The Wheels on the Bus Go 'Round and 'Round

I continue to feel less and less like writing. (Yet here I am.) It seems like one of those things from my childhood that I got in my head that I had to do it. I always wanted to be a writer.  At some point in my early childhood, I was around people who would have regarded that as an admirable accomplishment. Now, I put slightly less credence in the idea that I'm a Libra and therefore like books, but who knows--that might be a true statement as well. At any rate, I find myself wondering if I feel like it's something I'm supposed to do, even if after all this time I haven't really done much.  Maybe that is what I should be looking at.  Know me by my fruits, to paraphrase a wise man.

Yet, writing is a lot of work. It's not that fun sometimes. More and more, actually. Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just old and tired. And there is that whole thing about the lack of instant feedback. Photography is kind of the same way, but only kind of. Music is the exact opposite, or it feels like it is. I don't play in front of an audience, though, so "feedback" is kind of a moot point, but I hear the music, like it (or don't like it,) and it's done and will never come back, so I just have to play some more.

I doesn't seem like I have much to say. That would be why one writes in the first place, isn't it? It seems more and more likely that I'll never think of anything that hasn't already been thought of, and possibly written down. Maybe, for me, writing is like air-guitar. I used to like the way it made me feel, but it is essentially an empty avocation. I would love to have something to say. I was thinking about this the other day when I ran across an article, and had a subsequent conversation with a writer, about the art of plotting. I remembered seeing lots of articles online about plotting, and story elements and character development, and all that good stuff. The thought I had was, with all these books and articles, a lot of people must want to figure this out, obviously not because they have a story to tell (if they did, they wouldn't be looking at articles on how to create stories) but because they want to write and are in search of something to write about. Odd. Sort of.

I still may do it.

A Moment

How much can I write in fifteen minutes?

I've been working on the music pretty hard lately. I am beginning to think that those of us who are not universal or Renaissance or good at multi-tasking (and the latter is not one of my strong suits,) may not be able to be consistently creative in things that reside in areas of the brain that are too far apart. I say this because when my interest in photography increases, I feel less like writing. I always thought that had more to do with finding a creative release, so to speak, where only one is necessary, so you tend to want or need to do only one or the other. Now I think maybe it actually has more to do with the way the brain works. You know, the visual cortex and the language part of the brain being so far apart that the little neurons can't wink at each other from that greater distance.

The music, that is a whole 'nother thing, though at least in my case, it's closely related to the visual, but not language. This may explain why I've noticed musicians tend to use language in ways that invoke visual images rather than strict logic. Hmm. Just thought of that.

  Well, a lot of half-baked ideas. Let it simmer.

An Embarrassment of Extravagances

move over, Chet

Today's entry will be brief. I bought this guitar. Did I say that? As a matter of fact, I got a pretty big tax refund this year so I thought I might get away with splurging on a guitar. Main thing you need to note: it's red. My second guitar (when I was in high school) was also red, and similar in design. Only, it cost about $15 back in 1964, and this one cost slightly more than that. Possibly 8X more in 1966 dollars. Whatever that means.

As it turns out, I also bought a new cell phone. This was more a matter of necessity, in order to preserve my sanity. The Samsung was driving me nuts, so I bought an iPhone again. I had one about three or four generations ago and it worked great. This is even better. One thing I am glad about is that the camera on it is much better, despite Samsung's claims about how good the cameras in their phones are. I found the one I had to be pretty crappy.

picture of Uma taken with my new iPhone

Now you're thinking that's not such a great picture, and you're right, but the lighting is challenging, and the iPhone did a pretty good job of creating some sort of "usable" image. Trust me, the Samsung would have botched it.

I just realized that Uma might be the most photographed cat in Missouri at this time. I'm not sure I want to think about what that says about me.

Iams Who Iams

Here I go with no idea where. Story of my life.

I'm looking forward to Saturday and the weekly practice session with fellow musicians Kahlid and Ali, (percussion and bass, respectively) who have both demonstrated a great deal of patience with my inability to play jazz guitar. Very supportive--and . . . I'm not sure but I may be getting better. This is where I silently curse my mom for not making me take music lessons so that I might now be able to sight-read musical notation, a skill which in the case of some of these old standards would come quite in handy. However, even without it I think I'm just starting to get the hang of it. With music, there is no end goal. You hope to always improve and grow, but there is no ultimate level where once you attain it, you're done.  Sort of like life, (he said, waning into a downward philosophical spiral.) At any rate, even if there were, I'd still be chasing it from way behind.

Not to blame my tools, (as the poor workman is wont to do) but I wish I had a nicer guitar. I think I got hoodwinked when I bought the Epiphone Les Paul because it seems like it's falling apart. To actually play with other musicians who are making a lot of noise, it helps to have an instrument that can cut through just a little without sounding like an MP3 on an iPhone speaker. Tax refund coming . . .

Of more immediate concern is the cat food situation. There is none. The cats are worried. Well, L-bot is not worried, because she spent the first few months of life as a wild animal, so she will just wander around the house and gnaw on stuff, but Uma has this strange world-view in which I am an endless source of food and entertainment. I do my best. Besides, they just ran out some time in the middle of the night, and I promised them I would go to the store first thing this morning, just as soon as I consume enough coffee.

I read somewhere that cats in the wild routinely go two or three days without food, and get all the nourishment they need from eating the occasional bird or hapless baby bunny. This I tell myself so I don't feel so guilty as I look over and see Uma sitting quietly and patiently approximately nine inches from the food bowl.

Addendum: Luck isn't real. If it were, there wouldn't be so many baby bunnies. There are because the survival adaptation has been to offset predators by having lots of babies, meaning only the lucky few will survive into adulthood. Eventually, one would think, baby bunnies would begin to have the "lucky trait" due to the mechanisms of evolution. However, there are still lots of baby bunnies, and cats. I think this is because luck isn't really a thing.

OK now I have to go..  Uma is trying to eat an envelope from my bill pile.

Addendum (b): I have returned, victorious, from the grocery store. No time for adulation right now. Maybe later.

It was horrible.

What Do a Blue Moon and this Blog Post Have in Common?

Greeting!

(Normally I would say greetings, but I think I'm down to one reader of this blog, now. Me.) Actually I stole that bit. When I was a little kid my mother and sister were looking for my sister's tennis shoes all over our apartment. Eventually my mom held up a tennis shoe and said, "I found one!"  My sister took it from her and said, "Thank."

It's been so long since I've written a blog post, and here I don't count those most recent posts where all I did was stick up a photograph, that I figure at this point, anything I write will be an improvement. Or possibly a detriment. Either way, it's sort of locked in, cosmically, and all I have to do is type more or less randomly.

Things have settled down. Another way of saying there has occurred a slow transformation in my life from annoying to boring. But, I dast not complain, because the annoying part was pretty damn annoying. Apartment living agrees with me pretty much. However, one night during the St. Patrick's day Parade and Public Urination Extravaganza, here in Kansas City, someone parked overnight in my parking spot. MY parking spot. I had to park out on the street. I leave as an exercise for the student what kind of car it was. Hint: it belonged to someone really important.

The cats continue to guard the place. Often they can be seen racing back and forth from the bedroom to the front bay window at top speed, dodging, leaping over, or otherwise crashing into hapless items that have bumbled onto that imaginary line between point A and point B. What they are doing, I figured out, is chasing either ghosts or those entities that reside in the parallel universe very close to ours and which only cats can see. Or really small gnats.

I live within walking distance of probably hundreds of retail stores and coffee shops and restaurants.

I am not in a band, but I practice as if I am, with these two guys, one of whom plays bass and the other drums. (I play guitar.) They are Ali and Khalid, relative late comers to the North American continent and the U.S. (early 70s) Actually we have a lot in common. I arrived in Kansas City from California about the same time they arrived from Pakistan, the only difference being that I faced the more challenging adaptation, because, you know, California.

I kid the Californians. No. Anyway, These guys like to play jazz. I have no idea how to do that, which makes me the perfect counterpoint to their efforts. The real difference between jazz and Rock & Roll is Rock & Roll uses three chords, and jazz uses 147 chords, many of which are attainable on the standard guitar fingerboard only with the use of three hands and a couple of C-clamps. I'm not sure yet why such simple melodies such as you find in pieces like Blue Moon or Lady in Red require so much complexity. Or maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. (Actually, I know I am.  It's a curse.)

There's more, but to keep going is to fall off the reverse hyperbolic curve on the boredom chart, and we don't want to do that.

Caboose behind Truman Station, Independence, Missouri

Near Independence, Missouri, Station