This is definitely one of the most challenging periods of my life. I’m trying to find a place to live and move into within the next two weeks (this will be my 4th in a year), record and launch a web video and earn enough money that I don’t keep dipping into overdraft “protection” (at 24% interest, it feels more like extortion, but I guess it’s my “choice”).
I love living in San Francisco, and can’t imagine living anywhere else (I am looking in the East Bay). But two bedroom apartments START at $1600/month. I keep seeing 2Br’s for 3k-5k. I guess there are lots of people who make enough money to afford that. Waaayyy beyond me, though, that’s for sure.
I just talked to the animator for the video and he says he can’t make the Veteran’s Day deadline, which while I understand and support his reasoning, still sucks ’cause when is a *better* time to release an anti-war song that also honors our troops? Fundraising has not gone as well as I need, either.
I’m ready to take to the streets and start playing for change. Seriously. I’m actually looking forward to that, ’cause Haight-Ashbury is two blocks away from my current place. The person I’m subletting for comes back in a few days and is cool with sleeping on the couch in the front room, and I’m feeling worlds of pressure to find a home so I can get on with the business of making music. It’s all feeling a little, ok a LOT overwhelming right now.
I’m just a walking ball of stress. I look and feel like shit. This year has been pretty exhausting. It’s addded many strands of grey to the noggin, too.
I’ve had a pretty intense couple of weeks, I’ll tell ya. I had a moment with the planet Mars the other night. I sat in a backyard, lookin up at the stars through the trees and there was Mars, looking right back at me. All of a sudden, I’m thinkin, “This is a season of challenge where your faith will be tested”. And I imagined being a recruit in the Roman Army being poked in the chest by a gritty, war-chiseled vet.
Latest Project:: War has been on my mind a lot lately, as I work to get Semper Fi released. My sister (hi!) heard it and has supported me in getting the video produced. I get more and more upset each day as the situation in Iraq gets worse and the world’s need for humanitarian help continues to grow. Maybe I’m just pissed that the price of gas has doubled in the last four years. Hm… wonder how an Executive Branch full of oil industry execs allowed THAT to happen. And they call ME a traitor. Indeed.
What it ACTUALLY is is that I’m exhausted and running hard.
What’s happening for me right now:: – finding a place to move into on Nov 1 (fourth move this year) – rehearsing and recording 4 songs for an EP to release with the Semper Fi video – producing the Semper Fi video (which right now means fundraising) – keeping up with a 40% increase in my workload at work (which is GREAT, since I get paid hourly and need the $) – keeping my sanity
Flattered:: I’ve been invited to be a “Celebrity Waiter” at the Stars on Staff luncheon for Music In The Schools Today, a non-profit that provides music instruments and education for 10,000 kids. Pretty psyched about that.
Deleted:: I just deleted a bunch of political ranting. Fact is, I’m angry. I think the Bush family with Rove & Co’s adept help managed to sell a bill of goods to the republicans and Americans at large. I am praying for someone to drop the new Pentagon Papers on some reporter’s desk although I don’t think corporate media would report it, anyway. Let the whistle blow.
Wow, it’s been an interesting several weeks. I don’t even remember my last post. I went to Burning Man, which was an intense experience on many levels. First, the place is just magical and intense to begin with. But things really started cooking for me when I ran into someone on Friday night who was from New Orleans. Since I don’t watch TV and was really incredibly busy for the weekend Katrina hit through the first part of the week, I didn’t get the news. It wasn’t until Friday that I heard, and i was in the middle of this giant art party in the desert. As Johnny LeFite told me the story of what was ACTUALLY happening, I fell apart. There I am at two in the morning in a playa bar called Whisky and Whores hosted by a camp of people largely from the Gulf region. It was intense. These people had come all the way from the bayou to the playa and all they had left were their sequined hats and fuzzy jackets.
And as Johnny unfolded the devistation and the clusterfuck of government ineptitude, i started trembling with anger, empathy and grief at the loss. I love New Orleans. Even though I only spent one night there (I’d made a detour from a work trip I was taking from Alabama to Dallas just to go), after a few hours I was asking where I could find work and a place to live. I was smitten immediately. So New Orleans is special to me.
Anyway, it was a traumatic, exhausting day as I tried to help organize a Burning Man response feeling incredibly guilty at the juxtoposition between being dancing carefree in the Nevada desert while so many people were dying and being displaced. And in the absence of any reliable news source out there, it felt like I was living in a bubble while chaos reigned in the entire country.
I got home and was relieved that things seemed relatively normal (gas prices and oil company profits rising commensurately, hm..) affected by this and the ensuing saturation of images I absorbed for the first time when I returned. It took about a week to get beyond the shock, anger and fear of global economic collapse kicked off by gas prices putting an intolerable strain on the economy. Hasn’t happened yet, but I really wonder if the economy can bear another blow to oil production (say, losing the war in Iraq and the second largest oil reserves falling into the hands of muslim extremists… how about civil war in Saudi Arabia? ‘nother Hurricane?) in the next couple years. Even so, the price of oil just continues to rise, which means the cost of everything is going to rise. That’s called inflation. Add into the mix that the supply of oil is only going to shrink from here on out, the total lack of any significant advances in petrolium-based alternative energy deployment, and a government rife with oil and defense executives and you have a recipe for economic disaster.
Here in San Francisco, we had our one or two days of the newspapers asking “are we ready for the Quake?” I stocked up on water but have slacked so far on putting an actual 72 hour kit together. Gonna do that this weekend, I think.
And today I launched a campaign to raise money for the production of my next web video for “Semper Fi”, a song inspired by my sister who’s been in the Marine Corps for something like 15 years or so. If you’re down with what I’m up to in the world, help me out, wouldja? It’s gonna cost $3500 to produce the video, and I need help.
I was hot for her from the minute I saw her. She had this amazing way of being captivatingly gorgeous and deliciously feminine while at the same time being one of the (rowdier and luder) boys. The same day we met, she used her tongue to make sure the snuff I’d just packed for the first time in my life was in its place in my mouth. At that moment, I fell in love and took her with me. Of course because of meeting me, she ended up breaking up with her boy, but couldn’t see me because it was “too confusing” and ended up getting married to a stunningly godlike rock-climber.
I was on classmates.com a month ago or so, and noticed that my high school graduating class was having its 20th reunion. Even though I’d only gone to that school for my senior year (I moved into a very close-knit community and class the day before school started), I still thought it would be neat to “go back” and play some of my music.
My high school is in El Dorado Hills, a kind of posh suburb of Sacramento and an advanced form of gentrification – the kind that tears down the old supermarket and puts in a swanky stripmall with hyper-manicured pathays between the Starbucks and the day spa.
The reunion was held at a country club in the middle of a new, upscale land development. It was kind of like Levittown meets Dallas. Hummer-sized tract homes – like ENORMOUS homes being built in modular gated community pods with names like “Centex” and “Equinox. A long, rolling ribbon of asphalt strolls over hills that used to be nothing but fields. And by long, I mean the clubhouse was 3 miles in. This devleopment just went ON and ON.
Anyway, I came over this hill, and the small valley between my hill and the next is a giant driving range. Green everywhere, sprinklers tch-tch-tch-tch and a line of golfers dressed in khakis (who paid between $10k and $35k and $2-500 a month for the privelege). One of whom is an older, portly woman wearing giant sunglasses and a huge sun visor out of which poofed a spew of orange/yellow/blond curls. She was whackin the HELL out of the green. It was hilarious.
The clubhouse sits atop a hill overlooking both the golfcourse and the rest of the manufactured exclusivity of the development. The signs said “Dress Code Strictly Enforced”, which I took to mean the faded jeans I’d worn all day weren’t going to fly. Good thing I brought a pair of dark denim pants. “No Denim”, indeed.
I got to the reunion itself and tripped out at seeing faces I hadn’t seen in 20 years, none of whom I had a particularly close relationship to, and most I didn’t know at all. I set up to mic and record my performance on a ProTools system I have on loan. I’d forgotten a very key adapter for the computer it runs on, so I ended up just using it as a mixer and wasn’t able to record any of the performance.
Which is probably just as well. It was as bizarre as anything else that night.
I was scheduled to play after cocktails and as dinner was being served. I missed my setup and soundcheck due to traffic which stretched from Berkeley to Davis. It was crazy. I had about ten minutes to relax from setting up, which was perfect. Everyone was seated for dinner, and the organizer introduced me. I didn’t think much of the fact that no one applauded after my introduction. I just started playing my set of 5 songs while people got up to the buffet and started eating.
I finished the first song fairly satisfied with my performance, and not one person (out of a hundred twenty or so) offered applause. My second song was met with an equally dreamlike silence. I looked at the DJ, who had soundchecked me between songs during cocktail hour, and he kept giving me the thumbs up whenever I’d look at him. Same with my third and fourth song. Nothing. People weren’t even looking at me. Well, that’s not true, one of the hottest women there (a “friend” of a classmate, who was ESCORTING him to the reunion) gave a gracious smile as I started Unamerican, my last song.
So I’m in the middle of the third verse when one of the stars of the class (then AND now – with Adonis-like looks, he was a star jock in school and later went on to play professional baseball for two major league teams) approaches the piano as I’m singing and starts waving his hand and talking to me.
Well, I couldn’t listen to him AND sing, and it was clear he wasn’t going to go away until I acknowledged him. Which I did. I stopped singing mid-verse and looked at him.
“After this song, we’re going to do a toast. One of my friends, our classmate, is going to make a toast, OK? AFTER you’re done with this song”. As if by stressing “after”, he was trying to be polite.
Honestly, I’d googled him a few years ago, trying to find out if I was one-degree removed from a professional baseball player. Couldn’t find him. Other than that, hadn’t really thought much of this person in the last 20 years. But in that moment, I remembered how he struck me as totally clueless in high school, too. Some things DON’T change.
Some things inevitably do. Hairlines receded like the treelines in this “community”. People didn’t really look very different than I remembered them. They certainly didn’t ACT differently. The loud “popular” chicks were still loud and “popular”. Given that it’s 2am on Sunday, and I’m blogging, I guess I can say that the geeks are still geeks.
The toast in question was a gentleman I only remember as being a football player and kind of an intense guy. Turns out he’s now a sniper for the SWAT team. He said something to the effect that we (as in the class of 85) had built El Dorado Hills into what it is today. All of us. We were the foundations of what EDH had become. I was hunched over my equipment bags, wrapping cords and not looking around nervously. I didn’t (and still don’t) understand the logic, but I DID raise a glass to the class of ’85.
By the time I had put my computer and borrowed equipment away, I went to get some dinner only to find that everything had been cleared. Feeling my bloodsugar start to get whacky (which turns me into kind of a tweeker), I decided I was gonna get something to eat even if I had to pull it off the plate of some overfed catering staffmember. Fortunately, the nice gentleman got me a plate “A little of everything”. I was happy to be eating food, but marvelled at the cost/quality ratio ($60/not so hot).
I finished my dinner (well, I’d *almost* finished eating) when I had a nice conversation with someone I don’t remember who said I’d written how much I admired and looked up to him in his yearbook. After that, I stepped outside to get some fresh air.
At that point, the still-to-this-day best friend of my first girlfriend, first True Love and first soul-wrenching heartache came spilling off the dancefloor to get some air, too. I didn’t recognize her at first, and she wasn’t wearing a name tag. But as soon as she mentioned my first’s name, I instantly remembered her as one of my girflriend’s two best friends (together, they were “The Triad”). I kept remembering a couple of pictures of “The Triad” my girlfriend had sent me while i was in the Navy.
Here was someone I hadn’t talked to for 20 years, and who probably knew more about me than anyone in the room. And whose recognition dredged all kinds of past memories and feelings.
In the few days before I’d left for the reunion, I tried to put a video crew together to document this milestone in my life. I thought the footage would be an interesting story to tell – returning to my roots to share my new talents.
I’m not so bummed I decided at the last minute to not spend the money or effort. Although I think it might be funny someday to see the tape of me playing my heart out to a totally ambivalent, inattentive audience. I was laughing last night, and just laughed again as I wrote this.
But I’m not sure if it’s funny “ha-ha” or my natural reaction to trauma (whenever my back goes out, for instance, I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity that I consider myself such a strong and able person, yet I can’t even stand up). Cognitive Dissonance, I think it’s called.
And yeah, last night qualifies as congitively dissonant in my opinion.
Just moved last weekend into three different locations, within 30 minutes of each other. I’m couch surfing for a week while the sublet I’m going to move into NEXT week is vacated (current tennant is going to S. America for a couple months). Since her room is a lot smaller than my last room or two, I’ve had to additionally put a lot of stuff into storage. My couch-offering friend has graciously adopted a few larger pieces of furniture until I can find a semi/more permananet home.
I’m feeling pregnant with new songs and am eager to get settled somewhere so I can get a studio set up to start making some music. I’ve been rehearsing my voice a lot during the day on the long commutes between job sites, and am not playing the piano as much as I want or need to. My only guitar is pretty next to useless with tuning knobs that won’t stay in tune. Not to mention a busted pickup, a bridge that moves (not supposed to). Looks like a guitar is next on the big dollar purchase list..( meaning it looks like it’s gonna be a while) Maybe that just is to get me playing piano more, anyway.
Haven’t made much progress on the demo. The event in June led right into needing to find a place to live, then of course, moving. Despite all the chaos, I finally enrolled in accupressure school. Start next week and will be certified by the end of the year. I’m under no delusion that any kind of financial success, should it come at all, is indeterminantly late. I’m making music because it’s what I do. If God/Life/The Universe wants the world to hear my music, it’ll happen.
My current job pays about 80% of the bills, so I’ve got to generate an extra source of income. I already know I can get paid doin it. just need to do it more. Ain’t that always the truth.
I’m feeling hungry. Not in the “I need food way”, but in the “I’m gonna eat the world” kinda way. Hard to esplain, especially since I’m faced with having to find a place to live in 12 days. My roommate and I were/are buying a house in San Francisco, and there’s a possibility that deal is jeapordized, which would suck a lot. But we found out last week that our plans to move in are not going to happen in the next 30-90 days, and our current sublet runs out on the 1st. So we’ve literally only got a few days to figure out where to go from here.
I find myself grasping a bit. For air. For solid ground. I just read the email sig of a friend:
“A student asked the Buddha, “For all the different people who have come to listen to your words, please tell us about the Way you have found and known.”
The Buddha answered, “When you take things it is because of a thirst, a clinging, and a grasping. You should lose that and lose it altogether, above, below, around, and within. It makes no difference what it is you are grasping. When you grasp, you are losing your freedom. Realize this and grasp at nothing. Then you will cease being a creature of attachment, tied to the powers of death.” -Sutta Nipata”
I don’t know if I’m capable of completely “letting go”. I AM trying my best to breathe through the incredible amount of stress arising from not literally not knowing where I’m going to be making my home in 2 weeks.
I told another friend that I was definitely feeling my faith being challenged. I’m always telling people to let go, let God (often not in those exact words). Now it’s my turn to take my own advice.
See, i HATE moving. More specifically, I hate home-hunting. Especially under duress. But I’m also taking on “letting go” as a practice. Getting stressed out to the max is not serving me in getting done what I need to do to manage this whole thing. I need to be on top of my game (perhaps not be writing my blog?) and knocking things out. And trust that God/Life/The Universe is gonna keep me covered. Literally.
On the music tip, I had a phenomenal NINE HOUR long rehearsal/writing session. I miss those badly and it was a real joy to put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and play away. Two really great song structures emerged, and I haven’t been able to get the music out of my head. Waiting for the words. What makes these songs particularly powerful and exciting for me is that they were written in “the new voice”. I’ve been singing for a year now, and the songs I wrote a year ago work really well for a brand new voice.
Since then, my voice, confidence and thus performance have all improved significantly. These will be the first songs written specifically with a more complex, passionate and expressive voice. I’m still loving the original bunch, but I’m also absolutely delighting in hearing my voice do things I never imagined being able to do (until 1/1/4, that is). Can’t wait to put a recording of it online for you to hear. Think you’ll like.
life seems like God “selected all” and applied a motion blur to the frames in my life. Salt Lake City was cool. Met the mayor, “Rocky” (I’m looking forward to meeting my own mayor – Gavin Newsom, who has surprised, I think, most of the people who voted against him.) and got to spend some time with my friend Dave and Fr. Centurio Olaboro, a Catholic priest from Uganda, who’s working to aid some 820 orphans left by HIV-AIDS. 2 million people have died in Uganda from AIDS, leaving a generation gap that has displaced thousands of children. He does his best to feed, cloth and house them, but it seems that they just keep coming. It was a privilege to meet someone whose life is so clearly given to serving others.
On a more personal note, the last few weeks have been clobbered with an event I’ve been co-leading for over a year that took place on Friday. It was a huge success, but it totally dominated my life. Now that it’s behind me, I’m trying to get back into a daily rehearsal regimen, and am planning on finishing my demo in the next few weeks. I’m eager to get a regular happy hour gig or something somewhere with a decent sound system so’s I can crank it up.
Eating a bit of humble pie tonight. I went into the studio with an aggressively optimistic idea of what I was going to get done. Fact is, I haven’t rehearsed in over a week, and Friday saw the fulfillment of a year-long effort to produce an event for over 450 people.
In all of the compressing time of the last couple weeks, I’ve always felt like everything was happening exactly as it should. I’d finish doing one big 4 or 6 hour task exactly in time to start the next, and everything just sorta flowed together. Took a fair amount of sprinting and dodging (and a deliriously minimal amount of sleep), but everything worked out.
And things haven’t just been working out… They’ve been happening with magic with a dreamlike shimmer. Could be the sleep depro, but I’m feeling fairly caught up.
So tonight I go into the studio, thinking I’m just gonna bang out a few ace renditions of songs for the demo, edit ’em and have ’em ready to go in a couple hours.
“As if…”
Tonight’s session was lackluster at best, and reflective of both my languid rehearsal schedule and my (recovered, but still) exhausted body. I thought I was just gonna nail it, and instead, I ended up getting mired.
I’m right now reminded of something I told my mom earlier on the phone today – my job is to just keep doing what there is to do, and everything else is going to work out just fine.
Fact is, I’m incredibly impatient. I want to get the demo done yesterday, and start reaching out to the music industry contacts I know. At the same time, I’m well aware of not REALLY being ready for what I’m looking for. I still have work to do, and the hardest part about it isn’t doing it. It’s in the anticipation of being done, I suppose.
But in this iterative process called “Life”, I suppose there never really IS “done”. Just “Done for now”, I guess.
So I’m not gonna have a demo ready for this weekend. Rus was brilliant tonight in supporting me – saying that he really felt I “had better [performances in me” and I know he’s right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I’d just stroll into the studio without having played a note for a week until a cram rehearsal last night. And cramming just don’t work with stuff like this. It’s all about consistency. And patience.
So OK, God. Lesson learned. Again.
Back to my regularly schedule episode of “Trusting Life”
I just finished a most wonderful night of writing like I’ve not had in a long time. I think I may have mentioned before that I tend to notice my technical stuff leaps a little whenever there’s a break. Steady practice has definitely been critical, and it seems to come and go in phases. Sometimes I’m consistent writing/rehearsing 2 hours a day. Lately, I’ve been so busy working on the demo that my w/r schedule has gotten pretty, um, open.
So anyway, tonight, I lit some candles, and said some prayers, and found myself in that familiar place that is perfectly me. And of course, the Muse was there in all her divine deliciousness. Wrote four songs? Five, maybe? Got my arms around a lyric for a progression I’ve been working on. Spontaneously combusted into this beautiful rose-colored flame.
Speaking of flames…
I was about 3 hours into my session, and was totally lost in it. I felt more open and free and confident and strong with my voice and playing. I felt the groove and played in it like a surfer plays a wave. I wrote a few songs on guitar, further mastered a few that I love to play, saw my guitar skills rise a notch. In all, it was a really great night.
At about 3:20, I was just completely lost in the space – playing songs all night long… My back was starting to hurt (I’ve been sitting on the edge of my seat for a few hours now) and I was (and am still) frankly pretty frickin tired.
Despite that, I was determined to record a song I really want to have on my demo. it’s called “It’s Alright” So far, we haven’t gotten a really good take of it. So after all this celebratory playing, (and the onset of tired eye syndrome) I thought give it my last shot to nail a take.
I had a false start, which kinda snapped me into attention. I stood up, fidgeted a little to ease my aching back, and sat back down again, replaying the first intro. It felt good. The transition into the second intro went reasonably well and I ended up starting to get rolling into the verse despite my fatigue.
I’d just finished the first line of the song (“I know this preacher…”) and was ready to nail the second when I heard this noise like a loud chicken cluck and saw this flash of light to my right. Like someone had just lit a match. As soon as the TOTALLY incongruous thoughts untangled themselves (“chicken” “in my bedroom” “lighting matches”) I started freaking out. How did a chicken get in my room, and more importantly WHY is there a chicken in my room. Or (I was starting to realize there really wasn’t a cat or a chicken or any kind of animal in my room – I started comparing the noise I’d heard with a distressed cat, or some kind of wild furry thing. The only thing I could come up with was “chicken”. but why???) – “what the hell was THAT?!”
Now, I’ve had my share of transcendent spiritual experiences – moments of connecting with some other realm, or at least feeling closer to it. Well, I’d been in that space all night. And in a way, this experience was similar, but it was sharp and scary, and I absolutely KNOW that I saw and heard something.
Suddenly this crush of memories from my childhood tried to explain what had happened – “It’s Satan! They’re demons!” Then I thought “No, they’re just ghosts”, and then I thought “WHAT THE HELL ARE GHOSTS DOiNG IN MY ROOM!?!”
Between the rushes of ice-cold tingling up and down my entire body and a hyper-aware sensitivity to any movement or sound, I was pretty, well, freaked out. “What the hell WAS that?!”, I would later hear myself ask on the recording (i was till rolling). Something had just jarred me out of one of the greatest renditions of one of my favorite songs. It hit me like a lightning bolt – it was shocking and undeniable.
I had a moment where I thought, OK, what’s going on here? It was a moment of feeling really rational, not panicked. Just trying to figure out what the noise and flash were that I undeniably epxerinced.
Three things happened next at the exact same time: my turned slowly to my right, I had a sensation I can only descibe as instant comfort and understanding, and I had a thought “Someone’s trying to tell you something.”
“Fine,” I thought…
“What?!” I said into the empty room, kinda like “This had better be good…”
As I turned around, I immediately noticed that one of the candles on my mantle had gotten totally out of control. I’ve noticed this phenomenon where these votive candles will go nutso, but just in this one place. And it had happened twice before with lots of times when it DOESN’T happen.
Just all of a sudden, the wax in the little metal cup gets super hot and turns into a kind of souffle of flame. As a result of all this flame, the metal cup gets really hot, too.
Trying to blow these flamers out is bad news. It just seems to make the flames get higher, not to mention being blown in the direction of other flammable things. Disaster waiting to happen. Or happening, as the case may be. Napalm in a cup.
Anyway, it became immediately clear that Someone WAS, indeed, trying to tell me something. My guardian angel? God? My grandpa? The relationship between this real or imagined noise and flash and the VERY real fire hazard getting out of control was undeniable and obvious. I can’t overly stress the redundancy. It WAS like heaps and heaps of obviousness.
I don’t mean to make a mountain out of a molehill. It wasn’t like the flames were very big. Just about 4 inches, more than enough to ignite just about anything.
After I’d put out my little 1 alarm fire, I knelt down at my bed, kind of trembling. Out of nowhere I’d heard a chicken and saw a flash of light that was so real that it stopped me in my tracks. Had I not been jerked out of my hazy songwriting space, I would have continued playing my little heart out until I’d either smelled the smoke, or saw the room get bright and flickery.
In either case – not ideal.
I just got down and thanked “Whoever”, Whoever being God, my Granpa, angels…the Divine Providence that clucked at me or whatever, turned me around to show me the imminence of an unattended disaster. I felt comforted and held, like a Dad putting his arms around you. “You really can’t let this happen again… It was a mistake, but it’s really important you never put candles back in that place, OK?”
I left the room to get the last load of laundry out of the dryer, and was surprised at the stark difference in the feeling of the two spaces – my room and the hall. I had this phrase come to me that I think will work itself into a song someday – “all the saints and angels are watching” or something like that.