Solemnus

ZOMGBBQ I L-O-V-E MY BAND!!

Once again, It's been awhile since I've posted. Yes, I've been busy, but there were other reasons as well.

Done with that now. Other people can worry about their feelings. I'm done walking on glass.

But first, let's recap the last six months of my Life.

1) Divorce. Proceeding. Getting ready to file the paperwork. Finally making progress packing up the house down in Colorado Springs, expecting a few more weekends of solid work and I'll be ready to clean it, put it on the market, and get my crap out of there.

2) Love. Proceeding. Having moved in with Kristie and her grandmother, I find myself occassionally getting stuff done, what with not having to travel from Colorado Springs to Denver and back every day. This also gives Kristie and I a lot more time together, although busy as we are there are bursts of "who are you again?", but they never last. That's nice. I've closed down all but one of my other polyamorous relationships, and that one is merely waiting for time for us to get together and make it official -- based on her behavior, I'm guessing she's figured it out. Which is a bummer; not very polite of me to put her in the position of having to figure it out on her own. But we live 60 miles apart and I didn't want to break up via text message; I have more respect for her than that. Oh, well. Morale of the story: Steve is not perfect.

3) Time. Being healthy and thus having a clearer head in general, I have managed to trim my involvements back to the point where I currently enjoy three evenings per week whose commitments are music related -- and two of those can be surrendered at a moment's notice if I need the time for something else. Very nice.

4) Music. Whirly Jig has its new structure solidified, arrangements are tightening, and performances are good. Now we move on to making the arrangements solid and the performances great. Part of this will include working out some sound system issues, which is easier now that we have a sound system, largely due to Gary's contributions. I also have a volunteer in the band to become VP of Pendar Productions, which means I can proceed with plans to convert it to an LLC. We just did three St. Paddy's Day related gigs and now it's time to start pursuing other contracts with vigor.

5) Money. Eh. Until the house sells, I'm kinda' jammed. No pay raises this year, despite it being our "best year in the company history", since the coming year holds many unknowns and lots of gloomy predictions, the execs are playing it cautionsly. Wise move, I'm sure, but when (not if) we make it through this year better off than we're worried might happen, I'm betting we don't see a retroactive pay raise. Ah, well, beats unemployment.

6) Work. Still employed. Prospects of getting back into software development at the moment look a bit dim, but I'm sure that won't last. In the meantime -- still employed.

7) O.T.O. I am still just about the single most irresponsible person in the Universe about deadlines, but the local body is flourishing now. We've got classes and presentations on a wide variety of subjects taking place, and actual magick workshops in progress or in the planning stages. Go Team 93!

Otherwise, it's Life as usual.

Been awhile since I've posted. Been busy.

Let's see. We last left off with me having some good visualizations of what Depression must be like, but I had my path out of it clearly marked and I have treaded that path with a fair consistency and that is long behind me now.

So, back in the sunlight, what has changed?

1) GO. Disease gone; drive energy and focus returned; Palm Centro linked to Google Calendar and ALL my E-Mail going there -- Dudez and dudettesez, I am here to tell you -- I am a one-man To Do List ass-kicking machine.

2) Band. Lead guitarist successfully terminated (turns out he wanted out anyway so win/win there), new guitarist seems to be working out and the band's energy is UP. Also, probably not doing much RenFaire work anymore. Bars and barmitsvahs, here we come!

3) Love. Interesting road here. Went from polyamorous active relationships to a handful of relationships with no sex. Well, one of them is willing, but we have a history and I'm a bit concerned about jumping the gun on that, so...time will tell this tale. And then there's one relationship which I'm finding myself wanting more of. Almost like...y'know, that...monagamy....thing. Seems odd to WANT to restrict myself. But there you have it. Love's a funny thing.

4) Money. Well, I'm divorcing. So therefore, I'm broke. 'Nuff said.

5) Kiddo. My daughter remains the firecracker of the town, already earning kudo points in her new lifestyle, going to school, learning to remember her celphone -- ja, my daughter is growing up.

6) Networking. TWITTER ROXX0RS!!! Bit off more than I could chew at first but have that well in hand now, I'm finally starting to actually use these social networks designed pointedly by and for geeks like me. Facebook linked to Twitter, I could benefit from a good MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook agnostic simultaneous-update tool Taking advice from anyone who can provide. But Twitter rocks the house. Find me at http://twitter.com/marinersk

7) Moving. Yeah. Well, in a few weeks I expect to see my house more than once a week so maybe then I can start cleaning ex-wife's stuff and my stuff out of it, which will faciliate fixing up things that need fixing, which will facilitate selling, which will facilitate moving, which will likely facilitate cash flow (see "Money" above).

8) Politics. Not November yet; I don't discuss election stuff until November. Actually, this year, I'll probably start in the last week of October since elections are Nov 4th. Need SOME time to research everyone's stances and how they've changed since everybody else started caring what these folks have to say.

9) O.T.O. Yeah, well, funny thing about being in charge of people is that you find out just how much time a leader of anything wastes in stupid shit. But the organization is worth it so I deal, and am learning to deal bettter all the time. We just lost access to a great free facility for classes but we'll overcome that, like O.T.O. bodies have been doing for a long time. But the folks are really getting engaged again, and soon, dare I say it, they might even start getting INVOLVED. I have decided I need to dedicate more time to this organization, however, and so I need to start living less than 72 miles away (see "Moving" above).

10) Music. Distinct from "band", my personal progress on music has been a bit slow of late, but that's only when compared to the past year where a veritable flood of creativity seemed to be gushing out of me faster than I could capture it. Not dead, and ready for an upswing, there are some new tunes seeking lyrics, some lyrics seeking completion, and a collaborative effort with good friend Jennifer which needs a lot of polish on my part. I expect the simmer will rise and heat will turn up on this front soon.

11) Health. Disease gone (see "GO", "Band", "Love", "Networking", "Moving", "O.T.O.", and "Music" above). However, I am overweight. And I haven't been focused on losing it. Tried to take a video of myself for my new 12seconds.tv account (thanks to all-around general Goddess Ariel Waldman of NASA and Pownce for the free invite!) and could not believe just how UN-photogenic I have become. :: shudder :: Time to shape up. Starting yesterday.

Enough ramble for this broadside. Stay tuned. Da boyo is alive and kickin' and Heaven and Hell combined have no clue where I'm headed next. But on we go.

Typical Sagittarius.

Wow.

I have never been so completely disappointed with myself.

Never.

If this is the kind of heavy, desolate, overwhelming, self-loathing sense of uselessness that people feel when they suffer clinical depression, I understand how they can get trapped in unhealthy cycles and develop pessimistic attitudes. I also see how they might think of pessimism as "realism", and see optimism as "fantasy".

With my very long history of success and brightness and nearly unbounded optimism, I find I have only one small hole in this cloud of darkness, and that long tunnel toward the light only exists because of - quite directly because of - some serious spiritual growth in the past ten years or so.

And with this path well lit before me, I now move to fix that within me which is broken. I accept the weight of the results of my irresponsibility, I acknowledge that I have screwed things up which affect many, many people, and I am saddenned -- but I walk on.

Someone without the strength of my phenomenally blessed experiences could easily be incapable of this kind of recovery; I see that now. They would be in a limitless black cloud with no sign of, and undoubtedly no hope of, escape.

My ex-wife describes The Ring in The Lord of the Rings as Depression personnified, and she related completely to Frodo's plight. I took that as accurate, but had no mental image to tie it to.

Now I do.

Wow.

Wednesday, 09-Jan-2008 10:18am

I've always got a song stuck in the back of my head. Unless I'm completely exhausted, there's always something there. Some songs stick longer than others, sometimes it seems to be on shuffle.

Today's happy sticky music is the first movement of Beethoven's 8th Symphony.

Very nice.

Friday, 21-Dec-2007, 4:24pm

I've come to realize something. I've successfully migrated from Dispassion to Passion.

I mean, I knew I was on the journey, but I didn't realize I'd arrived. Funny how Life sneaks up on you.


Dispassion

I've been spending the better part of the past decade learning how to be dispassionate. In so doing, I've made huge leaps and bounds in personal growth, finally taking lessons to heart which have been extremely helpful in managing my Life, my emotions, my priorities, etc. The O.T.O. dramatic Initiations I've taken during this time have dovetailed quite nicely into the Life lessons I'd been absorbing.

Collectively, I call this Synchronicity; paying attention to the things I should be, the rest working itself out better than I could have planned it. Of course, we Thelemites refer to this as "Moving with the inertia of the universe". Christians might call it "Walking with the hand of God" or something similar. Same general idea all around.

So being dispassionate has had many, many perks. For one thing, you don't get upset as often. :-) For another, it is easier to weed out the real story in between two peoples' sides when you're the trusted party in the middle they both dump on. And I have been blessed with exposure to a large number of these kinds of circumstances in the past year or three, leaving me with a much-broadened understanding of human nature in general.

But there are plusses and minuses to everything.

Some direct results of being so thoroughly dispassionate for so long is that I lost the drive to excel at work, settling instead of merely being competent. I stopped writing new music; what few efforts I initiated ended without actually accomplishing anything useful. My performances with my band have lacked that...dare I say it...that *spark*...which makes good performances great.

So, like all things in Life, some good, some bad. But definitely worth having learned.


Passion

In the past year, however, I have re-awoken my sense of Passion in the world. Largely, it's because I've finally gotten a 15-year-long illness under control, and have been able to focus again. Of course, I publicly blame my band, but that's another discussion entirely. The simple fact is that I have rediscovered the joy of being passionate about things.

This, too, led to many things in my world getting better. With renewed focus on work I have become one of the more valuable people to my company (a state once familiar to me, lo those many years ago). I have taken on leadership in a damaged and nearly dead O.T.O. local body and, arguably, have it moving in a direction toward living and thriving again. My band has become revitalized; our energy is up, our audience connection is vastly improved, and we've written several new songs this year -- and (finally) we are seeking AND FINDING gigs outside the easy-to-get RenFaire gigs we'd settled for in recent years.

Again, Synchronicity; these things happening just when they need to. And many benefits have arisen, some still in the works, but all moving me toward being a better person in society as a whole, and the commensurate effects on the world around me.

But there are plusses and minuses to everything (/deja vu/).

Some direct results of re-awakening the passions within include being unable to stop crying uncontrollably at good movies, books, songs, etc. The terrible deeds we hear about every day affect me strongly, and elicit strong reactions as well. And, as I have recently discovered, I am capable of taking things personally that I should be more than casually capable of letting wash off my back like water to a duck.


Balance

In the end, of course, balancing these two powerful forces in my Life is what I'm aiming for. But I had to spend time dancing in the purity of each, embracing their unique strengths, in order to know how to balance it.

And last night, something clicked into place, and I found a balance I had been seeking for about a week and a half.


Ha! Bring it on, Choronzon. Catch me if you can.

Thursday, 20-Dec-2007, 12:41am

It seems I have reached a new Abyss.

I am, for the first time in a long time, at a loss for how to proceed. I am staring out at this new Abyss (and it, of course, is staring back, ever-penetrant). Events are streaming past me into that space, whipping at my arms and clothing, pushing, always pushing, forcing me to lean forward with ever increasing certainty.

Do I have the strength to vault over this one, or will it suck me in, gravity forever pulling me downward, inward, to some uncertain destiny?

Choronzon, always a ready and worthy foe, licks his lips in anticipation. Normally, so do I.

My Warrior aspect is hesitant, this itself of note by virtue of its rarity. I cannot recall the last time this has happened. For the first time in a very long time, I do not know if I am up for the Task.

Wow. Who'dda' thunk it? Me, actually lacking confidence. In anything.

Wow.

Wednesday, 26-Sep-2007, 10:35pm

I just can't get Inis Oírr out of my head after rehearsal tonight. Especially Susan's whistle part that she invented for the tune. But I hear the fiddle and guitar back there, too, and I suppose even my bouzouki part. But that whistle... OMG. It...consumes me.

It makes me want to just stay up all night long playing music.

Wednesday, 19-Sep-2007, 8:04am

I'm getting edgey; all these music and song inspirations bubbling up all over the place and I do not have the time to record them before I lose them. It is so wonderful having the creativity back again, but by the same token, each time I lose the inspiration before the piece is complete feels like a good friend gone overboard and lost at sea. Just makes me want to scream sometimes.

Band rehearsal tonight; I have been steeling myself for a very unpleasant duty I must perform. It could change the landscape of the very composition of Whirly Jig; I hope not, but I cannot see any other way to get done what needs to be done, so I must take the risk. And that's enough on that issue.

My antibiotics have run out; I've been off of them for about four days now and I can feel the infection creeping back into my system. Having spent the past several months with this beast in complete check, I now find it odd I ever accepted this condition as "normal". Wow.

And we're past the Faire season, now, so I really need to buckle down and start scheduling appointments to get the permanent solution taken care of. I've been informed it will be nine months worth of dental procedures and cost about $12k (thank goodness for insurance).

I've managed to pinch a nerve in my left arm and it's causing my pinky and part of my ring finger to be numb and tingly all the time. Yaël has done some quick work on a few of the places where this is supposed to be solveable via massage but we haven't gotten the right one yet. And since I didn't go over to her place last night, I'm now stuck with this condition through the weekend unless it lets go on its own. :: sigh :: This will make playing the bouzouki fun.

Enough for now; I need to get back to work. But I am making the effort to blog more consistently.

Tuesday, 28-Aug-2007, 7:41pm

OMG I love my band.

We are rehearsing (actually, I'm butting out for the moment and took the opportunity to write this) an old tune called Inis Oirr (sometimes spelled Inisheer for the Hooked-on-Phonics crowd) and the arrangement this band is producing rather dynamically is actually making me cry.

That hasn't happened on this song since I heard Kindred do it in 1992.

OMG I love my band.

Friday, 20-Jul-2007, 11:09am

Well, my wife is in Ireland and Scotland for two weeks whilst making a grand finale to a long-running tradition of disappearing to a bed-n-breakfast on the weekend of any Harry Potter novel release to hole up and read all weekend. In order to simplify my logistics with my daughter, I decided to take 2 weeks of vacation at the same time.

With Annie having joined The Muses and an upcoming lifestyle change likely, I decided to use this two weeks to start packing up my house for sale, because a move is very likely in our near future and there's a lot to be done before this house can sell.

I can say that I've done almost nothing to get the house ready this week; mostly I've been doing computer cleanup. This is, admittedly, long overdue, but the hard drives weigh the same whether the files are present or deleted so it isn't helping the moving process any.

My daughter has passed her first audition and has become a "Big Green Dancer". She is featured on two segments in the audition review video ( http://www.biggreenrabbit.com/rabbitvideoden.html ) and has her first gig with them this coming Saturday. I hope the show takes off because this could be the beginning of a good career step for her.

Monday, 16-Jul-2007 10:40am

We got whirlyjigmusic.com back!!!

When I first discovered it had been snagged by a domain reseller, I sent them an E-Mail message:

> To Whom It May Concern:
>
> Well, it seems we let our whirlyjigmusic.com domain
> name slide into arrears and you've managed to snap
> it up.
>
> What will it cost for us to get it back?
>
> - Steven K. Mariner
> President, Whirly Jig Music

I got no immediate response, so I contacted my registrar, found out that the E-Mail address I'd used was intended to be a spam filter, and that the established mechanism was to put in a certified bid for the domain. Minimum bid is $100, so that's what I bid. Whirly Jig ain't exactly rolling in the dough.

Well, they had 10 days to respond to the offer and they did not. However, the day before the offer expired, I got a reply to the original E-Mail message I'd sent. It looks to me to be a very carefully crafted (read: legally safe) E-Mail message:

> We received your email about the domain name
> WHIRLYJIGMUSIC.COM. [Company name deleted]
> registered the domain name after it became available
> for registration. If the person or company you claim
> to represent was the former registrant, they obviously
> did not renew the domain name to continue its
> registration.
>
> However, we are not interested in keeping the domain.
> Therefore, we will instruct the registrar to cancel
> the registration and transfer the domain name back to
> the previous registrant, whoever that may be.
>
> Sincerely,

I logged in to my registrar this morning and sure enough -- both of our domains are back in our possession. So I adjusted the DNS entries and over the next two days whirlyjigmusic.com will come back online.

Yippee!

There is one interesting side effect of the way this happened. The domain name was transferred back to my registar, and since I was "switching" to them, I got a free year on the domain.

Weird couple of weeks this has been.

So...would this be a bad time to announce that the band is actually breaking up anyway?

Heh. Yes, I'm kidding.

Sunday, 08-Jul-2007 7:37am

OMG did we have fun yesterday. Mel and Susan wrote a whole song while we were at Faire yesterday.

Some background:

There is an organization called The Rogues; one chapter of this organization is The Rogues of Colorado. Each chapter is considered to be a fleet, and the fleet is organized into ships, and the members of the chapter hold positions on the ships, and yes, each ship has a Captain, First Mate, Quartermaster, etc. Most members are simply "crew" on one of the ships.

A good friend of mine, Chaz, serves on a ship called the Ragin' Saint Mae, and wrote a song about it a few years ago. It went over well. I might even go so far as to say it went over very well.

Later, Captain Moon approached me to write a song about his ship, the Rising, and I had gone years just absolutely uninspired to produce anything like what I wanted for this song.

My bandmates Ken and Mel were in the Rogues; Ken was on the Ragin' Saint Mae, and Mel was on the Rising. The Captain of the Rising was working to get Annie and I into the Rogues, and he and the Commodore stormed the stage a few years back and inducted Annie and I into the Rogues as Step-n-Fetches (sort of a probationary period where you act as gopher for pretty much anyone in the fleet in order to earn enough points to graduate to full Rogue). I am fond of saying that we were "pressed into Service".

So, back to the song. It took a few years, but I finally was inspired to put one together I liked about the Rising (with lots of inspirational boosting from my bandmates, most notably Mel, who actually wrote a few of the lines which made it into the final version). It went over well. I might go so far as to say it went over very well.

I kept pestering the Commodore (a position of local oddity for the Colorado chapter of the Rogues for reasons too complicated to discuss here) for ways to earn points to get out of Step-n-Fetch and into the Rogues proper. He kept brushing me off, saying we'd get around to discussing it, etc. I just assumed he was too busy.

Shows you how gullible I can be.

Unbeknownst to us, Annie and I were earning points just by playing our music on the Pirates Pub stage at the Colorado Renaissance Festival, and last year at the End-of-Faire Rogue party we were lined up with the rest of the Step-n-Fetches and graduated. Part of the agreement, apparently, is that we got to be inducted onto The Rising, with Captain Moon.

I still have a hard time accepting myself as a full Rogue 'cuz I didn't go through the very low-grade hazing that often accompanies the Step-n-Fetch probationary period. But everyone accepts it, so I guess I'm finally getting comfortable with it.

So last year, there was a bit of a reorganization within the fleet. The First Mate of the Rising was given her own ship, the Kumori, to serve as Captain, and my bandmate Mel went over to the Kumori where I believe she serves as Ship's Bard. I was promoted to Ship's Bard on the Rising.

Anyway --

A few weeks ago I'd stumbled across a riff on the bouzouki. I worked it into something useful, and then came to the realization that I was going to have to improve both my muscle strength in my fret hand and my technical discipline on the instrument in order to be able to play this riff the way it needed to be played.

So I've been working on it, and it emoted a feeling akin to a chase scene of some kind. I always seem to default to horses when I think of high speed adventure music, but this didn't feel like a horse scene. Not a car scene, either. Not on foot. I just couldn't place it. But I kept working on it, refining it, got it more or less consistently sounding more or less how I wanted it to sound last weekend.

Bandmate Ken also liked the riff, and started playing around with serious guitar solo work to go with it.

And then yesterday, just after the morning gate show, bandmate Mel asked if she could borrow that riff to use in a song about the Kumori, and it hit me like a burst of sunlight -- the flavor and feel this riff evoked brought to mind images of a pirate ship, with crew hanging off the netting and rigging, as she pursued (or was searching for) her prey. It was like a fully-finished movie scene burst into my head.

Though I was reticent to let go of this cool riff I'd created, it really was the perfect use for it and so I said she could.

Later in the day, in between shows, I started noodling around with the chord structure that went with the riff and starting humming basslines of how the song might go so Mel could use that as a guide in writing lyrics, which she did with aplomb. Susan, another Kumori shipmate (I believe she serves as Quartermaster), chimed in, and throughout the day, after every show, we sat down and made more progress on it; me refining the melody and they the meter and lyrics. By the end of the day it was done and we had a seriously kick-ass song.

As we made our way to campground, Mel and Susan wrote two more verses, which we then rehearsed into the meter we had developed for the song, and then took it down to the campground where the Rogues were having a huge gathering, and we performed it for Captain Zetsumei. It went over well. I might even go so far as to say it went over very well.

Yeah. Our band has no creative energy. Good thing we're breaking up the band. Unh-huh. Yeah. Right.

Whirly Jig Lives

As some of you may know, Whirly Jig was preparing to break up. In pairs, we'd each had conversations about how this seems to be the last year, we have no creative energy, etc., etc. So we finally decided to get together and have an actual band meeting about the breakup.

Instead, we wrote a song.

Well, finished a song. I actually started it 3 or 4 years ago, inspired by, of all things, a character concept invented by my good friend Sean Foree working at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival over a decade ago. I dubbed it "The Lazy Brigands". But all I had was the first verse and a chorus, and a nifty tune to go with it.

I have tried over and over again these past several years to make some progress on this song, but could not be inspired to produce anything that had the flavor and feel I wanted. My bandmates tried to help, but they didn't understand the direction I wanted the song to go (and I seemed unable to explain it sufficiently) and so they kept coming up with these ideas -- brilliant ideas -- but they just didn't fit. And so it went unfinished all these years.

In something like 10 minutes we completed it as a group. That, plus the raw energy we get from working at the Faire, rekindled the old Fire.

So we're not breaking up.

Stupidity Should Be Painful

Well, our whirlyjigmusic.com and pendarproductions.com domains expired in May. And since the band was almost certainly breaking up, I was willing to let them go. Besides, the registrar I use was the kind of registrar that would hold onto the domain name for a long time (as much as a year, in the old days) so it's not like there was a rush.

I was oh so ready to just not have to worry about the band, the music, or any of the festivals we might have played at. So if the domain name goes away, so be it.

But now we're sticking around. And there are offers afoot to travel a bit this year again, and everybody's jazzed about it.

Then our web site went offline. Apparently, the web hosting provider had been trying to charge the same debit card we've always been using but the bank was declining the transactions. This made no sense, as we had plenty of money in the account, so I re-entered the information. Still declined.

Then the debit card expired and the bank did not issue a new one. So I finally got in to the bank to find out what was going on -- and for reasons I cannot comprehend, the bank had decided on its own to not reissue the debit card because the account had been inactive all year (we'd operated largely out of Petty Cash this year).

Okay, this explains (sort of, I guess) why the web host provider wasn't getting paid. I'd been wanting to change web host providers anyway, so here was my opportunity.

I ordered a new debit card for the band bank account so I could use it to renew the web hosting and domain name services, which had by this time of course also expired.

I picked up the new card from the PO Box on Monday morning and as soon as I was in front of a computer I set up both domains on the new web hosting provider, and then proceeded to renew the domains at my registrar.

Except they weren't there anymore. The band's account at the registrar showed no domains. Gone.

I managed to buy pendarproductions.com back, but it cost me an extra $150 because it was in "redemption" status.

However, I was unable to buy whirlyjigmusic.com -- somebody else bought it up just a few hours before I did.

I Hate Vultures

Turns out the company is one of those domain resellers -- they snap up cool looking domain names hoping to make a profit on reselling them at a markup.

Now, from a business perspective, this practice is as old as the hills. I buy the land for cheap, when the town expands in this direction, the prices go up, I make a profit for having the insight to buy what will eventually be more wanted than when I bought it.

But to hang out like a vulture, actively hunting out domain names that expire and snap them up so you can sell them back for profit simply because the owner was an irresponsible twit is downright predatory. And I really hate predatory business practices.

But I am a firm believer that stupidity should be painful. So now I have had to put in a certified bid to buy back my own domain name because I was stupid enough to let it expire -- and expire long enough that the vultures got to it before I did.

Ugh.

But hey, at least the band is still together.

Well, mostly. Annie's continued participation at this point is unlikely, and that brings up a whole new batch of issues that perhaps we'll discuss in another entry.

The innocent little girl sat on the bench, guarded by two angels.

The monster's arm reached over the fence, the blackened, finger-like claws over seven feet long, but it stopped short of grabbing the girl.

"No," said the Magician, "You shall not touch this girl. She is protected."

The claw remained; unable to proceed, unwilling to yield.

The Magician worked the garden; the blackened fingers made an occassional grab for him.

"No," said the Magician, continuing his garden work unabated, "I do not fear you, for I know your Nature." Then, slightly more commandingly, "You are bound." The Magician returned to his labours.

The claw remained long after he departed; still unable to proceed, still unwilling to yield.

Noone else dared approach the girl for fear of the Monster.

The innocent little girl sat on the bench, guarded by two angels.

There it is. Lying there. Breathing slowly, less deeply with every breath.

Dying.

There's an odd peace within me as I watch my current musical endeavor drawing its final breaths.

It is saddening that this magical combination of talents should surrender and go quietly into the night, but I must say I'll take that over the fiery explosion of Ego and malcontent which often accompanies a musical disbandment.

However, as Jem Moore once put it: There is more to music than just the notes.

The Fire is gone. We did not tend to it, and now it is gone.

It's hard to imagine not having a performance venue, even if just one or two per year, to get ready for. It seems such a foreign concept that I might actually not ever go on stage again.

And yet, here I sit. We haven't spoken about it as a band but each of us has had conversations with at least one other band member about it. I think we all acknoweldge the Fire is gone, and I am not certain any of us really wants to put the effort into trying to rekindle it.

Odd, given the amazing joy we have each experienced on this short almost-5-year journey.

The Fire is gone. We get on stage, we do our thing, we entertain, we love it and get a nice performer's rush out of it, but that's it. We're just not the Fire-Piss-and-Vinegar band we were a few short years ago.

And I am strangely ready to sit with all the other retired stage hands, have a slow, comfortable drink, and enjoy the fruit of other peoples' labors, reminiscing perhaps from time to time about our chapters in that story.



Not an hour ago I sat in my hotel room, noodling around with my bouzouki, producing music of a type I have not been inspired to make in a long time.

No boom-chuck-a-chuck 4/4 western pop flow; it sounded almost New Agey. No doubt a reflection of my current mood.

And lost to the vagaries of time, since I did not have my pocket recorder with me and was not following any particular plan or pattern. I just played what I was moved to play.

Spontaneous composition. I haven't done that in a LOOOOONG time.

Apparently, this chapter in my book is about to come to a close.



Funny. After years of crossing paths, I finally got to actually sit down and socialize with Marc and Andrew. I think I've always connected with Marc on a performer's level but more so with Andrew on a personal level.

And now that I've finally gotten to sit down, out of the public eye, and just chat and BE, it seems our paths are unlikely to ever cross again in any professional capacity.

Very odd, this Life.

So very odd.

Here it comes.

Ramping up to the local Renaissance Festival season.

I want to write more songs. The Rising went over really well last year.

But my lifestyle choices this past year leave me very little creative time.

Choices. That's what they are. Time to adjust. Fine-tune. Get back on the Path.

:: sigh ::

I just came to the realization that I view music from the anticipatory state, not the currency state.

This, I think, explains why I have such a bitch of a time staffing music by hand. The written language of music speaks from the perspective of how long the current note will last, not from the perspective of how quickly the next note gets to interrupt it. The math works either way, but the perceptive issues have me focused on the wrong thing at the right time and has me instinctively trying to adjust the duration of the NEXT note instead of the duration of the CURRENT one when establishing timing.

It probably also has a lot to do with why my instinctually-applied musical expression is as popular as it is; I think most Americans tend to live their lives in a more or less anticipatory state, especially in this modern, spoiled, instant-gratification culture we have developed. My expression of music may well "speak to" my audience members on a level which is far more primal than the actual music itself.

Weird to only now have sufficient clarity on the Art to be able to generate words to describe it.

Maybe that's really the only difference between Art and Science.

I've just discovered the joys of the neti pot. I CAN BREATHE!!!

As I sat and observed my Brothers, Sisters, and friends pay their respects to Brother Cecil after the Greater Feast Gnostic Mass this weekend, I came to the realization that Brother Cecil was my teacher, though I knew it not.

I wish I'd been a better student.