Times A’changin’ (A Year Passes)

It’s crazy to think how far things have come in the past year. I don’t know how things will change in the coming months, but going from a practically part-time, full-time job to aspirations of being a full-time musician while in school part-time is something that I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

Everything that I’m planning to do right now seems to be pretty far out there compared to the some of the other goals that I’ve ever tried to accomplish. But I do think that with the way the things are going with the band and a few other things going for me, primarily a great set of friends that I’ve found over the past year, I think I’ll actually be able to meet those goals and I think it’s an awesome yet terrifying thought.

With all the things that I thought I would be doing at this point, never had I thought that being a professional musician would have been one of them. I always thought that I would’ve been an engineer or even a soldier, but learning how to pick up the bass guitar and play it for money had never crossed my mind.

Quite a few things to come along way in the past year but I never thought would happen. For instance I’m not actually typing this blog post. I’m dictating it to a software ghostwriter. The friends that I’ve made this past year balls seems surreal. Especially in the sense that I don’t have the greatest personality for making friends and keeping them, but I feel that every friend that I have made has taught me something about myself that I had not known and I feel a lot more mature over the past year because of it.

I may not be the best person that people think of when they think about personalities with people and I might not be the most well-off person that they know that people think of when they think of people that are relatively well-off, but I have to be thankful for every person I know because without them I’m pretty much just another guy that some people know but not everyone does.

It’s not that I’m planning at the chance to become more popular, but it just seems natural to want to have more people know who you are. I mean it would be nice to use your popularity to influence people to hire you or even give you a little bit of work to do on the side, but that’s just abusing people more or less. I don’t think I would be that kind of guy and I don’t think I could even do it.

So what is really change me in the past year? I have to say it’s the people that I know.

Be it the band or my friends, it really has come down them. I’m sure people aren’t thinking about my birthday when they think about giving me the chance to hang out with them or invite me along to random bar crawls or parties, but looking back on the past year, it really has been one of the best birthday presents I could have asked for.

This year I don’t have the means to give everyone that I care for something that tells them that I appreciate everything they’ve done for me this past year but I’m going to figure out a way to tell them exactly how I feel. Yeah that’s supposed to be something for Thanksgiving, but think it’s appropriate right now.

More than ever.

With Apologies (to the Dictionary)

hy⋅per⋅bo⋅le

–noun Rhetoric.

1. obvious and intentional exaggeration.

2. an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity” and at most times this blog.

I added emphasis where I thought it’d be particularly helpful for the readers’ benefit.

Why I’m Deaf (for Future Reference)

I’m writing this as a reference that I could point women to when they wonder why I strain to hear some conversation. Aside from the fact that I couldn’t string together a spoken sentence until I was four or five years old and roughly a third of my left ear canal is composed of scar tissue from frequent ear infections, hearing tubes and their related surgery, I generally blame music.

After the SMCRVA event last week, the OMGWTFRVA announced after-party eventually moved from Delux to Sticky Rice, a sushi bar in downtown Richmond, just in time for karaoke to start. Typically, I like to watch everyone else get up on stage and sing their lungs out, but I felt compelled tonight to mix things up and add my voice to the ritual.

I sang Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps” and while everyone may not have been up on their feet, clapping, or dancing, I do have to say that I had plenty of damn fun throwing myself out there like that and singing. Next time, I won’t be as sober when I sing and we’ll really see what I can do with my voice.

Regardless, the experience really got me thinking about what prompts people to have the musical tastes that they do. It may not necessarily be one of those traditions passed down generation after generation, but it doesn’t always have to be a case of youthful rebellion.

Music has a quality of affecting someone’s emotions if they’re receptive to what’s being played through their ears. They effect emotions in a handful of ways. Not the least bit typically overlooked is their lyrics. Poetic, sappy, romantic, depressing, uplifting, cutting, ironic, joyful, hopeful–they all have some sort of emotional attribute that describe the mood of the song. They go with the music’s rhythm and the instruments being used, although the latter doesn’t really matter that much, to create the feeling the song is going after.

But that’s a generalization about why music is so damn difficult to understand. It has a lot of different representations through genres. What makes music important to me on the other hand is the sort of feeling I get listening to a song–which is especially present if I’m listening to a band perform live.

I was invited to hear KiTheory play at the Sound of Music studios on Broad St this pas weekend and I quickly came to understand that by walking in during the middle of their set I had missed some pretty awesome indie/electro stuff with a live drummer to round out the great sound. There’s something about that sound, the minor key progression, the melodic singing combined with a voice synth that just jumped out at me.

I commented on Twitter about how I was re-imagining the concert adding myself in on bass. I was following along with the live sound of the band, telling myself little notes like “add in a chord here” and “minor scale here” while humming through them in my head. It gave me this feeling that the idea was a stroke of genius while feeling damn privileged to hear the raw, live sound.

Music motivates me to be creative in more ways than simply being a musician. While churches and various other institutions have always used music to do more than simply get an emotion out of people, but rather to elicit a call to arms so to speak, music in all of its different forms is exactly that for me.

So if you see me reach for a pair of in-ear headphones and plug them up to my iPhone, you may want to consider me a little deaf to the world for a few minutes. I might just need the little hit of inspiration to get some work done or to tap into my seemingly distant creative side.

Out of Character (Reading Between the Lines)

It’s come to my attention that I’ve been acting out of character lately from various people, some of whom I’d trust with my life and some of whom seem a bit out of left field with the suggestion.

It’s not the ones that I trust that are throwing me into confusion–it’s the ones who claim to know me and disapprove of something or another. This admonishment follows some manner of adjusting or compensating for something I see going on. Either I make a moral judgment  and let them know they’re being a supreme asshat or I just decide to avoid the drama and sidestep the impending shitstorm.

Honestly, I’ve had a hard enough time trying to keep my mind somewhat oblivious to the minutiae that continuously present itself no matter where I am. I definitely notice way too much for my own damn good, and I hate it. There are moments that I wish I could forget things entirely without the need for a concussion or some sort of injury to my brain. A file system for my brain would be damn useful. That way all I have to do is think to myself, “Forget that shit,” and it’s instantly forgotten.

Sadly, my mind doesn’t work like that. What I would give it if did… talk about a quality of life increase, right there.

But that’d be too easy, right?

Then again, file systems have their own checks and balances, not to mention their imperfections. Something might simply get corrupted and lost. I would never really know what it was and I would simply go on oblivious as I intended to be. Could I tell if there would be something missing that shouldn’t be?

The file system on a computer deals with this time and time again. Most notably, RAID-style file systems might lose some small amount of data that make a file incomplete because of the nature of the system. With the redundancy inherent in the design of the system, the file system can simply read sectors around the file to gleam what the corrupted file should read as. This happens automatically and an end user may never see anything more than a slight performance blip during their computer use.

That’d be nice to have around if my brain’s file system lost one of my memories or they became hazy. It would be nice to remember what has gotten indistinct over time. In the same way, it would possibly reconstruct the memories that I’d rather not remember all at once. Perhaps a file system that would be able to help me forget what I’d like would also be smart enough to help me keep memories around for a good long while.

I guess I’m better off not screwing with my brain anymore than I already have. Though I do wish I could forget being betrayed, crushes that would never work out, conversations I should’ve never heard, life does go on. And I’ve got more important things to worry about.

Sometimes the simple things escape me. I can’t make excuses for them, I just have to keep changing who I am to be a better person. That’s the goal, after all.

Is Fiction For Me?

The #writeclubrva meeting that I attended got me thinking about fiction writing, why I used to attempt it, and why I’m not still doing it. NaNoWriMo was only being attempted by a couple of the members in attendance, but with an exception, everyone seemed to be planning on writing some fiction.

I used to attempt a fair bit of fiction back in high school. I used the time I spent in authoring fiction to counter-balance all of the journalistic articles I was writing for the school newspaper. What @knownhuman said at #writeclubrva was definitely true: “The first draft is for yourself.” All the drafts I attempted were for myself, aside from the grammar errors. I was never able to write anything that wasn’t short-form fiction.

In hindsight, I do believe I’ve found the reason that I wasn’t able to write anything of length that wasn’t atrocious to my own eye: I was stuck in some sort of dream-length rut. I’m not quite sure why I was stuck on the episode nature of dreams as a basis for the narratives I would write, but I’m certain of this even more as I become more a creature of horrible sleep and less a creature that has dreams when he sleeps.

I used to be thrown into the most random of situations and felt like I made decisions inside the dream that would make the most sense. For instance, I might be walking along my neighborhood’s streets with a backpack on when a car passes me–narrowly hitting me–while being chased by a police car. I have a ‘holy shit, that almost hit me moment’ and then look over at the ditch before reaching for my cell phone and realizing that there was a suitcase on the ground. SAMSONITE, even.

What can I attribute the previous dream to? Rewatching Dumb & Dumber before I turned in for the night.

The simple little things like that were my initial inspiration for writing fiction in the first place. I’m not so sure that I can return to that train of thought, but that’s halfway the point of this project that I’m doing. I’m forcing myself to write these new posts and try to communicate these new ideas that I’ve learned about since the last time that I kept a blog.

Will I be writing fiction? Yes, I probably will. I think I’ll be attempting to explore some of the narrative fiction that I once labored to author years ago. I’m not exactly sure if I’m going to be writing fiction in the narrative way, but I will be attempting some sort of episodic fiction along the lines of what used to appear in newspapers when they were looking for filler space in their ‘lifestyle’ sections–not that newspapers are busting at the seams with content…

Regardless, I think I’ll just sit here with my coffee and continue pumping out ideas so that I won’t have posts come out a day late like this one. I’ll write what I damn will, and I hope that I can communicate my thoughts well enough in the future. That’s what I’m working on, anyway.