Tag Archives: personal

Down the Rabbit Hole Again

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Every time I think I’m escaping the rabbit hole of 80s college rock and moving on, I end up slinking back in again!  Well, this time I’m not working on a related writing project…I’m just enjoying the music this time out, while I wait for new releases to come out.

Plus, I get to listen to some of my radio mixtapes from back in the day!  It was a little over thirty years ago that I decided to put a blank tape in my Jonzbox and let it record 30 to 45 minutes of whatever WMUA was playing that evening, just to get a taste of their playlist.  I’d just bought a six-foot retractable antenna for the radio, which boosted the signal considerably, so I could go nuts at any time of day.  Soon I’d expand to other stations, with WAMH becoming my home base for the rest of the decade.

By early 1987 I’d changed things up in my bedroom.  It had gotten a new coat of paint, I’d gotten rid of some furniture I’d grown out of, and my radio had moved across the room to the top of the bookcase, where the few books that I had were slowly being shoved out to make way for my growing cassette collection.  I was hanging out with the Vanishing Misfits gang, which meant that a goodly amount of my collection at the time was borrowed albums dubbed onto tapes of questionable quality and age.  But hey, as long as I had the tunage, that’s all that mattered!

Interestingly, I only made one college radio tape that year, but I think it was because all my hard-earned money was going to buy albums down in the Pioneer Valley!  I did make a few mixtapes that year, though, mainly commercial radio stuff, but by the end of that year I was itching to make more.  I had one of my buddies who was into the hardcore punk/metal scene (he also introduced me to Slayer’s Reign in Blood…at catechism class, no less!) make me a mix on the back of a cassette dub I had of The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland (my favorite album of the moment and possibly my number 2 favorite of the year, just under Music for the Masses).

Thinking back, 1987 was definitely a sea change year on multiple levels for me.  Changes in friendships, tastes in music, personal and emotional outlook.  My writing was still crap, but it was better crap than what I’d been writing just a few years earlier.  Hell, I was even changing the way I looked, letting my hair grow longer (no more 80s spike, thank god), wearing concert tees and pins of alternative bands.  Taking myself a bit more seriously.  Sure, I had a hell of a lot more growing up to do, but that was the year it took hold.  I was no longer the annoying nerd trying to fit in.  I was the kid with the Walkman, listening to bands you’d never heard of.  I was the kid who spent his study periods in the library, writing away in a notebook.  It was the year I’d finally figured myself out and didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about it.

 

A bit of listening

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The one downside to listening to new things this early in the year is often that there isn’t anything new out to listen to.  So I’m often bouncing around my music collection, throwing on whatever happens to pop into mind at the time.

As usual, I’m writing this just before my evening writing/editing session, and I was in the mood for a bit of Porcupine Tree — a band I’d discovered while at HMV (their 1999 album Stupid Dream had just been released) and one that would often be a go-to for my writing sessions during the early 00’s.  In this case, 2002’s In Absentia came to mind, so I popped it on.  It’s a lovely album, recorded at the point where they’d decided to morph from dreamlike, guitar-based prog rock to a more prog-metal influenced sound.  [Note: lead singer/band leader Steven Wilson would be the first to slap me for labeling them prog, as he quite loathes the term.  But I digress.]

I’ve posted numerous times before about some of the key album releases over the years that influenced, or at least gave a soundtrack to, the Bridgetown Trilogy.  This album, Dishwalla’s And You Think You Know What Life’s About, Mansun’s Six, Beck’s Sea Change, and so on.  They’re all great albums that I’ll still throw on now and again while I’m writing or editing.

Does music distract me from my work?  Well, yes, sometimes it does.  Especially if I hear a song like Silversun Pickups’ “Panic Switch”, which often sends me across the room to pick up my bass to play along with it.  But more often than not, just as it has since I was a scruffy teenager first attempting to write novels, it serves a dual purpose: it’s background noise to help me focus on the task at hand, and it’s also a sound that, if I choose correctly, influences whatever it is I’m working on at that moment.  I’ve listened to music for so long, and for such long stretches, that if I don’t have anything playing while I’m working, I kind of feel naked in a way.  The silence makes me self-conscious.

But you know, that’s why I have such a large collection as I do, and why it’s 99% digital now.  I have a library of sound that helps me through the day, in whatever I’m doing, whether it’s writing, editing, or the Day Job.

And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

 

Fly-by: Q4 Madness

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naruto-angry

Seriously, Q4 would be a lot better if it wasn’t so damned busy.  Then again, it wouldn’t be Q4 if it wasn’t.

Sorry for a lack of update today, folks!  I’m attempting to dig out of an avalanche of Day Job inquiries, as well as catching up on Book 3 editing and preparation.  I should have some tunage-inspired posts for you next week.

*deep breaths*

Do I really listen to that much music?

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2016-11-29-11-14-38

The new 4TB external doing its thing on top of my dusty PC

So yesterday I started to move my mp3 collection to my new external hard drive.  Originally I thought, hey, why not just do a block copy-and-paste all at once? and tried copying bands A through M.  After about twenty minutes the status said ‘5% done; time remaining, 11 hours.’  That lasted until Depeche Mode, when the PC went to sleep last night.  That was easily rectified of course, and I’m now going via small blocks of letters (it just finished N through P a few seconds ago).

So why am I doing this?  Well, I think my externals are just getting worn out.  Currently the collection is on two smaller 1TB externals and I’m starting to have issues with the PC reading one of them.  It’ll work, but if the PC happens to go into sleep mode for any reason, the connection will get all wonky.  No fear, though!  Every mp3 is also copied to a third 2TB external whose sole purpose is to simply be backup storage.  Nothing has been lost!

But seriously, though…why 4 terabytes?  Isn’t that a bit excessive?  Well, no.  It’s a very comfortable amount of space for a collection that’s slowly been expanding for almost forty years.  It gives me space for what I have already and an equal amount of space for any future purchases, rips, or downloads.  [Especially now that I rip my cds at the max bitrate of 320 kbps.  I’m not too snobbish about bitrate, but the higher it is, the better, clearer and louder the sound quality.  And I usually stick with mp3 format instead of FLAC or anything else, simply because it’s space saving and I don’t hear too much of a difference.]

But that still begs the question: do I really listen to that much music?

Well, I don’t listen to every single song in my collection on a daily basis, no.  That would be impossible.  It’s more of a library than just a collection, anyway.  I use it not just for entertainment but for background while I’m writing.  I use it for reference with my music-related writing.  And I share it with a few people on my Plex server so they get to listen and enjoy my tunage as well.  A. likes to listen to stuff occasionally via that route while she’s working.  Not everything gets heavy rotation play, but my library is big enough where I can shift that rotation and keep it fresh.

But yeah. I really do listen to that much music.  If I don’t have a streaming radio station going, I’m probably listening to a certain batch of albums.  Currently I’m going through a bunch of the 2016 albums in preparation for my eventual Best Of list next month.

Some people love vintage cars.  Some love special edition books.  Some love collectible figurines.

Me?  I love music.

Angry

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I’m not going to sugarcoat it.  I’m not going to avoid talking about it.  Yes, I am still angry that the Fuckwit is pretty much our next President (barring any Hail Mary play by the Electoral College in the next few weeks — I’d love dearly for that to happen, to be honest).

Is Walk in Silence going to turn into yet another political wanking blog?  No.  I’ll still talk about music here.  That isn’t going away.  Same with my writing blog.  But I’ve decided I’m going to…loosen the rules here a bit.

As a child of the 80s, I was well aware of the Reagan and Bush I years.  I understood what the GOP tried to do not only to the Democrats but to pretty much anyone who didn’t toe the company line.  I saw how conservatives tanked the economy.  Hell, I even saw how Thatcher ruined the UK.  Granted, I was a teenager and didn’t really have much idea what to do in response, and I lived in a stable household and made do without a lot of extravagant things (because that’s what you do when you’re a good Roman Catholic American — starving kids in China and all that).  I found my solace in college radio.  The rebelliousness of its sound was enough to validate my irritations.

Now I’m 45 and I’m trying to figure out how the hell to combat anything the Fuckwit and Shithead Jr (his veep, natch) will try to do to curtail the standards of life for those who aren’t White, Hetero, and Rich.  And how to respond to the ‘oh, it was just a joke, we didn’t mean it’ gaslighting.

I mean, other than going onto Twitter and venting.

As much as I hate to use the phrase, I’m thinking of the long game.  I’m thinking not of what we can do now (not that I’m avoiding it — I know of countless other people who are already calling representatives and writing emails and letters and going on marches), but preparing what we can do if that fails.

In a weird way, I’m still somewhat inspired by college radio here.  I’d commented on Twitter a few days ago, in a rare lighthearted mood that day, that my approach was like alternative rock.  Think of it this way:  back in the 80s, college radio was considered weird and stupid and you were a weird outsider if you liked that sort of thing (and maybe even taunted or beat up because of it).  And ignorant conformists cannot handle the square peg.  But it sang to you, knew exactly what you were feeling and thinking at that time, and that was your own vindication, however small.  Then, in 1989, Love and Rockets’ “So Alive” hit the Billboard Top 5.  And then two years later, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the charts and HOLY SHIT did that change things.  Mainstream radio was never the same.

Point being — you may be that outsider.  You may be the one who feels disenfranchised by the bullies and the ignorant jackasses.  But you know who you are.  And in this day and age, you know there are others out there just like you, hurting but holding on through sheer stubborn will and self-preservation.

Focus on that.  Fight back.  Focus on remaining true to yourself, and fuck everyone else if they can’t handle that.  Feed on it.  Expand on it.  Be what and who you are, not what they want to make you.

And make that the mainstream.

 

 

[NOTE: Yes, I know calling those two names is petty. Give me that — it’s just me vocalizing just how much I detest the two men, and I’d rather not use c**t in my blog if I can help it. Furthermore, please do not try to argue with me that ‘it was a democratic vote, they won, get over it.’  Say that to all the people who couldn’t vote because of the GOP’s obvious system-gaming and voter suppression.  Say that to all the women who now fear that their health care is threatened.  Say that to the LGBT who feel threatened by Pence’s bigotry.  Say that to the Muslims and the Mexicans and the immigrants who now feel that their country’s leader and his growing cabinet don’t give two shits about them.  And then look at those who are reveling in the Fuckwit’s win and are now spraypainting swastikas, tearing off hijabs, beating people up, and telling others ‘go back home’ when they are home.  And then explain to me how that’s a fair system.]

War Is Over! (If You Want It)

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wio-iywi

For all John’s faults as a person in his life, he was also the first person to own up to them.  He was a man with little to no filter — we all know people like that — and sometimes things would spill out that were tasteless or hurtful.  Sometimes he’d need to have it pointed out to him that he was in the wrong, and more often than not, he’d admit fault.  Sure, his relationship with Cynthia was rocky and fraught with issues, and they weren’t exactly resolved as much as they could have been.  Sure, he was hard to get to know, and he had a hair-trigger temper, but he’d apologize afterwards.  Sure, there was that ‘Lost Weekend’ in the early 70s when Yoko sent him out to LA and he proceeded to be a drunken idiot, but come 1975 he’d gotten that out of his system, admitted how badly he’d acted, and spent five solid years being a close husband and father.  Sure, he and Yoko had their own media circus in the late 60s and early 70s with their Bed-Ins and their Bagism and their other political movements; they knew they were famous and the press (especially the UK press) printed news of every time they sneezed in public, so hey, why not use that to their advantage?

My point:  we’re all infallible.  We’ve all done dumbass things, hurt people, made fun of others.  Had prejudiced and/or bigoted opinions.  Done things that in retrospect we’re mortified or embarrassed to admit happened.  But THAT’S OKAY.  As long as we own up to it, learn from it, change ourselves because of it, then we’ve done some good in this world, both personally and universally.

I learned that from John over the years, and that’s why, despite his faults, I still see him as a decent man as well as an intriguing musician.  That’s why I don’t make much noise about the peccadilloes of those around me and those in the media, unless it’s warranted.  You can have different opinions than me, and I’m totally fine with that.  As long as you own up to them and learn from them, and see how they affect the rest of the world and not just yourself, and become a better person in the process.

We’re all water from different rivers
That’s why it’s so easy to meet
We’re all water in this vast, vast ocean
Someday we’ll evaporate together
What’s the difference?
There’s no difference.
–“We’re All Water”

Christmas Time Is Here Again

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So.  Here we are on Black Friday.  A. has the day off today and is in the other room listening to podcasts while I’m stuck here in Spare Oom until 4pm.  Neither of us are going to be heading out for any shopping any time soon (unless that includes heading to the local corner store for a few groceries).  She’s done most of her shopping online, and I’ll be doing that later today myself.

With the many post-college jobs I’ve held over the years, I’m used to working on holidays and busy shopping times.  I dealt with the Q4 sales season at HMV for a few years which actually started mid-September but really kicked into high gear on Black Friday; that’s when we’d put out all the Christmas cds and prepare the huge amount of backstock of the big sellers.  During the Yankee Candle years my schedule got truly wonky; ten-hour days, six days a week, and quadruple the volume going out.  Between those two jobs, it’s a wonder I still found the time to write!  [Noted, I did get sick a lot more often at that time, due to exhaustion and unhealthy eating and smoking habits.]

Even when I moved away from the retail and warehouse jobs, I still had to deal with the public: the last snowy commute when I lived in New Jersey, the last-minute calls of businesses holding their banking until the absolute last minute, and so on.  I don’t think I’ve ever taken any Christmas-season weeks off in my life, at least not without chalking them up as sick days.

So yeah, I’m well-versed in holiday stress.

That said…I do my best not to let it get to me.  Sure, I completely understand the irritation of long lines, clueless shoppers, squealing kids, long work hours, and so on.  But I decided early on that these petty grievances are part and parcel of the experience, and chose not to dwell on them.  Too often, negativity spawns more negativity.  My complaining about the idiot in front of me to the guy behind me is going to make that guy think ‘you know, you’re right’, and he’ll end up in a bad mood.  Life’s too short to be irritated by everything under the sun.*

This is the time of year where I choose to embrace everything good that’s happened, on a personal level and otherwise.  Time to listen to all the great albums that came out this year.  Time to bask in the fact that I self-published a book, with three others coming out in the not-too-distant future.  Time to think about how lucky I am to have great friends and family.  Time to think about how awesome A. is.  And just enjoy the positivity that comes around.

 

* – Granted…this isn’t about me willfully ignoring truly bad things in the world.  I’m just as frustrated and saddened as most people by the events in Paris, the Syrian refugee situation, and at this very moment, the shooting in Colorado Springs, for example.  The point to this post is about dealing with petty irritations that really don’t amount to much in the grander scheme of things.

You Say You Want a Revolution

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I try not to go into politics all that much online, at least not anymore.  I used to debate and growl and soapbox like the rest of them out there, but in the words of John Lennon, I’m “no longer riding on the merry go round / I just had to let it go.”  I found that I was taking a lot of things a little too personally and emotionally, and realized that not only was that unhealthy for me, it was also pretty irritating to everyone else.  I had to back away and focus on more important things in my life, like family and writing.

I still think about it some, just not as much as I used to.  This past week has been kind of a tough one, considering all the white noise I’ve been hearing.  [I use the term ‘white noise’ here to describe the heavy volume of Tweets and FB posts on certain political subjects, most of which is usually in the form of shouting matches, name-calling and trolling.  Most of it is well-meant but often drowned out by the thousands of others saying the same exact thing and the thousands of others saying the exact opposite.  Thus, white noise.]

It’s not that I’m ignoring the injustice and the idiocy out there.  I’m still well aware of it.  I’m just not offering my opinion on a public platform nearly as much as I used to.

Sure, I may still be a rebel at heart in some respects.  If I want my voice to be heard, believe me, I can make it heard.  But I realized some years ago that the voice I was using was getting lost in the din of that white noise.  Or as I’d said on my LJ, I no longer wanted to contribute to a lot of the hot air that was already out there.  I chose to internalize my thoughts about things…think about them, figure them out.  Think about why they were bothering me, what I can do about it (if anything), and go from there.

One avenue that hasn’t escaped me when it comes to this sort of thing is music.  I’m fascinated by protest songs, especially if they’re in an unexpected format.  That is, protest songs that aren’t outright protest songs like the ones we expect from Pete Seeger, or early Dylan, or Billy Bragg.  Or even obvious outcries, such as the punk aesthetic of the Sex Pistols or Dead Kennedys.  Some of them are oblique, only describing a hectic mise en scene of a stressful time.  Others are more poetic, describing the mood or the mindset of those involved.

Still others decide to offer no filter; calling it like it is, for good or ill.  Pouring out black bile and anger and never holding back once.

In the past week or so, I’ve been trying to focus on many things in my life, both internal and external.  Trying to keep focus on my writing deadlines and near-future writing plans. Trying to avoid overindulgence of social media and social justice.  Trying to avoid reading the comments.  Trying to keep an even mind and an even heart.  It’s tough, especially when it sometimes feels like it’s expected of me to react to whatever injustice is going on. It’s tough, but I have found ways to calm myself.

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, as Congreve says.

 

 

Connection

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No, this post is not about Elastica stealing the opening riff of Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba” from Pink Flag.  I’ve already made my peace with that.

This is about social connection.  I was just thinking about this earlier this morning…I’ve had this nagging feeling for ages that there was an actual reason behind my wasting so much time refreshing my Twitter feed.  The obvious answer is that I like staying in touch with all my friends, especially now that they’re all on the east coast and I’m on the opposite side of the country.  But there’s got to be more than that.  I’m usually on top of my stupid occasional timewasting addictions — playing with my mp3 collection, watching YouTube videos, looking up what’s playing on the station I’m currently listening to — and I know that my threshold is about fifteen to twenty minutes before I automatically start guilting myself into getting some actual work done.

But what is it with Twitter that I keep wanting to update the feed so frequently?

I think I figured it out, and I wrote it down in my personal journal: Twitter today is lunch period back in high school.

It’s definitely got to do with staying in touch with my friends back east, there’s no denying that.  A lot of these friends are connected to my circle of friends from my junior year in high school, either directly or indirectly.  And back then, back when I was a spotty nerd weirdo wearing Cure and PiL tee shirts and having given up on trying to fit in with the popular cliques, the lunch period was the primary time I could hang out with said friends when we were in school.  I really looked forward to hanging with them, even if it was just for twenty minutes a day.

Sure, we’d cross paths in the hallway, or meet up during a study hall.  The occasional after-school get together and the weekend trips down to Amherst were a bonus.  Back then we didn’t have the instant gratification of social media on the internet — hell, my family didn’t have DSL until 2000 or so — so we made do with the moments we were given.

We never quite lost touch in those pre-social media days, even when we were no longer nearby and some of us were too broke to stay with AOL, let alone make a phone call.  We emailed, even snail-mailed each other occasionally, and I would even make a few roadtrips out their way on my vacations.

Live Journal changed that, when I reconnected with a large number of them on a social media level.  Then, a few years later, Twitter and Facebook made the contact more immediate, and it’s been like that ever since.

This social evolution took so many slow and deliberate steps that it’s just like anything else I do over a long period of time.  I don’t always notice the subtle changes and the current level I’m at.  So it’s not as if I’m stalking all my friends or have no IRL of my own…we’ve just been connected at a consistent level for so long, I don’t always notice why I keep refreshing the feed.  Passive addiction.

This lends itself to the ‘stupid timewasting addictions’ I spoke of earlier…I get into a habit of doing certain things that I don’t immediately notice if I’m overdoing them.  This is why I’ll also speak of ‘unplugging’, where I’ll just back away cold turkey for a while.  It’s not always due to the occasionally frustrating online conversations that pop up, or what have you; it’s just that it’s the only way I know that I’ll break those addictions and reset my life.  Plus, it’ll give me more free time for contemplation and working on the projects I need to work on.

I do find it interesting how, in this age of instant and continuous connection, the lesson we should really take out of it is moderation.