Stumbling Toward God?

It was not my intention to resume blogging regularly. I merely wanted to vent some things that I did not expect anyone to care about, so I decided to post them in a place that I did not expect anyone to read. Yet now, the idea of having more posts in the last week than in the previous six years was too good to pass up.

In the current political climate, scrolling fb just makes me angry, and say things that I regret. I basically exiled myself in disgrace after making some tasteless comments following a mass shooting. Of course, there have been so many more shootings since then, perhaps no one remembers.

I have been active on twitter for the past couple of years, but that has lost a lot of its appeal as well. I challenged myself to post something every day of 2017. I did not quite achieve a 100% success rate on that, but near enough to feel good about it. In 2018, I have not been nearly as dedicated. Partly because that community has issues of its own, but mostly because I wanted to post jokes and amusing observations, but this has been a rough year, and I am not often amused anymore.

So, for this week at least, it’s back to blogging. Going forward, who knows?

I realize that with so many people losing everything in the fires, it is petty for me to complain about my computer. Especially since mine was a completely avoidable tragedy. I am a fool for not backing up. I even used to have a backup hard drive, but it failed years ago, and I never replaced it. So here we are, and if that bothers you, you might as well stop reading now.

I have heard that a habit only becomes an addiction when it interferes with other areas of your life. For me, I essentially decided a long time ago not to participate in life, and I find other things to fill the gap. I get obsessed with certain things to a degree that appears as an addiction, until sooner or later, I completely lose interest and move on to something else.

Before this week, I did not fully appreciate how much I relied on my computer as a distraction. Obviously for surfing the internet, but I don’t even own a tv, I streamed everything, and it was also the only thing in the house that could play dvds. Of course I used it for games, for reading, for writing, for saving things for later. It was my music studio and my sketch pad. Frankly, I have been mourning it like an old friend.

Ironically, I spent the past three months renovating a room into a home office (slowly, because I am very lazy and, as noted, easily distracted), and my computer died literally the day before I was ready to move it to its new home.

It occurred to me that I could use this as an opportunity to refocus on to some other projects that I have been putting off. Then I realized that my notes are gone. All of them. Notes, designs, calculations. Nine years of my life, from the utterly trivial, to potentially very consequential financial documents, and everything in between, gone, in a blink.

Though it goes against everything in which I believe, I increasingly find myself considering the possibility that my house might be haunted.

I don’t actually believe in ghosts, or spirits, or anything supernatural. (That being said, I really ought to rename my blog, but that is another discussion entirely.) However, I am concerned by the continual “house settling” noises lately.

It could be termites, and the house is not settling so much as slowly collapsing. It could be climate change causing more rapid temperature fluctuations. Or both.

I recall that once, in my foolish youth, I went from room to room casting out demons “in the name of Jesus.” Again, this seems utterly absurd to me now, yet I can not help but wonder what exactly caused me think that would even be necessary at the time.

Supernatural or not, there is a darkness to this house. Literally, as the windows are situated such that there is very little natural light, but figuratively as well.

I am not saying that walls actually have memory, but I have lived here for a long time. I started my blog in this house all those years ago. I have been here through so much death, and loss, and failure. So many bad memories, and so very few good ones.

Sometimes when going to the mailbox, I can not help but reflect on the literally thousands of times that I have made that same walk, and I relive so many different things that weighed on my mind during various phases of life. And it hurts so much.

I have tried to leave several times, yet for one reason or another, it never works out. It was always meant to be temporary, and I have never really felt comfortable here. Yet, staying is just so cripplingly convenient. Like the house won’t let me go.

My desktop computer died today.

It’s been over three years since I last posted. Needless to say, things have happened since then, and almost none of it good.

Two years ago, I participated in something called nanowrimo, a challenge in which one takes the 30 days of November to write a 50,000 word novel. My finished story was under 30,000 words, and it was not good, for far too many reasons to get into here.

I started to write a blog post about the process once, but that also was not good.

This year, I decided to forgo the novel, and try to bang out as many short stories as I could, from a list of ideas that I have been keeping and adding to since my college days. Most of these were also not good.

A lot of them were not even finished. For some, I reached my intended conclusion, only to think, “You call that an ending‽ What was the point of that?” One took a unexpectedly dark turn and I was too disturbed to continue. On a couple of others, I just got bored and abandoned them midway through. A few might have been decent.

It doesn’t really matter now, because my computer died, and they’re all gone, along with the master idea list, and really quite a lot of other things that I am going to miss.

It seems that I left the lights on on my blog. I had to reset my password to get back in here. It is a bit early for me to talk about song picks for the year, but then again, since I had only posted twice in the last three years, maybe it is really late.

I really only listen to music from female artists these days. Maybe I am just a lonely old man. Or maybe it is because boys as a whole have completely forgotten how to rock, and the ladies are taking over. Let’s go with that one. As it happens, earlier this year, I was almost in a band with a female lead singer, but it did not work out. Anyway, what was I listening to this year?

I actually quite liked that super-massive mega-hit by Taylor Swift. Well, one of them anyway. You know, the good one. The one that has the second most views of all time on YouTube. I do not think Miss Swift really needs my endorsement, as I read somewhere that her album outsold everything from the past twelve years. There was a story a while ago about iTunes mistakenly uploading about 10 seconds of white noise labeled as a Taylor Swift song and it still went to number one. We are not here to talk about pop stars are we? (It turns out that we are.)

Charli XCX – Boom! Clap! / Break the Rules: You may or may not know her as one of the two white girls from last year’s utterly inexplicable hip-hop hit by, well, two white girls. I, for some reason, watched a video of her performance on SNL, and was shocked when she totally kicked ass! So I checked out some of her stuff and… I just was not into it at all. Oh well, I moved on and more or less forgot about it. Then several months later, I happened to run across her name again somewhere and I did a little more research. I came to the conclusion that whoever produced her album did her a huge disservice. Her recordings are just typically forgettable synth-pop, but then she went on tour with a three-piece all-girl punk-ish band, and it is a whole different story. A pop star who is better live than on the record? No, this is a pop star who is only good live. Who knew that was a thing? So skip her official videos, here is her full set from Glastonbury. Now, I am not even going to pretend that anyone is going to read this and watch that whole thing, so I would also just like to point out that on the second song she busts out a comically over-sized inflatable guitar, yet she “plays” it with such conviction that for a brief moment, I questioned whether the damn thing was actually plugged in and making noise somehow. Which is patently absurd, of course, but this girl is legit.

Tove Lo – Talking Body: This is an unwholesome video for an unwholesome song by an unwholesome singer. I do not know if it is because she is Swedish, or because she is a rock star, or a combination of both, but she is far more open about sexuality and nudity than us repressed Americans. As this is still *nominally* a Christian blog, I am not going to provide a link. Just know that this song exists, and that it has been stuck in my head for months. Incidentally, her live band consists of two drummers and keyboardist. Drummers are hard to come by, and here she is flaunting two of them? Scandalous.

Lights – Up We Go: Ugh. This is a straight up peppy, feel good, throw away pop song. There is no reason in the world I should like it at all, but that hook is so dang catchy. The lyrics are actually kind of dark too, when you get right down to it. Now, in the same vein as what I said above, it seems that music videos featuring female singers who aren’t stripped down to their underwear are rather rare. (Presumably because the music industry is run by even lonelier, dirtier old men than I.) This video does feature a couple getting it on, but at least in this case, it is not the singer herself. This is what we call artistic integrity, I suppose. Anyway, if that is a deal breaker for you, have a nice acoustic version instead. [As long as I am being all morality police-y, I maybe should have mentioned that Charli XCX has quite the potty mouth. I don’t care.]

The Like – June Gloom: This is actually a song from 2006 that I discovered the last time that I was on a girl band kick. Unfortunately I found it too late to include in that list, so I am throwing it in here for completeness. Is the song any good? I actually have no idea, but the video is mesmerizing. [SPOILER: the pretty girls are a misdirect! Watch the instruments!]

And the winner is:

Meg Myers – Sorry: Okay, enough with the guilty pleasures and embarrassing confessions. This is real. This girl single handedly got me excited about music again. I would not be talking about any of this otherwise. (BTW, didn’t I used to know a Meg Meyers? Not the same one.) She reminds me of Courtney Love, which might not seem like a compliment as Courtney Love is a train-wreck of a human being. Yet I actually liked Hole. I do not know about you, but I realized that I want my artists to be a little damaged. I feel as though a lot of singers have an “authenticity” problem, but Meg here sounds like she has been through some shit, and she sings like she means it. This song is the title track from her debut album, which was conveniently released in 2015. Although, she actually had a couple of EPs before this, and to be perfectly honest, I feel like her older stuff seemed to have more “teeth”. While this song is decent, also check out Heart Heart Head, Curbstomp, and, well, everything else really. Perhaps “Sorry” is not the best song of the year, but Meg Myers is definitely the most interesting artist that I know of right now.

What: I spent the month of February recording a different song every day.

Why: Why not? Perhaps a better question would be, “Why now?” The project came from a number of factors all coming together. I have been thinking, off and on, for a long time about how I have written “around thirty” songs. Many of which have never been heard by anyone. Although my song writing has been quite sparse in recent years, on those rare occasions when I do come up with something new, I consider recording and posting it online. Then I think that the new song is sort of the musical equivalent of a direct-to-video-sequel-with-none-of-the-original-cast to one of my earlier songs, and yet no one has ever heard THAT song either.

So, with “around thirty” being the number days in a month, it occurred to me some time ago that I could take a whole month and spend one day recording/developing each song. I dismissed the idea pretty quickly at the time as wildly impractical. However, this past December, I quit my job of which I just could not stand another day. Then in January, after years of teasing the idea of investing in vintage guitars, but being unable to pull the trigger, I finally bought one. (Which I could talk about at length, but it distracts from the topic at hand.) In the meantime, the crappy band that I was in a few years ago got back together. And while the band leader is talking about recording and doing shows, I feel that I have heard all that before. This band did not go anywhere the first two times we were together, and I have zero expectation that things will be different the third time around. I just see it as an excuse to play music a couple of times a week, which I would not really do otherwise. Yet it gnaws at me, why am I relying on this guy when I have piles of my own material that I am not doing anything with?

So, with January drawing to close, no particular plans for the future, music heavily on my mind, and of course, February being the shortest month, somehow it just clicked and I decided, “Screw it, I’m doing this!”

This was most definitely a “quantity over quality” endeavor. I knew going in that I probably was not going to finish much of anything. While I have no doubt that many talented individuals can do full production on a song in a single day, I myself am not known for doing things quickly. I do not remember exactly how long I spent the last time that I undertook a serious recording project, but I believe it was on the order of several weeks for only three songs, and even then I was not completely satisfied with the results. So the idea of getting a complete song in a single day was pretty much out of the question. Even though I was not writing new songs, simply recording/arranging/completing existing material, that is still a lot of work. Especially considering that I have not been practicing guitar very much at all in the past few years, and that I have practiced vocals basically never, the goal was not so much to get versions of the songs that I could share with people. It was more for my own reference, to get these ideas out of my head and into a more tangible form so that I can evaluate what actually has potential, what needs work, and what is a lost cause.

Some of the early stuff, I think is pretty good so far, I basically just ran out of time with my one-song-per-day-then-move-on rule. And several times I had some new ideas for a song a day or two later, but again, going back was a no-no. Around day 12 though, I started to run out of steam and really phoned it in for the next week or so. I am almost afraid to go back and listen to any of that. And I was really scraping the barrel some days, with songs that I probably have not played since the Clinton administration, and several ideas that I always felt were good, just never developed, now left me wondering, “What was I thinking? There’s no song here!” It is hard to completely give up on any of them, since in a very real sense every song contains a piece of my life and a piece of my soul… but some are still pretty crappy. I was also unpleasantly surprised by the number of songs that are fun to play yet tedious to listen too.

In any case, I really need a break after living and breathing music every single day for four weeks straight. It was a great learning experience, and I have about 28 different stories that I could tell. But I need to give it a little time and distance so I can go back and listen fresh.

That said… I can not really spend a month recording and not share anything. SO, this song is not the greatest thing that I have written, but it has special significance by being the most recent. In 2012, after one of the aforementioned band’s breakups, I was frustrated not only with the  drama between band members, but also the fact that I really did not like the kind of music that we were playing anyway. Wanting to write something more my own style, I came up this over the next couple of days.

I never specifically decided to stop blogging, I just lost interest. After this post, it is hard to say when or if I will ever post again, so…

I have been aware for some time that I seem to feel that I deserve absolutely everything that happens to me, good or bad. Consequently, I tend to be extremely ungrateful when people do nice things for me, but on the other hand, I am not very indignant when bad things happen either. I have discussed how few times I have lost my temper in my adult life. In trying to analyze why that happens at all, I eventually concluded that I get angry when I feel that I am not getting the respect that I deserve. Which was an anticlimactic revelation; isn’t that why everyone loses their temper? Yet it does not happen to me very often, because most of the time I simply do not feel that I deserve much respect anyway. In fact, the times when I really get hot seem to not be specifically about me at all, I become incensed over the idea that the person would treat ANYONE that way.

Ultimately though, I have been puzzled by my own attitude for some time, as it implies a certain justice/balance/karma to the universe that I do not subscribe to intellectually. Do I also feel that everyone else deserves everything that happens to them? Not particularly, but them I am quite narcissistic and can not say that I spend much time thinking about other people, especially in those terms.

It was only recently that I dug even further into myself and realized that, if I get exactly what I deserve, yet I want more than I have, then the only way that I know to acquire it is through deceit and trickery.  To try and advance above my station, as it were. Though the details are hazy with the fog of time, I recall a moment many years ago, long before I ever even considered setting foot into a church. In a dark place emotionally, I had, not so much a plan, but a thought, a desire, a whim; to reinvent myself. To fool the Universe itself into giving me… something more than what I had.

And it didn’t work.

I happened to find myself hanging out with an Iraq war vet last weekend. I know for a fact that this guy has lived through and seen things that i could not begin to imagine, nor would I want to. Yet several different times, he mentioned that he thought I was brave because my mother died.

This was utterly baffling to me for several reasons. First of all, being brave is not about the things that happen in your life, but rather your response to them. I can not remember if I have stated this before, but I have certainly said it to myself often: everybody’s mother dies. They may be young, they may be old, but sooner or later it happens to everyone. (And if it does not, on the rare occasions that a mother outlives the child, then THAT is the real tragedy.) Everyone’s mother dies, but most people manage to still be a functional member of society afterwards. Me – not so much. Nothing brave about that.

I do not know if it was solely because of this conversation, or if there were other factors as well, but I had a particularly bad week, in which I was even less functional and productive than usual. Nothing brave about that either.

This movie was fine. I pretty much got what I expected out of it. I want to get that out of the way up front, because I do not want to talk about the movie itself so much as its place in the world.

At first glance, one might compare this to Movie #1 and think, “CGI, fairy tale, princess… this is just more of the same.” I did at first. However, a significant theme in this movie is the relationship between mother and daughter. I found this odd, because mothers are usually conspicuously absent from these movies. What do you guys have against mothers over there?

This lead me to investigate the key difference between these two movies. This movie was produced by a company that so revolutionized this style of film making that their name is practically synonymous with it. It was distributed by their even-more-well-know parent company. Conversely, that other movie was (I guess) produced in-house by that same parent company. Which means that it has a place in said company’s “official canon”, and, perhaps more significantly, that movie’s protagonist is an official member of the character franchise.

Neither of those is true of this movie. Which is a shame, because I feel that this is a better example of the kind of movie that made that company famous than anything they have produced themselves in the last decade or so. (Present company excluded, of course.)

Someone on fb (who am I kidding, it is always the same person) posted something about the number of abortions in the U.S. and China. The China figure was significantly higher than the U.S., but when adjusted for population, apparently China has roughly double the number of abortions per capita. Which is still a lot, so that point is neither here nor there.

No, what I have been pondering for the last week or so was a comment someone else left about how the aborted babies are “immediately with Jesus forever.” I do not know that there is Biblical evidence to support this, I think it is merely assumed because God is not a d-bag*.

I started thinking, academically, about what part of you actually goes to Heaven. Specifically, whether or not you retain your personality and values in the after life. I have to assume either that these unborn babies with Jesus will either have no personality, or that our personalities are in no way formed by the experiences of our mortal lives. Or that that which is aborted is not actually a person. Or that the whole thing is hogwash and there is no such thing as Heaven.

And with that simple comment, I felt as though the entire concept of eternal life came tumbling down like a house of cards.

*Although the Biblical evidence for THAT is somewhat open to argument.