Stumbling Toward God?

I usually feel guilty every time that I write a post about music, because I imagine that it is not why folks come here. “Ugh. Another post about guitars? I’m not reading that.” Yet today I am of the mood that they should be happy that I am posting anything at all, jerks! (timoth is good with the people.)

I have been having some internet difficulties again lately, which naturally means picking up the guitar a little more often. These days I have been focusing more on instrumentals, because a while ago I had an idea for a Purple Robe project that would consist of a series of short (one to two minutes) guitar instrumentals in wildly different styles to try to create different moods. Why? I do not know… is there a good reason “why” behind anything the Purple Robe has ever done? Basically just to see if I can, I guess.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I came up with one piece that I think is kind of “piratey”, and another that, though I am not really sure how to describe the style, sort of reminds me of a summer breeze. There is also a “Chinese” flavored one that has been kicking around for a couple of years, and a couple of other snippets as well. None of these are anything close to full songs of course. And just because *I* think that they sound like a particular genre that I know nothing about, does not make it so.

I am not sure why I even bother to mention this, because I think we all know that I am never actually going to finish it. In fact, with my tendency toward total secrecy when working on a project, merely bringing it up pretty much guarantees that I will not finish it. Why all this mucking about in genres of which I know nothing anyway? You know who does that? People far more talented than I, and it still results in the poopiest music of their careers.

Then I somehow got to thinking that one problem with my body of songs is that none of them have a really “killer riff”. I do not like to think of my self as merely a “chord strummer”, in the sense that you often see someone in at a coffee house, open mic or church simply strumming basic open chords as accompaniment for the vocal. (Although some of my songs actually are exactly that.) Still, for whatever reason, I do not really like to move my fretting hand a lot when playing guitar, so my style does boil down to mostly picking or strumming chords, even if it is not the most common or obvious form for a given chord.

Technically speaking, a “riff” is any repeated musical passage, so even a simple chord progression qualifies. But what we are talking about here are KILLER riffs. I am thinking of “Rebel Rebel”, “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, “Iron Man”, “Oh Pretty Woman”, “Boys Don’t Cry”… I could go on and on, but hopefully for at least one of those songs, the mere mention of it created a distinct musical passage in your mind. A killer riff gives a song identity*.

A killer riff should be short, often only one or two bars, although it can be longer as even some of my examples above are. It should contain notes of a scale and not just a chord. (Until very recently I thought that a scale and a key were basically the same thing, and even now knowing that they are not, I am still a little fuzzy on the distinction and the purpose of each, but even so.) A riff is different from a melody, although they can be melodic. It should be a “hook” rather than repeating through most of the song, which I think makes it more of a “rhythm” than a “riff”, though that is a somewhat ambiguous and possibly artificial distinction.

So what to do I have? “Wasting” has a neat little guitar thing, although it is really just two alternating chords with a little flourish in the middle. “Art of Letting Go” has a riff that I feel gives the song identity, but it does not have notes that you could hum or scat sing or whatever like the above examples. “SoPoard” has a nice repeating phrase, although it is quite long and slow. I think my riffiest of riffs is from a song called “The Wait” which no one has ever heard. [I should totally finish that one, you would like it I think. Well, maybe not if you have not liked any of the other ones. Nevermind.] Yet even that one underlies most of the song, which was against one of my conditions.

So, it is as I said: no killer riffs.

*The leader of a band that I used to be in was always talking about giving songs “identity”, by which he usually meant taking a perfectly good groove and changing it around so that it messed with people’s expectations (including the rest of the band) and quite frankly, now sucked. That is not what I mean here.

These annual reflections seem like quite a farce at this point, but it seems that I have somehow managed to retain a couple of regular readers. Also, my previous post reminded me of something that I was thinking about a long time ago but I never got around to posting. So let’s do this.

Someone once told me rather bluntly to simply “get over whatever it is that you’re mad at God about.” This was probably a couple of years ago now, yet it has stuck with me, not as a useful piece of advice, but rather as an indication of a total lack of understanding of my situation.

Mad at God? I remembered in that moment that I had already once admitted to being mad at God, and one thing I have learned about dealing with conservatives is that it is important to not take back anything that you have said lest you be labeled a “flip-flopper” and they will never respect you.* So there was no denying that I was mad at God.

The question then becomes: what does it mean for me to be mad at God? For someone who has a “relationship” with God, I can see how it would be quite simple. It would be like if you had two friends that had a fight and and now they are not speaking to each other. One of them needs to make the effort to apologize and take it from there. (Obviously if we accept such a scenario, then God being infallible and all, the fault is entirely mine.) But what if I am not mad at someone that you know? What if I told you instead that I was mad at my grandfather? (My mother’s father, and I am not, by the way.) However, if I were… he is dead now and whatever the issue, no reconciliation is possible. Or indeed, what if I had some reason to be mad at my father’s father? Well, he died long before I was born. He is not even a “real person” in my head, more of vague person-shaped idea.

What if I were mad at a legendary figure? Someone who either never existed at all, or is so surrounded in mythology as to be essentially fictional? Santa Claus. King Arthur. Odysseus. What would it even mean to be mad at one of these?

So then, what if God were not real? What if all that I have attributed to Him over for the last eight years was but a mishmash of hopeful naïveté and confirmation bias? To be mad at this is to be mad at an abstract concept. One might as well claim to be mad at “love”, or mad at “peace”.

This is where I stand.

*I am fully aware that this is a downright insulting over-simplification, but I could write a whole separate post on what I actually mean by this. I do not feel like doing that now, so maybe you could just pretend to understand what I am getting at here and we can move it along.

In my last post, I was trying to make some point about coincidences that, to be honest, I do not even understand myself. I thought I could throw some anecdotes together and allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. However, I was not very respectful to the young lady mentioned.

I have been struggling over this for the past couple of weeks. I did not know her well; she was just one of the kids I knew at a job that I used to have. It must be a decade or so since I last saw her. With the modern stalking marvel that is Facebook, I was able to surf through friends of friends with poor privacy settings to find some recent pictures. Had I happened to encounter her somewhere in the past few years, I doubt I would have recognized her. She merely looked to me like some random twenty something year old.

So I do not remember much about her, but the disturbing part is that I am ashamed of what I do remember. The fact is, I really did not like her. Looking back now through the fog of time, it is hard to say why. I thought she was a brat, but perhaps I was too quick to judge. She was only, I do not know, in her early teens, I guess. That is an awkward time for everyone. Maybe she grew out of it. I was quite young myself, and not mature enough to deal with conflicting personalities. Perhaps if I had met her again more recently, we would have gotten along much better. We will never know now.

There is one incident in particular that I had completely forgotten about, but now it haunts me. I am not comfortable going into details aside to say that there was a conflict. As far as I can remember now, it was a conflict that was never “resolved”, but rather never mentioned again.

It is troubling in a more general sense as well. I tend to be an out-of-sight-out-of-mind type of person.  To think now about all the people who come and go in life, and I never give them another thought until maybe ten years later I hear that they are gone forever. It is especially unsettling in cases of unresolved issues, where it was just easier to never see the person again than to address the problem. Which is pretty much my default.

There is one other thing that has been itching at my memory. That contrary to what I said above… I did see her more recently. I want to say that one time I went into a store where she happened to be working. Yet it is so blurry, like a barely remembered dream. Did I actually speak with her? Did I just see someone who resembled, and may or may not have actually been her? (Especially considering that, as I mentioned above, the young lady she became did not look like the girl I remember.)  Maybe this incident did not involve her at all, and I am confusing her now with one of the other kids that I had not seen in equally as long. I am just not sure. I want this to be real, although I hardly see why it even matters now.

I realize that this rambling nonsense probably means even less to the reader than my usual rambling nonsense, but still I want to say, thirteen years too late: I am sorry, Rachel.

For the past few years I have worked setting up the sound equipment for a local community’s summer concert series. As I was heading to work yesterday to pick up said equipment, I happened to be listening to Zooropa. For the unfamiliar, the song has a rather long ambient intro with synths and heavily effected voices and samples. Right at the moment when the full band kicks in, I noticed a pedestrian a little ways in front of me suddenly lean to one side and make a motion to hitch up her jeans slightly or something. Or in other words: shake her booty in time to music that only I could hear.

I drove on thinking about what an unusual occurrence this was, and at some point I realized that this coincidence did not effect my belief in God in any way. Because I know that we live in a complex and chaotic world with uncountable variables, and sometimes coincidences just happen.

I was talking with my dad earlier this week and mentioned that this concert series was starting up again, and then I happened to remember that it was while setting up for one of these shows a couple of summers ago that I heard the news that Michael Jackson had died. I do not know why that is important to anything at all, it was just some random detail that I remember for some reason.

So anyway, when I arrived at the shop yesterday, one of the secretaries was on the phone. Toward the end of the conversation it became apparent that she had received bad news. After hanging up she asked me if I remembered [a girl I used to know], and that she had died that morning.

WTF? Now this is just bullsh

Anyway, when I do blog, it is rarely about God at all. Usually it is about music. This is no different. Also, I should probably mention in advance, there is not going to be any payoff to this post. You have been warned.

I have been playing guitar again lately, or trying to anyway. (Mostly as a means to avoid something more important that I should be working on, but whatever.) I have also been thinking a lot about my “greatest hits” (in the loosest possible sense of the phrase). Basically, I have written a lot of songs over a lot of years and am now wondering which songs would someone expect to hear if I was doing a show? Not just a simple open mic night where you play three songs that no one has heard before and everyone in the place is either politely waiting for their turn to play or ignoring you entirely (or both), but an actual concert where people are coming to see me specifically. Answer: I do not have any hits. I do not have any fans. There are maybe four people on the planet who I would expect to even be able to name any of my songs off the top of their head. Most people that I know have not heard any of my music, and a good number of my songs have never been heard by anyone at all. In particular, the stuff that I have written in the last seven years, which have been few and far between, a lot of it is unfinished, most of it is crap, and very very little ever heard by anyone but me.

Yet I am reluctant to put any serious effort into new material when so much of my old stuff, “the classics”, remain unrecorded, intangible, unavailable. So then I invert the question: which of my songs do I wish that other people knew? Of course, then I just want to say, “All of them!” But there are a few I can throw out; that one was dumb; that one never really worked; that one was more of sketch than an actual song. Then I get to the pile of unfinished works that were solid ideas that I just never had the tools to execute the way I imagined them.

There is one song in particular that I have been struggling over. It is called “A Secret”, not that I expect that to mean anything to you. At the time I considered it the pinnacle of my guitar playing. Most of my songs are pretty simple. There’s the verse part, the chorus part, either a bridge or a solo but almost never both (and sometimes neither), maybe a little instrumental transition between chorus and verse. Three or four pieces total is all. But this song had a whole bunch of pieces. I actually wrote it by recording a lot of parts to a phrase sampler and stringing it all together, layers, loops and all. It is actually in G Mixolydian mode as well, which is unusual for me, not that I knew anything about modes back then, it just worked out that way. Yet it is not one of my hits. I do not remember the words, although I do have them written down somewhere. It is not one of the songs I play on the those occasions when I do pick up the guitar. You do not need to know it, I will not be playing it live.

Not that I will be playing anything else live for that matter. However, going back to the open mic idea, it occurred to me that Youtube is, in a sense, the world’s largest open mic. Better in some ways. There is no three song limit, and you are only watching because you want to. Of course, the down side is that it is not real… So I set up a channel a while ago as a way to get my music out there… and that is as far as I went. My playing style does not lend itself well to “pick up the guitar, face the camera, and go!” As I may have mentioned in the past, my songs sound like they want the full band treatment. I often lament that now I finally have the resources to at least fake the other parts for demo purposes, but lack the overall passion for music that I once had. Part of it is that songs written as an angsty teenager are harder to take seriously at 32. In retrospect, I was surprised at the high number of my songs that have lyrics where every line or couplet starts with the exact same word or phrase. U2 has several songs like that, and the Cure have a few as well, which is probably why I thought I could get away with it, but now it seems rather uninspired.

As for making videos, I have come up with concepts to go with a number of my songs, but seriously, if in all this time I could not be bothered to even record anything, what chance is there that I am going make them visually interesting as well?

Today is the seventh anniversary of my blog. An awful lot has changed in seven years. Some things have not.

It also happens to be Easter today, or “Resurrection Sunday”, if you prefer. Somewhat appropriate to “resurrect” my blog from its longest hiatus yet. Stumbling Toward God… I was talking with someone a little while ago about how that title was not really appropriate. I have not been blogging this year because I honestly do not have anything more to say on that topic. I am no closer to God than when I started seven years ago. I almost went to church one Sunday several weeks ago just because I was feeling so alone, but then I had to ask, “How exactly would that make me feel any LESS alone?” So I did not.

It has been a rotten year so far. I was tempted to call it the worst year that I have had in a while, but then I had to ask myself, “Really? Who died?” Well, no one that I know. So, generally speaking, that would make it a better year than 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, and oh, while we are at it, 2008? Jesus… Well okay, but this has been a bad year for *me*… nevermind.

Earlier this year I set out to find a song released within the calender year of 2010 that I actually liked.

I failed.

I realize that I am getting old, and I also know that probably for as long as there has been recorded music, one generation has been saying to the next, “How can you listen to this trash? That’s not music, it’s noise!” I wonder if we have reached the point for the first time in history where we instead look kids in the eye and ask, “How can you listen to this trash? It’s so boring!” Sad times.

At some point I started listening in my truck to a CD by the band Hole that I received for Christmas one year back when they were popular. (Was Hole ever “popular”? Back when they were on the radio anyway.) It was surprisingly good. Certainly better than what is essentially a glorified vanity project by the widow of a music legend has any reasonable expectation of being. (I miss the ’90s.) I particularly recommend Boys on the Radio.

I did, however, manage to keep a list of songs that I found entertaining this year, even if they weren’t actually released this year:

The Funeral – Band of Horses (2006) There was a show called FlashForward this year that took a fairly interesting premise and a generally talented cast and threw it all away with unlikeable characters making mind-boggling poor decisions. It was mercifully canceled, but I watched the whole season, perhaps out of a combination of boredom and morbid curiosity.  Yet somehow, the final scene set to this song made me want MORE. (Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good montage?)

Walk Like a Zombie – The Horrorpops (2005) First let me say that I really do not understand the whole “zombie” phenomenon. A lot of people (a lot of geeks anyway, a category with which I usually identify) seem to think that zombies are inherently awesome, but I simply do not see the appeal. Never-the-less, this song is excellent. I find it to be the absolute perfect blend of macabre and old-timey goodness.

Those songs are several years old though. Since it is my blog and my list, and who honestly cares or even reads this crap at all, I decided to bend the rules and consider songs released in the final months of 2009.

Until the Day You Die – Abney Park (2009) I like to drop the name “Abney Park” now and then with the assumption that no one has any idea who they are. Perhaps I have done it often enough by now that some of you might have bothered to look them up, perhaps not. In any case, speaking of “old-timey goodness”, this song has it in spades.

Since I have previously established that today’s music is boring, I find myself drawn to cover songs and remixes. In that vein we have:

Bohemian Rhapsody -The Muppets (2009) If you happened to be wondering if The Muppets are still relevant in the twenty first century, the answer is “Yes”.  I don’t know what else to say, if for some reason you haven’t seen this yet, you absolutely need to stop what you are doing and correct that right now.

United States of Pop 2009 (Blame it on the Pop) – DJ Earworm If you are at all interested in mash-ups, this guy is a master. This song is so much more than the sum of its parts… which is truly a feat considering that many, if not most, of those parts are downright unlistenable on their own.  (Although if you happen to feel that the end result is likewise unlistenable, I can respect that.)

The Lovecats – Tanya Donnelly & Dylan in the Movies (2009) Listening to Hole got me thinking about another female fronted ’90s band, Belly, and wondering what Tanya Donnelly was up to these days. It turns out that she is collaborating with some unknown band to really sultry up an old song that, despite being a fan of The Cure, I had never liked in the first place. So that’s something.

My pick of the year for “2010” is:

White Noise – Lauren O’Connell (2009) Remember what I said about girls and acoustic guitars? Nevermind, I don’t either. I discovered this songstress via the much more popular Pomplemoose, who use the same “videosong” production technique*,  but I like this song more. It is a bit “folky” and a  rather slow starter, but what it lacks in face-melting rock, I think it more than makes up for in bowed banjo solo!

*Which clearly influenced my own Christmas song, which I don’t know, maybe you missed?

I had a dream, several weeks ago now, that I witnessed an (unspecified) miracle that made it absolutely impossible to doubt that Jesus was truly Lord and Savior. And my having accepted that allowed someone who really does not talk to me anymore to completely forgive me, which was essentially a second miracle.

It was the sort of dream from which you wake and take in your usual surroundings with a very dissappointed, “Oh.”

I have witnessed no miracles since.

I am not much of a “sports” guy, but if there was one sport about which I cared even a little, it would be baseball. I do not now recall the exact timing of events, but the facts are these:

In 2007, the Colorado Rockies made it to the World Series for the first time since the team’s formation in 1993. (They lost.) Around this time, and likely inspired by this, I researched and discovered that there were still four teams that had never been to the World Series. This number was reduced to three when the Tampa Bay Rays reached the World Series the very next year. The Rays were an even younger team, established in 1998. The oldest team that had not yet been to the World Series was the Texas Rangers, established in 1961.

Being the fan of the underdog that I am, I decided that the Texas Rangers were my team. This was probably sometime between the 2007 and 2008 seasons. As it happened, the President of the United States at this time had previously been a managing partner for the Rangers, so I felt a little extra sympathetic for them because of that.

It is now 2010, today the Texas Rangers are playing game 1 of their first ever World Series and I could not be prouder.

Yet, ever the skeptic, I try to look at it objectively. There are thirty teams in Major League Baseball, two of whom face off in the World Series every year, so the odds a team chosen totally at random being in the World Series in any given year is 1/15 or about 6.67%. However, MLB is split into two leagues, with sixteen teams in the National League and only fourteen in the American League. The Rangers happen to be in the smaller league and the odds of a particular team winning that league at any point in the last three years, if I did the calculation correctly, is about 20%. Not particularly good odds to bet on, but far from mind-blowing that I happen to have been correct.

However, baseball teams are not random numbers. Certain teams are objectively better than others, and though there are considerable factors involved, I think that generally speaking, a team’s record is not expected to change dramatically from one season to the next. In 2007, the Texas Rangers finished last in their division. In fact, they had only had one winning season (in which they won more games than they lost) by that point in the decade. Three years ago, no one would have thought they were a championship team. No one but me, that is. I willed it to happen.

In the interest of full disclosure, I actually predicted a Rangers-Cubs World Series, and I wanted it in 2009. I was off by a year on the Rangers. That is not too bad, really. I was completely wrong about the Cubs. Momentarily going back to random guesses again, the odds of correctly predicting a World Series match-up is about 0.45%. (Or put the opposite way, if one announces such a match-up, there is a 99.5% chance of it being wrong.)

But again, I did not choose the Cubs at random. As I said, I love a good underdog, and the Cubs famously have not won a World Series since 1908, and have not played in the World Series since 1945, when a gentlemen showed up to one of the games with two box tickets, one for himself and one for his goat. When the goat was removed from the stadium for, well, being a goat, the man claimed, “The Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.” And they haven’t.

Clearly that man was more powerful than I. But it does not trouble me, because I did not really care about the Cubs. As I said, the Rangers were my team. There is a picture of me taken on my birthday last year that I find amusing for a number of reasons, one of which being that I am wearing an my Official MLB Texas Rangers hat along with my typical t-shirt and jeans ensemble, and I suspect that the hat cost more than everything else that I was wearing combined. I am generally neither a “hat-wearing” nor a “spending-money” type of guy, but here I was in my expensive hat, to show solidarity with a forgettable baseball team, apparently as part of some elaborate joke.

An elaborate joke that paid off, of course. Because I am powerful. This is hardly the first time that something like this has happened either. Many years ago, I was reflecting on my life and realized that I had a very effective method of obtaining things:

1. Want it. Want it so much that I can hardly think of anything else.

2. Stop wanting it. Move on.

3. [Somewhat optional] Decide that I was better off without it anyway.

And then whatever it was would come to me. This method has been known to work on everything from toys to specific girls. I had not put this into practice in a number of years, though. Perhaps because I somehow became convinced that I needed to rely on an external god. This baseball thing does not fit the pattern though. Which brings me to the weighty question:

How do I seemingly have such power over such inconsequential things that logically would seem completely beyond my control, yet I remain paralyzed when it comes to taking even simple actions that effect the course my day to day life?

My Year Six post was an explanation of why men go to church. (Hint: it is for the same reason that they do anything else.) I intended to follow up it with thoughts on why women are attracted to the church. It is shame that I never got around to it, because I can not remember now what I was going to say.

Anyway, I was trying to find a scientific term for failing to achieve escape velocity to use as a title. “Weightless” was the best I could come up with; the moment when you have stopped going up, but have not yet started going back down.

The number of church/mission related functions I have attended in the past few months is truly unsettling. I spent a lot of years in the church, so maybe it is not a surprise if I still go to an occasional event or two… but nine? (One of which was a six week class, so technically: fourteen.) That seems like quite a lot for someone who is supposedly over this whole church thing. Some will say that that is proof of God trying to get my attention. I do not think so. I went to church for such a long time that now, basically all of my friends that see on a regular basis these days are Christians. Obviously Christians are going to want to do Christian-y things. I see it merely as proof that I have nothing better to do.

The thought of fully returning to the Church lifestyle is actually sickening to me. The frustration, the intellectual dishonesty, the pretending to be something that I am not… I did that for six years. Six. Years. I do not want to do that dance again.