Saturday

Another dreary, rainy day here in Kansas City. The cats and I are stationed by the front window, getting as much indirect, filtered daylight as possible. There is not much going on outside. Since it's raining off and on, the construction crew across the street isn't working. There is very little pedestrian traffic up and down the street--only the occasional car going either north or south with a little swoosh.

I meant to say that the "real" Busy Bee Cafe, the inspiration for the errant half-baked and eventually aborted plot line of my latest novel, is undergoing a refurbishment. The building front is getting new trendy floor to ceiling windows that are very clean and very modern, even set as they are in the old brick wall. Same treatment with the front door at the corner of the building. Not sure what's going on upstairs. All I know about the upstairs is that there are windows. It always looked to me like a couple of apartments might have been up there at one time.  The big sign on the side of the building is still there. Perhaps they mean to leave it. I guess it is to be a bar/restaurant/music-venue, like other places up and down the street. I suppose reality is actually being altered there, but in the same way that we are time traveling to the future--slowly and with great pain and anguish.
At any rate, I once thought if there were apartments up there, I would like to live in one of them--but not if there is going to a bar with live music downstairs. That's a little too much reality for me.

Not to complain, although I do reserve the right to whine and pule, my neck is still sore. It still hurts when I turn my head to the left too far. When driving, for example, I can look out the driver's side window, but I can't really look over my left shoulder without wincing. I've been to the chiropractor, which was no help, and a masseuse (same) and I've been to the acupuncturist twice now. My third appointment is this Wednesday. He seems to be doing some good. My neck is improving incrementally. It's expensive and not covered by insurance. However, not to complain as I'm sure there is a Republican somewhere who is confident that this is all somehow my own fault. I'm not arguing the point.

My acupuncture guy is also into other things. He mentioned that he does past-life regressions. I can't say that I believe in that, but I confess it sounds like fun. He just mentioned it, not as a course of treatment for my neck, but he told me sometimes revealing a past life can cure maladies in this life.

Due to the chronically sore neck, I'm giving up most of my guitar playing. I discovered that the position(s) I get myself into while playing are aggravating the situation. Playing music turns out to be a sort of asymmetric endeavor on more than one level.  I told the guys in the jazz band I'm going to have to give it up. I hate to do that, but I also hate being in pain much of the day, so there you have it.

I am alone by the window. The cats left unceremoniously and covertly, in the same way that they arrived. They are stress-free.

Friday Arrives Without Divine Intervention

   Just as an exercise, I am trying to write a blog entry knowing that I sit alone in my dining room in front of my computer. I am not somehow in cyberspace, swirling around touching other cyber-people, communicating with other intellects out there, maybe feeling the warmth of their souls; I am just sitting here in my dining room, typing.

   Well, and my cat.

   We humans are so easy. Any reality will do. It's become a kind of theme for me. The easiest, most obvious one is the one where we construct the knowledge of a world around us using sensory input. I hear a voice. A fire truck just went by. Bam, there must be a wall right here. OK I see it now.

   There are the alternate realities that very closely resemble the one based on sensory input. The one where your nose is too big, or where your friends are witty, or where the aliens are broadcasting mind-control rays down upon the continent.

   Of course there is Cyberspace and all the alternate variations you could possibly dream of.

   Reality check: yep. Still sitting here in the dining room. The cat has jumped down, though, and has stationed herself on the hallway desk where she may keep an eye on the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen is the back porch and the stairwell that provides passage from all the back doors to the parking area behind the building. In the other direction, beyond my livingroom, is the front of the building that sits in a row of other buildings, across the street from the new apartment building that is currently under construction. I've been here since December, so I watched it go up, so far. The workers just built the third floor. I hope they stop, as the whole thing has begun to impinge upon my view of the morning sky.

Midweek Appraisal

The A/C is not repaired yet. I guess repair is not the word. It is not cleaned. I would post a picture of the mold and mildew found inside the plenum chamber, just below the a/c coils in the basement unit, but it's disgusting. Not going to breath that stuff anymore. Probably why I have felt like crap since moving into this apartment--even though the furnace running does not smell, it was surely still blowing mold and bacteria into the system. For the last two nights, it's been hot and humid, but I'm not running the a/c.  Today a thunderstorm rolled through, which cooled things down temporarily but also increased the humidity. I had to close all the windows, which warmed it up inside. I'm on the second floor. It is 75 degrees outside right now. I have all the windows open and three fans running and the temperature inside has maintained at a steady, sticky 84.

Uma has adapted to the heat in her own way. 

Furthermore, if this weren't bad enough, I'm becoming a little disenchanted with the little musical group I belong to. OK, we're bad.  So bad. But, that's OK. The trouble is, the more I learn about jazz--the genre of music the two other members of our group want to play--the more I realize that I'll never be proficient at it. It's just one of those things. Like, if you enjoy painting as a hobby, and fall in with a bunch of people who aspire to paint the ceilings of chapels across Europe at the behest of various Popes or whatnot. Not gonna happen. I won't critique the other members. I just know that I have learned enough to suddenly realize that I should be embarrassed. I do NOT know what I'm doing. This has all given me a new respect for jazz and for jazz musicians, but, to be honest, I don't really like listening to it. I understand the allure of playing--but it's like juggling bean bags: fun to do, sort of, if you can get off the ground, maybe even impressive to some degree, but no one wants to observe you doing it for more than, say, five or ten seconds. I think to sum up without excuses, it has stopped being fun.

I'm diggin' the acupuncture, though. I go back Tuesday with questions and a few more items on the list of things I'd like to address. And the a/c repair guy is coming over tomorrow morning to fix the mold/mildew problem. Really looking forward to that.

Sultry

Much like the six-year-old whose very first words were, "Mom!  The toast is burning!" I have decided to create a blog entry now that something is wrong.

My air conditioner is out of commission, and it is hot and humid here. I am not a happy camper. I complained to the landlady about an odor when I first turned on the a/c earlier this summer. Smelled like dirty socks. The Internet said it was probably mildew and bacteria growing in the basement unit of the air conditioner. People came out to look at it. The third person figured it out and is going to fix it Thursday. That is two days away. Actually, two nights. Two hot, sticky nights up here on the second floor.

We are all listless, the two cats and I. The cats drape themselves over furniture like discarded rags. So do I. Is this how humans lived before there was air conditioning? Except for the people in California? (And their "whole house fans?")

OK. Enough of that. Work continues apace on the new building across the street. The parking lot/basement has been put in, and the first floor, which is wood frame. They are now working on the second floor. I'm curious how many floors the building will have, because after the second floor, the thing is going to start to impinge on my view of the sky. I mean to ask someone how many stories the plan calls for, but so far I haven't run across any English speaking workers.

I gave up on the chiropractor because she and the masseuse made my neck feel worse, instead of better. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe this is a good reason to stop treatment.  Monday I went to an acupuncturist, which turned out to be a very positive experience. I will go back there, and in fact I have an appointment for next week. My neck feels better, if not totally cured, and, like, three other things are better that I never even mentioned. (Yeah I have a lot of stuff wrong with me.) So, I'm very optimistic.

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.