Well, there it is. Anger builds up and resentment. If you lost the battles in your childhood you will possibly end up one of two ways. Completely broken or on a hair trigger. So today I am jumpy, jumpy and did I say I was jumpy. Yes a lot of that goes on for me at times.
I enjoyed our Sonic Boomers slightly chaotic gig at the beer festival and sat down to talk for about half an hour with Brian the guitarist. We just can’t do what we used to do. On Sunday I recorded and mixed a new tune that I came up with in the morning. Including all the overdubs an stuff. So I can still do music, but I feel old with the arthritis and all that. I do enjoy myself but though I am but a poor deluded but hope mostly kind trans person raging against the dying of the light. But also with getting older comes the understanding that the world and people cannot be fixed. Wars rage everywhere in the world. Mostly due to fear of the other and the rich still profit like Daddy Warbucks in little orphan Annie. Makes me wish I had some faith, miracles surround us but humans create an endless trail of destruction. My depression seems quite logical and reasonable at times. I watched the news last night of course and I as ever nothing makes sense does it?
Golden October? Pumpkin seeds🎃 Lots of those in a pumpkin when you slice them up. The second experiment with the slow cooker today which will be pumpkin stew if the gods allow it. It’s still mighty wet out though. I guess harvesting will be difficult? Not that I know about such matters of course.
This rains been going on for a week solidly now and it’s definitely not normal in my personal experience. Maybe this is a real manifestation of climate change. Its very different to the last few years at this point in the season. As usual I am trying to do stuff in the studio and I have started with a slightly unusual drum pattern for me which I have an idea about. Will it work? Stay tuned or not I guess, (more bad puns coming up). I will be teaming it up with a modal flavoured electric 12 string guitar part. I know I will regret it as it always takes me about half an hour to tune it. And also to find a suitable tone that’s interesting but not too distracting. The struggle is real 😉
Update. It took me 20 minute the get the thing sufficiently in tune, but it’s sounding Ok now. The tracks maybe not going to work that well. I have put some string lines on it from the Korg but I am not sure if I like it or hate yet it so I will stop now as I am getting kind of irritable.
I think a lot of my issues are routed in the fact that I stil have an ongoing struggle with depression and anxiety that makes a thing more difficult than they might otherwise be. This as I am sure you can understand also has left me with a tendency to not entirely trust others motivations and a fear of being manipulated/used which has happened in the past due to a combination of naivete and also sheer desperation at times. The few odd extra musical job opportunities’ have dried up completely this year, which hasn’t helped much either and the arthritis can only be managed to a certain degree. I get frustrated with myself that I am not able to engage more with people generally in social environments which I do find difficult on my own anyway. I have tried to live a simple life but its always got very complicated due to the fact that I have never been very good at walking away and perhaps too often guilty of flogging a dead horse. So music has a lot of extra baggage attached to it for me. I have usually gone the extra mile for people to try and make things work. I have sort of lost faith in it all really I suppose.
Hurrah. That is all. A conversation about current popular music took off on Facebook about it’s merits or lack of same.
Much of the music I listen too and still love is 50 years or more old. (prog, jazz classical and folk in my case). A friend of mine who is ten years older than me raved about a youngish performer who is a big star. So I tried listening to a few songs and it did nothing for me at all. the lyrics were Ok but anything approaching a memorable melody was not there in most of the songs. A lot of the old recordings I love to hear are not technically anywhere near the “digital perfection” possible now too. Is it just part nostalgia? Perhaps. There are good young new bands creating in all sorts of genres out there, but they don’t seem to get in to the public gase. There were always gatekeepers A&R people and so forth. Now almost everybody can for good or ill self publish their work and make it available, but whilst that is very democratic I do wonder how many works of genius are out there that most of us will never get to hear. So those of you that can get out and support your local bands, particularly if you find you really like and buy the merch if they have it. At the end of the day though you can’t make people like stuff if its not to their taste though you can try and expose them to stuff that tickles your fancy.
But wait there’s more. I am still finding it monumentally difficult to get on with anything, it’s a real uphill struggle at present. I do have a bit of a routine that I try to follow though. But no longer having a regular calendar of live performances and the social interactions connected with it has really knocked the wind out of my sails. In between writing this I am working on a musical idea, not sure where its going yet though. It might be something whimsical if it grows. It’s a Saturday night in which to be honest I hate. Its 5 years since regular gigging finished for me but I still can’t adjust to it. I am in a band which is great but it’s just not enough for me. Of course I cant tell how others perceive me in terms of body language. I tend to be quite twitchy at times. In pubs with friends I often stand or lean on the bar as I just find it difficult to sit still. Often to do with not being able to sit for extended periods of time due to arthritis playing up. In general if I am meeting people I tend to avoid anything early in the day due to a combination of things as I am not good in the morning and worse if I am having a mildly depressive phase. Often it has been the case that I might go to meet say a potential new musical collaborator there seems to be a communication breakdown.
Real life example:
I went to meet someone that was looking to perform original songs as they wrote and so did I and we thought we had sufficient musical common ground for it to work. However it turned out that they wanted a band (not to start a duo) and started recruiting for one and suddenly it was going to be a pub covers act. So that went nowhere.
I have a reasonable sense of humour steeped in irony but people don’t always realise when I am joking or when I am being serious, maybe it is my fault in seemingly lacking gravitas or being seen as credible?
Talking of tickling your fancy, how are you doing? I think the rains made my brain soggy 🙂 Just reading a translation of some ancient mesopotamian poetry on facebook, Oh my… A young women minded to getting a good seeing too is the subject matter. Very florid language is used, but enough of such things.
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