It was the best of times. That's it. Just the best of times! [Glances over shoulder, anxiously.]

It's come to my attention that one or two people are actually visiting this page from time to time. Embarrasing: the last I wrote was 4 months ago, and then only to bitch about my job. Well, this is hardly the time to be reticent, I suppose, with so many dramatic changes for the better! (And my guitar teacher reminds me that this might actually serve as a creative outlet on some level.)

Obviously, I'm happy with the outcome of the election. An understatement. Since I've been writing plenty on this topic elsewhere, I'll probably just do a bunch of cutting and pasting to this blog, eventually. Optional reading for those curious about my political angst - and subsequent relief - at the close of the presidency that single-handedly destroyed the letter "W".

Elsewhere, too much has passed in the day to day to attempt to recount, but then less than you'd expect. Still practicing, still aimlessly. Bought another house and this time the process is sucking less. Hope to move in less than 2 weeks. Also, Fallout 3 rules. I think that brings us up to speed.

Soon, for your entertainment: more photos of musical equipment belonging to a non-musician!

Consistently too busy/ insufficiently inspired to document my life here, so posting borrowed stuff that seems apropos. Hey, everyone else is doing it.

The whole guitar thing is really working for me this week - gear, practice, et al. More on this soon.

A bit uncomfortable about some of what I wrote on Wednesday; back and forth as to whether to delete it... But fuck it - it's nothing but the truth anyway, and anyone who expects to get the whole truth from a weblog (from the bullet lists no less) is a bigger idiot than the author. Besides which and above all I'm mainly carrying on a debate with myself here...

So for today, I'm just going to copy and paste the only part of Wednesday's verbiage that pertains to the alledged, recently emerging topic of this blog, since anyone passing through would probably have missed it otherwise. (And also, this will help bury the preceding uncomfortable bits.)

"On a completely different note, I did finally arrive at a solution for my on-going laptop woes. The key was to get that bothersome Creative Labs card out of the equation, and the key to that key was to eliminate the need to route audio to multiple apps (which the Echo card would not do). That final key came in the form of an audio-to-MIDI plug-in, as opposed to a standalone application. Seems I backed the wrong horse with TS Audio to MIDI; WIDI has a better interface and works fine on my laptop. Besides which, running a single host application is more elegant, and a plug-in can be run in series with equalizers and compressors to improve compatibility with any given audio source (ie. an electric guitar.) That said, TS does seem to introduce less latency, and I might recommend it in some circumstances. (It's still installed on my desktop.)"

Past due for an update. So much has transpired, but in the end it seems we've come full circle. So why bother expending the energy to recount everything? Well, for the most part I won't, but in very brief summary:

The home-buying effort mentioned in previous posts turned quite sour. Ignorance on behalf of buyers, seller, agent all converged to make difficult/ impossible: a) the agreeable purchase of the home, b) the agreeable termination of the contract. Item b) was especially troubling, as I believed difficulties concerning item a) had long since voided any standing contract. But lawyers have not consistently agreed with my simple interpretation, and so our deposit is still hanging somewhere in the balance.

Meanwhile, another house has come and gone, but that one with much less drama: It was expensive, we bid within our means, and the seller took a pass. All fair game.

Somewhere in between, gout caught up with me - the worst bout of it in nearly five years, and the lengthiest bout yet. I've been mostly unable to walk for pushing three weeks, which is not even remotely convenient.

Forging ahead with guitar lessons. Discussions with Shawn led us to a guitarist named Howard Roberts who's developed some truly excellent educational materials concerning jazz improv. Working on this - and learning more on some days than I have in preceding years - despite having little sense of where or whether I will find a voice in the future. My sense of self as a young, angst-ridden rocker has largely past. (When angst does present itself today, I can see little value in conveying this in music.) But the obvious alternatives - instumental folk, jazz, et al - do not resonate either. I see the occasional glimpse of reason in playing guitar as an end in itself, but this has never truly been my sense of it, and digesting is a slow process. I'm not sure it will ever "take".

Continuing to reflect on my (growing, now exponentially) distance from the world of Guitar Craft - especially in light of my work in a more traditional guitar teacher/ student context. I can never overstate the value of my experiences within Guitar Craft, but there is a growing awareness of what it cost. Of late, a few specific things have been coming forward, two of them personal and one functional:

What we take from Guitar Craft - or anything else - reflects what we begin with, and therefore who we are. So:

(That the last bullet item would likely concern/ terrify GC staff is one more reason I maintain my distance...)

On a completely different note, I did finally arrive at a solution for my on-going laptop woes. The key was to get that bothersome Creative Labs card out of the equation, and the key to that key was to eliminate the need to route audio to multiple apps (which the Echo card would not do). That final key came in the form of an audio-to-MIDI plug-in, as opposed to a standalone application. Seems I backed the wrong horse with TS Audio to MIDI; WIDI has a better interface and works fine on my laptop. Besides which, running a single host application is more elegant, and a plug-in can be run in series with equalizers and compressors to improve compatibility with any given audio source (ie. an electric guitar.) That said, TS does seem to introduce less latency, and I might recommend it in some circumstances. (It's still installed on my desktop.)

Dig the video inset right. I'll resist the temptation to prattle on metaphorically.

Yes, I've been gone, again, for nearly a month. When I last posted, things were looking very rosy on the music nerd front, which inevitably caused me to tinker excessively, and break everything. More specifically, my new wireless laptop setup was proving so effective, I decided it was time to upgrade the laptop itself, with more memory and a faster hard drive. The memory upgrade was as simple as expected, but the hard drive upgrade was a multi-faceted disaster, consuming my attention for several weeks.

Wedging the drive into the tiny little Vaio was a challenge in itself, but the real trouble came in trying to transfer the contents of the old drive to the new one - Sony had included a proprietary restore partition on that drive that confused any and all transfer utilities. Not so's they'd fail, of course, but just enough that they'd spend hours appearing to work, while in fact achieving nothing.

So I finally had to abandon my hope of transferring that installation (you know, the one that had encouraged me to upgrade in the first place?) and proceed with a fresh install. This is where the HDD stopped hassling me, and a sound card took over in its place. Limitations with the Indigo IO had nearly reversed my new wireless strategy, so I had begun testing a Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook card (yes, all of that is its name) in its place. This is a lesser product in several ways, comprimising fidelity for a zillion features as per ancient Creative Labs tradition. (And the software and drivers appear to have been developed by clever monkeys.) But I needed an alternative, and there aren't many options in this form factor.

Anyway, before the upgrade, I had finagled with this thing for a couple of nights, when suddenly and for no apparent reason, it began working properly. I was confused, but it seemed reasonable to expect I could arrive at the same state later if the need were to arise. Then, of course, having replaced the hard drive, I was entirely unable to get things right... and spent another three nights installing drivers, fiddling with senseless control panel applets... even reformatting and reinstalling the OS a couple of times. I was just about to give up on the ZS (isn't that a better name?) when suddenly, and for no apparent reason, it began working properly again.

Now it says a lot about me that I would lead with half a page about the hard drive in my laptop, considering that the other reason I've been absent is: We've bought a house. Or we're buying a house. Or we're trying or whatever. It's an incredibly gray area and I'll probably feel that way until around the time I'm trying to sell said house. Any transaction on this scale presents a huge sense of vulnerability, countless unknowns, and I'm not very good with any of that. I haven't been sleeping a whole lot and I'm generally thrilled and miserable at the same time... which is hard to explain to Tzu, despite all evidence that she's in the exact same place. So yeah, busy with that for a while.

I used that little metaphor about dominoes falling down a couple of weeks ago - after I decided to put away all my MIDI hardware and start using a wireless and all that. This week I started to imagine the occasional mutant domino, made out of some kind of cartoon rubber: things go along just so far, until they collide with one of these inevitable, incorrigible mutants and - one by one - start bouncing right back to where they started. Except that I'm a couple of weeks older and a few hundred bucks lighter, on average.

This time, the bouncy domino is the Echo Indigo IO audio interface. My brave new solution works fine with the Firepod on my desktop, or with an Audio Kontrol on my laptop, but when I build out the ideal rig - my tiny new wireless connected to my tiny laptop with the very tiny Indigo plugged in the side - I find I cannot run both Ableton Live and TS-Audio-to-MIDI at the same time. Apparently "multi-client" input support is only sometimes supported by ASIO 2.0 devices. Did someone say "specification"? Hush.

Meanwhile, I've come to the conclusion that Nintendo has inadvertently shipped the finest musical instrument of the decade. Seems an unassuming Wii Remote (roughly $40) will connect to any Bluetooth-equipped PC, at which point you can run an application called GlovePIE (something about the name makes me uneasy, but I'm not going to look too far into that...) and map all of its motion-sensing goodness to MIDI (or just about anything else.) Also worthy of note: it works! This has some really cool applications in approximating KaossPad-like behaviour, etc. but of course I went straight for my personal obsession: building a decent footcontroller. And because the WiiMote transmits information about its pitch and roll, I was able to make a wireless MIDI expression pedal by (I am not making this up) velcroing a stock WiiMote to the side of an old volume pedal. This is so impossibly simple it made me laugh like a little girl. Then I decided this wasn't really stucturally sound, and I'd actually need to build some sort of boxlike structure on top of the pedal to house the WiiMote. I looked at it for a couple of minutes, and then realized that the "box" was already there; I just needed to turn the pedal upside down! Then I laughed like a little girl some more.

Of course I won't be finished until I've taken a something apart, soldered some other things to it, and gotten properly frustrated. (In my defense, this is the only feasible way to make use of all the extra buttons!) I'll be back to report on that soon.

Oh, and I have actually been playing a little guitar. Paul Gilbert's "Get Out of My Yard" DVD is keeping me pretty busy with new ideas. And it's keeping my newly revived Variax busy, too, since he makes use of a lot of prepared guitar/ alternate tunings on these songs.

Well, the Grim Reaper didn't kill me last week, but he did give me a very bad cold. (This is in keeping with an unspoken agreement I've had with Death since my early teens.) On Saturday I had to help some friends move and that put me well over the edge. A point to consider: your exercise equipment will probably do more for your friends' fitness than your own - once you've got them carrying it all over hell and back.

So this week, pretty much nothing doing except work and sleep, despite the various guitar-arisings detailed in posts below. Averaging maybe 30 mins. of practice on the acoustic each night - which doesn't even constitute treading water - but I have learned some interesting things. One example: a dominant V chord imposed on a relative minor key can imply a harmonic minor melody. (I'm still a little hung up on semantics with these things - when to be absolute and when to be relative visa vis chord numbers, key names, interval names, etc... but the more I let go of this the more new observations become available. So screw it... it's not like I'm going to forget the "understanding" I'd held to for the last ~20 years, right?)

Nearly April already. 2008 takes the new record for "Years that Scare the Crap out of Me by Just Kind of Uneventfully Whizzing By."

Driving into work this morning, I saw a homeless man standing on the side of the road in a black "hoodie" (how did this ridiculous word ever make it into the vernacular?), and - as viewed over the tops of the cars - he was a dead-ringer for the Grim Reaper. In the briefest of moments before I realized part of me was daydreaming, I heard a tiny idiot voice ins my head say, "oh, cool", as if he'd just sighted a celebrity. So yeah, I'm tired, and if this is my last ever post, we saw it coming.

Shawn talked me down from the proverbial ledge during a guitar lesson last night, after a visit to an open mic (as an audient) the night before cast a glaring, uncomfortable light on the depth of my present identity crisis. It's curious - no, more than that - to note that this void exists somewhat intentionally: I arrive here partly of laziness, partly of simple commonness, but also partly by way of striving toward a sort of Zen minimalism. In retrospect, becoming an absolute dullard with nothing to say was always a foregone conclusion, the end of the line. I win.

Lucky for me, Shawn can relate, and/ or sees me as a fascinating specimen illustrating difficulties that arise in other students. For now, he recommends I practice other people's music. OK. With a hard reset so late in life, I'm having a hard time visualising my trajectory as a musician, but - XBox 360 notwithstanding - I don't have anything better to do.

Taking it back down to earth (since I haven't a cloud to stand on), I did finally find someone willing to sell me the wireless doodad below. And the lowest, most Pavlovian part of myself is bound to be drawn back to the instrument once I've hung a shiny new doodad off of it.

So the wireless doodad ("down, and to the right") fell through. Musician's Enema honored their reputation by screwing the pooch with utter totality. I really wish I had a picture of the small tragedy they shipped me, but all I have is a thousand words. In summary, a question: what exactly does it take to embarrass MF? If their inventory were in my basement, I couldn't bring myself to sell it on eBay.

close

Well as it turned out... no opinion of the AKG, renewed/ confirmed opinion of Musician's Enema (formerly Musicians Enemy formerly Musicians Friend.) What follows is basically another MF rant, just so you know whether to bother...

The only positive thing I can say is that the customer service dood was friendly and reasonably competent, although I spent a combined 30+ minutes on hold that I'm never gettin' back.

I don't even know where to start: the box was filled with "packing materials" consisting of crumpled brown paper. This was all on one side of the box, with the product mysteriously placed on the opposite edge, making the packing material pretty much pointless.

The package I pulled out of the box looked like it had been through several wars - ie. had probably been sitting on various shelves at various Guitar Centers since the 80's, and demo'd extensively. And/or purchased and returned: the box was plainly opened and retaped at least once, and the packaging inside was all torn up. The battery cover on the transmitter was broken and bouncing around inside the box. Believe it or not I'd have let all of this slide, but...

Here's the kicker. There was only a transmitter. No receiver whatsoever. Immediately (and based on past experience) I knew the deal: MF never had a PR40 to begin with; their website was just full of s*** again. What gets me is this: my purchase flagged the point that stock was low or nil - they updated it immediately afterwards to say none available. At which point, what? They opted to just put a random object in a box? "He'll never notice..." What exactly are they using all those computers for over there?

Not to mention, what monkey could look at this crumpled battered product, and put it in a box and ship it out (without laughing out loud at the same time)? I've ordered tons of "B-stock" product from zZounds and have rarely been able to determine why they labelled it as such, and they've never botched an order. MF botches nearly every order somehow, and the crap they're willing to call "new"... it's terrifying. I think the fact that there is an affiliated "brick and mortar" store (or evil empire if you prefer) actually hurts them (or rather their customers) in this instance. They happily shovel out the GC left overs which no one would ever buy if they saw them in person.

I never would have bought from MF in the first place, except that they were the only vendor to claim to have this product in stock. Nice system they've got going there. Come to think of it, the GC staff are trained to do the same thing - always telling me they've got something in stock, only to hand me an "equivalent" after I've driven an hour. Grrr.

Fool me ~~twice~~ half a dozen times... won't get fooled again.

Otherwise, a wonderful weekend, and uncommonly social. David Torn and Prezens on Friday night, preceded by a wonderful dinner with friends Tim and Jess. I was sufficiently impressed with Prezens to offer a brief standing ovation. Alone. In the front row. In a crowded room of perhaps 50. So that's saying something. Others were not entirely convinced by the improv, but all agreed it was a valuable experience.

Saturday morning we met with friends I haven't seen in nearly 4 years, and with offspring that didn't exist then! Immediately afterwards, an unexpected guest arrives to share beers and tales of old, then off for dinner and comedian Brian Regan with my mom and her boyfriend - another wonderful night.

Sunday in the basement, amazing myself with my unfamiliarity with the Beatles repertoire. Then, video games with Tzu until finally we collapsed.

There seems to be some kind of 100th Monkey phenomenon happening with regards to analysis of polyphonic signals. Celemony has released some big news about their latest technology:

All of this emerging software represents years of work, obviously, but it's interesting to see public interest perk up all at once, almost to the hour. The editor of MusicThing comes right out and says, "You'll be able to turn any guitar into a guitar synth with no special hardware." Hey, that's my line! (Actually, at this point I prefer the present tense.)

While we're surfing together... if you're the kind of person who hates nearly all video games because you love video games, then you will love this person:

It's interesting how one change in technology will cause my perspective to shift with regards to related technologies, and my entire approach ("solution": too optimisitic a word) suddenly requires an overhaul. It's like watching dominoes fall over. And similarly, I'm usually left with a big mess to clean up.

A couple of old ideas started bubbling up in my head once I realized (last week) that I might be able to make do without MIDI cables. The first idea was going wireless, which - once I saw a mere one (1) cable connected to my guitar - started to look like a feasible proposition. After much hemming and hawing about the extravagance, and the fact that adding new tech to the mix almost always results in frustration and disappointment, I sucked it up and ordered the doodad to the right. It's the smallest wireless solution I could find, and also among the cheapest. It's also discontinued, so I could only get away with so much hemming and hawing. (I snagged the very last one from Musician's Enemy.) It should arrive in a couple of days and surely I'll be back to bitch about some detail or another...

The second idea represents a slightly bolder leap of faith, considering past experience. But when I realized I no longer needed a MIDI pickup, the idea of the Variax as one guitar that could play just about any song in any tuning crept back into my subconscious. (Yes, I know there is no band, no gig, no need, etc. but my subconscious is apparently not clued in.) So I spent some time getting the Workbench software working (again, and again not easy) and got the sounds arranged to my liking, and donned headphones and started to test this against some simple amplification models. And I was very happily surprised, actually. With headphones on, the Variax can sound quite good in standard tuning, and passable in alternate tunings, so long as the amplification is tweaked to mask shortcomings.

This was enough to get me working on the guitar itself again. When I had my Nitefly conversion done, I never routed for AA batteries, assuming a 9V would suffice for short sessions. This was never really true, and more recently the guitar started refusing to operate on a 9V altogether. So I rewired and fiddled and finally got the thing making noise without external power, only to find that I couldn't wedge batteries in anywhere. I'm not handy with a router (and don't have a router handy) so as a desperate holdover, I wound up with this Frankenguitar weirdness (left.) Secretly, I kinda like it. If my Variax were a DeLorean it would surely feature a flux capacitor. Maybe two.

But the Variax is a fickle mistress. Or maybe a mistress to inspire fickleness? After all of this, I brought it up the stairs and plugged it into another amp. (The whole point of the flux capacitor business was to make the thing more portable, right?) And to be honest, it sounded like ass. This is familiar territory. What I consistently find with these high-tech instruments is that they can sound amazing if you poke and prod them just so, but they are absolutely dying to sound bad, and know all kinds of ways to do so, and will do so the very second you aren't paying strict attention to them. When you really ought to be playing guitar.

Addendum: Because this is just beyond amazing. Ordered my first ever wireless Monday. It shipped just yesterday. It hasn't even arrived yet. And today the following is brought to my attention:

Big developments in music-nerd world. Providing the obvious backdrop: I've long been fascinated with hybrid guitar/ guitar synth rigs, and I've long been obsessed with achieving the associated timbral flexibility with as little hardware as possible. (Insert predictable self-deprecation/ excuse re: my thusly not practicing and thusly contributing to the downfall of various bands.) Anyhow...

I got back to wondering about something I've wondered about on and off for years now: audio to MIDI conversion via native PC software. What's been taking so long? Can it be that there's simply no demand? That makes no sense; if there's sufficient demand for Roland to get commercial hardware to market, there must be sufficient demand for some genius somewhere to code up a little chunk of middleware. Then, can it be that the CPU overhead would be too high? Impossible. The Roland GI, as just one example, has been around for well over a decade, and there's no way the CPU that shipped in that thing was more powerful than even a single core of your typical Core Duo. (Even allowing for specialized architecture, filtering, blah, blah, blah, Moore's rule easily dispels the entire argument.) If there is a single remaining complication, it's in getting six discrete signals (one per string) from the guitar to the PC, but that should be a relatively small hurdle. If a home grown parallel-to-serial (USB) solution can't be arrived at, then maybe it's time to start researching the few firewire guitars on the market, expensive though they may be...

So I started Googling. And it turns out the software guys (gender non-specific) and acoustic analysis guys (also) have been hard at work. They've gotten way farther than merely converting monophonic signals to MIDI and summing the lot together. I don't know how I missed this for the last ~5 years, but there are apps out there that will analyze a polyphonic, multitimbral recording and produce a multitrack MIDI file as output! What's more, some are capable of performing this feat in near real-time, and considering that a guitar is (for these purposes) a single timbre, with a limited six notes polyphony, this gives much hope.

I downloaded two applications: Intelliscore Ensemble WAV to MIDI Converter and TS Audio to MIDI. The former appears to be the more sophisticated program, with a higher price tag to match, but for my purposes I actually had more luck with the latter. (Part of this may be that the TS is shareware, whereas Intelliscore is a demo with an absurd 15-second timeout. As in: observe a problem, make an adjustment, read the demo warning, begin again.) Intelliscore fully supports dynamics (velocity) and pitch bend, but the response time was too slow out of the box. Whether this can be remedied is not necessarily something I can determine in 15-second bursts, so they lose the sale. TS, on the other hand, is really, really fast - faster than hardware in fact - but doesn't appear to support velocity or pitch bend. This is something I'll investigate further, but in the meantime I have to consider: my hardware (MIDIAxe-equipped Parkers) never supported velocity or pitch bend all that accurately anyway. Most of my MIDI dynamics were actually achieved with a pedal riding volume/ mix. Besides which, TS actually tracks the sixth string and very low notes properly, something the hardware never got right. The only hitch is that string harmonics are tracked so fast, some sounds will spawn all kinds of incidental notes in the upper registers. (Pianos call this out right away. There are various filter controls which are apparently intended to address this problem; I haven't had time to test these but I expect they'll do the job.)

So. VERY interesting. There are several companies (Roland, Axon, even Gibson now in their own vague way) putting money behind discrete signal-path MIDI solutions, and I've been one of the (relatively) few consumers for this technology. But I'm increasingly convinced that the whole thing is a dead end. What I've observed proves (to my satisfaction, at least) that the aim can be achieved with a single analog signal cable, and intelligent analysis on the receiving end. (Amazing that the developers of this techology don't even have modern websites. Leading to an entirely different discussion about the perils of virtual development vs. the profitability of hardware development, and the frequent ignorance of best solutions as a result. But I digress.)

What all this amounts to for me is the elimination of some phantom power supplies, cables etc. from my rig. (Oh how I wish I'd found this stuff when I was still performing electric music...) What I imagine it might mean for the industry is a lot of obsolete products, even a paradigm shift for future products. Closer to home, I've got ~$4K tied up in very nice MIDI guitars, and if I weren't so attached to them for their merits as guitars, I'd be thinking this was a good time to sell.

Last minute travel plans dominate much of the weekend, but there is time on Monday to make some progress, as evidenced in this:

Sitting at the kitchen table with guitar, I'm really happy with what I hear and feel. There's still something like a fear of recording, and on various levels I'm not ready for an audience. But then, it feels like a step forward to be able to separate these qualities: to consider playing for the sake of playing as entirely apart from the aim of making a recording, and this entirely apart from preparing for and subsequently engaging in performance.

Alright, let's talk geek. I'm takin' it to a whole nuther level here. If there were readers, many of them would know that I am interested in video games, and sometimes even enjoy them. The first half of that sentence is an understatement, which compensates for the precise accuracy of the second half. Anyway, I resisted this interest for years, but as my musical activities waned in 2007, I became a complete video game nerd - following the industry closely, buying new consoles, renting and ranting about new games on a weekly basis... Somewhere in there Tzu took an interest in Guitar Hero, and we bought a used copy for PS2, despite my insistence that having a fake guitar next to all the real ones I don't play enough was a little absurd.

And then I fell in love with this game. Especially, this game very loud, in the dark, with a beer on the big speaker to my left: a "nightclub simulator". Part of this has to do with a genuine admiration for the game. I can and often will wax philosophic' about participatory listening, rythym and song structure, and so on. But there is also this simple fact: I'd found a way to blast rock tunes and drink beer in the basement - for hours - without alienating my wife. A mixed blessing, plainly, but also part of the truth...

So we play this game for a few weeks, then bring it to a friend's house where it gets left behind as a loaner. And we begin to miss it. And I get it in my head that I ought to sell it and buy the XBox 360 version, which is alledgedly superior and besides which the PS2 will likely find its way upstairs, where we can't be so loud. Then things start to get truly absurd.

I sell all the PS2 stuff back because it so pains me to have a single extra object in the house. This yields all of ~$40. My preferred gaming shop - yes I do have one and no I don't even care whether you tell anyone - doesn't have Guitar Hero in stock, so we wait it out. In the meantime, I get it in my head that trying out Rock Band might be fun for Tzu and I. On a whim, I go out and buy it. In all of 5 minutes, I decide I don't quite like the guitar controller, and I hate the track list, and I'll be needing a copy of Guitar Hero III to round things out. The next night I purchase GH III for the XBox 360. I get it home... and I hate the controller. Now I'm $300 bucks into Simon Says with a Soundtrack, and somehow I'm unhappy with the lot of it. Of course, my formerly preferred gaming shop has no interest in a return.

The next day I'm sitting in the basement, tools and parts strewn all over the floor, both guitar controllers gutted, and I'm fabricating various modifications. I only turn on the games themselves to test the functionality of the guitars, which I am managing to improve, though never quite to my satisfaction. Actually playing the games has ceased to be musical, or in any way fun.

And suddenly the true depth of the absurdity occurs to me: this is a perfect simulation of my former life as a rock guitarist.

Been back and forth about this website lately, mainly leaning toward scrapping it. This documentation of a band that never happened/ is presently also not happening, combined with an account of mid-life suburban laziness, isn't newsworthy. A more moderate idea was to leave the website up as a repository for MP3's etc, but to abandon the journal. Then again, by the time I start posting MP3's they'll be like trees falling in the woods. All of which also indicates: no matter, I don't need to make a decision right now. A few bucks a year for the hosting, bleh.

And besides, there is news this week. This, which has me actually excited about playing guitar for the first time in years:

Taking stock. Of 2007, inevitably, but also reaching further back. This has been the climate under my thinning hair and between my ringing ears in recent weeks. As for 2007, well... I saved the money I committed to saving, but this wasn't a very ambitious amount to begin with. There was no pain in achieving the goal, nor am I likely to retire early as a result. My other two aims for the year led ostensibly to failure, but with significant glimmers of hope arising in the end-game. Yes, in my world, glimmers are significant.

Specifically, all of the weight I lost in the first half of 2007 was gained right back in the second half, and my music-writing goals were not met in a timely fashion. As for the former, a scare regarding my cholesterol and weight in extremis has prompted new diligence in diet and exercise. I'm losing weight already, and feeling reinvigorated. For the latter, I was apparently not up to the task of simply beginning to write "one new piece of music a month" in 2007. Not without help anyway. But... with the recent help of new teachers, I've begun writing, and playing, and practicing. The genre of the writing is not as I'd have expected, but it is a valuable process all the same. One challenge is to expect nothing of this - remembering that no one else is expecting anything either. And when I do see something, to accept - even appreciate - but to expect nothing further.

So, looking back further, and taking stock. What have I become? What have I failed to become? Why or why not, and is everything essentially as it should be? Some of this comes down to shifting blame: away from putting this on the difficulties that have arisen; and toward attributing this to myself. That is, for getting mired - in various ways - in negativity rather than addressing said difficulties. This is a start, in so far as it appeases my basic need for a sense of "justice". But on a deeper, truer, level: moving from a mechanism of blame toward one of acceptance: what was my life was a product of my capabilities as a whole, and this is constantly changing. My sense is that assymetry in these "capabilities" is what has led to much of my discontentment over the years. I have long known myself to be an inherently contradictory personality. The Capricorn Monkey, the mad stoic, whatever. And similarly, I have "suffered a privelege" in having many talents alongside many character flaws, which has led to an awareness of waste, and crippling regret. A stranger once took my hand and told me, with almost frightening sincerity, "You are an amazing talent." My reflex at the time was to disagree. But perhaps what really agitates is that he might have been right, and honestly, what have I achieved? Well, it is a New Year.