The Lost Episodes

Wow, what happened?

My last post was January 23, with "Pirate Mode Unlocked." I intended on having a series of pirate-centric blog posts to capture the whimsy, lightheartedness, and adventure of the next few weeks of my life. I guess because my life wasn't whimsical, lighthearted, or adventurous, I didn't end up doing that.

Actually, every time my reflections and sentiments coalesced into a blog post, before I could make the time to sit down and type it out, the tone and focus of my life shifted to something else. Meanwhile, the dry, mundane, sentiment-free details were captured in my experimental daily journal file, so I didn't personally feel the information was lost to the ages, so I suppose I must have become somewhat complacent in the decline of the blog as an entity.

But, this blog is so much more (and so much less) than an empirical timeline of searchable terms I can later track out of curiosity and perspective, documented in the name of accuracy. That's the what the Word file is for.

Now, I am going to attempt to "catch up" on the past three blog-less months by listing the blog posts that could have been. I cycled through a lot of distinctly different mindsets.

This was a long time coming. Sorry about this...


A Pirate's Freedom

I was going to have a series of at least four posts like this: A Pirate's Whimsy, A Pirate's ____, etc. to depict my sense of wanderlust and my refusal to feel shackled by the domestication and the inescapable responsibilities of any given week.

I did let the Pirates of the Caribbean complete soundtracks fuel me for a while. And slowly nursing the movies (and the rum) over the course of days. But I didn't reach and grand epiphany or recruit any crew members to my purpose.

January 31st, for example, was a good example. I took Liam in the car and one wrong turn led to another, and I saw signs for a place I hadn't heard of, Covert Park. It turned out to be one of those spectacular overlooks of the river and the mansions that line it. Lots of rocks for Liam to climb on. Afterwards, we went to Long John Silver's because Liam wanted shrimp and I wanted a vaguely nautical location. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring with POTC music, but missed my friends, and lamented how difficult and unlikely it was to make new connections of the same caliber.

Eventually, I did customize a pirate costume by shopping online and thoroughly comparing combinations of components to come up with a unique look. It was superior to my existing, "bare minimum acceptable" pirate costume I had for our entertainment business. It's not often I get hired to dress like a pirate, but I did on March 3rd. That last-minute booking was the catalyst to make me be fully prepared for next time.


Blue Mana

Pirate Mode was not limited to Pirates of the Caribbean, however.

Over the past couple years, I casually picked up the occasional Intro Pack or Duel Decks for Magic: The Gathering. These are the pre-constructed decks that you can just whip out and play. No collecting, no researching deck-building strategy, no-muss-no-fuss. I refused to get into the time sink (and money sink) of collecting a CCG like the old days, but I had been getting back into playing the game I once enjoyed, and I did want to accommodate house guests by having the option available for impulse request. So, I was precisely the demographic for these ready-made decks that MTG aficionados may or may not shrug off with a "meh."

The new release of "Merfolk vs. Goblins" is what pushed me over the edge. I bought it, and finally opened a big cardboard box full of maybe up to two hundred dollars' worth of still-shrinkwrapped items from that game, some of which were Christmas gifts.

There are five "colors" of magic on the Mana Wheel. Blue is one. Its focus is cunning, manipulation, and the treachery of the sea. Islands are the lands that give you the mana points to spend. That is the crudest, most insufficient explanation that any Magic players reading this will cringe at, but the point of this blog post was to cover the rest of the appeal of the seas beyond just Pirates of the Caribbean. 

I sometimes miss being on the Great Lakes and the adventures I had with friends there. Jimmy Buffett is quick to remind me. However, to be fair, the only time I ever saw the ocean properly, I was just turning seven years old. The Great Lakes leave an impression on you, though, and a boat is a boat. A horizon of nothing but water looks the same as any other.

I made a mix CD of music that gave me that feeling. A long time ago, in the early years of this blog, a few film music lovers dominated the comments and thus encouraged such posts as this; I posit a playlist for you to drive around to on a free day with long roads and clear blue skies.

1. 12 Years Later (Treasure Planet, James Newton Howard)

2. Main Titles (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

3. Main Title (Earthsea, Jeff Rona)

4. Haircuts (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

5. The King’s Plans (Earthsea, Jeff Rona)

6. The King’s Plot (Earthsea, Jeff Rona)

7. Speargun (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

8. Swimming (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

9. Helen Sews (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

10. Wonderful Friend (Earthsea, Jeff Rona)

11. Silver (Treasure Planet, James Newton Howard)

12. Let The Games Begin (Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas, Harry Gregson-Williams)

13. Ray’s Theme (Steamboy, Steve Jablonsky)

14. To The Spaceport (Treasure Planet, James Newton Howard)

15. The Launch (Treasure Planet, James Newton Howard)

16. Sailing (Earthsea, Jeff Rona)

17. Fly In The Sky (Steamboy, Steve Jablonsky)

18. Launch! (Steamboy, Steve Jablonsky)

19. Escaping The Smokers (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

20. The Chase (Steamboy, Steve Jablonsky)

21. Sparrowhawk (Earthsea, Jeff Rona)

22. Raid By The Airship (Steamboy, Steve Jablonsky)

23. Ray’s Dilemma (Steamboy, Steve Jablonsky)

24. Helen Frees The Mariner (Waterworld, James Newton Howard)

25. Jim Saves The Crew (Treasure Planet, James Newton Howard)

26. Is It The Shore Or The Sea? (Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas, Harry Gregson-Williams)
27. Silver Leaves (Treasure Planet, James Newton Howard)

Volition Revisited

By the second week of February, Pirate Mode gave way to BGSU nostalgia.

In a productive way, this time.

I was going to write a very thoroughly thoughtful and thoughtfully thorough blog post, but I'll just copy and paste what I said on Facebook. After all, I soon burned out on the project and moved on.

On Valentine's Day, I posted to Facebook:

I have been in a vivid state of BGSU nostalgia since Saturday. Part of it’s the dreary, cold weather, which is rare here. But I also finally got around to something that’s been nagging me for a long time. An old project that needs fixing.

My Master’s Thesis was a symphonic tone poem, which never got so much as an offering for a reading, even when the resident orchestra was offering readings. In February 2006, just as I was calling the composition finished, the Finale file became infested with gremlins who ruined the MIDI playback, so I didn’t even have THAT to show for my months of toil. I became so burned out on the bullshit limbo Dr. Lillios purposefully kept me in to the point of screwing me out of graduating on time, and the epic saga of the thesis betrayal has been thoroughly blogged about, that for the longest time I couldn’t even muster the stamina to look at the notation file. (I still don’t have that stamina, really. I hate Lillios, Shrude, Beerman, and to a lesser extent, Kuehn… not to mention at least 51% of the student body.) Then, it became a matter of Real Life taking precedence over such trivial matters as personal catharsis. Either because I had bigger fish to fry or because I couldn’t bear to gaze down the steep precipice that was BGSU Mode, I kept resisting the call to deal with this and about a dozen other unresolved concerns.

Now, though, I am intent on using Logic Pro to get a reasonable digital mock-up of the damn thing, but it’s taking me to a dark place. And the amount of work it’s going to require is overwhelming to think about. But, gods damn it, I need the satisfaction of this accursed recording. I have so much “unfinished business” from Bowling Green. On the bright side, it is motivating me to rekindle old friendships. 

I just had to say something, because so often I keep things limited to my own head, so no one ever knows I go through weeks like this, and I think my BGSU peeps should know that I still think about you a lot. Hell, I just the other night watched Revenge of the Sith in your honor. Or, dishonor, depending on how you feel about the movie. 

I also often think about an epic lightsaber duel-to-the-death with each of the composition faculty members, individually. In a field of boiling acid geysers and lava and noxious fumes and flying piranhas and needles and voracious Pygmy-Cthulhu demon babies. 

I mean all of this in a productive way. My graduate thesis still mocks me twelve years later. I must kill it. Evil was allowed to endure, now I must cast it into the fires of Mount Doom from whence it came. Sooo… who wants Pita Pit?

Spring Fusion

The return of Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy in February took me by surprise. Everything has a "holiday creep" these days, encroaching on its predecessor's seasonal space, even beer. Hey, if you can sell Christmas decorations on July 4th, why shouldn't I be able to drink lemon beer in February?

A year was lost. The Accident and its aftermath. I was gorging myself on the mental candy of spring and summer, juggling various interests from past years' spring seasons. To be fair, February in Texas is warm enough that it doesn't feel out of season to do so. I was fusing the years together, but it was all tinged with regret and anxiety and self-pity over how last spring should have been.

I found some new places around Austin including coffee shop sanctuaries and hiking trails worth repeatedly visiting. I was doing my best to "make every day count," as was my New Year's mantra.

By the time of Liam's 3rd birthday on February 27th, this blog post would have been a buffet of cheerful ideas, inspiring memories, and rejuvenating music. Green was returning to the world.


The Anniversary Effect

I was experiencing what psychologists call the Anniversary Reaction. I was going to write a cathartic examination of the past year since the car accident. But I kept most of those thoughts to myself.

In the end, there is no "making up for lost time." That's why it's called lost time.

I did, finally, finish my outline for my therapeutic "Crisis Music" album. It was too exhausting to begin to actually compose it, though. Someday. Someday, I will have finished a project that someone out there can use to help them through the unspeakable dread and despair.


The Long Road To Recovery

On March 13th, Juliet had some pretty significant surgery. To this day, she is not recovered. My mom has been living with us once again to help during Juliet's recovery. I say the "long road" because it feels like it's just one such thing after another. For three years now. It all started with a lump in a breast. The car accident was just Fate being a dick. Then, her melanoma diagnosis took the last reserves of my spirit out of me. At this point, I can't take any more crises. And Juliet has endured literally years now of these physical and mental hardships, the inescapable burden of living in a prison of flesh. You can't take a vacation from your broken body.

And I myself had been feeling sick every day since Halloween. It turned out that the excessive dust from our purgatory of unfinished home repairs since buying the place three years ago was a major culprit; I feel better now. At least, I have my sense of smell back, and I am not coughing every day. The vocal cord nodules I fear I have had for months might be getting better, too. I probably won't need throat surgery.

I have a long, bitter rage-rant to give about healthcare in this country and the perverse and hypocritical philosophy driving the Republican Party, those who think that living is not a basic human right, but being able to mass murder is. You might bridle at that, but I've got some hard questions to confront you with in person about it.

Basically, things have been hard. Again. Still. Always. And I am burnt out. I can't pay the toll it has taken on me. No amount of time spent in the woods can heal it. And that says nothing of Juliet's mind and body. That's just me, the spouse.


Truman Accolades

I intentionally cultivated a strong sense of college nostalgia so I could focus on some old composition ideas from those days. It was the Naw Ruz party at the community center on March 20th that sealed the deal. I was one of the face painters that night. Something about the nice shirt I was wearing and the way the "golden hour" hit the green grass near the park in Georgetown reminded me of spring recitals of the old days.

I had many present-day goals in mind that benefited from staying mentally rooted in Spring 2004. When someone tells me I shouldn't live in the past, I say, "No, I live in the Alternate Present, striving for a Future in which the Past is still relevant. Besides, what the hell is the point of that supposedly enlightened goal of 'making memories' if you aren't allowed to indulge in them later?"

This would have been full of thoughts that probably wouldn't have been confined to a single post. Therefore...


Steve Canada's Hard Lemonade

On March 28th, I tried the Austin-local Deep Eddy brand's lemon vodka, evoking the spirit of those parties we used to have where Steve would mix his ferociously alcoholic lemonade. Those were good times. But I discovered that I can't drink like a 22-year-old at the age of 36.

In the interest of brevity (laziness), however, I will once again simply copy and paste from Facebook:

For exactly one week, I’ve been in an unshakable state of nostalgia for Spring 2004. My last semester at Truman. There was always something unsatisfactory about the way my time there ended, something I never quite resolved. BUT… that season was also, quite possibly, the easiest time of my life. The easiest, most glamorous, and most hopeful time of my life. Quite possibly. 

My fifth year in Kirksville. I had actually graduated in December 2003 with my B.A. in Music Composition. So, that spring I was just taking a couple of graduate credits for composition and master classes (aka comp seminars with the Mostly Live Composers Society), and spending the rest of my time just composing hardcore (devoted March and April to writing music for a theater production), heading up the Shotokan Karate Club, and living it up with a particular circle of friends who were predominantly computer science majors. 

Life was so easy then. I hadn’t yet realized how fucked I was by the imminent doom of going to the stacked-deck graduate program of the BGSU “Music” (in name only) department. As of March ’04, I was just glad to have received my acceptance letter. I was too young to even conceive of the sobering hardships of things like cancer. Back then, my biggest worry was probably something trivial and vain. Back then, with those good friends, though we all knew our days together were numbered (or perhaps because of that fact), we relished every get-together, we seemed to feed off of each other’s self-assurance, and the rapport and camaraderie was something unparalleled. I think everyone was feeling good about their own respective capstone projects as a backdrop, and we just had such a damn good time together every time the dozen-ish of us met up. I guess I just couldn’t get enough of that feeling: maybe that was my biggest worry. 

Too Talls Two, as we knew it, was named so after the first bar burned down. After we all left, a second fire claimed it and was reopened as Too Talls Two: Inferno. Though that was after our time, I had occasion to visit it once, at Christmas. Eventually, that shut down, too, and never reopened. I’ve had a long-standing fantasy of having “cheat code” money to waste on such stupid pet projects as a replica of our old hangout, built to my eccentric specifications, but called Too Talls Three.

This nostalgia began a week ago when I decided to watch the Matrix trilogy again, and now I have moved on to the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy. I just finished Ocean’s Twelve, which actually came out well after our time at Truman. Anyway, another long-standing fantasy I’ve had is more abstract, allegorical: the final scene in Twelve always made me think of a Truman reunion. That easygoing feeling, the rapport. 

I almost didn’t say any of this. I almost just typed it all up and deleted it. But too often I stew in my own ruminations for a week straight and speak only into the void, so my sentiments go unheard by a world that has forgotten me anyway. Fuck it. I’m nostalgic and reaching out, so be it. But each time this particular chapter of memory is revisited, it gets colder, fainter, lonelier.

There’s no going back to feeling easygoing after the past three years. But damn it, I can dream. Here’s a toast to all you mutual friends of Dean Yzon, my karate buddy who introduced me to you in the first place. Now, tomorrow I plan on watching Ocean’s Thirteen and dusting off my list of unfinished goals from Spring 2004. Not for closure. For re-opening. Whatever seemed important then might seem silly now, but we sure did feel good.

World of Healing

Easter. My thoughts upon driving the countryside after finishing, for old time's sake, my favorite video game of all time: Final Fantasy VI. I drove through some really nice scenery while listening to the epilogue on the soundtrack, purposefully finding vistas that paired well with the music; much of the end credits is over scenic footage of the airship flying over a world that had sprung from the brink of ruin. Gone were the browns and reds of the post-apocalyptic setting, and green was once again flourishing after defeating the evil that was trying to destroy everything.

I had many thoughts. It was Easter, and I hoped good things were being resurrected after a long period of a World of Ruin.

But those thoughts were, again, kept to myself. Could have been a good blog post, though.


The Pensieve

Finally, and this is the absolute pinnacle of self-indulgence, is a little case full of note cards that I call the Pensieve, a reference to Harry Potter.

In The Lord of the Rings, there is the Mirror of Galadriel, a birdbath-like pool of visions. Past, present, future. In Harry Potter, Dumbledore has this thing in the headmaster's office called the Pensieve, a basin in which memories can be vividly re-experienced. You practically dive into a replaying of the moment.

It all started with just jotting down a few nagging thoughts to get them out of my head so I could concentrate on the here-and-now of reality and responsibility. I'd pore over the notes later. This became a helpful and healthy habit for me. But then I took it to an absurd extreme...

In addition to the clinical tone of the interesting-only-to-myself personal log, the Pensieve is the other main reason why I haven't blogged in a while: the feeling of a need to do so has been satiated by both of these other mental outlets.

The idea behind the case of note cards is that they can be sorted through in search of a specific idea or drawn randomly. Specifically, I was anticipating a time when Juliet would finally feel healthy enough to take Liam on adventures and give me the house to myself for a while, and when that used to happen more frequently, I would sometimes find myself torn among the many options on how to spend that free time. When my mood is ambivalent, might as well randomly draw a project to commit myself to. That way, the opportunity cost feels forgiven somehow. You know, just make a list and roll a d12, and say, "The die has spoken. I shall do this task and forsake all others." But this is more detailed than a die roll.

So, it's partially a list of projects that I never finished, and partially a collection of scenarios worth reenacting for some greater purpose. Some note cards are specific memories to recreate. Some are situations that have been repeated before and are to be kept alive (such as taking Liam to the lake). Some are more general, a more abstract description of a certain mindset to evoke for the purpose of some related project. Some are exact itineraries to follow. And some note cards, which I wrote in blue ink to set them apart more easily, are outright fantasies, things that never were but should have been. Often, the purpose of dwelling on such things is to confront and get over a regret.

It's just a way of choosing among ideas for how to indulge in a day off. If I get to. But as of this point, I have probably a note card for every day of the year. I could never possibly indulge this much.

It still helps to write something down and tuck it away, so I don't have to be distracted by it anymore.

Here, let me draw one at random right now. Here's what it says...

Choose a horror screenplay to focus on.

Yikes. That's ambitious. Not today. See, there's a folder full of Word files for all the ideas I've pitched in phone conversations with the Captain. I had once talked about maybe committing to one for NaNoWriMo, but never did participate. I don't even remember what is in that folder. Such a waste of time, but again, that's kind of the point of the Pensieve.

Let me try again. The next note card says...

Star Wars Saga Edition RPG

No. I don't have time for that. That could mean almost anything, anyway. One more Mulligan...

"Friday Night Ritual." Kansas City -- July/August 2007; Meeting Dean for veggie burgers at Fred P. Ott's on the Plaza and breaking out of the oppressive work week.

Now that's a pleasant thought. Something worth reminiscing about. I would allow myself to grab a bite to eat somewhere and email my old friend Dean. But this note card is a vague description and begs to be expounded upon. And that is also kind of the point. I'm looking for something, I just don't know what. I might look up the archives of blog posts from those two months.

I told you it was an absurd extreme. It all comes down to a line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "I wrote them down in my diary so that I wouldn't HAVE to remember them."


Ten Years On

April 19, 2008, is the day I left Kansas City. Everything since has felt like an alternate universe. I should have made a long blog post to reconnect with the people from that time and place. I should have addressed all of that era's nagging, unmet goals and unfinished projects that still matter to me. But I didn't say anything. I have too many thoughts and not enough time.



Closing Thoughts

With everything going on, all the chaos especially regarding Juliet's health and our perpetually unfinished house, not to mention having a three-year-old on top of everything else, I just find myself too busy to type a blog post anymore. The daily journal and the ridiculous collection of vague thoughts on note cards keeps me from putting it higher on my list of priorities.

This is like the tenth time I've blogged about how I don't blog as regularly as I used to.

The blog started around the same time as Facebook, all those years ago. At the time, the blog was an excellent substitute for redundant emails to keep in touch with people. I used to blog at least once a week. But since then, Facebook has taken over the world. And the blog is now merely an extension of Facebook, at least the way I use it.

I'm fine with it now.

But I do mean to blog at least twice a month, since it seems I will never do it twice a week like in the old days.