front yard and looks at me. I roll down the window and tell him to go home. He is really beautiful. Black against the orange leaves. Fitting.

Very productive day at work so far. Much better than yesterday. Secret seems to lie in selectively - and strategically - ignoring things.

11/16/05

Weird thing this morning. I'm driving to work when I notice some roadkill just left of the passing lane on 91S. For a moment I take it as usual, slightly sad but common...then glance back. It's not a raccoon, or a housecat or anything I'm accustomed to seeing. It's a big, white swan. And it's sitting upright, just as it might look floating on the water. Only the stains on the feathers and the vague way the neck sways in the wind indicate death. Very surreal. And oddly disturbing.

New Haven grows increasingly gnarly on a daily basis. There have been several robbings and assaults right outside my office - some in broad daylight, some at gunpoint - and this is a very nice neighborhood by all appearances. On Monday I tried to go to the bank and was turned away by many policemen. If I had to guess, I'd arrived shortly after an attempted robbery. And yesterday someone was shot to death a couple of blocks from here while trying to change a tire. No clue as far as that shooting goes, but for the rest, I'd say we're reaping (or being reaped by) economic trends as sown. Without getting overly political, I must note I'm reminded of how nutty the urban scene became in the early 90's, post-Reaganomics.

11/17/05

The timing of Mark's recent diary entry is uncanny. I was reading through the group's posts before adding my own, and the main point I intended to make was that Havre de Grace has been giving me fits this week - specifically in terms of convincing myself whether various sections begin on upbeats vs. downbeats. I know I've been starting at least one figure improperly - if not more, then only because two similar errors are cancelling one another out. (And if I read Mark's post correctly, he might be about to throw another curve ball.) The challenge: to address this honestly without jeopardizing Sunday's performance.

Some nights Havre de Grace feels like a roadmap of how different Mark's brain is from Marc's brain.

Lots of GC dreams lately. Monday or Tuesday morning, Curt popped in out of the blue, wearing a black ski hat and a salt and pepper beard, and waved with both hands as if to say "go". Clueless as to what this means. (Best guess: I'm anxious about performing on Sunday with TG in the audience.) Last night I dreamed I was on a course. YGP were there as well as, I believe, Victor, and they were showing me a newly "accepted" technique wherein the left thumb was used on the fingerboard just like any other finger, allowing one to reach extremely wide intervals. I was having difficulty with this but everyone assured me I was picking up on it relatively quickly. (This one probably came from my recent observations of my thumb sticking conspicuosly out from behind, and over the top of, the neck, and my briefly considering the possibility - yes, I actually tried this one out - that I just have a long thumb LOL.)

Andy Summers and Benjamin Verdery perform a custom-fitted Ingram Marshall composition tonight. Looking forward to this; wish everyone could join me.

11/18/05

Last night was... full of surprises. I hesitate to commit any more than that to print.

Good news: Guitar Rig v2 proves to have many new and improved sounds, including a beautiful rotary cab (to complement the oddly premature rotary effect) - a sound I've been missing since I retired my POD 2.0.

Big night (YGP in NYC) in 2.

11/21/05

Difficult to be truthful about last night without being negative. I'll start with the positives, then: the club was really quite lovely. A small room, but nicely decorated and lit, with a friendly staff, excellent sound, and a wonderful audience that extended right out into the street by way of large storefront windows. The talent that preceded and followed our set were very impressive.

jefe had very kind words about our own performance, so there is hope that the things going wrong on stage were not entirely apparent to the audience. But it is a sad state of affairs to catch yourself hoping for a disconnect between performer(s) and audience.

Details:

As per every cliche - but I mean it this time - I was playing at 100% the day before the show, and felt more prepared than I've ever felt for any performance. In the morning... hmm. Partly cloudy. I felt comfortable donning the guitar at the club, but our extended false start - six guitarists showing their butts to fifty-or-so Manhattanites - became discouraging.

I have advised before and (yes, I acknowledge that this is little more than a fancy "told ya so" but...) I must advise again that we simplify our sound solution for live performance. The laptop/ Protools rig is capable - the word "overkill" comes to mind - but there is a lack of familiarity that always threatens to burn us, and sometimes does. Dead air and indecision prior to our performance took its toll, I think. If not on the patience of audience and proprietors, than certainly on our own nerves, collectively.

Then, to the actual playing. Last night I recognized a very dangerous mechanism in myself - not malicious, just potentially flawed. If I notice for a moment that the band is playing poorly, this part of me might calculate: "hmm, we are playing at a different level than I had anticipated, perhaps there is margin in which to relax." This isn't giving up; the hope is that if we can not play precisely, perhaps we can play more organically, and in good fun. But the danger lies in the extent to which relaxation might beget collapse. In (my own) inexperienced hands, this is a probability, and a well-meaning mechanism invites us to follow one another off a cliff like lemmings. A better mechanism might indicate, "the band is on shaky ground, prepare for turbulence." i.e. if at all possible muster an additional reserve of attention; you will be needing it. The degree to which this led me to butcher Eye of the Needle, especially, will likely keep me up nights.

I felt a certain necessary energy leave the performance, a coherency leave the group, about halfway into Overture, the first piece. Shortly after, Despair was peeking out from under one of the tables, looking for a fight. I ignored him, mostly, but he followed me home.

Noteworthy: my impression in the regrettably brief time I could spend with the YGP afterwards was that they felt positive about the performance overall. This is already becoming apparent in our journals. If that is so, then perhaps I am judging too harshly, or perhaps the difficulties were more exclusively my own than I was aware. Clearly, this was a privelege and a positive experience, but I think it's important to acknowledge our failings before moving on. I was being kind in saying "it was a little rough", but the main point stands - we should do this again as soon as possible.

Things to learn: almost like a corollary to our failure to leave the stage as a group last week, I saw the impact of our not taking the stage as a group last night. We didn't have the luxury of a green room, or even a pocket in the audience big enough for all of us to stand together. But finding some means of acknowledging one another as a group - even standing on the sidewalk for a moment if necessary - would have been very helpful.

Good drive home with jef. We rarely speak in such depth. But arriving home, the theme of the evening persisted: things weren't quite what they could have been (if you will allow for this philosophical breach.)

11/22/05

Reading other journal entries about Sunday continues to inform. I concur with Alex's read on the audience, among other things. Tim's account is touching, and makes me conscious of the extent to which the rest of the team were affected by playing a "home game". By contrast, my own account of the experience seems nearly mercenary.

On this end, the impact of playing an away game, and the subsequent late night, have taken a toll. No help that "turning in early" last night somehow translated to 1AM. I'm tired, working at decreased capacity. There is a damp chill in the air today and I'm getting a nasty cough to go along with the theme. For two days now I've slept past "I'll sit after work" time and well into "I have no intention of being to the office on time" time. Indeed, yesterday, no sitting at all. I needed a day of rest from all things guitar and Guitar Craft, and took it.

Not sure what tonight will hold. I've had a lot of interesting half-ideas in my head - including a new piece for the YGP - which I needed to put on ice until after Rockwood. But then there is the eternal race against fatigue, and the clock.

11/23/05

A dinner outing for Mike's birthday consumed most of last night. This, and Thanksgiving beginning a week early with sister-in-law's visit, have unmade much of my recent dieting progress. But I am hopeful that weight gained quickly will be weight lost quickly.

Tzu cranky suddenly and without apparent cause this morning, but I must credit her: she warned me last night that this would be coming.

Long weekend is just about here, and I hope... pray even... for the time and the right kind of energy to dig into some creative projects. However a list of chores, plans, and things less tangible is already chipping away at the opportunity available.

11/28/05

Days since I've written. I am not generally inclined to write to a journal at home w/ Tzu in close proximity. Nothing sinister in this; it's just uncomfortable to engage in something so introspective while sharing a small space with someone else. And this weekend in particular, I never had a moment to turn the PC on.

Thanksgiving was enjoyable. Wednesday night was something like a recovery from the exhaustion incurred early in the week, Thursday a day of cooking and eating and playing games with family. Then the weekend became a blur:

Tzu's piano is on the way, soon, date TBD. So our little house will get littler and I must return to the dank pit (basement) from wence I came. Best to make it slightly less dank first. I've been doing this in stages since I moved in, and this time it really needs to be done right. So for three days I drove stuff to the dump, pried rotting cabinets out of concrete, scrubbed walls, and painted. I very nearly got a carpet in last night but couldn't arrange for a truck fast enough. Tonight, then. Proper walls will have to come later, backwards as that may be... I desperately need the floorspace back, now.

As a musician, it seems I am forever preparing to prepare. As I dig deeper into middle age this is sometimes grounds for despair. But these past days I've been good with it - I realize that I enjoy preparation, even if it is a couple of steps removed from the craft I aspire toward.

So I'm tired, sore, getting sick... but soon we'll have plenty of space; this new room will be the biggest in the house. One sacrifice has been a breach from my "internal architecture" - I confess that I haven't played guitar since Wednesday. That changes tonight.

My condolences to Tim and his family.

11/29/05

Yesterday I read about a guy who was hospitalized after leaning out over a train track looking for a train... and finding one... with his head. The most amazing thing, excepting his survival, is that this was the second time this had happened to him. So much for learning from your mistakes? Consider: on Sunday night I got high-temp paint all over my face while spraying some hot water pipes. Scrubbing it off, I counted myself lucky, recognizing that I should have been wearing goggles. Last night I finished the job, and afterwards, as I looked up at my work, a huge dollop of the stuff fell directly into my right eye. No goggles. I spent the next 30 minutes nearly gouging my eyes out trying to get the paint off, praying I wouldn't end up in an emergency room over something so stupid. Now I look like I was in a bar fight.

The whole night was like that - me making haste making waste. Carpet transport fell through again, so I finished painting stairs. Suddenly it was 12:30AM, game over. I was wrong about last night ending my dry spell with the guitar. I have a tendency to fixate on tasks I know I can bring to completion, even if they aren't the most important tasks on hand.

Slept from 1AM to 3AM, stayed awake the rest of the night, mind racing. Floor plans, brush strokes, framing options... No two ways about it - I've become overtired and overstimulated by this basement project. Never a good thing.

12/01/05

I'm still dug into the underground deconstruction/ reconstruction project, but very close to surfacing now. I finally got the carpeting home Tuesday, and I remarked in an off-hand way that the right thing would be to pull the old, ca. 1950, rotting ceiling down before installing the carpet. "Off-hand" meaning I had no clear intention of taking my own advice. I really wanted the room back ASAP - nevermind if some backtracking or heavy cleaning would be incurred. I've seen smaller endeavors fail on account of scope-creep.

Well... Tzu finally talked me into pulling the ceiling down first, God bless her. It was the smart way, the efficient way, as I said myself, the "right" way. And, God bless her, she insisted I wear eye protection, a mask, gloves and long sleeves, whereas I was going to just grab my crowbar and get at it. When the first wave of mid-20th century horrors came crashing down on top of me, I was grateful to be a married man.

Last night I got the carpet installed despite worsening flu symptoms. Stupid maybe, but it's hard to sleep with something this invasive half-finished and impacting so much of the house. Tonight I'll push some furniture around and this will be done, and I can resume with normalcy. In fact, I hope to resume with significant improvement: a big clean room for practice, creative work, and quiet sittings.

The cats had better not shit on my rug. :)

12/02/05

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, nearing the end of a seemingly perfunctory practice session. I'm a few bars into Eye of the Needle, when I recognize many layers of unnecessary processing going on: very cerebral counting, anticipation of changes, calculations pertaining to other harmonies... as if I were still trying to learn this piece which I've been playing for over 15 years. All at once this thinking lifts like a blanket and I'm just playing the song - effortless, confident. And strangest of all, mistakes aren't something to be avoided; they're just outside the scope of this sort of playing altogether.

How many other songs have I buried in excessive, habitual, learning processes? Can I experience this new feeling again? How soon? How consistently?

Basement is complete from a functional perspective. A new ceiling would be a good cosmetic measure, and sound treatment is probably in order for the painted, concrete walls, but I am ready to move in and start making big sounds. I think this might be a real turning point for me. My gear has been working to my (sometimes peculiar) satisfaction for a couple of years now, and now I have a suitable space in which to open it all up a bit. Command central.

It is probably somewhat foretelling though, that Tzu is already impatient with the amount of time I've spent working on the basement, let alone the amount of time I intend to spend working in it. Earnest work on the marriage is pre-requisite to any other undertaking.

12/05/05

Another weekend of hard physical work. Two more trips to the dump (for the most part, a ceiling, and a pile of cabinets, respectively) and that was just the beginning. Flu or whatever this is still hanging on, unsurprisingly.

As usual, I forgot to take a "before" photo, but a shot of the opposite half of the basement puts us in the ballpark:

Before:

Actually, the "studio" side was worse, thanks to "features" like old cabinets nail gunned to the walls, and a sheet rock ceiling from 1950-ish collecting insect carcasses and rotting from the inside, rusting the heads off about 3000 nails. I pried everything down, scrubbed and painted floor and walls, tore the ceiling out, took 5 trips to the dump, and carpeted... and now I've got about 40 sq. yds to make noise in! It's just a basement, after all, but I am very excited. Also, very, very sore.

After:

(Bonus: Whereas I was getting estimates between $5K and $10K to do it "right" - sheet rock, etc - so far I'm in a mere $600 and I've lost about 10 lbs!)

Sunday - decorating Christmas tree with Tzu, CGT playing Christmas music, Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale (just one, in deference to the Flu...) Much to be grateful for.

12/06/05

Sitting on the new basement carpet is rather cushy compared with the hardwood floor in the living room. Maybe too much so, or that's what I foresee thinking on my next GC course featuring a cold, hard floor. My feet manage to fall asleep just the same.

Dragged an old sleeper sofa out of the living room last night. T-2 days to the return of one Steinway grand to it's rightful heir. Hurrah!

Right hand work w/ the acoustic. Then, preparing to set up a neglected electric, I cut same hand reaching into a tool drawer - right where the pick meets the index finger, and deep. Not much electric practice, therefore, which is OK since the set up took about an hour longer than I'd anticipated. Now I remember why I stopped using Floyds.

12/07/05

Not much to say today. El jefe has lined up a promising bass player for the Means, but this begs the question: just how promising are the Means? "Assuming the Virtue" was a big leap for me back when, and now we're starting all over. Positive spin: skills have been considerably refined in the preceding two years, primarily via work with the YGP.

12/09/05

Rough time getting out of bed this morning. Illness seems to be making a comeback. An unexpected one, in as much as I've finally been slowing down with the back-breaking work.

Took a day off from the day job yesterday to oversee the arrival of Tzu's piano, but due to snow the drivers did not make it. Instead they came today, right after I'd left for work. Tzu has an early Christmas gift, and anything I could possibly add to this would be a stocking stuffer by comparison. (Not the most flattering photo; I will replace it for posterity ASAP.)

Best part - it sits right over my studio. I can drop an XLR cable through the floor where the TV signal used to be routed... should she ever allow me to record her.

Sitting last night was distracted. Acoustic practice was very good, and followed by a lot of practice with electric and vocals. Very specific, directed work in preparation for the arrival of a Means bass candidate. For instance, after about 30 minutes I could count to 4, 4 times, while singing, "that's something too unreal." 10 points if you can tell me why, by way of a song title. :)

Weird moment yesterday: I'm in line with Tzu at a Walmart when I realize that the guy at the register was a childhood acquaintance. (I might have called him a friend then; as a child I was less careful with that word.) I never considered how consistently the clerks at these big stores are strangers. Suddenly the divide seemed enormous. He looked much older than I imagine myself looking - how much of this is perception? I said, "hi Alex, how have you been", but perhaps too quietly. He didn't respond, didn't hear me? Did he recognize me? Many other implicit calculations: Would I embarass him? Hold up the line? Invite a new friendship that is perhaps too arbitrary or demanding?

He looked so quiet, gentle... beaten. I did not envy his fate, however common. I told Tzu about him on the way to the car: in grade school he actually kicked my ass once, for next to no reason. Not terribly bright, but he was one tough son of a bitch.

12/12/05

Did I leave the house even once this weekend? Wow. I don't think I did.

Exhausted by the time I left work on Friday. Straight to bed, with neither sitting nor practice. The euphemism for this is "the Dynamic Day Off", as in "this will have been my day off (despite no prior intention having been established.)" Per intention, however, I made up for this on Sunday, my proper day off.

Guitar work for the weekend primarily centered on Moving Force. (On the way home from work Friday, I had discovered a radio station playing this, and several other RF & LoCG recordings!) Prescribed tempo for this is (relative to my competence) just shy of insane. But by Saturday night there were signs of hope. Bar 17 presents a key, of sorts, for unlocking the on-again, off-again feel of the melody against the down beats. Also, some progress with Spilt (Sunlight? Name TBD), 2nd song of the not-so-quickly developing Means rep.

Notes: 1. Low-budget action flicks ca. 1974 are really difficult to watch. Gone in 60 Seconds, the original... almost unbearable (no matter what my neighbor may tell you.) And how embarassing is this - I didn't actually understand it. (Perhaps the remake would clarify, but I don't expect I'd like it much better.) 2. Humidifiers are not to be trusted. One, and then incredibly, another, set up to humidify the piano room, also peed on and through the living room floor, the water predictably finding its way to my desk, its contents, the brand new carpet beneath. I believe the correct terminology is "hairy conniption".

12/13/05

Grinding, annoying day of work. May the evening hold something better.

12/15/05

Since I last wrote:

Acquired a functional (thus far) humidifier, to prevent death of Steinway without destroying every other bit of musical gear in the house by way of flooding.

Sittings continue to be more distracted than usual. I notice that my feet fall asleep sooner and more painfully if I'm not wearing socks. I imagine this means either that the cold air exacerbates my poor circulation, or that I'm pinching an artery very close to the surface of my feet. That's just what cause and effect give me, I'm no physician...

Practice for the last couple of nights focused on Means songs. And last night new bassist Tim arrived. Very nice fellow, extremely easy to work with. Best of all, jef has worked with him before and really likes his approach, so in turns we all become easier to work with. In the absence of a second high voice in the tuned instruments we necessarily lose some things, but I think we gain something more important - primarily in the synergy between Tim and jef. Not entirely clear on the degree of Tim's enthusiasm or whether he will stay on board, but if he does this is a hopeful arrangement, I think.

For my part, I was pleased to find a new ease in working with others in a rock/ electric context. Progress best described by the Sex Pistols: "I know what I want and I know how to get it." All night long, when something seemed amiss, I could string a few sentences together for the others and get things quickly back on track. This is largely to their credit, obviously, but for me it's new. I owe much to the YGP and others for helping me learn how to learn these past few years.

Means, meanwhile, seems to be the right thing for the right reason this time. I'm older, married, I've got nothing to prove at this point - or at least no reason to try to prove it. Just three guys (so far) having fun.

So cold it pains my teeth to breathe, and the back of my left hand is dry, cracked, and bleeding. I can't imagine how the homeless survive this weather. I notice the wandering panhandlers are absent, but there is one fellow who is sufficiently out of sorts, I think I'll walk out of my way tonight to give him a little something. Poor Tzu slipped on the ice and hurt her hand just days after the arrival of her piano - plainly she's married into Marc karma now. Recovering quickly though.

Accepted to April's L2.5.

12/16/05

A wet morning, but with the snow and rain, mercifully, comes higher temperatures and a little humidity (my new obsession.)

The especially needy person that popped into my head yesterday was not at his usual post last night. I had a mind to give him my hat and gloves if he didn't have any of his own (the dollar I'd stuffed in my pocket seeming nearly pointless.) As it happened, no one was on the streets of New Haven but the business folk marching to their suburban cars and urban apartments. I hope the rest had found shelter and were being good to each other there. The homeless I have known consistently express a reluctance to spend the night in shelters for fear of one another. Tragic.

Practice last night: back to the YGP rep so as to falter as little as possible tomorrow. Sitting this morning: mind a scattered mess - still too connected with worldly trivialities in the wake of my efforts at home. Body: good excepting the feet, which are tingling within 20 minutes, even in socks.

My new favorite place on the Wild Wacky Web, just edging out GuitarShredShow.com: MusicThing. In turns interesting, informative, inspiring, hysterical.

12/19/05

When I got home on Friday night el jefe was there, visiting with Tzu and her sister. He had stopped in to pick up my copy of the BFD demo, and was invited to stay. We practiced a little bit together but the evening was more focused on social interaction.

Saturday - a good meeting with 4 of the YGP.

Saturday night a very difficult energy arises for no commensurate reason (in fact it is this absense of reason that most characterizes the difficulty, for me) and does not let go until Sunday night. By then I am very tired. I'm still very tired today.

12/20/05

Is it the weather, or is it the end-game from my recent tangle with the "flu-or-whatever"? (I still don't know the difference between the flu and any other cold, when you come right down to it.) Anyway, for days now, despite the absence of any other symptoms, I am overwhelmed with fatigue by about 2PM.

Gave a presentation to my co-workers this morning and was well-received. Equal parts show-biz and nerdery.

Christmas cometh. It seemed like I had the bulk of it sorted out well in advance, but as usual I come to the final days with several i's to dot, etc. Workplace has taken on a chummy, coasting feel already, eased into the holiday via a staff meeting today, a party tomorrow, and another one the day after. And to recover from all this hard work? A long weekend! Not that I'm complaining.

12/21/05

As "the Means Mark II, a Jazz Odyssey" (should I just rename the band "Puppet Show"?) becomes a hopeful probability, I struggle to avoid becoming tech support for the lot of us. If the drummer wants to use a PC-based sampler I should, ideally, be no more responsible for this than I would have been responsible for tuning his snare head. If a couple guys with day jobs can't be self-sufficient in making their respective noises after work, then our possibilities are significantly diminished.

So here I am once more - between the rock of teaching a man to fish and the hard place of providing all the fish. Sigh. Let's start with VST. No, back up, let's start with MIDI. No wait, have you installed an audio driver? Crikey. This is "Windows"... And it occurs to me, are you taking notes, or are you too busy eating fish? Maybe I've been a lazy teacher and fried them up myself? Maybe my best approach is to pretend I can't fish, so you will learn how to find a better teacher, or to better teach yourself.

Which one of us will get hungry first, that's always the question...

Grateful for musicians to make music with, but my tendency for crankiness is being tried. And for this, technology is the perfect catalyst.

Practice last night gets off to a very slow start. Preparation for rehearsal tonight => setting up electric gear => fiddling with a scratchy pot on a guitar => searching for tools => shite is it already 11PM? => run through a couple of songs and call it a night. Computers needn't be the aforementioned catalyst; any old technology will do. Last night the search for a Phillips head screwdriver almost did me in.

12/22/05

2nd sleepless night in a row. (Was my journal entry yesterday slightly testy and/or petty? Oops.) Tzu has a pulled muscle keeping her up, and subsequent caffeine-induced insomnia. The latter is catching. She settles in just as cats start scratching at the windows. I let them in and chinchillas and hamster start crashing about loudly in their cages. Close the bedroom door... and other cats start scratching to get out. Oy, maybe we need a bigger ark?

Means rehearsal was really fun last night, despite getting off to a slow start. Untimely technical challenges accrued until I finally decided to abandon recording, and all was well thereafter. Tim showed first unmistakable signs of enthusiasm over the latest song, Spilt. He compares this with Corrosion of Conformity, a band I've never heard. It makes me think of the Melvins, actually. Anyway, some good moments musically, and a lot of laughs.

Interesting moment, highlighting the way things come to have changed: Tim asks me whether I'm an anti-guitar-solo guy, since I've presented 3 songs and the only solos are the ones I've asked him to improvise on bass. Ironic that I love guitar solos, much more ironic that for my first 20 years with the guitar, playing a solo was all I knew how to do. In considering the question I find 2 answers: First, I'm more interested in writing songs at the moment, and if I'm working alone and I stop to solo, the song goes away. Second, I'm writing in NST for the most part now, and when I stop to think about it, I've never really learned to solo or improvise competently in this tuning. (Refer to exhibit A: the 2nd solo of Columbia at YGP's Rockwood Music Hall gig last month...)

Totally random aside concerning the way things change: I've noticed a change in the way Americans are using the word "anymore". I first heard it from my brother, visiting from NC, and took it to be a Southern thing. But more and more I hear Yankees doing this, too. Used to be (and I'm talking 30-odd years, without exception) you'd only hear "anymore" used to modify a negative statement:

"We never go out anymore."

But now, I hear such as:

"We always stay at home anymore."

Neither are grammatically incorrect, but for some reason my brain bends when I hear or read the latter.

edit: Well, what do you know, I just found this:

"Although both anymore and any more are found in written use, in the 20th century anymore is the more common styling. Anymore is regularly used in negative , interrogative , and conditional contexts and in certain positive constructions . In many regions of the U.S. the use of anymore in sense 2 is quite common in positive constructions, especially in speech . The positive use appears to have been of Midland origin, but it is now reported to be widespread in all speech areas of the U.S. except New England."

It seems Merriam-Webster is as tedious, or as bored, as I am.

12/27/05

Hmm, I believe "neither are grammatically incorrect" may be grammatically incorrect. But moving along...

Resuming sitting and practicing today after a couple of days off. This morning's sitting presented an extended moment of deep silence and stillness, very satisfying. On the floor, trying to will a little bloodflow or consciousness into the feet, and suddenly it is as if the whole world had turned to stone. Cool, breathing stone.

I'm off from work until Thursday, so I'll likely spend today haranging tech support here and there about the shiny new problems... er, music software I got for Christmas. First, off to do some important international banking...

12/28/05

Toying with the idea of deleting half of yesterday's entry. The last thing The Act of Doing Nothing needs is a sportscaster.

Practice with the YGP HVFG DVD today. Then, wrestle with Guitar Rig 2. Just on the edge of making this thing useful, but never quite there.

12/29/05

One day work week this week. Mercifully compatible with my marginal health. Not necessarily compatible with band practice tonight, but I'm looking forward to that just the same. Will Guitar Rig, having achieved a gimpy, half-functional relationship with a MIDI pedal, limp along with us? I'll try to be optimistic...

01/03/06

2006, so far, does not seem to agree with me. Maybe that's not the most accurate assessment, since I actually started falling apart late in '05.

Around Christmas I noticed what felt like a scratch on the roof of my mouth, which made it extremely painful to eat. (But don't worry about me wasting away: a little irony being that ice cream and mac & cheese go down just fine.) Anyway, this thing would not heal, and just as I realized it must be infection, it leapt to the back of my mouth and throat. I saw a doctor on New Year's Eve, but all cultures came back negative, and I had to go home with nothing but a recommendation that I rinse with saltwater. A couple of Vicodin's got me through the party I should have cancelled. Between inclement weather and poor health all around, only two of our guests showed. I'd have done more good in bed, in retrospect, but our little gathering was fun after all.

Anyway, I've been bedridden since then. The deciding factor in my actually coming to work today: my doctor is located a block from here. I imagine this appointment will be as useful as the last, but it will comfort Tzu at least. And then I can get back to bed. Hoping to resume practice, and a proper diet, within a day or two.

01/04/05

According to my physician, the sore throat I described yesterday is actually an absess near one of my wisdom teeth, combined with the pain of severely swollen glands. Just days ago, I passed by a deadline having opted out of dental insurance. Splendid. The pain is a dull annoyance during the day, but is significantly worse at night. Not least, it prevents me from sleeping.

I'm in pretty good shape overall, for a person in pain running on about 3hrs shut-eye. But I did let someone on one of the internet forums I frequent ruffle my feathers today. Whether I was justified or not, I'm a little embarassed to have given a damn.

Off to the dentist in a minute. (She's already alluding to oral surgeons, oy.) Then, if she hasn't done too much damage, the Means will converge in my basement. First guitar playing in several days.

01/05/05

So, yesterday... I arrive at the dentist's office, sit in the chair. The assistant begins cleaning tools, preparing x-ray slides, discussing this and that. Finally I ask, "do you think there's any chance of cleaning out the absess and letting this heal on its own." She looks at me like I'm an idiot and says, "oh, you're going to have to have your wisdom teeth out." I don't know what bothers me more, that she'd drawn this conclusion without so much as looking in my mouth, or that she wouldn't have bothered to inform me if I hadn't pressed the point...

Finally my dentist arrives. She's got a real can-do attitude and an excellent history of actually listening to my opinion. She decides to clean the infection and remove some soft tissue with a laser (Oralaser, how clever...) and minutes later, it's done. She tells me I'll probably keep this tooth for the rest of my life. I leave a few hundred bucks lighter but very happy.

Last night, rest, and the first practice in some time. Primaries, Overture (noticing that my fingering for Overture doesn't feel as effective as I remembered it.) Just barely sufficient, if that.

In bed last night, I find I'm more preoccupied with yesterday's public irritability on the internet than with the pain in my head. A blip within a blip within a blip (if that.) Meanwhile, on the news, footage of families of 12 dead coal miners, recently misled about their fate.

Feeling off today.

12/09/05

I have so much to write today, but Heisenberg pays a visit: there is an audience here and I am not entirely confident in my words. So maybe best to let them sit for a while. And maybe tomorrow they'll be right, and maybe tomorrow they won't be necessary at all.

01/10/05

Went to NYC to see the Les Paul Trio at Iridium last night. A wonderful time - venue, food, music, and not least the musicians themselves. A lovely audience, even. The entire night was a charm, until I got back to New Haven and found my car locked behind a gate. The garage's hours were posted on the gate itself - ordinarily drawn up and out of sight. Am I the only one who sees the irony in this?

I slept briefly on the couch of the friend who'd accompanied me to NYC, then recovered the car, drove home to shower, returned to New Haven for a very odd day of work.

The jury is still out as to whether yesterday's nearly public musings remain necessary, but I do know that I'm not up to crafting the words right now. I'm exhausted.

01/11/06

Rested. Feel for the first time in 06 like post-holiday normalcy has been achieved. And look, I've been using "05" in my January subject lines to date. A "12" even. This can't have been a good sign.

The much-debated words seem unnecessary now. My sense is to move forward. A good sense in general, accompanied with a very good feeling.

Fatal bird flu outbreak in Turkey. God has a sense of humor?

01/12/06

Checking the date and time, 2:12 confuses me for a moment. Did it become February already?? This can't be a good sign either.

Interesting Means session last night. El jefe insists on our taking up Asturias. The old Means played a pretty cool version of this, actually. But with only a guitar, a bass and drums, much faith is required - that perhaps the spirit of this music will make itself known through even the barest sketch - especially so during the Clouds. Deeply concerned when jef asks Tim about his impressions, and Tim begins, "it's an OK song, but..." The "but" that follows, expressing technical difficulties, is not the concern. If Asturias is reduced to "an OK song" by anyone's accounting, I'd rather not be playing it. Time will tell. Meanwhile, let's move on to a Black Sabbath cover, which seems to fit the ensemble better.

An effective schedule is set in motion this morning, despite - what is this? A cold? A 2-beer hangover? Something.

Tonight, I hope to spend more time with my wife than has recently been available.

01/13/06

Home last night, I reconfigure some music gear to facilitate reamping through the Vetta. This involves some comprimises per unforeseen limitations with my audio interface, but nothing significant. More significant: I have to turn my back on the pursuit of a unified Guitar Rig-based solution for the moment. It simply doesn't work in too many clever ways. Too bad, it's much more in keeping with my lingering ideal of getting any imaginable timbre from a guitar and a laptop.

A very humble dinner with Tzu - sandwiches and Fritos in front of a movie called "Kingdom of Heaven". We watched this in two halves separated by over a week, so I am hard-pressed to say whether I liked the movie or not. The first half hadn't grabbed me; the second half presented a bit more but seemed a little too conscious of it's own agenda, and the degree to which that agenda might be topical for the present-day viewer. (Not sure why I'm compelled to review a movie I didn't even watch, properly.)

Then, back to the basement to confirm my new Vetta setup hadn't fallen apart like a house of cards - hurrah, it hadn't! (Funny that reamping a digital modeling amp via SPDIF interface is low-tech for me. It's all relative I guess.) Then practice. Some new scale exercises I've been working on to extend my range on the first and second strings in NST. Then, Squeaky, Havre, and Growing Circle with metronome. I hear a new and more musical relationship between the metronome and the melodies of Havre, but otherwise I play like hell. I return to the bedroom with a sore right arm and slightly sullen attitude. Sleep.

This morning, listening to a delay-heavy RF track, I think that it's time I explore all of the technology at my disposal as part of the music I'm working on, rather than as a mere vehicle for the music. Not sure whether this will have been a constructive idea, but documenting it here seems appropriate.

01/16/05

Monday, Martin Luther King day. A day off from professional work. A day spent largely fiddling about with music toys in the basement. By 3PM I'm nearly done with el jefe's homework... will there be time for my own? Shouldn't complain though; excepting a few spikes of frustration, I enjoy this sort of work.

* * *

Interesting that I made the point about integrating music technology in a more musical capacity on Friday. I got home and installed new firmware into the Variax that same night and - amazing - it improved the guitar markedly. You've got to hand it to Line 6: love their products or hate them, they are really great with advancing their tech via free upgrades. Roland, by contrast, frequently hype ugradability only to play absentee landlord after the first revision. Anyhow - there is renewed hope of playing sets in both OST and NST with one guitar. (Of course, being properly prepared with a backup plan for such a guitar would probably necessitate... 2 others. Sigh.)

Saturday. Sitting, breakfasting, cleaning rodent cages, taking it slowly, then off to Y to rehearse and perform with the YGP. The performance was one of significant quality, and in unexpected ways. We were not the feature as I had (foolishly) presumed. This was for the best, as I would likely (and more foolishly) have opted out of commuting to perform 2-3 songs. Technical problems arose like clockwork and I subbed in on sound using the little Mackie board I'd brought along (just in case...) This wasn't particularly challenging, but I felt something special in trying to bring quality to this, and to acting as an audient, for the other performers. I couldn't help but think of all the nights I'd have given anything that someone behind a mixer a) knew how to use it, and b) cared enough to stand by, listen, and do so. When the YGP finally performed, something in the music indicated that we were receiving help, and I felt the more receptive in knowing that I'd helped the musicians and music that preceded ours.

This church... really likes Eye of the Needle. I had very positive words for the experience of playing it there in November. Saturday night we performed the loveliest rendition of Eye of the Needle I have ever heard, recorded or live. Subjectivity and limited experience are in full effect, of course, but this observation carries considerable weight. Afterward, grasping for words, I said, "It came from above," but it feels truer to say that it came from everywhere.

As soon as we took stage we were informed that it was snowing heavily. I decided not to fret (ba-dum!) - wavering in the commitment to perform would not make the drive any easier. Later, we helped clean up, said our goodbyes to a fine gathering of players and listeners (enough talent on hand that I fought with tears twice) and Tim and I left for the train station. A good conversation about the direction and condition of the YGP, before the too-long drive home to Tzu.

Sunday, a day off.

01/17/06

Frustration. Unexpected demands on my time require that I dig into vacation hours, and on conspicuously short notice. Complicating this, the near-empty gas tank I arrived home with on Saturday night, and the extreme cold since, prevent the car from starting this morning. I arrive to work late, only to ask that I leave early. Again. And by the way, I'll need a half-day on Thursday... Oy. Feeling a little squeezed.

01/18/06

Since yesterday: something feels wrong. The "post-holiday normalcy" I thought I'd regained last week has faltered. Every word and act is met with a vague - and lingering - sense of unease. Total exhaustion is the rule, but I don't know why.

Funeral and Minyan/Shiva last night. I leave feeling very awkward. At home, finally, sleep is very attractive but first I have to repair the broken faucet, and practice.

Tonight - Means, and housework as time permits. A very bad smell has filled the first floor - we finally realized today that we hadn't applied the bedding properly in the Chinchilla cage when we cleaned it on Saturday. I can now tell you from experience that this is a very, very big mistake.

Later tonight - try to sleep fast enough to get through work, a dentist appt. and a YGP performance in NYC tomorrow night.

01/19/05

Rushed home last night, washed the dishes, cleaned the stinky chinch cage. Routed a bunch of cables through the ceiling to minimize distracting inter-Means clutter. As always, forgot that the two ends of XLR cables are not the same. As always, got every one of them backwards. Repeat.

Means practice gets off to a very promising start. Trace sounds warm and musical. The little Flextone's dark timbre seems to agree with this piece more than the Vetta does. But the Flextone has trouble keeping up with the more raucous Junkie Stir and Spilt. Something goes weird with my vocal mic and by the middle of the session I'm killing my voice screaming over the band. At close I ask that we run the set proposed for Monday night - straight through, good or bad, making saves as necessary. Just before we begin, el jefe gets antsy about the time, vaguely indicating that we have 5 minutes in which to perform ~15 minutes of music. At the same time, I crank up my mic, adding all sorts of latency to the mix which I was previously unaware of. The run was pretty lame, but the good news is I got exactly what I asked for: an indication of what we'll sound like under the gun - ie. typical performance circumstances.

Cleanup, sandwich, bed, rise, sit (now I remember, rock band=tinitus), back to the office. Yesterday's undercurrent of dread (yes, that is the right word) is slowly lifting.

Now - to a dentist appt, home to gather guitar, train to NYC.

01/20/06

I wrote a very, very... very long journal entry concerning last night's performance and my adventures in getting there. But reading it back I wonder, am I really that interesting? Gut says no.

Much more briefly: I think we played quite well. There was very little - if any - magic in the air, but I could explain this in a dozen ways. To be able to play this competently under less than ideal circumstances is, in my estimation, a good achievement. I don't think we performed especially well, in so far as we have yet to develop a comfortable, coherent stage presence of any kind.

Sincere apologies to the YGP for my late (nearly too late) arrival. (Much more verbiage available on request.)

01/23/06

Excepting the professional routine, Friday became my Dynamic Day Off. Thursday's adventure left me in a condition unfit for any alternative, and Sunday was not destined to be a day of rest anyway. (Thursday's adventure had another interesting effect - the onset of grey hair. I have read about people's hair turning white suddenly in times of duress. Well, after my rapid sequence of stupidity, rage and depression at the train station, I noticed some brand new white hairs in the morning. Today, I sense an overall greyness. I give it 2 years...)

Friday night, a film called 2046. I'd looked forward to this movie, and there is a lot to like about it - fantastic visuals, some very good acting (Zhang Ziyi) - but taken as a whole I give it a thumbs down. Extremely tenuous metaphors, sense of composition unclear, if existent. Pretentious, heavy-handed. (Not unlike a daily journal interspersed with random, opinionated film reviews...) Then the History Channel got its hooks in me. Liberia, 1996, among the scariest (factual) stuff I've ever seen. Keeps me up til 3.

Saturday, slept very, very late. Sat, ate, shopped, practiced (enough to realize the left wrist is still broken, and less is more in a very obvious sense), and the day was gone. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" in the evening. (Did I just admit to this, in writing?) The opposite of pretentious. Silly stuff, but Pitt is always good for a one-liner or two.

Sunday, rise late, shower, coffee, sit (caffeinated, uncool), laundry, pack for New York, eat too much Spinach Pie, depart - collecting el jefe and wife Beata on the way.

Last night was a considerable improvement over our first appearance at Rockwood. Overall, I had the same sense as at Coda - we played competently under less than ideal circumstances. But here again the audience and staff were much warmer. As at Coda there was very little in the way of Magic, at least so far as I was available to it, but in this instance I could offer a single explanation, in a single word: tone.

Sound check was not as smooth as it should have been, because we were not clear on the amount of time available, and because we hadn't established a good method for working/ communicating with the soundman. Somewhat forgivable in the confines of this tiny venue, amidst so many acts, but the end result was that our tone was lacking. We achieved better tone, essentially by mistake, on our last visit. Last night there was not only the familiar threat of bass feedback, but worse, a boxy midrange hump - the infamous "plastic" Ovation sound which is, in fact, quite easy to EQ out of a mix. But the soundman did not take the liberty, and I hadn't done anything preventative with our own mixer. If anything the cascade of one mixer to another exacerbated the problem. I think if we'd been able to get a little more sheen from our EQ, we could have coaxed some real magic out of the air. As it was, there were occasional glimmers. I think the entire group would do well to become more intimate with the EQs onboard our guitars, in order to be able to compensate for this during the course of a performance, to whatever degree possible. I cut my mids a bit, but didn't realize until Asturias that I'd cut my lows too much in the process. I also advised that everyone turn down a hair, as I've found this to reduce boominess and get a little more chime/headroom out of the Ovations, but word only got as far as Kevin, who joked with the audience as if it were a personal matter. (Both the joke and turning down were effective IMO.)

For my own part, I got lost during the intro of Havre, for the first time in weeks. My bearings here are still too tenuous. And, breaking my own heart, I botched the bass line coming out of the clouds in Asturias. Asturias runs plenty deep, but complacency and distraction make for a deadly cocktail.

The most signficant moment in the performance, for me, came unexpectedly in the last measure of Columbia. It faded sooner than usual, and typically we would have repeated the figure again, but the right time and dynamic for the conclusion presented itself, and the entire group was aware, and responded. A small but very musical event. Additionally, Beata cited Reunion as her favorite piece in the set. Alex's contribution to the YGP continues to resonate.

Two competent performances in NYC in one week. Less hair and fewer amplifiers than anticipated... but this is the stuff my dreams are made of.

The YGP depart for Chinese. I stay and have a drink with the friends I'd arrived with, and still more who'd dropped in. Home to my wife by 10:15PM.

9 minutes late to my sitting this morning. Best not to be subsequently late to everything else today - esp. with ice on the roads - so acknowledge as much and move on. On the way to work I am considering tonight's gig at a joint called "Martini's", when a truck pulls in front of me with "Martini, Inc" painted on the back. I look closer and it turns out Martini, Inc is in a place called "Drums, PA". That's worth a laugh. maps.google.com, when provided with Drums, PA, puts a place called "Can Do Corporate Center" in the middle of my screen. FWIW.

I got to work, sang a 440, picked up the fork on my desk and confirmed it was correct. Not an exercise I've done in a while; I was happily surprised. I generally take success with this as indicative that I am in a good place. Let's see how I fare at the end of the day.

"the Means '05" (06? Mk II a Jazz Odyssey?) perform in public for the first time tonight. The schedule on the venue's website could not be more terrifying:

Front Room - Monday Night Football (9:00 - Close)

Back Room - Acoustic Jam (9:30 - Close)

That's 0 for 2. Pray for us.

01/24/06

Home last night. Wash dishes, shower, clean a litter box, run the set. All of these were good ways to prepare for performance, except perhaps running the set. I had considerable difficulty playing these now-familiar pieces, and began to focus on the possibility that I'd lose my way.

Mark is very timely in quoting RF last night:

"'Distrust the musician.' All they can say at the end of a performance is if they've liked it or not. They can't say if it's good or not."

So, I will temper my language: I really disliked the Means performance last night. It began quite nicely, with an improvised intro to Trace that was timbrally (per Merriam-Webster, not a word) and compositionally sound, but immediately into the body of the song, I lost track of my guitar's whereabouts, crosspicking across the wrong strings for a couple of bars and struggling to sing over the top of the ensuing racket. It went downhill from there... Trace at least held form; Junkie Stir, and even moreso Spilt became prolonged exercises in noise-making. In both cases, we suffered for not having checked sound at sufficient volume. jefe could not hear my guitar; I could hear neither my guitar (sufficiently) nor my voice (at all.) Some poor playing on my part, and some overplaying on el jefe's part (something like autopilot set in for Spilt) pretty much had us along for a ride.

The audience was patient, and the staff very kind - treating us like guests of honor (their own words) even after the three songs described above had... happened to them. They invited us to play an encore so we played You Won't Change Me. Turning up the guitar amp per jefe's advice helped this song considerably.

I am taken by the disparity between performing (essentially) acoustic music with the YGP and performing electric music with the Means. "Going loud" in public is just as I remember it - extremely difficult. The number and depth of variables are staggering. I also become conscious of a fundamental difference in character and function between these two musics, at least as they exist presently: the acoustic music is moving toward a place where it's nature is to give something to the audience. The electric music still threatens to take something away. This is likely a reflection of myself, and the things I've tried to satisfy in performing electric music. Profound improvement is necessary.

Home at 1:00AM. Performing in Milford, CT is a later night than performing in NYC. 5hrs of sleep. Resign to an evening sitting for the first time in several weeks.

440 still intact, as of noon today.

01/25/06

Very little to report. Practice last night was diluted with software/hardware fiddling in acknowledgement of left-hand tendonitis symptoms. At it's best, Technocraft, as it felt last night: downloading updates and plugging in cables.

Colin McRae Rally 05 is a great game - and I got mine used for $9. So cool I played for 30 minutes last night, despite evidence that I was injuring myself.

Poor sleep. Resigned once more to postpone my sitting. Well out of it at work, I address a very respected member of our staff by the wrong name (after drawing a blank and trying to make do with "you guys...") D'oh.

440, however, is spot on as of 10:25AM. How can I extend this exercise with the few references at my disposal?

01/26/06

Left hand still in very bad shape last night. Minimal practice (electric with vocals), and no rally racing.

The basement studio is looking more and more like the playroom of a child who hasn't put his toys away. Mics, cables, computing devices, and exercise equipment strewn all over as I look for the best ways to propel the Means, and to make their singer less fat, respectively.

Back on schedule this morning, but my "440" is a whole step(ish) sharp.

01/27/05

Very exciting advances with music technology yesterday! Enough to warrant the use of an exclamation mark, and also enough to comprimise my sleep and morning sitting. Can you say overstimulated? No help that the basement has settled in such that I sit staring directly at my gear. (There has got to be a better way to say that.)

For the first half of the week, calling the time I spent wearing a guitar "daily practice" was a stretch. When the YGP first addressed the commitment to practice, Alex said "I believe that quality spreads", in supporting that the practice we each take on might be anything: acoustic guitar, electric guitar, even something ostensibly unrelated. So in the absence of a functional left hand, I make the stretch that getting the doo-dads in my basement in proper order is "practice". But I have less experience, and no tradition, in achieving the quality of practice while doing this sort of work. Usually I'm just looking for cables. But last night there was quality in this - studiocraft would be the clever, analogous name for it. The studio is a treacherous place, especially if you are short on time or temper. Being present in order to make good things happen can approach the profound. Obvious things, but difficult in execution:

- Be calm.
- Be hopeful that there is a solution.
- Be realistic about the limitations of the tools at your disposal.
- Be open-minded about the tools at your disposal - they're likely more numerous than you are aware.
- Be thorough, taking time to address even the smallest detail according to best long-term preferences.
- Know when to comprimise in order to move forward, but comprimise no more than is necessary.

The pay-off, pending further testing in and out of basement: a darc-flavored Solar (or Somewhere) Voyager?

And so continues my Love-Hate-Love relationship with Guitar Rig 2. The latest update fixes a few things, and while I still have no ideal means of recording this technology, I am starting to get a sense of how best to perform with it: a bitty laptop running nothing but GR2 which simultaneously processes both my vocals and guitar. Each of these can be sent to FOH, or the guitar can optionally be routed to a guitar cab. Comprimises thus far: 1. If a separate guitar cab is used, each voice is necessarily mono. Acceptable. 2. There is no provision for controlling a soft synth with the GR2 footcontroller, and running a softsynth would require an additional VST host, likely comprimising simplicity and stability. Somewhat more troubling.

Still, I got to spend some quality post-tweaking time with this setup, quickly painting sonic landscapes and playing actual music! Excited, as illustrated by my verbosity. (And a photo of the setup will likely follow.) Amazing how easy it is to establish timbres, levels, even musicality, when you're alone. Mix in the sheer volume of a rythym section and things get sketchy fast - ie. Monday night.

On the same day - interesting work with the same company's (Native Instrument's) Reaktor 5. I have come to understand that this is probably just a toy for me - if anything, it distracts me from my musical aims. But wow what an insanely cool toy!

At the risk of gushing, RF's diary continues to amaze:

"...when one applies the rules of one world to another, in the expectation that the other world is bound by the same rules, we often miss what is valuable and available; even when this asks of us only that we open our hands and accept what is freely on offer." -RF 1/26/06

That's just for starters...

Very, very cold outside. Painfully dry hands.

01/30/06

Saturday began at about 9AM, with a trip to the dump. Had to get rid of some of the furniture displaced by Tzu's piano. Made no sense to shower before the dump, so the intent was to dump, shower, and have a sitting. Then I remembered the chinchilla cages, and cleaning these turned into a massive assault on the dining room in general, then the kitchen by association. I didn't stop cleaning until about 6:30PM. I'm half proud of how much work I did, half embarassed that that much work had become necessary. Either way, the rooms are transformed!

(Aside: the rate at which chinchillas produce dust, urine, feces... more to the point, work... is an amazing thing to behold. Preferably at a safe distance. For instance, in the home of a chinchilla-owning acquaintance who will do said work after you've left.)

So... "morning" sitting at around 6:30P... Then first proper acoustic practice in some time. Sunday, back into the thick of electric practice. This is much more exciting in person:

Sony et al, make checks payable to...

01/31/06

I feel slightly on edge about the fact that January has already gotten by, but then again... I've had an amazing amount of energy on tap lately, and I've been taking care of business at home and at work. So, all good, or at least I'll assume as much.

After a too-lengthy break (with a price paid in pounds) I am back on the South Beach diet. A big focus for last night was grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning. All executed with quickness and quality. Salmon with lemon cream sauce, chef salad, and a clean kitchen in about an hour!

Before bed, more acoustic practice. I wanted to do more modal work on the first two strings in NST, but used up the time available working on YGP rep. Note to self: I need to dig into the new material recently sent as tabs.

All that slipped off the schedule yesterday was physical exercise. That bicycle isn't going to pedal itself, and the two days last week didn't exactly finish the job.

02/01/06

Finally got to the work with strings 1 and 2 last night. A shift in focus from fingering to theory, with an awareness of necessary change in position between, and this all falls into place.

After dinner, back to electro work. Simplicity has somehow been pitted against portability in the studio: in order to track Means rehearsals and also maintain a proven, detachable live setup, some byzantine routing is required. I never imagined so much analog cable resulting from the adoption of a VST plugin! I routed about a mile of it through the rafters, quickly tested the concepts, and went to bed. (What a great visual: me, standing on a chair, throwing a cable over a rafter...)

No workout.

Two feelings yesterday worth mentioning, whether I like it or not:

- Reading Alex's journal concerning his experiences on a recent course, I felt, among other things, jealousy. (One of my intentions in April is to take a close look at the way I relate to the GC community after nearly 20 years in its periphery. So, can't hurt to be honest about such reactions.)

- On the way back to my car last night, I passed the same panhandler I mentioned a couple of months ago, to whom I wanted to give my gloves one especially cold night. But last night felt different, and the man felt different, and I walked by without stopping. I didn't even look at him, quite, and after I'd passed I felt an intense sadness.

Means converge tonight (to prove/ disprove viability of Byzantium.) Looking forward to that, although there is no new material to explore. Recent writing efforts re-establish the familiar: I am not a songwriter. At least not yet. Anyhow, Decrementia will be new to Tim, and jefe is eager to get back to it. I have some sketchy, new ideas for arranging the bass and guitar parts in absence of Stick.

Poor Tzu is in a funk, I think. Knees have been hurting her, and her husband is spending too much time playing with wires in the basement.

02/02/06

Yesterday = day two at the office wrestling with a little chunk of code I'd expected to complete in an hour or so. Beyond frustrating. But at about 4PM: success!

Bit of a bug made itself known in the back of my throat yesterday, but somehow I've kicked it. For this particular bug, a combination of Dayquil and Sam Smith's Winter Warmer are the ticket. Not a very hearty breed, I guess.

Band practice was disappointingly short. Late arrivals, a series of technical snafus, and an early departure on account of Tim's splitting headache... if we played music for even an hour I'd be shocked. My fear is that if we continue at this rate, we are essentially treading water as a band, and that much only if luck is on our side. But there was some good "research" taking place last night. The crazy GR rig proves functional, although mic and speaker placement, EQ and compression settings present feedback and mix challenges. My Vetta proves to be a great bass amp, which might save Tim's back in the long run. (Now he can leave his mondo Fender at home.) And - although jefe can never get it started up - once it's running, BFD provides nice drums in project studio-friendly MIDI format.

I placed a room mic and listened back to snippets of our performances as we progressed. This is a lot different than listening back to rough-mixed tracks. I might need those tracks, but I also need to know what someone sitting in the room would be hearing in the moment. I was actually happily surprised with our sound.

Dinner = a spoonful of peanut butter. Shower and bed.

Tonight = 30 minutes of acoustic guitar practice, and then, anything Tzu wants to do.

02/03/06

Same schedule as usual: post-work yesterday=trash, mail, phone messages, dishes, poo-management (various species), dinner, dishes; pre-work today=shower, sitting. Practice in between=Intergalactic Boogie Express.

Until this morning, and for days and days now, I've been feeling quite well. But the people around me... not so much, it seems. And you know this can be contagious after prolonged exposure. If my observations hold any weight at all, then I'm misinterpreted on several fronts and consistently met with negative (over?) reaction. Either that or everyone is simply going mad. Stars out of alignment? Possibly. Today a coworker has me especially unnerved.

02/06/06

Weekend starts out as a series of ripples: shaken by weirdness at work on Friday, I arrive home with an aim to drink a beer or two. We've just received two DVD's worth of "Deadwood" in the mail c/o Netflix, and Tzu reminds me of our half-serious plan to make a drinking game out of this show - drinking every time someone curses. Even taken half-seriously, this game has guaranteed a hangover before the first episode ends, so...

Saturday necessarily subs in for Sunday as the week's day off. Likelihood of working with quality of presence is nil. I get a haircut and Tzu and I go shopping for books.

As I've touched on repeatedly here, I have no idea how to write a song, and I am by now more than ready to look for help on the matter. I guess I've always questioned whether such a thing can be documented to good - or even non-destructive - effect, but as I've been catching myself complaining that I have no "methodology" for writing (as I have for practice, for instance) it occurs to me that I can and should develop one. To illustrate the depth of my humility on the topic: titles I nearly bought included "Songwriting for Dummies" and "An Idiot's Guide to Songwriting". "Songwriting for the Self-Loathing" was out of stock, apparently. There was some good content in these books, frankly, but they got into the commercial end of things too soon, wasting many pages as result. (For a reader who waited 15+ years to let anyone hear him play guitar, getting into sales anywhere in a book introducing a craft is too early.) I found a book on "Writing Songs on the Guitar" which I immediately mistrusted, especially per the bloat of tuning-specific chord charts, but the closer I looked the more this book seemed to offer. Then Tzu recommended a book on melody writing which seemed to complement this one perfectly. What do you know, they were written by the same author. Done and done.

Saturday night, dinner out. This is way too time consuming, and except at the best of restaurants (whereas we were at an Outback), not nearly worth it. 3+ hours later... to bed.

Sunday, as intended, sitting and a day in the studio (aka the basement). I finally have the lead parts to IBE memorized! Only took a few years. I can even play them all, at tempo, though not necessarily in a row LOL. Tzu sat with me while I tinkered with technical stuff, and then she sat at the keyboard and played synth parts while I played some heavy metal stuff on electric. What great fun!

Deep sleep until nearly 8AM. Hopefully accepting an evening sitting as part of today's work will mark the end of the obvious repercussions of Friday's weirdness.

02/07/06

Tzu and I both grumpy and "off" last night. But we acknowledge as much, which not only disempowers this sometimes threatening energy, but also casts it in a slightly humorous light. As such we stumble through dinner and cleanup. (More of that salmon w/ lemon cream sauce, and on 2nd preparation Tzu admits she doesn't like it as much as I do. D'oh!)

Poor Tzu is still struggling with her knees, and pushed herself too far in yesterday's PT. The cycle of wild energy that marked the end of January is apparently complete. February's feeling a bit more uphill, and is passing by more quickly (emptily?) than I'd prefer so far.

After dinner I resume IBE practice. Yes, definitely not all in a row... but I remain hopeful. Then something I've been meaning to do for a few days. Sit down and play along with some old Black Sabbath records. One of the most damaging consequences of my early digestion of the "Rock Star" mystique was that, as a kid, I never felt worthy to do this simple exercise, even after I'd developed the chops to play - and in some cases outplay - the material. The result: I didn't learn how to play a song until I was nearly 30. Well, it's all a little bass-ackwards now, but I think I'll learn some covers. At least it'll be faster going than it would have been then. Tim is always hacking around on Sabbath riffs before band practice and it seems ironic I don't know how to play the stuff, since I was so fanatical about the band for so many years. Hearing the rain at the beginning of the first album is evocative. An immediate speedbump - I can't play the fast riff in the title track and sing Ozzy's part at the same time. Yet.

To bed. Sleep comes slowly.

02/08/06

Guilty of some laziness of the unnecessary variety last night, and of the perhaps advisable but optional variety this morning.

After housework, sitting, and dinner, and despite plans to work in the basement in preparation for Means convergence tonight, I opt instead to practice in front of the TV, nearer to Tzu. (TBS was showing 2 banal horror films in a row, how could we resist?)

Then, following a dismal excuse for a night's sleep (add "noise" to the things a chinchilla will produce at a rate amazing to behold), I choose to add 45 minutes sleep to that which gets me through the workday, subtract 30 minutes from an already tight evening schedule, in postponing my sitting. Third time this week, and no good way to start a day that will be partly consumed by Means practice. Oy.

02/09/06

Last night = housework, a sitting, then a truly kick-ass Means rehearsal. Generally competent recap of existing material, then the revival of Decrementia, with one pass that captures some terrifying "something" that is exactly what is intended. Evil twin Skippy, er, darc says hello, wonders where all his hair went.

Angry reactions in the car. To the news (killing over cartoons... really? really?) And to other drivers (you just nearly killed the both of us, then the look on your face tempts me to finish the job.) What a mess.

Wrist survived last night surprisingly well, but I've got the familiar "bruised" feeling on the tip of my first finger, left hand. I've come to associate this, in a vague way, with oxidized strings, and there's no question all my guitars are past due.

02/10/06

Very tired yesterday. Days following Means are always like this. Professionally, I worked past the point of exhaustion. Very productive, but I left the office grumbling a bit. It is forever amazing to me that no matter how insanely fast you produce, people will arrive at taking this for status quo, until finally, they are asking whether it's done the very moment after they've proposed an idea to you.

Got home, did the standard domestic maintenance routine, had my sitting. Picked up chinese takeout for the 2nd time this week - not exactly weight-loss fare, but exactly the sort of comfort food I needed to ward off the hint of an oncoming cold. (This, and piles of C, did the trick.) Since there will - so far as I can tell right now - be no rest for the wicked this weekend, I finally gave into fatigue. Stayed in bed to watch TV with Tzu rather than practicing in the chilly basement. A partly dynamic day off, then.

An e-mail restating some points I couldn't ignore further elicited a response from me yesterday. And now the YGP is in the midst of the sort of self-examination that can be very positive, but in reality is almost always a disaster. My personal sense so far is that the most important points are still being missed. (Well, of course they're my points... I'm only human.) In the end, I think we'll merely have exposed that we perceive things differently. Then, we'll have to take deep breaths and make decisions that are above our personal reactions - which, really, are largely irrelevant.

In the meantime, I have one lingering point to add here, since further e-mail may merely annoy: CG's name is frequently dropped in order to give a perspective some authority. That's fair enough. We should recall that it was CG who recommended that the YGP "break up" following our last defined commitment, and surely not in the interest that anything be lost.

02/15/06

Friday. More e-mail passes between the YGP; the weekend plans are unclear. At lunch, I'm shopping for a Valentine's Day gift for Tzu when my phone rings. It's Mark. Incredible how perfectly comfortable (even comforted) I feel speaking with him "in voice" after the tension that marked the e-mail exchange. It seems that Alan, for personal reasons, may be unable to meet in NJ. Am I interested if this group should become a trio? The reasons against are piling up with what almost seems like an intelligence - a winter storm, Tzu's bad knees, tensions among the group... and now Alan's concern. My answer is no, but keep me posted as I am still flexible pending Alan's availability. In this moment I failed myself - saying that I was flexible when in fact, I had already interpreted the odds and begun to form a new vision for the weekend. An easier weekend, at home with Tzu and her sister. I extended this failing by telling Tzu that my leaving was unlikely, raising her own hopes for the same.

Mark calls back at nearly 4PM. Alan is on for the weekend, am I? My expectations and (various) promises are suddenly at odds. I said I'd attend if the weekend wasn't cancelled, but by this late hour I am convinced that the trip is a bad idea. To further complicate matters, I don't want to go. Trying to make a decision out of all of this, in the shadow of so much tough talk about "commitment", I get pretty shaken up. I finally tell Mark I'll be there. By the time I've left CT, I've also decided that returning Saturday is the best, and safest, comprimise. I want to arrive as a show of faith, and I want to return in one piece.

Friday night, a good, frank discussion between Mark, Alan, Kevin, and myself. Some circulation work and to bed.

Saturday morning, a sitting, breakfast, guitar work, and lunch. Following clean up, Mark recommends an extended circulation of 15 minutes. This seems arbitrary to me (and minimizes my favorite part of circulating, the moment where someone, sometimes, recognizes The End), but this results in our really settling into the process, discovering some interesting challenges, and creating some wonderful music. There is talk of errands to be run, etc. and this looks like the right time for me to leave. I pack and say my goodbyes. All in all, very good and necessary work done in a limited period of time.

Friday's conversation was arguably our most important work this weekend. And a good time to boot. Still, I'm left with an awareness of some slippery language and circular logic that would put men with the best intentions at risk. I guess in the end, truisms: no one of us is beyond reproach, nor are the five together beyond hope.

Sunday, move a huge amount of snow with a good old-fashioned shovel. Eat and sleep far too much (as is generally the case when Tzu's sister visits.)

Monday and Tuesday were meant to be vacation days, to spend with Tzu, and/or in the studio (and originally, to see Les Paul, who unfortunately has taken ill.) Instead, a SQL Server went to hell at the office and I worked 12 hours from home Monday, and a couple of hours in the office on Tuesday. Received an e-mail carrying energies very similar to those vollied between the YGP last week. It is interesting, maybe even valuable, to note how these things move in patterns beyond any obvious causality. Back home, vacillated between enjoying the day with Tzu and feeling demoralized by work. Sitting felt alarmingly necessary for 30 minutes, insufficient 30 seconds later. Too many things needed to be addressed during last night's practice, and predictably, none were. Preparation for an evening with the Means will hopefully occur as an intellectual process spinning in the background while I repair software...

3:09PM - I feel something lifting.

5:15PM - ...and descending again.

02/16/06

I'm stopped at a light yesterday, and a pedestrian does absurd damage to my psyche by way of looking at me wrong. If ever I have encountered a vampire, there he was. (Though oddly, he looked more like a state cop.) If ever a month were a vampire, February is it.

Nothing immediate to explain the exhaustion that falls on me every day, or the recurring difficulty with other human beings this month, but there it is. (Tzu has been an angel; maybe she senses that I'm in a precarious place...)

Considered cancelling band practice, but it had gotten down to the wire. No new material, no real hope of the muse descending on a writing rehearsal or (gasp) jam session in my condition. In the end, jefe seemed happy with the work. Tim was amenable, but as I usually find him, hard to read. I can take the work for what it was, but I am ever-conscious (maybe to a destructive extent) of the fact that I'm calling these players out of their way. On a night that feels - to be generous - like a baby step, I can't help but feel self-conscious or even disappointed with myself. Not to say there weren't some great moments... but these from the hours that were invested. I can't make up my mind whether that's a win. Probably because my mind is all screwed up trying to second-guess it from their perspectives.

Anyway screw that vampire; he's still sucking.

02/17/06

Constructive studio time last night. Cleaning up the PC and discovering some solutions/ workarounds for the previously unhappy marriage between Sonar and Guitar Rig. Hoping to see more of that over this weekend (which I found out today = 3 days!) 3 more guitars re-strung, and finally I got some contact cleaner to the right spot on MIDIFly no. 1's volume pot. Been trying for years. Clean swells, hurrah!!!

A little Intergalactic, and NST electric, but generally pretty light practice. Doping the time with studio troubleshooting and guitar maintenance has that effect.

Busy day at work today. Lots of housework (poo management et al) awaits.

02/21/06

Why can I not remember Friday? Is noting as much more valuable than whatever I'd have noted on Friday? Possibly.

Saturday, after tending to the usual, I have some friends over for pizza, drinks, music (listening), and talk.

Sunday, still slightly affected by those drinks, I get off to a slow start. Tzu is frustrated with her knees and with my taking care of her instead of getting downstairs to work on music as planned. A vicious cycle - the more I sense her anger the harder it is for me to be on my way. I decide to focus on resting and maybe cheering her up - pick up some lunch and some new games to distract us, blatantly resorting to consumerism in the face of difficulty. Not the most efficient of days, but the mood in the house is recovered.

Monday, a day off from work, home alone. I spend the whole day in the basement, really hammering on the studio, trying to become more familiar with the possibilities and limitations. Also, trying to "write" (for lack of a better word to describe this strange process) new material for the Means. The room is maturing toward the point where I can use a lot of gear simultaneously, running to the drums to play a few bars of MIDI, looping these, picking up a guitar, to record audio or MIDI, running to one of several mics to sing impromptu ideas, sitting down to comp things together and try to leverage what's there (without simultaneously crushing the life out of it.) Technically, a good day then, with two exceptions: 1. MIDI drums randomly stop recording. I still have no idea what the problem is, despite many tests and conclusions as to what it is not. The "solution" is to delete the track and start again. 2. One of my mics, or its cable, went belly up yesterday. A simple problem, but being unexpected it wasted a few minutes.

Creatively... I'll try to spin this with optimism, as laying the groundwork for today, tomorrow, the next day... Yesterday's output was not good in itself. I got bogged down trying so desperately to get something from an old idea I should have known was stillborn. Clever lyrics. Too clever. Not much else. Actually I was very discouraged at the end of the day, but Tzu talked me back into shape. Closed out the night by just "playing", per her recommendation, which left me more hopeful. (Played back the day's work before going to bed and it was still pretty dreadful.)

Woke today feeling sick. Is it possible for a song to be so bad it makes you physically ill? Feel like I poured all my energy into a very deep hole yesterday. Nauseous, sinuses fouled up. And yet, can't wait to get back to it. (Recording. Not the same song, surely...)

02/22/06

Last night: grocery shopping, housework, dinner, an evening sitting, then back to the guitar and recording. Unbelievable: I find myself going back to the idea that ruined Monday. But still, nothing. Then some more general practice, and finally IBE on electric w/ some very wacky GR2 effects. Intriguing.

This morning I still felt pretty lousy. Slightly sick, and one of my teeth is... not so much painful... but weird. Drawing way too much attention to itself. This, a headache, mind racing around work, and my cart-in-front-of-the-horse songwriting aspirations make for a pretty bleak sitting. By the end of it I'm wondering why I put together a rock band in the first place and am having abortive thoughts. Tzu tells me not to give up the Means before they've even had a chance. Still, frustrated with myself. Sometimes I feel like I am/am doing enough, and sometimes I just feel small. Painfully so today.

Teaching myself Flash at work. Means tonight, so suck it up...

02/23/06

Nearly 2 hours to settle in before Means arrival last night. Installing software, fixing guitars, testing connections... all systems are go. Means start in with an uncharacteristic discussion concerning direction and short-term goals, I nudge it slightly and cautiously in the direction of aims and commitment (with the disclaimer that it's a little premature to be looking for the latter.) Good to clear the air and vent about some of the creative pressures and frustrations I've been facing with 2 incoming musicians every week.

Then... right on cue every single technical thing possible goes wrong. From the sophisticated (S/PDIF clocks won't sync up) to the absurdly tedious (sudden cable short... where the hell is the other one?) Finally, anger really got the better of me; I just started to fume. Good money after bad, good years after bad... when the hell will all this shiny sh** just work?? Oh well, no recording tonight... Didn't think there was any hope of pulling it together sufficiently to have a productive night. But last week, at jefe's insistence, we'd started to work on this little fragment I wrote over 15 years ago. This week Tim brought a second part to add - just a simple bass line to serve as a verse of sorts, and when we started arranging over this things really came together. There might just be a 5th Means song in it! It is interesting to me that if I had selected those same notes in a row, I'd have thought nothing special of them and probably discarded them - but with Tim having settled on them I'm perfectly happy to treat them with authority, and I feel really good about refining the sound and finding the chords to lay over the top. I get lost in the open sea of possibility when presented with a blank slate, but I can work quickly and, I believe, tastefully, when I have some parameters laid out. Maybe step one (for a while) is to accept a moment of randomness at the beginning(s).

I hadn't had a chance to eat. After practice I went upstairs and Tzu had prepared a salad for me that was so pretty I nearly took a photo to post here. It looked like a flower. Pretend it is here:

Just got back from an overlong meeting. Everyone in the building suddenly wants "a website" but no one ever really quite knows what that means. And they are always in a hurry to write a big check to some consulting firm or another. I can not count the dollars saved just by establishing that we already have the tech in question, or that what is needed is a very simple variation. It's a funny conflict of interests though, when I consider a) I'm taking on work that would otherwise have gone to a 3rd party, and b) everytime I eliminate one of these contracts, I make my own profession that much leaner, such that ultimately, I'm probably decreasing my own salary by recommending the best course of action. Be that as it may I can't stand to watch things get more complicated than they need to, and besides, it's generally easier to develop this stuff myself than to try to interface with other developers and integrate their deliverables.

Geek mode off.

New abrasion on the roof of my mouth. Deja vu all over again. No particular reason, but this is very cool: Rondo

02/24/05

Would it surprise anyone if I reported that all the basement technology (perfect terminology presents) worked like a charm last night? If only it would fail in some consistent fashion, eventually I might determine which components need to be smashed against the wall... Anyhow, did some recording, made some small progress, but any optimism must be met with suspicion where basement technology is concerned.

Once again "real guitar practice" is insufficient. I am always wearing guitars these days, but consistently going to bed feeling like a slacker. This is not good. Hopefully meeting with the YGP tomorrow will lend perspective here, nudge me back on track. Lots of thinking about the different sense of the passing of time I've had through February, how this might correspond with a lighter demand from the YGP, and the implication that the group work remains very necessary for me.

February slipped from beginning to end feeling sort of empty. I look back on my journal and it's alarming to see reports of one band practice, then another. Weeks just slipping by, almost unnoticed. But then by contrast, it occurs to me that it was only weeks ago that the YGP were performing regularly, improving in leaps and bounds. Only weeks before that the Means (mkII AJO) were formed. Only days before that I did all that transformative work on the house. Perspective is slippery. Maybe I'm just having a hard time resting.

Nearly done with an RSS implementation for the Yale Press website. Hey, maybe I'll syndicate the YGP and the Means while I'm at it...

02/27/06

Friday night, out to dinner with Tzu. I try to order healthy: tilapia florentine sounds harmless enough. But the greasy, breaded mountain of food that arrives - even half of it - leaves me in a coma. Eating out is a hazardous affair. Then we head up to Gamestop, where I engaged in last week's rash consumerism and bought two crappy games at retail. But I'd misread the return policy and found out on arrival that I couldn't return them - the best I could do is sell them back as used, for pennies on the dollar. I felt stupid on at least three counts now, not least for driving all the way back to this place in the freezing cold, for nothing. Back home, really exhausted now, put in 30 minutes perfunctory guitar practice and crash out.

Saturday rise, shower, grab some coffee, and make for Yorktown. There's a little traffic jam and detour up ahead so I call to warn Tim I'll be late. 45 minutes later I've moved maybe 2 miles, so I call again to escalate the warning: I'll be very late; you'll need to go on without me. (The evening news indulged my curiosity: a deli truck drove into a van, collided with an overhead sign, and generally made a big mess. Footage included boxes of deli meat on the side of the road.)

So I arrive an hour late to the meeting, much of which is comprised of discussion. I talk too much - something I tend to do if I talk at all and then am met with silence. But it was the nature of the thing to say what had already been said, such that everyone could hear it at the same time - to whatever extent they will/ are able. The small amount of guitar work was productive. Nice circulation, and a Blackjack recap that, for me, finally clarified the scope of the piece. Much shorter than I'd imagined.

Saturday night - an evening sitting. Salad in bed, watching a really dumb made for sciFi movie, then MadTV.

Sunday - to the batcave! A day in the studio. Beginning with the impossibly tedious, but necessary. (i.e. Am I really going to tear down an entire MIDI drumkit, move the brain to the other side of the rack, and rewire the whole thing, just because the power cord is 6" too short? Impossible... Consider the alternatives... Begin.) Proceeding through constructive sound development (a variax sucks for transposing OST to NST, but can approximate a bass guitar very nicely), legitimate guitar practice (the Beatles inspire me to look for new inversions, then a little column about Micheal Angelo Batio gets me shredding for a couple of hours) and finally to recording (Weave.) A good hour of it, maybe, leading up to the inevitable unexplained meltdown. I can think of a half dozen reasons why my DAW suddenly went to hell, but given any of them, no reason why it wasn't so right out of the gates. Again, anger gets me. Maybe the whole eternally broken studio thing is a test for me. I should learn to just roll with it when it comes, and not get into a blind fury about whether or not it makes sense. Everything, after all, makes some kind of sense.

Chicken and broccoli and Deadwood. No beer this time.

02/28/06

A little more studio time last night. Realized I'd neglected to apply a Windows XP patch for Firewire throughput. System seemed more stable in some regards afterwards, less stable in others. So it goes...

Played back Sunday's work. Timbre is really nice, so it's that much more disappointing to realize that I dug in at an unsuitable tempo - too slow. Don't think I want the piece to plod along like this, but I don't want to break my momentum (such as it is) at this point either. So... I'll keep recording to this project, and scrap it in favor of a faster one after the rest of the song has come.

Tech held out but my left wrist did not. Apparently Sunday's shredfest was a little much. I think part of the problem is that the office chair in front of my PC casts my body and guitar at less than ideal angles. Hopefully I can adjust for this. Of course, I also do plenty of stupid things to my wrists just in the course of getting angry... no guitar required.

Low energy. The winter temperatures are really bogging me down this year.

03/01/06

Returned from work and was greeted by Tzu, who had worked from home. A nice change from the norm. Then, an evening sitting, shower, and a big salad on a coleslaw base. I have this growing suspicion that coleslaw is a miracle diet food. But I've been losing the same 10 pounds for the past three months (I'm an expert) so you might want a second opinion...

Watched the YGP DVD from early November. I'll need to see it again, mainly in the interest of deciding what audio tracks to request from Alan.

Then to guitar practice. Left hand still a little iffy, so lots of right hand work with metronome. I don't know if my right hand has gotten better, worse, or indifferent in recent months... but it has gotten faster. I seem to be finding a middle ground between proper relaxed technique and locked or pivoted extended techniques. This isn't sufficient in and of itself, but I'm hoping it will open the door to reaching new tempos in a relaxed state.

Big high-tech solution to the office chair problem: don't be so lazy, sit on the edge before you start playing. I already knew that. (Considering my "readership", you probably did, too.)

03/01/06

The daily grind was brutal yesterday. The Spring catalog is nearing and it's like everyone is coming out of hibernation at once - each with their own immediately urgent requests. Also, I began to catch the negative repercussions of my 'tude re: 3rd-party code; I find myself on the defensive with a freelancer who will be contributing again. Same answer as always: be completely honest and diffuse this as quickly as possible, but that opportunity has not yet arisen.

Means cancellation/ postponement per one bass player's understandable exhaustion. He'd had a Tuesday night gig and then his girl had a 4AM flight! Only surprised he hadn't cancelled sooner!

All for the best, as I really had a hankering to sit alone in the Batcave and play. Play guitar, play with the toys, look into possibilities. YGP looper-talk and Soundscapes reviews attract me back to Guitar Rig, this time with Project5 as host, MIDI guitars, and out to my Flextone II (Old Faithful.) There's a need to suspend disbelief for a while. I tend to get my techie side mixed in with my musician side, and where the products leave off being broken, I take up with assuming they are. So instead, hoping for the best, I just spend the night using the stuff...

And it was great!

Mainly NST electric w/ Dimension synths into GR2 (featuring Loop Machine). A few clicks and pops and various limitations but overall a good, creative experience. Solo over Theme I and Columbia, play IBE for a while, switch to OST and set up sounds to flesh out YWCM. Sufficient progress with both the tech and the instrument. Good stuff.

Walking in to work today it occurs to me, how can I possibly have writer's block when I am constantly bombarded with text c/o the internet? My songs needn't be about my own experiences, after all. Excited about this minor revelation, but these are, of course, unhatched chickens.

03/03/06

Snowfall and a tense vibe at home broke the evening into little pieces. Made dinner, practiced a bit (nearly an hour, but left wanting more), watched some TV with Tzu, and went out to shovel and clean cars after the snow had stopped. Easier than trying to squeeze it in as part of the morning, and besides, it really wasn't too cold last night. I might even say I enjoyed it.

Today at work, progress with Microsoft.

Is RF misquoted here? Seems I spent a few years trying to wrap my head around a variation...

03/06/06

Friday night tasted a lot like Thursday night, so there is less to report than might otherwise have been. Sensing blockage I "reassigned" the evening's practice to Sunday. Somewhere around 10PM (so tired by then I can barely remember) I went to pick up Tzu's sister, visiting for the weekend, at the train station. Then I fell asleep.

Saturday, sitting, housework (largely of the zookeeper variety) and lots of guitar practice. (Still obsessed with IBE and I now have a deeper understanding of the bass line than when I knew it by heart.) Then off to a birthday party for el jefe.

And for the rest of the weekend what didn't happen is more notable than what did. The plan was to work in the basement all day Sunday, but I was too zonked per the two or three beers at jefe's party to do much of anything. This is an increasingly obvious downside of getting old: even "responsible" drinking is terribly wasteful for me, because I'm so slow to recover. (I wonder how much of this is par for the course, and how much is a consequence of the excesses of my youth... and my not-so-youth.) Practiced dutifully per my decision on Friday and that was all.

03/07/06

In an autopilot haze when I got home last night.

Spent time in the basement trying to find the rest of Weave. I find something... but I don't know if it's the rest of Weave, don't know that it fits, really. And not sure that these new parts stand on their own in the first place. But this is a dangerous line of questioning that typically results in my chucking everything. Stand away from the Delete key...

Intermittent sleep, and not much of it. Worse for Tzu, I think. But somehow I'm not feeling it yet.

03/08/06

I have got to learn to work faster. My muse is like a ninja, makes these imperceptible little drive-by's. I catch a short chorus' worth of lyrics which I actually like, but do not follow through with enough to prop it up. Within minutes the sense of this thing is gone, and the bit I did like, all on its own, is vulnerable to my analyses. I was sure even minutes after writing that it had quality, but already I wonder whether it will survive. I understand that these words are ultimately a vehicle for something more important, but I can't help but demand something from them on their own. I know, it's only rock and roll, but I kill it...

Tried to record IBE on acoustic guitar last night. Ouch. There is a lot more to knowing this piece than just knowing all the notes in a row. True of any piece of music, of course, but these unconventional, angular lines... they don't just fall together... it takes something more. I can "fake it" on electric but the direct Ovation timbre is so unforgiving. And here overdubbing seems glaringly artificial. After a few dozen takes it seems incredible I ever played in a group that could make this sound musical - specifically, the BGE.

Returned to the basement after dinner to futz with gear for Means tonight. So close, so close, but the laptop is hinting that it's not quite up to it.

03/09/06

Work is slamming me. Lots of miscellaneous meetings and tasks scarcely related to one another, or to my own job for that matter. Not my preferred way of working. I'd rather the luxury of digging into one heavy project, finishing with it, and moving on to the next.

Then there's the rest of life. I am pretty wound up lately.

Good rehearsal last night, despite my starting off in a bad mood and totally bereft of energy. Tim proposed we all bring ideas for covers to the table, and jefe's pitch was Prisoner by Tears for Fears. I was immediately skeptical, because I think this is a song that succeeds primarily on the merits of timbre. But we dug in and within an hour or so had a live take on it that sounded very cool. And it's fun to play. I think we might also have established that the other part of Weave is, indeed, the other part of Weave. Running a laptop was a bit finicky as always, but GR sounded very good, and the looper came in handy. If I invest more time this might pay off.

Slept poorly. Again. Poor Tzu has a terrible cold (but she insists otherwise.)

Dentist appointment today. I should have set up a trust fund for my damned teeth. So much maintenance... it's like having a couple dozen used cars in your face, literally. Anyway, hygienist dug up some kind of holy hell today - I feel like my breath could strip paint. (Been meaning to refin the used car in my driveway actually...) She also decided I need a couple of new fillings. Ching.

YGP starts gigging again in T-2 days and counting. Time (past time?) to stop futzing with IBE and take up with that repertoire.

03/10/06

L2.5 is a mere month away. It's been pulling my thoughts forward for weeks now. Expectation is a prison and all, but there are some things I need sorted out in my head - to whatever extent I am able on my own - before I arrive.

Set aside my salad/slaw fixation in favor of chinese last night and paid for it on the scale, as anticipated, this morning. But damn it seems like forever since I've had hot food, and after that visit w/ the dentist yesterday I felt compelled to put tasty things in my mouth, if only to drown out the memories.

Then to the basement for an hour of practice along w/ the November DVD. Past time indeed. My playing was almost alarmingly bad, but I'm confident when I pick up the guitar tonight there will be evidence that I was learning from my mistakes (even if this process was imperceptible for the duration.) The seat I chose - not the infamous office chair but a kitchen chair of rigid right angles - was lower than I might have preferred, but this doesn't normally result in 60 minutes of crap playing. The fact is my hands have gotten out of shape, and some of the YGP material has gotten away from me. I actually could not remember the "chorus" of Squeaky and had to pick it out of the DVD footage note for note. How can this even be possible so soon after performing it regularly?? Sometimes my brain does not inspire my fullest confidence...

Forgot to mention that, after Means rehearsal on Wednesday, we stood in the kitchen and watched the Police on videotape, performing Roxanne at their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So incredible it's worth mentioning even a day late. Enough on that.

I lived in San Francisco very briefly in the early 90's - mere months, actually. You might even argue whether this constitutes "living" somewhere, but I had a job and some real hardship there, so it was certainly no vacation. Regardless, it made a stronger impression on me than any other place ever has. I frequently feel homesick for SF, somehow. So you can imagine how cool it is to run across this: http://preview.local.live.com/ The details I notice are incredible. For instance, the little shack I lived in is still on top of that house, 15 years later. I'd have imagined it blowing away by now, or perhaps being zoned/condemned out of existence. It used to rain on my bed!

3/13/06

Was, in fact, alarmed by my playing on Friday night. But stuck it out until things seemed to be under control again. When in doubt, shorten your strap 1/2", and make yourself a new pick. (Funny, I hate changing strings, but I love crafting a homemade pick. Makes me feel like a real gunslinger LOL. Except this time I shot myself in the foot: got just the right size and shape, just the right bevel on the business end, but one of the other corners was digging into my finger, demanding too much attention. So I filed it down. The perfect pick! Just have to be certain to use the right corner during performance... which I did not. Back to the drawing board...) After I'd gotten the YGP rep back up to snuff, I started to work on my hocketing skills, for a "final 5 minutes" which became another 60 and nearly set me off on a tantrum. Hocketing, even at moderate tempos, is not easy (for me.)

Saturday, the usual morning routine, and off to Yorktown. A meeting comprised mainly of repertoire work, dinner with the group, and then to the HVFG. The YGP plays a short set that begins with technical problems, continues w/ my noticing my "perfect" pick and subsequently dropping it, and yet ends with a nice go at Reunion. All seem to agree that there was a lightness in our approach to this performance, and a certain lack of focus.

Mark gave an extensive performance incorporating a looper and effects. Risky and ambitious. Some excellent moments in the music, and a learning experience to sit outside and watch another person suffer with technology while trying to make music. I am reminded again of the value of a poker face while in front of an audience. And of acceptance while time is marching forward (ie. always...)

Stay on for the remaining performances, and note that the simplest of these are the ones that try my emotional incontinence. Help cleanup a little, then bring Tim back to the train station, discussing our perforformances, past, present and near-future. And the recurring topic: Heavy Metal.

Sunday, inconsistent in my aims. I start out in the studio, expecting a day of it. I have zero luck with the audio files from the November YGP performance - these being of a mysterious format. I return to the surface for lunch, where I find myself charmed by the lazy vibe of the day. My inner Englishman is grooving with the grey, chilly-but-not-cold, wet-but-not-raining weather. All is quiet, yet bristles with Spring vitality. I decide to enjoy it, do a bunch of crossword puzzles. Play games. And if I should accomplish something in the studio, all the better. But when 7, then 8, then 9PM roll around and I haven't, I do feel ill at ease... stung by my own sloth.

03/14/06

March is flying past at the same alarming rate as February did. Maybe faster. What can be done?

Oh no! Oblivion has gone gold! Mercifully, the game will not be released until after the upcoming YGP gigs, but I fear I will be heading to Mendoza like a junkie on his way into rehab. And likely with considerably reduced familiarity w/ my guitar by then...

Last night: light housework, an evening sitting, bicycle training. Tzu returns having picked up a chicken from the grocery store, and heats up some veggies. She knows I have a very busy week and is looking to ease my schedule - very sweet of her, esp. considering her work day is longer than my own. Business for the week = a YGP gig, Means rehearsal (w/ several new covers to learn), and a clear and present need to EXERCISE. My metabolism is now such that one little burger - hold the fries - with the YGP on Saturday cost me 3lbs! It seems unlikely I'll get where I'm going by way of diet alone.

But I digress... guitar practice thereafter. A new pick, this one functional on all three sides and truly the right size, as not to distract or require performance-threatening modifications. All is well until I get to Havre. I seem to lose all sense of what an 8th note is. May this sense return before Thursday night!

03/15/06

Evening sitting (0 for 3 in the battle against the comfy bed this week), bicycle training, shower, a salad, and guitar practice. Terror! The more I work the more necessity presents! I know things can't be as bad as they seem; recent work with the YGP proves I can sit in the mix OK. But solo, I do hear problems, and this rep. is full of quirky little challenges.

Anyway, a reprieve: the Means cancel/postpone per one drummer's adventures in realty. So I will be able to practice extensively tonight as well, but I'm teetering between under-preparedness and a tendonitis flare-up. The challenge: recognize sufficiency when it is achieved.

The usual before a show: do I restring? Is it necessary/ is it too late? Lots of "scrape" last night, but is it the pick, the hand, or the strings? Amplification exacerbates the problem. I re-edge the pick a couple of times and this helps... for a while.

Starting to get a handle on looping w/ GR2. Also (danger, danger!) starting to want a faster laptop.

03/16/06

Grocery shopping, dinner, bicycle training, shower, sitting, and guitar practice.

Concerning new strings: "Is it necessary/ is it too late?"

Yes/ yes. I go back and forth on this and am ready to reach for new strings as late as 10PM. Then I look at it from the perspective of the audience and the rest of the group - would they more likely be offended by (or even notice) slightly dead strings, or by half of them being ~50 cents flat, as is so likely with new strings? I decide I'll restring on Friday. (News flash: Kevin restrung just last night! Perhaps our guitars would have gone out of tune in perfect harmony? Maybe I'm just too paranoid about brand new strings. I know many professionals perform w/ nothing but. Anyway...)

Overall my hands felt solid last night, but my attention wanders here and there and I miss some changes. Another decision: should I run the set before heading to NY, or will this just psyche me out? More than likely, I'll run it again.

Looks like Alex has been reading his share of Music Thing.

03/17/06

Left work early yesterday with ambitious plans. Did I really think I could: get home, eat lunch, wash the dishes, sit, drive to town hall to pay taxes, ride the bicycle, shower, practice, and pack for NYC before 3PM? Rise from sitting at 2PM, reassess, scratch town hall, bicycle, and the shower. Practice briefly, focusing on Growing Circle. Ironic, as I would later be reminded that this is not on our set list for the night. Leave for the train station at 3PM, still manage to miss the 3:33. From whence all the traffic at 3PM on a Thursday?? No worries, this time my plan was to be on an early train, so I'll settle for an on-time-by-plenty train.

Not so easy to find an empty cab outside Grand Central at 6PM. The first guy refuses to go to Leonard St, the 2nd guy doesn't know how. I tell him to go South until he hears otherwise, and that works out fine. It's a guilty pleasure to walk past a waiting crowd and saunter into the club, even if that crowd isn't waiting for us, specifically...

Good vibe in the green room. A last minute decision to replace Squeaky w/ Eye of the Needle - not a bad decision in itself, but I should not have agreed to go out to the stage and ask Mark about it; this should have been considered while the group was together.

Being the first act, and early, we have an unusual opportunity to soundcheck. But the soundman asks that we just soundcheck when we take the stage. I don't know why we continue to trust these guys. We take stage with as much grace as the need to find cables etc will allow, and then...

My channel is dead. Others are feeding back. The soundman is fumbling. We stand there for several minutes, helpless, while he stabs feedback at the audience on our behalf. When we finally begin playing I'm too quiet, Mark is too loud, Tim is feeding back in the monitors and I'm convinced that it's Kevin. Woohoo! I try to direct the soundguy to adjust whenever he isn't staring at the floor. Not much use, there seems to be something quite interesting down there. Lighting is such that I couldn't see a single face in the audience - very difficult to gauge the damage being done.

As for the playing: My sense is that we pounded through these songs with little heed to dynamics, but everyone else attests that the sound reinforcement produced this effect - entirely likely.

Although I'm generally very careful to "wait for it" before getting into EOTN, I think this time I began before the group was ready. As early as the first note, I sense unrest to my left, and by the third or fourth note my pick is misfiring. Shortly thereafter we are composing some very odd new harmonies. Then we begin Havre at ludicrous speed. Between tempo and the loudness of his guitar, there is very little hope for Mark to imbue his 16th notes with musicality. Within a few bars I am completely lost. We do manage to make a big noise for a minute or so, before moving on.

All of this said, the rest of the performance was actually pretty solid. As good as we might have hoped under the circumstances. I guess what's most impressive is that we all remained collected despite our mistakes. Our energy was well-contained, even after we'd left the venue. We regrouped in the green room, had drinks at the upstairs bar, and walked a few blocks for dinner at a Vietnamese joint. Mark and Alan dropped me back at Grand Central, and I took the stinky overcrowded train back to New Haven. When I got home, Tzu was waiting up for me.

Late night. Long day today. It's beginning to dawn on me that these NYC gigs are expensive: half a vacation day, $28 on the train, $15 for cab fare (x2 were it not for Mark giving me a lift), the near-unavoidable food and drink, and numerous other "hidden fees". But it's worth it while the vacation time holds out.

03/20/06

A good weekend. Rest Friday night. Tzu and I watch two movies - The Aristocrats, and Buckaroo Bonzai. I'm pretty lukewarm on both of them. Maybe that's too generous, even. However, I am a big fan of lying in bed for 4 hours...

Saturday, after sitting and YGP practice, the Means converge for an unusual Saturday rehearsal. We take on "Subdivisions" per Tim's request (and, again, despite my reservations) and have great fun with it! Tim takes the vocals and does a very impressive job. And I get an opportunity to sit at the laptop and really focus on guitar/synth sounds. In this context the toys are actually justifiable, and effective. Great fun. Afterwards the Means and the respective Mrs. Means have pizza, drinks, and go... bowling? Yes, and weirder than me bowling was the discovery that bowling has become trendy. A very young crowd, top 40 music, flashy lights... and a price tag to match. The kids have co-opted our crappy bowling alley! Kitsch is dead! And playing a game I don't even like now costs a lot of money.

Sunday, the usual routine, then back to NYC to perform with the YGP. I'm feeling just slightly out of sorts per the previous evening's drinks (or am I just looking for it?) I'm toying with the idea of coffee, and with the slightly riskier idea of the hair of the dog, so when I arrive to find Kevin drinking coffee with Amaretto, I join him. This, and an amazing jazz pianist, are a lovely way to come in out of the cold. The Rockwood is a lovely little place.

Presence of said jazz pianist gives us less elbow room and time for setup than we had anticipated. Mark does an excellent job w/ pre-prep though, getting everything wired up off to the side while the pianist finishes his set and the rest of us decompress. The soundman and I have a good dialog this time and we are able to get levels and tone without a single lurch of feedback.

If I were to offer my highly unreliable opinion on the performance, I would say it was our best yet. Mistakes, of course, but good energy and connection throughout. Soundman was still paying attention when we left the stage, and pulled the faders before anyone unplugged their cables. Nice.

I am really happy with this as our final performance of this period of commitment - it leaves me with a sense of composition, like a reinforcement that something very real was accomplished through this passage of time. Something was "on" last night, at least in speaking for myself. Playing this venue on this night, watching the clouds pass over the buildings across the street, is something that will linger.

YGP (with friends) shared dinner at the preferred chinese restaurant, and then I drove home. Some terrifying modern classical music with brooding strings and a low timpani on the radio. I kept waiting to hear the composer back-announced, but this music kept on and on, occasionally pausing, then taking up with another movement. Music by the Energizer Bunny of Doom, perhaps. In New Haven, a car fire on the side of I-91. Bright orange flames 15 or 20 feet high. My response is visceral, and it occurs to me: I don't think I've ever seen fire of this magnitude "in person" before.

At home, Tzu was waiting for me - and she'd made dessert! So much to be grateful for.

03/21/06

Last night was pretty low-key. Spent a lot of time fiddling around w/ a sound expansion for BFD called "8-bit kit". Not as much here as I expected, but some of it is scary, in the best way.

A meeting this morning that could have... and almost... and maybe even should have... turned nasty was wrestled toward a productive end. My life would have been simpler if it had ended in disagreement, and I was the one that did the wrestling toward agreement. Funny how that worked out.

Reading through YGP journals I am suddenly taken by a sense of well-being. We did some good work.

Very amused to see coincidental Miyazaki and Totoro references in Alex's journal. Why? This is Totoro:

(Behind him, his much smaller brother, Ivan the Terrible.)

03/22/06

Coleslaw and Oblivion. Almost enough to sustain a man.

Rolled it over in my head for a while, then called a Dynamic Day Off from the guitar. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't been so lax, especially w/ the Means coming tonight. So much fun, so little time...

03/23/06

Rough day/night yesterday. In a word, relentless. Heavy bombardment at work, followed immediately by Means convergence.

Means experience was all over the map. The best of times, the worst of times and all that. Off to a late start for reasons I won't enumerate here. Affected by the repercussions of this, we limp through a pretty lifeless Trace a couple of times. Funny, this is the most songwriter-ly of all our songs, but it feels completely stillborn. I find no joy in playing it.

Then, we get into Junkie Stir and Spilt. These sound ferocious. I get the plain sense that this is music I want to make, and that this is music that would excite me if I wandered into a club and saw it performed. But technical problems are... relentless. Vocals come and go in the mix - are the monitors voltage-starved? jefe's drum kit is literally falling apart under his abuse. I break one string, replace it, and break the next. After one take I ask "What happened?" and Tim replies, "We just rocked too hard." We have a good laugh over the sort of gear we need to get through these songs: all 1/4" diamondplate (even the drumheads), no moving parts (a kick pedal that is one piece of molded steel, no strings on the guitars....) Still it's frustrating that we can't get to the end of a song. The gear seems to be telling of the players: we're stretched a little thin tonight. By the time we get to Weave we are exhausted, and it sucks.

But aside from the music, the vibe is funked. It is an age-old fact that el jefe can drive me insane by way of tiny acts which I imagine are imperceptible to the casual observer. It is not the quality of any one act so much as the fact that they are... relentless. Thus, my responses are likely completely irrational to the casual observer, and certainly unpleasant to any observer, including myself. So in the end, I am both driven insane, and embarrased at myself. Fun for everyone. Last night ended like this. By the time I resurfaced, I was beside myself over it, and worse, feeling distanced from Tzu by my distraction.

Maybe I will try to compose an e-mail to ease some of my tension. We all know how effective this is.

03/24/06

Left work early yesterday, feeling feverish, nauseous, uneasy. Not at death's door or anything, but everyone who stopped by my office recommended I leave, so I let myself be talked into it. Went to bed for a while.

In the evening, a sitting, and practice, with Oblivion filling in all the minutes in between. (This game is so good I must fear for my non-virtual life.) As for the practice, I took a cue from other YGPers and focused on 3rd primary work. Despite my best intentions I tend to linger in C. Working in G I realize that, once my interpretations in G are really sound, they will translate to all the keys. This lends much hope.

03/27/06

Bad weekend. Taxes on Saturday. Watched half of my savings disappear. Over $12K due, and worse, about $6K of it avoidable but for my stupid, stupid, honesty. Not that I would ordinarily condone tax-evasion, but the income that bit me was a partial settlement of what was originally owed, and due to some sloppy (or perhaps intentional) bookkeeping, I was shafted out of additional self-employment tax (whereas I had not been self-employed when this money was earned) and fees (as if I'd chosen for this money to arrive 3+ years too late). But the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, and I can't fix it now. Trying very hard to just accept the loss. But so far... it's still cutting into my sleep a bit.

"Life is seldom fair, but always just." This one has been coming to me a lot in recent months. I could get a whole lot of mileage out of it. There is a very profound faith buried in this aphorism - one that I can just glimpse, but do not quite have claim to at this point in my life.

03/28/06

Very crazy day at work yesterday. I'm beginning to feel like people are sitting in their offices just brainstorming - trying to come up with projects to keep me buried under, with little sense of priority or of the fact that our "IT Department" is... me.

But how can I complain, when Tzu didn't come home from work until nearly 10PM, then got called again at 11:30 and continued working until after 1AM? IBM does not impress me as a good employer. It seems that the promise of a reasonable workload - just a few weeks away now! - has been a dangling carrot since the day I met her.

Late night then. Foiled once more in my efforts to get back in the swing of a morning sitting vs. an evening one.

Lots of thoughts concerning the ground I hope to cover in Argentina next month. Some unrest. I don't expect this course to be easy for me. Understatement.

Am now writing to this journal without any specific commitment. Probably should step back and consider this.

03/31/06

Decided against writing for a couple of days. Tendonitis - and many other demands that I type - contribute to this. But I would like to acknowledge Means rehearsal of this past Wednesday night, as it sounded especially good (from my especially untrustworthy vantage point behind the guitar.) The night had the feeling of hard work, and much of this feeling can and should be dispelled. Tensions and speedbumps that just a bit of focus would obviate. But despite the uphill grade we got some cool stuff done.

Catching up at work, getting my head resolved with my new financial situation (which, as it happens, I summed up too optimistically on Monday. Since what remains in my bank account actually belongs to someone else, I recently lost my entire savings to the IRS.) Onward.

04/03/06

3rd day of April and I'm already losing track of days - began typing 04/02 above. Also, losing track of hours. I hate daylight savings time. (I understand Ben Franklin is to blame?) I overslept HUGELY this morning, waking with a start and seeing that the clock read 9:00AM. YOW! This unpleasant feeling has been rippling through the day despite my boss taking it completely in stride.

On Saturday, over lunch, Tzu looked at me and out of the blue said, "You've changed." This is the sort of observation that stops you in your tracks, when delivered by someone whose affection you depend on. "Not necessarily for the worse", she continues, but still I'm left paying closer attention to myself. It's likely, then, that she was doing me a favor. I have noticed a little more anger in myself lately, and an uncharacteristic willingness to react and/or confront when I feel I'm being slighted. (Not with her, as it happens, just in general...) Something recent seems to have crossed a line with me, maybe it was the little IRS fiasco. But if my wife chose to marry a gentler me, maybe I owe it to her to work this out. Or maybe I'm just becoming more open, trusting her enough to share my own sense of humor, which has never been an entirely "pleasant" one.

Zookeeping, a sitting, guitar practice, and lots of rest on Saturday. On Sunday we went to the beach. Tzu had never flown a kite, so I bought her a couple last year, and she finally had a chance to fly them. Great fun, lots of laughs, especially after these cheapo kites started to fall apart, becoming less and less predictable. Back home to lots of yard work, out to dinner, some PC gaming and to bed.

Today's dose of perspective: the manager at the bagel joint where I got my lunch asks about my copy of Guitar Player - "Anything good this month?" I ask whether he plays and he kind of nods, then adds, "Went to Berklee. Now I'm stuck here." I ask if he performs in the area and he says "Used to. Now I just pile guitars up in the basement. The kids bang on 'em." I'd noticed an interesting energy about this guy months ago, but wouldn't have guessed he was a musician. Then in retrospect, it seems obvious. His bearing is much more positive than these words convey in print.

04/04/06

I'm a cranky boy today. Can't seem to get rested enough.

Everyone asks whether I'm getting excited about my trip. This is always the case before I go away on a course. The reality is that I usually get nervous. No matter whether I keep my mouth shut or try to explain my plans - when people hear you'll be out of work for a week or more, they just assume you'll be drinking cocktails and snapping polaroids in some exotic locale. Not that I'm going off to war or anything. Still, "excited" isn't the right word.

04/05/06

A surprise: snow this morning.

Anger management in tight little cycles these past 24 hours. A phone call set me off last night and Tzu, just home from a long day at work, had to comfort me. It should probably have gone the other way around.

An e-mail exchange today helps resolve anger over a separate matter: I'm now convinced that there was no foul play in the matter of my taxes. At least none that was intentional.

Distracted. Needless sentences forming in my head all day. Every so often I notice and dispell them.

04/06/06

exhausted. meeting burn-out.

post-means tendonitis. no-left-hand, no-caps journal entry. likely the last online entry until i return from argentina.

the plan is no more guitar until the course begins, but committing to this is more frightening then committing to a practice schedule. left hand indicates rest is in order, though.

means positively rocked last night. js persists w/ its fierce vocal and a new roxanne-inspired rythym. spilt gets even scarier with the addition of noise-synth during the guitar solo and a haunting, jangly pop outro. trace is revived by way of sampled string section swells - a crutch maybe, but we all love it, so good enough. decrementia, well, you know... blossom is resurrected on tim's request and j&t add a reggae feel under the verses - cool. i mention that blossom is rough, and an anti-climactic way to end the night. tim's reply: i'm a "negative nancy." True dat.

jefe annoyed me again without actually doing anything wrong (well he did forget half his kit, but ironically i took this in stride - it saved us the time of waiting on the set up, after all) and i acted like an idiot. but much more restrained this week. eventually i will learn to keep my snide comments to myself. or at least the completely non-constructive ones. little by little...

our increasingly out-of-date website says the means are back. but if spilt is any indication, the means are way forward.

04/27/06

A solid week of Guitar Craft dreams.

From Lunlunta:

Oceans
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens!
Nothing... Silence... Waves....
-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

05/10/06

I hadn't expected to post in this forum again, my work with the YGP having come to an end. But the YGP itself has come to an end for the time being, so the vague concensus is that we might continue to write here regarding our individual paths.

I wasn't sure where or whether to begin, but something in Kevin's journal needs addressing, so here. He writes, with regards to Saturday's meeting of the YGP:

"Two in favor to three against it continuing."

This is not exactly true. The one word, "it", is a sticking point. Three had decided not to continue. I don't think any one of us came to the table hoping or intending that the YGP cease to function. It was only that a majority of the participants were unavailable that this was the fate for the group. For my part, I was genuinely surprised.

Evident in our meeting: a sense that something was complete. Mark would clarify that only the beginning is complete, and I see some truth in this. But for several of us, a completion of any kind presents an opportunity that we can't afford to miss - an opportunity to reassess and investigate the balance of our lives outside of the YGP. And in my case, at least, the balance of my life outside of GC.

I regret speaking a bit too much on Saturday, or at least too emphatically. I fail to resist opportunities to spin one-liners while I'm trying to make important points, coloring my language until it is not entirely true.

But in general the discussion was well-considered and benevolent - each of us respectful of the others' opinions and needs, even where this might have represented a loss or sacrifice. Musicianship seemed evident even with the guitars in their cases. Apologizing for my own wordiness afterwards, I told the group, "It will be a long time before I stand in a room with four other musicians, and it's this quiet again."

Driving Tim back to the train station and talking about non-YGP matters, I'm reminded that I'll also miss visiting with these four friends, whom I'm now likely to see far less often.

And since that puts me in the swing of recounting my weekend: Home to Tzu, a delicious potato salad, and video games.

On Sunday a friend I'd not seen in many years paid us a visit. Fabulous to rediscover how much we have in common. As a matter of coincidence, he'd seen a LoCG performance last year. Something had disappointed him, and it wasn't the music. He couldn't put his finger on it. He didn't need to.

A new laptop, all revved up with guitar-mangling software, and the Means at the ready. I step into the clearing.