(Phaysis)

So how you guys doing? Good? You folks comfy enough? Grab a chair, pull up some floor. Me, I’m doing swell. Just dandy. Got a short story from last year I’m retouching, chapter by chapter. Also reviving some old songs for posting at my Glass Door site.

To do that, I revived my old desktop PC and am trying to remaster some of that music for posting, and lemme tell ya, it’s not so easy. I honestly can’t see how I got anything done with that old piece of shit. But I got it working, sorta, enough to tweak some music. I’ll have to wire the PC into my actual recording gear to record the audio, since the computer is too old and ill-maintained to record its own audio without dropping clicks and pops into the recorded waveform. [frowny-face]

Actually, the only thing I really need that PC for is the Yamaha S-YXG50 synth software which was written so long ago that it won’t work on modern systems. I have a few songs whose sound depends on that software, so as soon as I record those tracks, I can transfer all the files, mothball the PC and move on. (If none of that made sense to you, just lay down on the floor and close your eyes until the confused feeling passes.)

Let’s see…what else? Ah, yes, against all better judgment and wisdom, I signed a 6-month lease extension on my apartment. It’s an OK place, but my neighbors suck. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care how much noise I make, because obviously the McStompy’s upstairs and the pasty-white soul screamer next door don’t care, either. Last weekend, I cranked up the bass box on my sound system and turned on the music just to prove to them how thin the walls are. Maybe they got the message, I don’t know. But there I am, living there for another 6 months. Here’s hoping I don’t lose my job anytime soon, eh?

Speaking of job, one of the managers in my department, a decent guy who’d been there for most of his professional career, gave his two-week notice. I was chatting about it with another coworker, and apparently he’s leaving the company to pursue a new career. Which I was fine with until I found out what he’s looking at doing: going into researching Creation Science. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, I can’t fault someone for having a passion. Hell, can’t fault someone for making a conscious decision to change their life, lifestyle, and career to explore their faith. But Creation Science? Why not study UFOs or something else instead? It’s just as factual. It just gets my goat, a perfectly sane, technical man deciding to look for data to support his religious claims. It’s like a drunk man using a lamp post more for support than illumination.

Even when I was a dyed-in-the-cloth Southern Baptist evangelical youth, I could still find a way to reconcile the creation mythos with evolutionary science. They fit perfectly. Did I think the earth was 6000 years old? No way. I knew the universe was eons old, broader than consciousness, and that it could still fit in God’s pocket. I carried with me the understanding that the physical processes that govern the universe are the tools that god used to create everything. It made complete sense that all life on Earth would start from the simplest forms and evolve up to the high forms we exhibit. That was the real design. Even our nation’s founding fathers, who were die-hard Deists, held this opinion. He wrote the rules, and we eventually happened, not the other way around.

I just cannot fathom the leap of logic necessary to believe that dinosaur bones were placed inside the ground by the Devil, with permission from God, in order to test our faith in the Creator.

It is with profound joy that I announce that after so many wasted years of missing the boat, my music site is up, live and functional, and that you can now hear some of my music. About damned time.

“Where is it?” you ask? Well, it’s where you would expect to find that great music from the band Glass Door:  glassdoor.net!

I still have a few loose ends to tie up, but there it is. So far, I have two full songs and one “found sound” posted. I’m even going so far as to make cover images for each song I post — in some respects, I’m more proud of the images than the songs, but I love all of it anyway. Call me Pygmalion.

What do you think, sirs?

In this town, a man is known not by who he is, but by what he does. He is remembered for the final product of his creative output.

It is not enough that you make music. You must make enough of it that people enjoy your work and carry your name banner into the field. But toy with a few tunes here and there, write something on an occasional basis, and there’s no juice, there’s no increase, there’s no gravitas, there’s no elevation. Rockets require a lot of fuel, the right spark, and directed focus of force to leave the ground. Without that direction, you’re just a firecracker, another in a long string of firecrackers, each making your pop before the cherry flame travels down the fuse chain to the next in line.

It’s not enough that I have fire. Not enough that I have fuel. I have the raw materials in hand (music can be made with coconut shells and rubber bands, for chrissakes). What’s left, then? Direction. Direction of force. The drive. The discipline. The dream to rocket off the ground.

So I got shown up.

I had the strange fortune the other evening to share my table in a crowded coffeeshop with an interesting woman. She needed a place to sit, she asked, I offered the other half of my table. I noticed that her laptop was festooned with a menagerie of Drupal stickers, Drupal being a website creation framework that I’ve looked at for my own needs but turned down on its apparent complexity.

“Strange,” I thought. “She’s a girl, and she apparently likes Drupal!” The chauvinist in me short-circuited for a minute as he tried to reconcile the fact that technically-minded women do exist. This is the modern age, mind you. “Well, then. That’s kinda hot.”

I tried to pay her no attention and keep to my side of the table, being a “nice guy” and all, but the opportunity arose and I had to break the fourth wall. Turns out she’s a marketing girl (a marketing girl!) and she’s fanatical about Drupal. “Full retard,” she said. Worked at several consulting firms that did projects in Drupal, and is now an independent marketing consultant, building sites and blogs for clients, doing SEO and all that Web2.0 stuff. As it happens, we know mutual acquaintances. This town is small, small.

So I confessed to her that I tried looking at Drupal for one of my sites (Glass Door), and found it hard to work with, and that I balked at the need to get my hands greasy in PHP code to customize the site to my likings. She gaffed at that idea, said that it’s so easy to work with. You just install, select your options, and bam it’s customized; no need to write a single line.

I’m humbled. If a non-technical marketing and sales person can grok something that I cannot wrap my head around, I’m doing it wrong. Sounds like I need a major mental reset.

So I’ve come to an internal agreement. Actually, it’s more like an admission of defeat. Either that, or it’s a sudden ability to see that the easist path has been plainly in front of me the whole time. Call it what you want, but I ain’t happy about it.

See, for the past eleventy-thousand years, I’ve been trying to build a website to showcase my music. After spending countless hours drooling, shit-for-brains, while staring at my laptop hoping to spontaneously grok everything I needed to do and write all the code to my own fluidly-custom specifications, I’ve given up. I’m stupid. So stupid, I’m gullible. I managed to convince myself that I had enough mental energy left over at the end of my workday to set up to the task of building a website from the ground up. How foolish I am!

So, having gotten half of a notion last summer to give up coding a full Ruby On Rails website, I decided to try some pre-rolled frameworks. I looked at Drupal and WordPress, among a few others. Since I already had some modicum of “experience” with WP, and since Drupal has a steep learning curve, I went with WP. And what did I discover? WP version 3 unleashed a new feature where you could make your own custom post types, so you can create a Song and have it display along with your regular Posts, Pages, and Attachments. “Astounding!” I exclaimed. “Just add my Song code and build a template, and I’m home, sweet mother of god, HOME!”

Herein, we shall call this moment The Second Great Con of the Man On Himself.

The problem, you see, is that WP 3.0 has half-assed support for custom posts. It doesn’t pull posts made from different types into feeds, doesn’t include them into the front page, doesn’t support archives. For that, you need a WP plugin developer’s mind, and the free energy, street smarts, and tenacity to navigate the byzantine WP wiki in the hopes of finding the help you need to make this happen. As it turns out, custom post types just aren’t user-friendly.

Since my job requires me to be task-based and results-oriented all day, every day, I just can’t summon up the smarts or desire it takes to actually make this stupid little dream of mine into a reality. When I’m settling down for my evening coffee, trying to unwind my head and get into my projects for the night, you know what I really want to be doing? Absolutely nothing. Now I understand the attraction to clicking on the TV and turning yourself off. I can’t do this anymore.

I lost my love for the web. Giving up. And now my task is much simpler. There are plugins for WP that allow me to stream media and set up podcasts. They make things on the back end much easier, but they are neither custom nor completely intuitive to use. That’s the tradeoff. And right now, I’m trading in my programmer’s hat for a dunce cap. The internet has won.

Hurp a derp.