First, let me just assure you that there’s nothing ominous about my silence. Life is good; I’m taking tons of pictures and learning about the craft of photography and even doing some photo work. My family is good. The spring is beautiful in Santa Fe. My old dogs are getting older, which I worry about, but it’s very good to remember to love them as much as I can as often as I can. I’m still writing, but just not posting a lot of stuff to this dumb quasi-diary. No crazy car accidents. It remains incredibly good to not be playing music, it’s still one of the kindest things I’ve ever done for myself, and I’ve even started selling instruments. I’m cooking all the time, and I’m trying to figure out how to best combine my interest in Southeast Asian food with my interest in outdoor cooking now that the weather’s nicer. Whatever. I’m having fun and most of my online silence is me living away from the computer. A good thing.

The other component of my online silence is that I’ve basically lost interest in the “unfocused blog” idea, and I’m exploring ideas about doing something that’s a little more pointed. Now that I have some very nice and “realer” outlets for the parts of me that used to cling to music, an “unfocused blog” is just not enough to scratch any real creative itch. Part of me craves a different or at least more specific challenge. When I’m “between outlets,” then this rambling, unedited and unfocused writing outlet is better than nothing, but “better than nothing” isn’t a gap I need to fill right now. Photography provides me with a lot of the challenges that attracted me to music. And, even more importantly, I haven’t learned enough about it that I’ve stopped enjoying it. 

So, on the very unlikely chance that someone’s actually reading this – if I shut this down, I’ll be back. Some ideas I’m juggling:

• I’m more likely to craft a “real” photography website before I get back into any blogging. It’ll be a nice challenge, and Buddha knows that nobody’s going to do it for me.
• I’m already offering my help to some people with projects that I believe in, including a little charity in New York that provides birthday cakes for kids when their families can’t afford it and a permaculture landscape design startup in Santa Fe. So while it may seem outwardly unimpressive for me to just do the work my 2-3 full time jobs and family life require, I’ve got other stuff going on. Always.
• I’m thinking about starting up another little company of my own, or at least blogging about something that might generate some kind of audience. If I can craft an idea that represents an attractive-sounding challenge for me, I’ll give it a try. I’ve got the energy for a startup but haven’t convinced myself of the right idea yet.
• I’m going to put together at least one, probably two, photo books in a small run for friends and family now that they’re so easy to create and so affordable. (And on-demand is cool! I don’t have to print 500 of them and wonder what to do with 499, I can create 5 and if someone else wants one, turn that into 6 without breaking the bank.) It’s not because I think I’ve arrived at some epic level of achievement, but rather because I’m excited about what I’m doing and want to share my excitement with people I care about.
• I’m getting into printing photos a little more; this is weird for me, a departure from how I treated music. When I wrote my own music, I almost never recorded any of it. I liked the noncommittal aloofness of it, kind of like “there’s no way of capturing the brilliance of this concept in a recording, so I’m not even going to bother trying.” (Yeah, right!) So anyway, me actually printing photos out represents a type of commitment that I rarely exposed my music to, and it’s nice. Nice to get it out of the way, to work past it. In some weird way, it may even come full circle and help me feel differently about music one day. But for now, I don’t actually care; it’s enough for it to be what it is. And again, it’s not because I feel like I’ve “arrived,” it’s because I’m excited about what I’m doing and want to do more of it, and the best way to do more of something is by doing more of something. Sounds simple, hard to put into practice.
• I’m dabbling with a lot of learning for work and updating my skillset. Partly so I can do good work for my clients, partly to keep myself challenged, and partly because “you never know.” 
• I’m slowly – SLOWLY – scribbling out some backbone ideas for a novel. I may never put enough effort into it to finish, but it’s an enjoyable challenge and even when it leaves me frustrated, I find that it opens up creative channels I didn’t know about or had forgotten about. So even if it remains nothing but a creative exercise, I learn from it and grow.
• There are lots of even un-sexier things I need to handle, like projects around the house and taking advantage of several contiguous broken-toe-free months to get out and run again.
• Geocaching; good, dumb fun that I want to do more of in the spring. It gets us out of the house and takes us places we’d never find on our own and exposes me to odd places and things to photograph. It’s a great way of getting out of your own head and coming up with something to do that isn’t laden with expectations or burdened with familiarity. Even just hiking more has been great. I really like New Mexico. No, I love it. On one hand, it feels familiar, like home, but on the other hand, it’s still 99.9% undiscovered to me. So without any financial or spiritual or personal goal attached to it, it’s just great to get out and see and hear and smell and live the experiences that are here right in front of me.  

That’s the short list; if I sat and brainstormed for 20 minutes, I’m sure I’ve left large blocks of things out. Things that I’m planning and may never finish, things that I haven’t even planned. But I’m in an exploring mode, and trying out Stuff is what keeps me entertained these days. It’s not that I abandon everything I start, far from it. But I don’t pressure myself about it; I have so many ideas and so many areas to explore that there are bound to be some false starts. 

I’ve had people ask me what I’ve been doing since I quit playing music, and my answer comes across as sarcastic. (Imagine!) “I’m pretty busy not-playing music.” And for most people, that’s an underwhelming response; I’ve heard, “I’m not impressed,” several times recently, and in almost exactly the same way, so I noticed. But here’s the thing about it: 1) it’s true, and it’s great. Not-playing has been very good for me. 2) I don’t actually care if my life sounds impressive or not; what I was doing when I was playing wasn’t impressive either, and I’ve spent my “artistic” career choosing unimpressive paths. If I’d wanted to be impressive, I wouldn’t have stuck with piano and I wouldn’t have played jazz. (Well, that’s not strictly true, I’m stubborn. But the point is valid; it’s easier to be a rock star by playing rock music, so to speak.) If I wanted to take impressive photos, I’d forget about cliche sunsets and common birds and find some naked chicks or something. Whatever.

“I’m walking around outside” is probably not any more impressive, yet hiking and being in nature is fundamentally nourishing to me. “I grill food behind my house a lot” isn’t impressive, but I love it, I learn from it and improve, and I’m getting pretty effin’ good at it for some things. “I’m taking pictures of common birds and treacly sunsets” is probably not that impressive, but taking dumb, cliche pictures of this barren landscape has become important to me and so has my work on getting better at it. It’s probably not impressive that I live with all these big, dumb, ugly mutts that I love being around. (Who, by the way, aren’t dumb or ugly or even necessarily that big.) It’s probably not impressive that I have a charming kid or that I’ve been married for a decade and a half or that I’m learning the difference between Western and Mountain bluebirds, or that I know the difference between an ocotillo cactus and a cholla and a prickly pear. Or that I spend more time reading about comparative religion issues than most people spend watching TV. I could go on about all the unimpressive stuff that I do, but that defeats the purpose – it makes it sound like I’m trying to make it sound impressive. And I’m actually not. My point is that – impressive or not – I’m quite busy just being alive, and from where I’m sitting, that’s more than good enough. 

I know I’m getting wordy and rant-y. (Imagine!) I guess I’ve just heard, “Hmm. That’s not very impressive,” too many times recently to consider it just a joke. It’s actually kind of funny to me because I’m more content with more things in my life than perhaps ever before, but I have to admit that it still gets me thinking. I guess I’m not even sure if I wanted to set out to do something impressive what it would be and if it would be Suitably Impressive to others. And impressive compared to what? Or who? What is it that I’m being compared to? Me, 10 years ago? (I can’t imagine why.) Strangers? Which ones? Imagine my shock at realizing that I’ve never even taken the time to learn what or whose Level of Impressiveness I’ve been competing against lo these many years!

I’m actually smiling as I write all this; partly because I’m enjoying my own rambling more than I should, partly because I really, really like my life and find it very funny to get glimpses of how other people might see it, and partly because I’m catching myself in my old Suffering Artist role – like if the world was never impressed by my music, it was surely because it was so brilliant. So if I’ve now reached beyond Too-brilliant Music and actually achieved an entire life that “the world” (or 2 or 3 people in it, to be more accurate) doesn’t “get,” then Suffering Artist thinks we are most assuredly on the right path. And partly because the me that’s making fun of all this secretly still thinks this way.

It’s all pretty funny, just as it should be. But maybe I won’t stop pointless blogging after all. I’d hate to not-impress someone by giving up another pointless activity. (Heh…)

Phase two will be pulling back from people I know and like and have been playing with. There’s not much going on now, so it’s no big deal yet – nothing to say no to. But I will when the time comes. I’ve been laying the groundwork for a while, so I don’t feel like I’m going to be ambushing anyone, and nobody really depends on me for anything so it’s not like I’m botching up anyone’s living. People will still seem surprised, partly because I’ve been having issues so long that people tune them out and don’t take them seriously, but that’s fine. I’m finding that telling people I’m “taking a break” yields no resistance, but telling people “I’m quitting” is a more threatening notion and raises lots of arguments that I’m not really interested in. This is not a cry for help or fishing for praise or encouragement. If someone realized that running made their knees hurt so they stopped running and started searching for another activity, nobody would fault them, so I’m trying to present it more like that when someone wants to argue. In truth, I feel strong and expansive, not weak and retreating, and there’s something that feels incredibly good about breaking the loop I’ve been in with music. At the same time, I’m so totally empty and filled with dread when it comes to all live music and everything that’s involved that there’s not really any question. I’m tired of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; that creates pain. Duh. So rather than sweet talking myself into more of the same, I’m deciding to try something different. Whatever it is. I shouldn’t have an anxiety attack when I recognize a possible gig phone call on caller ID; that seems like a bad sign.

As a result, my music calendar is empty except for one possible date at the end of this week. That’s it.

In theory, I worry about my decision. “What if?” What if I change my mind? What if I miss it? What if I’m wrong? Those are purely thoughts, and I can count them and organize them and evaluate them. But when it comes to the real feelings involved, it’s cut and dry. No debate, nothing fuzzy, nothing vague. This is a rare occasion where my brain leans decisively either left or right, and it’s unfamiliar. And welcome. And it’s not like I make any important part of my living from it these days; I’ve avoided depending on music, and on the down side, that’s required me to pursue fallback plans that have worked out pretty darned well. But on the positive side, I’ve been able to remain involved as long as I have by effectively slowing the eventual complete burnout.

It makes me reflect; am I ungrateful? Is my ego undoing me? Am I cutting off my nose to spite my face? First, I am not ungrateful, or I don’t feel so. My quitting music is about the present and about the future; I regret very little in my past, and I’m thankful for the people music has put in my path and the places I’ve been and the things I’ve tried. But I’ve had very few great musical experiences. Very, very few. People get involved with their passions to have great experiences; I’ve given this music thing 3+ decades, and I don’t feel like I have another 3+ decades to wait, so I’m ready to try some other path or paths to positive experiences. It would be different if I knew what I was waiting for and just losing patience, but I don’t have any idea; all I know is I repeat the same things that make me unhappy and wait for them to suddenly make me happy for some reason, and the novelty of the process has long since worn off.

I realize that I should enjoy the “journey” and not the “destination,” and while it may seem that I’ve missed that point, that’s actually a driving force behind me stepping away. I’m not trying to get to some specific place where suddenly everything’s good, I’m just openly recognizing that I kind of hate the journey that music places me on. So I’m changing it. And I don’t feel particularly egotistical about it. I know that I’m good at what I do, and I know that playing OK is probably the 80th bullet point on the list of stuff it takes to make a living off music, and the 79 bullet points that are higher up are mostly stuff I’m not interested in. I never have been, and I am even less these days.

2 funny things that are happening as a result. First, I realize how deeply I enjoy NOT playing, or not playing gigs at least. When I have a conflict that prevents me from playing or I turn something down, I get a profound sense of enjoyment and accomplishment that playing a gig never, ever brings. A glow; a physical sense that I’ve just done something good for myself. It tells me that I’ve been sleepwalking through my involvement with music. I don’t work hard to set up my own projects and bands and gigs because I dread a lot of what’s involved, so I ride the coattails of other people’s work and projects. I do what’s required and with care – I do have pretty strong work ethic, regardless of my feelings – but I have been doing gigs in my present because I have been doing them in my past and for little other reason. If gigs are for fun and money, and I don’t need the money and I don’t find them fun, there’s not much reason to keep doing them. Is there? I’ve heard all the stuff like, “But you create because you’re DRIVEN to create, for the LOVE of it!” I’m DRIVEN to drink beer and LOVE fried food, too; does that mean that I have absolutely no say in whether or not I partake? Doing something because you absolutely have to is not the same thing as doing something because you absolutely adore it. There’s a difference between unhealthy, addictive behavior and joyfully participating in a passion. Isn’t there?

The second thing is that within minutes of deciding not to gig any more, I found myself in my office/studio doing a much needed cleaning and fixing up my music setup and just playing, and loving it. A cork pulled out of a bottle; a feeling of enjoyment and growth just from playing. New, calm music pouring forth. New ideas, new directions, just new. So I intend to just keep playing and enjoying that I enjoy it for a little while. No agenda, no business plan, no gigs, not even any sharing with others. Just me, playing by myself and for myself. For a change, and for the better. It’s a weird feeling, playing music for enjoyment, and actually ending up enjoying it. This kind of enjoyment has become distant and almost unfamiliar for me, and my intuition was telling me this me should not be the case. So I think I’m on the right track.

Who knows where I’ll be later today, next week, next year? All I can do is make the best decision I can right now based on who I am and what I feel at this moment, and for now I’m a little in touch with how I feel and what I want to do. “Quitting” is not quitting in this case, it’s drawing a line in the sand, closing one door with the hope and the intuition that I’ll find another one to open. Maybe I’ll start playing “new age” music or learn the blues for real or start singing. Well, I’m not going to start singing, but you see what I mean. Maybe I’ll learn some classical pieces I’ve shunned, if it feels right.

All I know is whatever I’d been doing hadn’t been working for me, regardless of how it appeared. It didn’t feel right at several levels, and rather than discovering that just now, I’ve just decided to stop ignoring the not-feeling-right. And in doing so, I feel that I suddenly have a feeble, but real foothold on something else that – working or not – actually feels right. I suspect that at some point, I’ll eventually evaluate whether it’s “working” by thinking about whether I’m making money off of it and that may change my new and novel feelings about it all. But at many important junctures in my life, just doing what feels right (once I discover what that actually is) has taken me in new and important and unexpected directions. After feeling off base for a long time, I feel like I’m starting to see hints of a path and I’m very interested in seeing where it goes.

Enough. Now to think about some changes in how I feel about my “day gig.”

By the time it’s done, I’ll have made something like 13 round trips of 140-180 miles each ranging from 60-90 minutes each way. 

13 trips x 150 or so miles = 1950 miles
1950 miles @ $3.70 a gallon assuming 28mpg = $260 (this is generous; I don’t always get 28mpg)
13 trips * 2 hours of driving for the round trip (guessing low) = 26 hours of driving

An average trip is for about 3 hours; shorter ones are maybe closer to 2 hours – a 1 hour gig, arrive at least 30 minutes early, hang out for at least 20-30 minutes afterwards. A longer one is much longer; I got to Albuquerque at 2:00 on Saturday and got home at 12:30am. So let’s call it an average of 3 hours just to be conservative.

3 hours average * 13 trips = 39 hours.

26 hours of driving + 39 hours of sound checking and playing and hauling equipment and rehearsing = 45 hours.

Federal minimum wage as of July 2007 was $5.85.

$5.85 * 45 hours = $263.

So if I want to cover my gas cost AND make minumum wage, I have to make

$263 + $260 = $523 dollars.

Take a theoretical $100 gig. Do 3 rehearsals (25 bucks or so of gas for each one) and the gig itself, and you’re at plus or minus $1 already, plus you’ve probably got at least 20 hours into it. A hundred bucks is decent pay for a gig, too, especially in these times. I would need an awful lot of gigs where I clear a dollar in order to replace any important part of my living. And I have to think that there are more profitable ways to spend 20 hours. Music’s its own thing, it’s partly out of love, but 20 hours for a buck in your pocket or a buck in the hole is almost beyond love if you do it all the time.

Thanks to one good paying gig, I’m actually a little ahead of the curve. So I’m scoring a little over minumum wage for squeezing in an extra week (40 or so hours) of worth of work over a couple weeks. Depending on how you slice and dice it (which gig for which artist, for example), I’m either making a couple cents an hour or losing $25-40 bucks (and up) for each gig if you don’t factor in that one higher paying gig.

Negative $40 is not a great return on my time investment, and a cynical person might say that paying $40 to spend time away from a home that I love and a family I adore seems a little steep. I’ve done all the gigs voluntarily, and there’s been no gun to my head in any way, so I’m not actually complaining. I’m just evaluating how I spend my sparse “extra” time going forward, and it’s pretty hard to justify losing money to be away from my family. I have hobbies, books to read, a daughter and dogs to play with, neglected wives (wife, actually), home improvements to do, and so on. If I absolutely loved every second of every gig, there’d be nothing to consider. But that’s a stretch. And it’s a dangerous notion that “since you love music, you should always be willing to do it or free or less.” I know people who love the law, but their pro bono time is completely voluntary. I’m doing a benefit at the end of the month for free, but the caterers are getting paid; I know the realities of trying to live off something creative and I’m not salty about it, but I’m aware that it’s not cut and dry. Some people love installing car stereos or painting motorcycles or working outside with plants or healing animals, and there’s not a lot of pressure on them to do it for free most of the time. But for music, there’s almost a weird jealousy, an expectation that since you’ve evidenced 30 years of involvement with something that you must LOVE it, and since you LOVE it, “I’ve got you where I want you.” Your love must mean you NEED to play, so if you NEED to play, you’d probably do it whether or not you got paid, so why bother paying? Or paying fairly. (Whatever that means.)

That being said, I have to say that I’ve been very fortunate in my small little circle. I’ve found people that I share mutual respect for as artists and as people, and (as I will likely repeat more than once), the weird thing about those positive associations is that they’re also the ones where money’s not a consideration. i.e. I’d do those things for free, but never have to.

So I’ll plan on backing away from a lot of it going forward. In truth, I may not even need the plan; next month might be almost totally empty, and the month after, absolutely blank, so this “I’m not going to take many gigs” thing could just be ego-driven theory that I never even get a chance to execute. But I do have to prioritize. The weird thing is that even people close to me say things like “You just CAN’T QUIT music! You love it! It’s too important.” My reaction is usually unspoken, but something like, “Really?” I can’t quit? Ever? Because people can’t quit what they love, and I MUST love music? And if I stopped doing many gigs (again) then I couldn’t possibly be doing anything else with music that I enjoy? There are a lot of assumptions and subtleties in there that can’t be untangled in a sentence or two, but I can say this: I don’t think I could be happy in totally eliminating music from my life, but I already know that I can be pretty OK without playing live much. Not being public and not being involved whatsoever are totally separate notions.

In a perfect world, I would LOVE the people I’m working with, and I’d take home at least a little money. In a less perfect world, I’d LOVE the people I’m with and maybe break even or at least not lose too much. In one world I don’t live in any longer, I’d just make money regardless of who was involved, but I never take gigs for money alone any more. (In reality, I haven’t enountered many gigs out there where the artist is purely painful, but it’s nice to know that if I stumbled across one I would feel no pressure to take it.) One worst case for me is involvement in music I don’t like and with people I don’t like AND not making money at it. Blessedly, it doesn’t happen much; the rare few people I really haven’t gotten along with have usually at least compensated me OK. Whatever.

It’s actually pretty simple when I think about it; all these hypothetical combinations don’t really happen. In real life, I’ve been very lucky about finding people I love being around and making music with and getting fairly compensated for spending time with them feels like a gift. I keep rambling about it because I love those times so much that I wish I could do it more often, and in order to do it more often, I’d have to make some part of my living off of it, realistically speaking, and I’m not there right now. In where the chemistry is not quite there, it’s not a big deal; it’s nobody’s fault, it’s not personal, and there’s not much to do about it – just move on. Gigs with Larry Mitchell and Joy Harjo, for example, or anything involving my man Howard Cloud or my new friend Chris Cushman, are a joy, and I’ll cancel things to make them work out. They nourish me and I’d do them for free, but I never actually need to. Other stuff I’ll have to examine case by case; I’ll try almost anything once, but I’ve been doing it too long to do things just to do them, so if they don’t have something tangibly positive associated with them, I’ll have to back away.

And I’ve already tried a lot of things once, so at the risk of sounded jaded (because I am, at least a little), I can bypass the courtship sometimes and skip right to the breakup. No big deal. (I’m not confrontational by nature, but as soon as I hear one of those “I sure wish I could pay you what you’re worth, but it’ll definitely happen in the future” lines, I just smile and nod and wait to see exactly how they define what I am or am not worth in the form of my pay for their gig.) I’m not driven by money as far as my relationship to music, actually to the point of being a detriment, but there’s only one of me and only 24 hours in a day and an awful lot of life to live, so I have to prioritize things. If something is fun AND I get paid AND my daughter can come see it and have fun too, that’s one thing. If something’s not fun AND I don’t get paid AND I miss a weekend with my family, it gives me tools to make “business decisions” with for muller.com. A lot of music stuff is more fun to tell people about than to actually do, anyway. I’ll just continue to focus on the stuff that’s at least as much fun to do as it is to “complain” about…

I’ve been fortunate to be busy for again for a minute, it’s a nice way to stay honest and try some new things and be around some new people. And it’s actually been really fun, it’s even fun to have a chance to complain about “being so busy.” But if the next month happened to be anything like this one, I simply can’t afford the time and money to do it the same way again, so I probably won’t be this busy again for a while. And I’m looking forward to it. I’m young enough to still be open to trying out the things that fall in front of me, and I’m old enough to recognize (for myself) the difference between “just busy” and “good-busy,” and I’ll continue working towards “good-busy” and save a little of myself for my nuclear family.

Balance. Just an idea still…

It’s been OK to not be busy; conceptually I hate the idea of not playing more, but realistically, I have a pretty full plate with my business and my family so it’s usually OK. Like I didn’t have any gigs or rehearsals last weekend, so I built gates. Wooden ones. And I barbecued. And the weekend was too short. Add to that a couple of 150 mile drives and several hours of practicing or playing, and they get even shorter.

My already-busy schedule leads me to dread a lot of stuff that I shouldn’t dread, and this week’s music is a little like that. I’ve met some great people and I’m looking forward to 6 gigs over the next 2 weekends. But taking time off from work 3 out of 5 days this week puts some unwelcome extra pressure on me. I think I’ve built up enough good karma with everyone for it to not be a big deal, but it’s my living so I worry. I’d hate to turn down gigs, though, so I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. (And that’s what I did last year, turned everything down. It helped, in the sense that work was crazy and the extra headspace and time was welcome, but not so much that I’m repeating it this year.)

I’m cautiously optimistic; in one sense, it could be a busy month or two, or it could be that I’ve reached some sort of critical mass in my local scene – before, I was not busy, maybe now I am. Or maybe it’s a fluke. We’ll see, I’m pretty OK with it either way.

I’m very geeked to be playing some jazz stuff with my man Howard Cloud and my new friend Chris Cushman, we were in the same room together for the first time today and I felt like we had really good chemistry. It’d be a little sad if the state fair gigs are the only time we meet, this could be the foundation of a great group.

I have another gig with my friend Joy Harjo. I love playing with her; her group is great and populated with really super people, and Joy herself is an inspiration. She has an amazing energy, very quiet but immensely powerful. It’s always a treat to get together with her, and we’ve had at least a gig a month over the summer.

My friend Carmela Rapazzo has started writing some new stuff and we get together periodically to rehearse it. I’m going to probably do an Obama benefit with her at the end of September, but I’m also a part of her gearing up for a new album she’d like to do. She’s an enjoyable singer (which is a weird thing for me, as anyone who knows me will tell you), and also has an amazing, positive energy about her. A dynamo, one of those people who you, when you meet them, you always feel better afterward than you did before, even if you felt great to begin with.

I met this guy RaShaan Houston as a jazz singer, and our first rehearsal was really nice. Snappy. Instant good chemistry; again, good people and good music. I haven’t done many “real” jazz gigs for maybe 13 or 14 years with a couple rare exceptions, so it was nice. Then he felt me out for maybe playing at the State Fair with his pop project, he calls it Phocus, and I checked the music out and went for it. The band, again, is populated with nice people, there’s a really nice energy. The music itself is fun; pretty positive, and a lot of jazzy chordal stuff kind of like the stuff I liked from Incognito in the 90s. More of a disco or house approach than acid jazz, but it’s great. RaShaan is talented and fun, the drummer’s great, it’s just good. Don’t know how often Phocus plays out, but RaShaan’s interested in booking more for the jazz quartet – not a lot of male jazz singers in this town. (Or that town, as the case may be; it’s another Albuquerque project, so there are lots of 150-mile round trip drives involved.)

My complaint-mantra in the last dark period of day gig stuff has been something like “I’d love to make some changes to who I spend some of my professional time around.” Everyone knows someone who won’t leave a terrible job because of the great people they work with or something like that. I’ve been there, I’ve done it, and I actually like everyone that I work with pretty darned well. But I still get a charge out of learning some tricky music or locking up with a drummer or getting to solo with a great band or working to make a soloist sound good, and as much of a drag as music gigs can be – long commutes, dreary rehearsals, hostile venues, occasionally questionable pay rates, etc – when I work with good people, it’s usually worth the price. Even after all these years and all my frustrating experiences (and great experiences), I find that music feels like it has some meaning when it’s with good people, and it’s that meaning thing that I’ve been missing.

So I don’t know if I “manifested” some business, or it’s a fluke, or it’s part of a pattern of ebb and flow that I don’t recognize, but it’s nice to feel busy with music in almost all good ways, and it’s nice to feel in demand. My ego needs it at least occasionally. Part of me is just enjoying it, and part of me is engaged in some very non-zen clinging – I’ll be glad to have some time to breathe in 2 weeks, but I don’t really want the period to totally stop, I’d love to keep some music going. I’m still totally passive about it – if the phone rings, I gig, if it doesn’t, I find something else to do, so if I was serious, I’d make a more formal outreach; do the demos and press kits and phone calls, but I’m not quite there yet. I’m almost afraid to want to remain busy since I don’t do anything to control it, but mostly I’m just having a blast and getting to know some good people. It’s a good period; not an easy period, but a good one.

I still can’t help but wonder why it has to be so all-or-nothing though; if the all periods were even more all, I’d be forced (or be able) to quit some of my work, and if the nothing periods were even more nothing-y, maybe I’d have to quit. (Probably not, actually.) I guess my day gig makes it all feel extra hectic, and deep down, I crave the day where I can make music and/or some other stuff a bigger part of my time and life and my day gig a smaller tax on my time and life. For now, it’s a reminder how very, very tricky it is to live in any sort of balance. I hope I can figure it out at some point. But maybe it’s not something that gets figured out – maybe the all-on and all-off ARE the balance. I’ll think about it. (Of course…)

Fast forward 15 years or more, and even before this new millenium had started; I’d had the brilliant insight that if I never recorded my music, or if I never recorded it well, then I couldn’t really share it with anyone. And production is at least challenging and creative as writing the music itself. Fast forward another 5 years or so, and I’m in a new town in a new state and don’t know many people to play with, and I’m “back in the studio” recording my own stuff off and on again to stay a little involved with music, and it’s a good period – I feel like I’m learning again.

Step 1 has been to just force myself to finish and post work when I’m in one of the periods where I crank out stuff. I’m interested in restraining my “music guy” impulses and my experiments these days are designed around simpler ideas. I guess what I’m trying to learn more about is giving as much importance to “how things sound” as there is to what’s actually being played. Step one has been the exercise of starting things and finishing them.

Step 2 has been just to actually take Step 1 a little further. Forcing myself to just finish stuff is a good first step, and by starting to do that and then later listening on iMac speakers and laptops and $8 computer speakers and home stereos of all sorts, I’ve had to go back in and learn more. It’s chance to practice stuff that I’ve formerly just thought about, and every time I go through a period like this after a break from it, I learn a lot.

I’m not trying to become a studio engineer, I just want to feel competent enough that I’m either not holding back music I want to work on or can even improve music ideas through production choices. I still get most of my musical jollies out of the process of creating something and I still have irresponsibly little care whether anyone else actually ever hears it by the time it’s done, and this is another small but very important step for me toward breaking out of that mindset.

I slept like hell, partly because of the foot, partially just because I sleep like hell. I gave up for a while and got up and did a little work at about 3:00am. I finally wore out and got to bed at about 3:30, 3:45, and slept off and on for a while, much better. I feel someone gently shaking me, and my first thought is, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I’m never going to sleep through the night. Ever. I turn over, and it’s Anette. She said, “Mocha brought a mouse in.” My addled and half-asleep mind  tried to assemble the idea. No, I couldn’t have heard right – cats keep mice OUT of the house, they don’t bring them IN. This came out of my mouth: “Huh?” My wife patientely repeated and added some details. The cat, Mocha of former “Mocha and Java” fame up until Java disappeared, brought in a mouse and was taunting it in the hallway. It was still alive and making squeeking noises, and it woke Anette up, she’d fallen asleep in the girl’s room and not stirred until the mouse noises. The mouse had escaped into the living room behind the nest of entertainment system wires and Anette couldn’t get it herself. She had a broom and a big tupperware container. My life is a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and I’m a little known character named “Pasty McNosleep.” In the cartoons, my wife throws boomerang fish.

So, 5:00am, at the first signs of daylight and on one or two broken toes and after almost two weeks of latenight/earlymorning sleep deprivation, I was hobbling around my living room trying to get a desert mouse out from under the sofa. The cat had long since lost interest and even when we managed to capture her and force her into the same room, her kitten attention span had long since been used up and we had no choice but to let her back outside. We managed to chase the mouse out the back door, and that was that. After I worked on the computer a little, I zombied back to bed at about 6:00am to try to scrap a couple odd minutes more of sleep before I got up to start it all over again. My daughter often gets up around 7:00am these days, so in a perfect world, I had 60 minutes of sleep available. And it’s not a perfect world. (“I can get 46 minutes if I can sleep…. NOW!. Okay, NOW!”) It sure was beautiful out, though, quiet, pleasantly cool, clear, smelled great. I considered just bringing a blanket outside and laying the bed of my pickup truck, but that would have taken my 60 potential minutes of sleep and made them into 0. Give or take. One of these days, I might as well, though.

The cat came in, hopped on my back, then onto my daughter’s old bed (the one she never used but that is still set up in my room) and fell deeply asleep. Damn cats.

We sat and watched some insects – ladybugs, praying mantises (mantii?). And we watched funny dogs, and dogs and cats playing together, that kind of thing. One of videos that came up under our search for ladybugs was “Ladybug Picnic,” a Sesame Street classic I’d forgotten about. One thing led to another, and we were watching the original “Mannuh Mannuh” video, however the hell you spell it. Some wacky beatnik (this is the 1969 version) with a turtleneck and crazy black hair blasts across the screen and quietly says “Manuh Manuh” and 2 hippiesh maidens in white cotton dresses and long, earthy pigtails do the response (“do dooo-dee doo do”); if you haven’t seen it, you can picture it if you know the song. (There was also a newer, shorter version with pink monsters and an updated beatnik, we were kicking it old school last night, though.)

The schtick for the segment is that outside the simple, catchy song, the wild beatnik guy occasionally tries to scat sing, as though the constraints of the song represent “the man,” but he longs to let his tortured soul cry out, to soar. But always gives up under the icy and stoic stare from the girls who seem to express their seeming disdain for nonconformity in perfect, Mothra-twin unison, and he sheepishly goes back to the refrain, and the energy for another outburst swells up again.

After the second set of scatting (in the unlikely case that you’re unfamiliar with the term, that’s when jazz singers say things like “doobie doo” and “shoobie dooba”), I notice my daughter scowling at the screen. Without looking up, she said, “What he is trying to say?” (My daughter’s speech patterns are often a cross between my own, Yoda, and Martin Lawrence. I don’t know where the Martin Lawrence influence comes from.) The muppet scats on, and she says, “What he can’t say?!” She gives me a dirty look, like “Where do you find this stuff?” Next scatting, “What’s that guy trying to say? Can’t he talk?”

I look at the time bar, and we’re near the end. He’s scatting for what must be one last time, and she gives me a disgusted look and says, “He can’t talk right.” Without waiting, she hops out of my lap and just walks out of the room.

Kids her age make up words and sounds and whole languages all day every day, and they watch silly songs and have silly stories read to them, and since she lives with me, she’s also been forced to listen to beatboxers and tablas and Tibetan throat singers and every Simpson’s episode and Japanese cartoons and and she gets peppered with really weird questions that don’t even make sense a lot of the time, often involving made-up words. People saying things she doesn’t understand isn’t new.

But there was something about this that was really offensive to her, and as I replayed other instances where she’d been offended by music or speech, that constantly churning rock-tumbler which is my brain assembled the evidence and came to the new conclusion – she doesn’t like jazz scat singing.

I wonder where she got that from? (*cough*)