A lot to chew.

I'm overwhelmed.

And its my own damn fault. The creative mind is like a fly wheel. Tough to get moving, tough to slow down, nearly impossible to stop, and right now, just spinnin and spinnin and spinnin.

The first song I wrote for Castle Park was penned as a fun little ditty. Not really for anything but my own amusement. But the silly ditty ballooned into the idea of a concept album, which then ballooned into the idea of creative nakedness (ie this blog) which then ballooned into the idea of writing the entire experience as a narrative book.

So now not only do I have random ideas, but I also have random ideas about random parts of the project. Theres no focus, there's no organization, and I've spun myself into relative inaction.

What should I ponder today? Should it be a few hours banging on chords at the piano? Should it be a chapter about the day I wrote "Follow Me"? Should I listen back to my new demo and decide which parts I liked, which parts I didn't, where to add cello and more cow bell? Should I escape to the garage and jump on the computer before my wife tells me that Calvin needs a bath?

"But I just gave him a bath last night."

"He's dirty."

"Dirty from what? Playing video games? Running around the house killing bad guys with a cardboard sword? Trying to poke a straw into a juice box and then giving up after ten minutes and then insisting that I do it even after he has destroyed the straw and forcing me to poke a hole in the box with my fingernail and squeeze the fruit punch into a plastic cup? Tell me please . . . how could he possibly be dirty?"

"Don't argue with me."

"Yes, dear."

Should I tune a guitar, pick up the junk that has accumulated throughout the studio, put the headphones on and listen to other songs that I like hoping to be inspired but not plagiaristic?

Anyone of these things would do, but then there's that fly wheel again. Sit at the piano and wonder if any of the songs could use harpsichord. Tune a guitar and think that I should put up a new posting to let the world know I'm still alive.

Or make a list of all the things I'm procrastinating about and start to hammer away at them one by one until I've done everything there is to do . . . ever.

Or procrastinate about making a list.

That is . . . in fact . . . exactly what I am doing now.

I don't want to make a list just yet. It will put things in perspective, give some organization to my thought, allow me to make dramatic progress in the shortest time possible.

But I don't wanna.

and you can't make me.

I'm feeling overwhelmed

and its my own damn fault.

and I'm kinda cool with it.

for now.

1183 Days

The company that hosts my first album on iTunes has informed me that it has been 1183 days since my last release. There's also a big green button on the front of my dashboard that says "Release New Album Now." I'm considering pressing that button in the hopes that it is a magical one.

That is to say, it might just be the kind of button that one would press when one is adrift in artistic purgatory. Press the button and suddenly everything I've been working on, thinking of, and dreaming about will be sucked from the shallowest level of hell and assembled to reflect exactly what I wanted it to be, rather then what it is now.

That is to say, a mess.

It's not enough that I feel the self inflicted pressure of what I'd hoped to be a magnum opus, or the nagging insinuations of friends and family who ask what I'm working on now, when I'm gonna write again, what new song is ready, but now I have an electronic website saying, "Gee dude, I thought you were serious about this whole making music thing. Are you quitting or what?"

The answer is "No, I'm not quitting."

"Taking a little hiatus there big boy?"

"Nope, in fact I think about this project almost as much as I think about food and sex."

"Writers block then?"

"No, more like writers attention deficit disorder."

You see, it goes like this. I think, I dream, I write, I edit, I post, I record, I listen, I hate, I change, I record, I hate, I change, I hate, I record anyway, I still hate . . .

. . . and just two days ago, I do something I haven't done yet.

I throw away.

Thirteen songs have been written for this "New Release" Two never made it out of the garage. They will remain scratches on note paper never to be heard. I have dreamt of digging them up for another go, but I've decided to give them up to the gods. One song made it to the couch for a performance in front of my wife. I thought it was cute, Joann smiled half heartedly, but now I know that cute is not the direction I want this to go, and though some of the lyrics are salvageable, the melody certainly is not.

One song, in fact the first song written for "Castle Park" and the only one co-written with a three year-old may be reincarnated in a different form, but will remain unrecorded until that new form has . . . well . . . form.

And the last is the heart breaker.

A song I love. I loved writing it, I loved performing it, I couldn't wait to hear it work, and it never did.

Oh, how it never worked.

It didn't work slow, it didn't work fast, it didn't working electric, it didn't work acoustic, my wife never liked it.

Or as she put it, "In the twelve years we've been together, you've only written one song that I really hated. It sucks, but you're gonna have to give it up."

Side note: The only true mistake I can make in life is not to listen to my wife.

So there it is, or more importantly, there it was.

I should wonder how many of those 1183 days I could have spent on something more productive, but I'd never really be able to codify it, and thinking like that is counter productive.

But 1183 days since my last release seems like such and excessively long time to be working on somethings that is still in its infancy period.

But lets do a little math shall we?

I began Castle Park in January of 2009. That cuts 1183 down to about 730. I worked about 5 days a week for the past two years with only about 20 days of vacations and holidays which brings the total down to about 210 days of free time. At least 95% of this free time is taken up by silly little distractions like maintaining a household, doing daddy stuff, doing husband stuff, watching episodes of Lost and reading books. That gives ma a total of 11 artistic days that I have been writing, composing, rehearsing and performing.

Sure it may seem like three years since my last release,

But its really not even a fortnight.

I am way ahead of schedule.

Screw you magic button!

Top Ten Reason I'm Feeling Old Today

Reason Number Ten:

I'm resorting to top tens.

Reason Number Nine:

I was in my jammies before 5:00pm

Reason Number Eight:

Had to make tacos for the rest of the family cause I wanted a red cabbage salad instead.

Reason Number Seven:

On top of which I burned the taco shells and Calvin won't eat them so I had to make him a turkey sandwich with carrot sticks.

Reason Number Six:

Actually decided to have a red cabbage salad for dinner tonight.

Reason Number Five:

Had a long drawn out discussion with a coworker about how this new generation of coworkers have bad etiquette.

Reason Number Four:

During this discussion I mentioned their poor elocution. One of them, having been invited in on the conversation, asked me what elocution was.

Reason Number Three:

Joann was doing the laundry and I started to worry that my jogging pants were in the washer which means that I was going to have to run out in the freezing cold with either a pair of shorts or a pair of black pajamas. Crisis was averted when I found the pants crumpled up in a ball on my side of the bed, but despite the fact that I only have one pair of jogging pants, I still own a pair of jogging pants.

Reason Number Two:

I decided to have an acquaintance of mine do the recording for next week's acoustic run of the album. That's right, I'm actually paying somebody to do a job I could have done myself.

Reason Number One:

It's 7:03 and I have to get to bed soon.

Sleep Well Campers

Challenge Week

So last week, unbeknownst to all, I decided to begin my new year's resolutions and get my shit together for lack of a more elegant term. I know that New Year's resolutions have become sort of passe, but I've decided to bring them back, if for any other reason, just to be contrary.

Last week was the "get your ass off the couch" week. Of course I was a little sidelined by a big new book, but I persevered anyway. I wrote everyday, I didn't eat fast food or consume copious amounts of alcohol, I exercised, lifted a few weights, went for a daily jog, and by Saturday I was feeling full of momentum. (and five pounds slimmer)

This week, however, adds a new wrinkle. What if we try doing all that, and work on music.

Crazy, you say.

Scoff, I scoff.

I start my vacation in one week and I'm gonna record another dry run of the album. This time, rather than building much of a production, I'm just gonna put the guitar in my lap and a microphone in my face and see where it goes.

My wife is very excited about this idea. She much prefers the scaled back sound, and having gone over my previous work, I think I agree with her.

The nice part about this trial is that if it does work, its cheap to produce professionally. The down side of course is that there ain't no production to put some gloss on what I consider to be my sloppy musicianship. Ain't no hiding those bad notes.

Which means I've got to practice. I have to tone those muscles. I gots to learn how to be a player.

And last week, I just about broke even. I could get all the stuff done without much sacrifice to the work and family gods, but now I'm gonna have to find another hour to my day and that will be the challenge.

Its easy to get your ass off the couch, but try doing that and holding on to an obsessive dream without putting a knife through Calvin's eye.

Either way, so far so good.

Joann has hid the knives.

Good Words

"Gee we've got a lot of meds." I said to my wife searching for the vitamins. I didn't actually say "Gee", but I'm in a bit of a G-Rated mood today. (Pun . . . freakishly intended.)

However what I was looking for wasn't in the primary medicine location.

"I'll check the secondary pharmacy." She had of course stopped listening to me at this point, but I continued my search. And my talking to myself.

"Not here either. I'll go check the tertiary pharmacy."

For those of you not familiar with where we stash medicines throughout the house, the primary location would be the locked hutch where we also keep cereal and canned tomatoes. The secondary location is in the cabinet right above the dishwasher. Its high up and difficult to get to if you're a five year old with a stool and a mission. The tertiary location is the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom where we keep mostly Q-Tips and underarm deodorant.

I never found the vitamins, but I did remind myself the word "Tertiary"

Its words like "Tertiary" that can literally keep the song writer's mind spinning for days.

First, how would I use it? When would I use it? What does it sound like being sung? What rhymes with it? Does anyone know what it means? Do I file it under cool words I hope to use some day, or does it go in the lyrical gymnastics pile?

These are important questions a lyrical writer must ask his/her self any time an interesting word falls in his or her lap.

The first two questions are usually pretty easy.

How would I use it?

Any way I want.

When would I use it?

Whenever I felt like it.

Does it sing well?

Not especially, but it does have a nice melodic ring and aside from the beginning TER, each of the syllables end in very suitable vowel sounds. Sh EEE Air EEE. Now I just have to find a rhyming scheme and a story to fix it to. This shouldn't be too much of a problem. I've written songs built around a single word before, but that was in the theater. IndiePop might frown on building a song around a word that doesn't have much modern use.

Besides, as of this last hour, the only thing I've found to rhyme with "Tertiary" is "Were she hairy"

as in "Were she hairy, I may ask her to wear longer pants."

But really . . . who talks like that?

I could get away with the near rhyme.

Mercenary. Obituary. Sedentary. Any A-R-Y would do. But that's cheating. And even though I'm not above cheating in any respect, I think that a word like tertiary needs to fall under the category of lyrical gymnastics, in which case the rhyme has to be pure and the subject of the song has to connect.

I may spend a few more days on this one.

It might only be a couplet, but what if that couplet turned into a verse.

Can a pop chorus use the word "Tertiary?"

Probably not. But I'm keeping my notebook handy at all times.

I tell this story to my wife who looks at me lovingly.

"You know what word I keeping seeing?" she says. "Suss."

"Suss?"

"Yeah, suss."

"hmm. That's much easier to rhyme."

I'll have to look up what it means.

and ne'er the Twain shall meet.

Joann came home with my last christmas present yesterday. Bundled in a Barnes and Noble bag was the almost twenty pound autobiography of Mark Twain.

Volume One.

of three.

An all new time suck has begun.

For those of you who don't get NPR, Mark Twain wrote an autobiography that he insisted not be published until one-hundred years after his death. He died in 1910.

Actually for those of you who don't get NPR, Mark Twain was the writer of several classic 19th century novels including Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Still nothing?

Mark Twain wrote books.

I like to read books.

This is a big book.

But it brings me to the point of my story which is the "Time Suck."

I first heard this term used to describe work email. The person who used it was describing how much wasted time she was spending checking and responding to her email. Especially all those email strings that she wasn't necessarily a part of, but had been cc'ed every step of the way because the corporate culture is all about real-time information. (The fact that his leads to fear and hostility should be the basis of someone else's blog entirely)

But I am a "Time Suckoholic" and a procrastination queen. This autobiography is twenty pound of perfect excuse to turn the rest of the world off.

But I can't turn the world off. I try, but it just won't let me. Exactly three pages into the introduction (the actual book doesn't begin until page 209. . . freakin heaven) Calvin pushes the pages aside and insist I tell him which Angry Birds level I was on.

"I don't know"

"But Dad"

"I don't know"

"But dad!"

This is where I snapped and sent him to his room until he turn into a polite boy.

He raced away screaming crying.

And as he raced away screaming crying, he shouted out this line:

"But dad . . . how many seconds is that?"

"Till your mother gets home!" I yelled and then went back to the book.

The introduction of this all great time suck began with the usual acknowledgements and thank-yous, then it dives right in to the story of how Mark Twain began several times to write his autobiography and then stopped. Starting stopping starting stopping. Each start with a fresh new take, a bright new plan, a brilliant new future. Then it wasn't until he seized upon the idea of stenography and dictating his story that he really got to work in earnest. As I mentioned, this part doesn't begin until page 209.

And then I got to a line which made me think for a second about my own story. I will paraphrase, because a blog should not have footnotes, so it goes something like this:

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of everybody else and therefore he should write it down. He finds also that everybody else has thought and felt the same things and therefore he should write it down.

or some thing like that.

Everyone should write their own story, for it is both unique and universal.

Note here that not only did I shorten the sentiment, but I also remained gender neutral.

(Side note: All authors steal concepts and either refine them or bastardize them and some authors can share the same sentiment with two very different styles. Kipling wrote " . . . and ne'er the Twain shall meet." in regards to the linguistic differences between British English and American English. Wilde wrote of it too but said "Two continents divided by a common language." Gotta love Oscar.)

Either way, the line reminded me that I have to write. Not just because it's something to do in those narrow moments between living and sleeping, working and cooking, playing and punishing, but because its good for me. And it might be good for someone else too. I might be the time suck someone has been waiting since christmas for.

Sure there will be false starts. In fact there have been more than a few already. I might not even start until page 211. And it is possible that what I want is impossible. That being an artist and being an actual adult are just too far removed from one another. And that to pursue one is to damage the other. But I gotta do what I gotta do. And I gotta try.

And to cap off these last bits of prose, twenty minutes after I relegated my little monster to his room, I found him laying on his butt in the hallway putting his tiny little feet into Taylor's enormous shoes.

"Are you ready to be a polite boy?" I asked.

"I haven't decided yet." he said.

You're not my hero.

I have failed Calvin's hero test.

Not with cruelty. Not with a lack of compassion. Not with average everyday loser-dom.

But by not knowing how to kill the bad guys on Mario Galaxy 2.

Its shameful. Its obscene.

"how can you tell me to go to my room when you don't even know how to kill the bad guys?" his eyes seem to say.

See . . . and this is the truth . . . my dad could do everything.

He could play music, throw a baseball, build things out of wood, fix a car, play chess, accelerate through a tight corner in a Mazda pick-up truck, and most of all, he could teach me how to do those things too. And I learned to do those things. ('cept maybe the ball throwing, not so great with the ball throwing.)

But I learned to do other stuff too. I'm good at math and analytical thinking. I'm good at teaching people and getting them enthusiastic about the learning process. I can cook. And I can take an even tighter corner in my Toyota echo than the engineers ever thought possible. I know science and get just about every pop culture reference thrown in my direction.

However . . .

I did not know that you had to wiggle the controller on the Wii in order to kill the bad guys on MarioGalaxy 2.

And if I can't kill the bad guys, how am I ever going to be able to get the star at the end of the level?

And this is what Calvin needs right now.

A hero who can get the star.

I am not that hero.

And he knows it.

When Taylor was six we were driving in the car and he was asking me question after question. After a very long answer there was a pause . . .

"Josh . . . do you know everything?"

"Yes Taylor . . . yes I do."

And I had him fooled. I had him fooled through grammer school english and middle school math. I even had one of his teachers comment on how nice it was to have a parent who actually understood algebra. I had him fooled up until his first pre calculus class (a class I had dropped in college) when he handed me his homework. I looked at the symbols quizzically.

"I got nothing"

"Just look at it."

"I got nothing."

"Would you just look at it please?"

"Yeah . . . still nothing."

"Please, just look at it!" his tone getting more exasperated by the minute.

"Okay, yeah, uh huh?"

"And?"

"Nothin."

"God! I hate you! You're not my Dad! And you drive a stupid looking car."

I may have made that last line up, but the tone was the same. I stopped being the guy he turns to for help and became instead the asshole who insists he chew with his mouth closed at the dinner table.

Taylor, if you're reading this . . . seriously dude.

Lock it up.

But the point is is that Calvin doesn't want to know how to play music, or build things with wood. And he already knows how to accelerate through a tight turn (a blog I'm saving for later.) He won't do any cool math for at least another few years and he's way too interested in crashing cars to even think about fixing them yet.

What he needs is someone who can get the star.

What he needs is a hero.

And I know he'll come around. Sooner or later I'll be awesome Dad again. And maybe by that time I'll drive a cooler car.

No . . . scratch that.

Maybe by that time Toyota Echos will be cool.

Cacaphony

Lying in my bed.

Novel, face down on my chest.

Eyelids closed, but I'm not really sleeping.

There's a moment of silence.

But just a moment.

I can hear Joann talking on the phone. Her voice always goes up a half a scale when she's talking on the phone as if her phone voice is that of a fourteen year old. It's a lilting voice when she's talking to friends and loved ones, a mousy hesitant voice when its a stranger on the other end of the digital line.

Right on cue, the rumbling monster truck noises begin. RRRRRRRR. Vroooom. Die-cast cars being raced on the kitchen linoleum. Crashes, scrapes, furniture sliding. These are the noises of a boy who knows his mom is on the phone and needs to be louder.

Then, impossibly, Taylor's voice screeches into the hallway. It's blocked by two doors, a living room and two hallways, and yet, and yet. I don't know what he's listening to, but he wants us all to hear his non-harmonic rendition.

Joann's voice begins to get louder as she tells her story.

The monster trucks increase in their violence.

Taylor has invented notes beyond the western 12, beyond the eastern 24, he has single handedly created a musical scale that teeters on the infinite.

"good bye, I love you" she says.

Click.

The throaty four barreled carburetors cough their way down till the last drop of leaded gas has passed through their chambers.

"Mom?"

An idle note hangs in the air until the mad violinist in Taylor's larynx has reached the end of his bow.

All is quiet.

Must be time to get up.

Fat Kid Cometh

2010 was unreasonably depressing.

Not in the "bad things happening to good people" sort of depressing, but in the "I don't know what I'm doing, I don't care what I'm doing, what's in the fridge and/or on TV" kind of depressing. I've grown accustom to those kinds of years and have made my peace with them. Twelve months is a long time to be floating in purgatory, but some people like the view so much they can spend a lifetime there.

Not me.

Not usually.

I like the idea of stopping for a while for a recharge, but that doesn't really seem to work well. It becomes more of a slow drain than anything else.

I was working with a sound engineer many years ago who had done studies on battery life. He had created a battery life chart that shows how each individual battery type operates and compares to one another.

The pure winner was Duracel. It displayed the perfect time vs power curve. As the battery was in use it slowly lost power.

The clear loser was Energizer. It would begin at full charge and then the power of the battery would quickly sink to the bottom of the scale and it would hold that power for long periods of time. Hence, Energizer may go for a quite a wile, but only if you're a cymbal playing bunny and not a 34 year old with ambition.

2010 was an Energizer year. Out of the gate chomping on the bit, and then a dismal drop in enthusiasm, and a twelve month crawl of apathy.

So here I am again. Chomping at the bit. I make no promises, but disappointment has now turned into anger, frustration into fury, apathy into determination.

A little exercise, a little writing, a little rehearsing, and a little bit watching my belly fat jiggle when I brush my teeth, and maybe I'll wake up this time next year with a sense of myself again.

Oh, and Taylor turns 18 today.

I've been saving boxes.