Best Laid Plans, Made Known

So, it’s done. It’s finally over. After nine latent years, my Glass Door song “Best Laid Plans” is polished, posted, and ready for the harsh criticism of the faceless Internet.

I wrote it impromptu-style in 2002 during a dark period, and it shows. After languishing raw on my hard drive for years, I had enough of the anxiety and felt that it had to be published. In the past months of reworking and remixing it, I’ve gone back and forth on the sound, never happy with it. Finally, I pushed it into the right direction and decided that I was too tired to keep tweaking it. I had enough, the song had enough, and so there it is.

A song is where the musician got tired of mixing the music.

I’ve been sitting on this song for so long because it was raw and way too personal. I recorded it in one take, but it has taken the better part of a decade (most of that it sat motionless) until I was ready to show it. In public, I make a point of putting forth a manly, strong, guarded front, and the original spoken words for the song were too honest, too unprotected. I just could not, in all bravery, put it out there. So I had to rewrite the words, put some distance between my ego and the words, bring it to some sort of generic applicability to the everyman listening. Even still, there’s some of me in there — there has to be — but it’s a little more bearable.

All things told, I am actually that lonesome at times. If you’ve been reading all along, you’d know that all too well. I do crave the company of other people, but something in the metal-on-metal execution of my life leaves me unable to make that happen without unease. And so there I am, with “these lonesome ways of my soul.”

Blame

“You are responsible for your own experience.”

From what I’ve been told, this statement is posted at the front gate of any Burning Man event. It is supposed to be an admonition to seize your own destiny and craft the kind of life you want to lead.

To me, it feels like an after-the-fact, regret-filled I-told-you-so. If I am not living as I had hoped, then the burden of blame is laid squarely on my own shoulders. I mean, by this logic, who else can possibly be at fault?

If my own nature casts me as happiest when I am alone, but my desire leaves me unhappy at being alone, then how am I to reconcile this inherent disconnect between nature and desire? Which of them should I lose if they can’t be made whole? Who am I if I can’t rise above this struggle and do something about it?

New XDay Nomenclature

To appease the “Keep CHRIST In CHRISTmas!” people, and to be fair to all, I’ve compiled a handy list of other holidays in their shortened X form. (Never minding the fact that the X in Xmas is a shortened, easily-writable form of “Christ”, derived from the historical usage of the Greek letters chi and rho to signify the full name of Jesus Christ in both literature and art.)

  • NewX – January 1
  • Xhog – February 2
  • Xtine’s – February 14
  • WashX Bday – third Monday in February
  • St. X – March 17
  • Xster – 1st sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox
  • Xfools – April 1
  • CincoX – May 5
  • MX Day – second Sunday in May
  • MemorX – Last Monday in May
  • FX Day – third Sunday in June
  • 4X – July 4
  • LaborX – first Monday in September
  • Xbus Day – second Monday in October
  • Xween – October 31
  • VeX Day – November 11
  • Xgiving – fourth Thursday in November
  • XFriday – first Friday after the fourth Thursday in November
  • Xmas – December 25
  • KwaX – December 26 through January 1
  • NewX Eve – December 31

Hope this makes things fair for everyone.

Happy Alone Together

Let it be said that when I am at a table by myself with a book, when I am alone in my apartment working on a project, when I am driving a lonesome road with the music, I am truly happy and sufficiently content.

At the same stroke, I am also terribly lonely and mildly discontent at the spectre of being alone every time I am in these happy places.

It is from being around people that I manage to stay grounded in reality, that I somehow retain my ability to talk, to formulate coherent sentences to convey meaning and message without noise or babble. The more I am alone, the less coherent my thoughts become until the conversations are all in my head and you only hear what leaks out.

So how do I reconcile these two polar extremes? What is the middle ground between being happy with productivity and being not lonely?

Roll Indie Fiftee Reap Air

Just so you know, I’ve been nerding out pretty hard this past week.

Last Monday, I picked up a very used Roland D-50 keyboard at the pawn shop. Although it was manufactured in 1987, it still output audio and the MIDI still works, but the poor thing has problems (I should’ve talked them down on price, but even still I got a decent deal). All of the keys on the fingerboard worked, but a few of the keys had screwed-up velocity sensitivity. The pitch bend was busted. And some of the panel buttons either don’t work or require a heavy push to get them to work. This poor piece of gear needed some serious TLC.

Knowing what I was up against, I made the due diligence to get some required tools to do the cleanup and minor repairs. Got some paint brushes for dusting, a wire brush to scrape any rust, some 91% rubbing alcohol (because 70% has too much water), and a can of electronic contact cleaner.

Within an evening I had it taken apart. The damned thing had spiderwebs and cat hair in it. No wonder it half worked. Last owner didn’t give a shit, and it shows. I got most of the crap out of the case in short time, but it took another evening to get the fingerboard completely disassembled, and I mean completely, like down to the frame. Pulled the keys off and soaked them in soapy water; they were as nasty as the bottom of a computer mouse.

It took a few evenings, but I got both circuit boards under the keys cleaned, got the rubber contacts wiped down, all the dust and “water damage” (to doctor the truth) are cleaned up. I found proof that the keyboard has been worked on before by someone who didn’t have the smarts or the tools to do the reworks correctly, and that probably accounts for one of the keys reporting full velocity on each press. I redid the rework; hopefully that fixes that.

Yesterday, I decided that I was tired of having sub-par tools to do electronics work. After having the pleasure of working with professional soldering equipment at work, my piss-poor Radio Shack iron just won’t do anymore, so I went to the electronics store and got a good Weller soldering station, a handful of different tips, a bottle of solder flux, a dispenser, and a cheap multimeter to replace the piece-of-shit I’ve had to use for the past 25 years. Nerding hard core.

This afternoon, I pulled the entire unit apart, taking the boards and cable assemblies off of the master frame. Took them to the balcony for dusting and a heavy session with the contact cleaner. Afterwards, more of the panel buttons went non-functional, so I spent part of this evening tracking down replacement parts. I desoldered and removed one of the switches, and I’ll take it to work tomorrow to get its exact dimensions with some proper measuring tools. If it matches the replacement switches I’ve found so far, I’ll be placing an order for an entire panel’s worth of buttons.

This is all very exciting!

Hopefully by next week’s end, I’ll have a fully-functional Roland D-50, refurbished and ready to go. And then the hard part will begin: writing music. D’oh!