I do not believe that I have dissociative identity disorder, but sometimes I feel like I do have multiple personalities, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

My evidence: most of the day today, I was working on contaminant transport models - calculating first-order decay rate constants, biodegradation factors, and chemical concentrations in groundwater samples collected at a site over the past ten years.  All these data and calculations were then geospatially synthesized into a 2-D model and simulations were run, calibrated, and verified, and then used predictively.

Look, I'm no Einstein.  This may be child's play to some of you, but my brain isn't wired toward mathematics and analytical thought.  I tend instead to be more intuitive, creative and verbal.  But I'm willing to do the heavy analytical lifting and work my way through the calculations, equations and spreadsheets, even if it doesn't come naturally to me.

But here's the thing - after doing these calculations, etc. for a few hours, the normally verbal part of my mind sort of shuts down and I find it extremely difficult to make small talk with others, to be creative, or to think, as it were, outside the box.  A linear, analytical mindset takes a hold of me, and although all my memories and so on are intact, I feel like I have a different personality.  I feel like I'm someone else. 

My analytical personality is not nearly as likely to crack a joke, engage in whimsical thought, or find comfort in music as my creative personality.  My analytical personality is even more introverted than my creative personality and probably appears quite cold and aloof to others.  "Robotic" would not be an inaccurate term to describe my analytical personality.

It may or may not be due to different lobes of the brain, but my theory is that when I use the functional but rarely accessed analytical parts of my brain, the fun-loving, intuitive, creative part of my brain goes somewhat dormant, and I think, feel and react differently than I do at other times.  I don't think I'm alone in this - it probably happens to others too, whether they're aware of it or not. It's possible that my introspective, contemplative meditation practice makes me more aware of these changes that I would be without the practice.

But anyway, my name doesn't change, I don't have a different or alternative history and memories, and it's not like there's a different ego-self living in my head, but there are at least two different sets of personality traits that can emerge depending on what my mind is doing otherwise.

Let's Make The Democrats Angry!

We here at WDW have been sticking it to the Republicans for long enough - now let's post some things to make the Democrats mad as well (or to put it another way - if you can't laugh at yourself, then make fun of other people!).

Water Dissolves Water - pissing off and alienating people of all political persuasions since 2004!

Let's Talk About Abortion

Sure, there's nothing that could get controversial on this topic, right?

For the record and full disclosure up front, I'm adamantly pro-choice, so whether or not you consider that to be an inherent bias, at least know that much going in.

I've heard arguments for and against abortion based on ethical issues, and neither argument, pro-choice or anti-choice, has been particularly compelling to me.  The only argument against choice that I've heard that's at all logical is fundamentally and irreducibly religious.

As I understand it, to the religious anti-choice crowd, abortion is equivalent to the taking of a life, and to them, life begins at conception.   That latter part doesn't make sense to me.  As I recall my high-school biology, conception occurs when a living sperm cell fertilizes a living ovum cell.  Everything's alive all along and nowhere in the process is "life" created in anything not already living.

No, even though they say "life begins at conception," they don't really mean "life."  If conception brought life into being from non-living minerals and clay, they'd have a pretty compelling argument, but they don't mean "life" as in living or non-living.  By "life," they mean an individual personality, an ego-self, a soul.  A living "someone" who did not exist before conception by other living "someones."

Well, I got a problem with that.  The very fact that the new living "someone" is a product of cells from other living "someones," was incubated and nurtured in the body of the female "someone," and at least until birth depended on the female's eating and breathing for nutrition and respiration just like every other organ in the female someone's body, makes me less and less sure that the so-called "new life" is really separate from the life or lives that conceived it. The closer I look at the situation, the harder and harder it is to find where one organism ends and the other begins.  That's probably part of the reason that the mother-child bond is so strong throughout the higher animal kingdom - the two are really inseparable parts of the same whole.

So living cells fertilize living cells, and then the fertilized living cells continue to exist in intimate association with the body that produced it.  I still don't see a "new life" or a new living "someone" there, just a continuation and extension of what already is.

What must really bother the religious anti-choicer is the existence of a new soul.  Now, at this point, it probably won't surprise you to learn that I question the existence of a soul, at least as some sort of entity that lasts beyond an individual's life.  The closest thing to a soul that I can see is consciousness, that luminous realization of ourselves that ties together memory, personality, and free will.  And consciousness is what can be called an emergent property - it arises when a living brain of sufficient complexity becomes self-aware, and disappears when the brain is no longer functional.  It's like a light bulb and illumination - there's light only as long as there's a functional bulb and a power source from which it can emerge,  and whenever the power's off or the bulb is no more, no light is produced (at least from that source). Similarly, there's no consciousness or soul or atman (to borrow a Sanskrit term) that can outlast the mind from which it emerges, and there's nothing eternal to anyone.  Sorry, folks, but that's just the way it is.

Even if I'm wrong, I don't understand the concern about destroying a soul if the soul is eternal - if anything, the soul is just being liberated before suffering through a lifetime of sickness, old age, and death.  If the soul is eternal, it cannot be destroyed.  But there is no soul, so those are just hypothetical considerations. 

The decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a deeply personal one for those involved.  It obviously involves religious or spiritual matters for some people, as well as identity issues ("am I ready to be a parent?") in others. It's undeniably a difficult and involved decision to make one way or the other, but I really don't understand why some feel that their (in my opinion) misguided views on this whole matter need to be foisted on those making the difficult decision for themselves.

See?  Nothing controversial here, folks.  Just some plain common-sense considerations.  Problem solved, and you're welcome. 

Next we'll take on world peace, lol.

Facebook Is A Social Disease

The promise that social media once held, including Facebook, Instagram, and yes, Blogger, has given way to a confused and confusing stew of propaganda, useless trivia, and conspicuous consumption.  The potential for a Fifth Estate has succumbed to a relentless attack of weaponized misinformation and toxic conspiracy rumors.

The more you tweet, the more posts of dubious origin you repost, the worse it gets.  It's been documented that too much time on social media can lead to depression, anxiety, and alienation.  What once promised to bring us all closer together has turned into something more likely to drive a wedge between us.

I'm not abandoning WDW, at least not yet, but for a couple months now, I've cut way back on other social media.  I'm not telling you what to do, but I do suggest examining asking yourself to determine what actually compels you to post.  

Beautiful Shitholes

Former Talking Head and current Renaissance man David Byrne recently put together a 2 1/2 hour mix tape he calls The Beautiful Shitholes.  Explaining the mixtape, Byrne writes, 

I assume I don’t have to explain where the shithole reference came from. 

Here’s a playlist that gives just the smallest sample of the depth and range of creativity that continues to pour out of the countries in Africa and the Caribbean. It is undeniable. Can music help us empathize with its makers?

The artists and song titles are displayed as the songs progress in the widget above, but includes contributions by Ibeyi, Amadou & Mariam, Miriam Makeba, Orchestra Baobab, Songhoy Blues, Tinariwen, Fela Kuti, and Oumou Sangaré, among many others.

Not only is this a fun listen and a sunny soundtrack for your day, but it's essential music - as Byrne notes, it may help us overcome the xenophobia and mistrust that some divisive politicians attempt to spread.  

How can you hate someone who makes you smile and tap your feet like this?

Dreaming of the Masters

1968, Part III.  This is where Miles Davis was by 1968, playing with his second great quintet, quite possibly the greatest band ever ensembled (no exaggeration - Miles on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and the incomparable Tony Williams on drums).  The only possibly competition would be Miles' classic quintet of the 1950s that had the immortal John Coltrane on sax, Paul Chambers on bass, Red Garland on piano, and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

This was the last recording by that 60s quintet and Miles' last "traditional" jazz album - after this he went electric with In A Silent Way,  psychedelic with Bitches Brew, and then full-on funk with On The Corner (to the OCD collectors out there, yes, I know I'm skipping over Jack Johnson and Live/Evil, but I'm just trying to touch on the major milestones here) (and to the OCDers out there inclined toward puns, yes, I recognize that Milestones was an earlier Miles LP by the classic quintet, with the addition of Cannonball Adderley on alto).

   

Anyway, it's not that this song, Tout de Suite, doesn't have it's own psychedelic elements - the way one can so easily get lost in the different layers of music in this song and the almost dub-like way that instruments fade in and fade out and appear and then disappear mimics the marijuana experience of losing one's attention in the minute details otherwise missed while "straight."

Alas, I wasn't listening to this in 1968.  I don't think I discovered this LP until 1974 or 1975, and didn't fully appreciate it until I bought it on CD in the 90s. But nowadays I love this music and I love this album and I love this song. So yeah, it does sorta support the 1968 theorem.

           

1968, Part II

According to research performed on metadata from the Spotify music streaming service and recently reported in the New York Times, the music most frequently listened to by men of widely different ages turns out to be the music that was released when they were age 14 (13 for girls).  They analyzed the data for the number of times a given listener played a given song, the year that song was first released, and the age of the listener, and then calculated how old the listener was when the song was released.  

With remarkable precision, the frequency of play peaked for male listeners for music that was released when they were 14 years old (13 for girls).  Therefore the data shows that people in their 50s listen primarily to 70s music, people in their 30s listen primarily to 90s music, teens listen primarily to contemporary hip-hop and pop, and so on.  

The researchers conclude that the age of 14 (13 for girls) coincides more-or-less with the completion of puberty.   Therefore, the music that was popular then was what one most likely would have been hearing during the first flush of desire, the first erotic response, the first heartbreak, and getting over the first heartbreak.  Our neurons appear to become hard-wired to associate those particular sounds with those important experiences, and we carry those neural associations around with us for the rest of our lives.

This doesn't apply to me, I figured.  I recognize that I'm an oddity, a statistical outlier, but I'm 64 years old and listen mostly to music, on Spotify and elsewhere, that was released post-millennium. In my humble opinion, the greatest decade of popular music probably occurred between 2005 and 2015 (for what it's worth, the best jazz was probably recorded in the decade between 1965 and 1975).  What's more, I outgrew the juvenile bubble-gum pop I listened to at 14 by the time I graduated high school.  I wouldn't dream of listening today to my favorite songs from 14-years-old.

Or so I thought, until I did the math.  I turned 14 in 1968, when I was in the 8th grade and in that private prep school that Franklin Graham also attended.  By 1968, the counterculture had already taken over, and Janis and Jimi, Morrison and the Airplane, had already replaced the British Invasion of the earlier 60s for me, and The Beatles' 1968's white album sounded nothing like the Yeah Yeah Yeah Beatles of 1964 (ditto the Rolling Stones' 1968 Beggars Banquet album).

To be perfectly honest here, folks, I have to admit for having something of a soft spot for the music of 1968 and 1969.  Back then, caught up in the revolutionary counterculture of those heady times, I thought the music of the time was profound and important, and much of it still sounds that way to me now.

Looking back at my 1968 yearbook, I asked myself what records can I remember that smirking young man in the picture above buying during the eighth grade?  I remember him buying Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Volume I (taken mostly from Highway 61 Revisited and Blond on Blond, both of which are on my iPod today, mixed in with more modern songs).  I remember buying Jimi Hendrix' Are You Experienced? (a 1966 release, but one I didn't discover until 1968).  I remember Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxter's and, yes, the white album and Beggars Banquet.  Maybe all this is considered dad-rock now, but even writing the titles today feels like I'm describing some sort of pantheon of musical achievement.

But I don't listen to late-60s classic rock exclusively or even predominantly.  Most other albums on my iPod are from 2016 and 2017, with a few "older" LPs from 2005-2015 by Animal Collective, Godspeed!, and Thee Oh Sees.  Why did I not fall into the same rut as most other people, and only listen to music from a certain pubescent stage of my life?

Here's a theory - the unifying "message" of all that dad-rock I listed above was that music was new and fresh and urgent and revolutionary.  Could the take-away to my 14-year-old mind be that I had to keep the music new and original, to not get complacent, and to constantly break through old thresholds and barriers to hear what's being played now?  To be certain, I did manage to stay up with the rock music of the time, refreshing my acid-rock record collection of the 60s with David Bowie and prog rock and krautrock in the 70s, then punk rock and new wave in the 80s,  alternative rock in the 90s, and then indie post-millennium, with lots and lots of side diversions into free jazz and the avant-garde, various genre and subgenres of electronic music, and even flirtations with country and Texas swing.  

Did my neural circuits get wired at puberty such that the thrill of the discovery of the musically new and different still causes release of the endorphins and neurotransmitters associated with first love, first heartbreak, and young desire?

1968, Part I

The famous evangelist Billy Graham died today at age 99.

Even though our beliefs are quite different, I didn't have any particular problem with the Rev. Graham.  Even though he became quite a wealthy man, he generally avoided the pitfalls of financial or sexual impropriety that seems to have affected so many evangelical preachers, and while he's widely viewed as a conservative, he managed to become a spiritual advisor to many presidents, Democrat and Republican, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  So RIP, Rev. Graham - you lived as you preached, and not many men or women can say that.

In 1968, I was in a private prep school.  Can you spot me in the yearbook picture?  The names are out of order - I'm the little guy squeezed in between larger upperclassmen, front row, third from the left (for some reason, the names for both rows are listed right-to-left, not left-to-right).  

My personal connection with Billy Graham, and the reason for this post and the seemingly non-sequitur paragraph above, is that Graham's son, the jack-assy Islamophobe Franklin Graham, was a year ahead of me in that private prep school.  He's not in this picture but he appears elsewhere in the same yearbook.  He was kind of a bully and kind of a jackass even back then, but we all knew who his father was and allowed him a lot of latitude - the young man had a lot to live down and rebel against, so a lot of his buffoonery was tolerated.  

We weren't friends - he was a year ahead of me, which means a lot in the eighth and ninth grades, and I wasn't cool enough to embellish his rep - I was a day student at a boarding school, a townie, and he was the resident son of a celebrity.  Now he's a jack-assy Islamophobe, recently denied entry into the UK for his "hate speech" remarks about Islam and gays (I forgot to mention, he's also a homophobe).

  

I don't blame Billy for Franklin's behavior, then or now, but I do blame the self-righteousness inherent in evangelical Christianity, especially among the Christian evangelists.  But that was back in 1968, apparently the year I acquired my musical tastes (to be continued).

Here's a video from last weekend.  Instead of going to see St. Vincent at The Tabernacle, among many other things I, along with my Irish companion Cait, cleared some building in Cambridge, Massachusetts of a gang of super-mutants.  I'm playing as a female character, so if you've been wondering if two girls can take out a half-dozen or so super-mutants with nothing but an axe and a shotgun, the answer is yes, or as Cait asks "How does it feel getting your arse kicked by a girl?" 

Trigger warning: extreme violence (and ham-fisted editing.)

Happy President's Day

Why I Didn't Go To See St. Vincent at The Tabernacle Last Night

St. Vincent at The Tabernacle, March 8, 2014

1. Even though I had tickets, on the night of the show I didn't feel like it.
2. The Tabernacle is way downtown in the tourist area near Centennial Olympic Park and CNN Center, is a pain to get to, and expensive to park near.
3. I  knew that if I wanted to get a half-way decent spot to view the show, I'd have to get in line at the venue by at least 6:00 pm, an hour before the doors opened and two hours before the show started, and wait around with a bunch of 16- to 20-year-olds.
4. I've already seen St. Vincent at The Tabernacle, so there's that.
5. I really preferred to just stay home and play Fallout than go to the show.
6. I found that I was making a list of excuses in my mind to justify the decision I had already made.
7. I didn't feel like it.   

Time and Place

Highway I-85, Georgia Mile Marker 91.8 - 9:12 a.m., February 16, 2018

Dreaming of the Masters

After posting Cannonball Adderley's Mercy, Mercy, Mercy last week, the logical next step is to post his brother Nat Adderley's The Work Song.  To me, the songs were always two peas in a pod - surely, there must be a 45 single out there somewhere with those two songs on either side.

But I'm also still so full of rage and anger about the recent gun violence in Florida, the pathetic national response, and the complete and utter lack of any political will to do anything about it.  That rage leads me to want to post some fiery late-60s free jazz, something by Albert Ayler or Archie Shepp, say, or some late period John Coltrane.

But, hey, let's all just take a deep breath and remember that last Tuesday was Mardi Gras. And in commemoration of Mardi Gras and the unique culture of New Orleans, here's a 1970s interpretation of some dixieland jazz.  And speaking of deep breaths, it's by that master of circular breathing, the singular Rahsaan Roland Kirk.  

So strap on your seat belts, take the top down on your Cadillac, and let's all get down and go down to New Orleans together.   

Another school shooting, another mass murder, another 17 lives needlessly taken.  Welcome to another day in America.

Since the December 2012 shooting of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, more than 1,600 mass shootings have taken place in America.

I'm angry.  Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, where the latest shooting took place, said that he prayed that this would never happen.  I apologize if this sounds harsh, but we don't need your mother-fucking prayers, Little Marco.  We need common sense gun-control legislation, something agreed upon by the vast majority of Americans.  If your Congress can't pass legislation to make events like yesterday's - and the past 1,600 other mass shootings - less likely, then we need a new Congress.  Save your prayers for a new job.

Meanwhile, the only gun-related legislation signed by the short-fingered vulgarian was to undo restrictions on selling guns to the mentally ill.  Now, he's towing the NRA line that the problem is mental illness, not the widespread availability of guns.  The NRA spent $11 million during the 2016 Presidential race to support Donald Trump and another $19 million to oppose Hillary Clinton, for a total of over $30 million.  Little Marco (“I’m praying for all the victims, their families, and our first responders in the #LasVegas #MandalayBay shooting”) has received $3.3 million from the NRA.

Stop fucking praying and start passing legislation!  America is the only civilized country with this problem, yet we keep asking "What can we do about it?" and then offer "our thoughts and prayers" to the families torn apart by the gun violence that we allow to continue.

We need new laws.  We need a new Congress.  We need less prayer and more action. And we need it now!   

Valentine Day

I self-identify as an urban monk, a high-functioning hermit living in the city.  It's not that I hate people, it's just that I prefer not to be with them all the time, even as I live in their very midst.  It's a strange and not unchallenging position to take, but one with which I've grown quite familiar and comfortable.   

There are many of us, some more introverted than others, some more misanthropic than others, who've chosen to live alone for one reason or another, removed from family, spouse and children, with few friends and even those generally kept at arm's length.  And there are others who've had a life of solitude choose them, sometimes to their complete surprise.

It's well known that holidays, especially the holidays, are hard on single people, especially those who haven't made up their minds to deliberately be alone. But for very different reasons, it's also hard on those of us who have made that decision and if I may be so bold as to speak for the other urban monks and inner-city hermits, it's not the holidays that are hard - it's the expectations of other people that are so difficult to tolerate.

It all starts around Thanksgiving, where the so-called normal people, we'll call them the "normies," assume that if you aren't attending some sort of familial feast like they are, you're missing out on something. Now while many of us feel that a four-day weekend is reason enough to celebrate, and four days in solitude off from work and away from others is the best way to celebrate, the normies reaction is to either display a spectrum of emotions ranging from pity to grief, or worse, feel a need to intervene and invite you to their familial feast out of pity, putting you in the awkward position of either turning down their offer and appearing ungrateful or just plain rude, or going to a dinner that you don't really want to go to and frankly, they'd really prefer for you not to attend.  So we loners just try to keep a low profile, avoiding discussions of what we are or aren't doing for the holiday, and hope no one discovers the truth of the matter.

It gets worse at Christmas, except you're less likely to get invitations to come join the normie festivities.  But if you're not celebrating Christmas with friends and family in the way that the normies expect, their reaction is just as likely to include contempt and anger as it is to range between pity and grief.  And while you just want to be left alone, they assume that there must be something malignant about you and your preference, and I  know many people who've lied about their Christmas plans and experiences, not out of shame or guilt, but just to avoid the normie's self-centered judgement.

And on New Year's Eve, if you aren't planning to have either 1) the biggest, most extravagant night of your life, or 2) an intimate evening with a loved one, you are missing out on the very meaning of existence.  And on New Year's Eve, the normie reaction to you just being yourself is particularly hard to predict: you might get the dreaded awkward invitation to their own planned bacchanalia, or you might get that uncomfortable expression of sorrow or pity ("it must suck being you"), or you might get a hostile, xenophobic  reaction ("oh, I suppose you're just too cool for NYE?" or "I guess our traditions just aren't good enough for you, amirite?").  The only advantage of New Year's Eve is that it's fairly easy to avoid the normies in the week between Christmas and New Year's, so there's that.

Then finally, we get tonight.  Valentine's Day.  The last of the dreaded cavalcade of holidays.   But here, we have two good defenses at our disposal - first, by now the normie's expectations have been tempered and they no longer are even expecting us to have plans, romantic or otherwise, and second, they all want to leave work early for last-minute shopping and other preparations and are actually somewhat grateful to have someone else to pick up the slack in their absence. 

And third, based on what I've seen, no one really has as much fun on Valentine's evening as they had hoped.  There's always some degree of disappointment and unmet expectations.  To one person, the gesture just wasn't big enough, and to the other, the reward might not have seemed commensurate with their effort.  And I hate to break it to the ladies, but I don't know a single, solitary man who wouldn't really prefer, when he's really being honest, that the whole holiday just didn't exist, no matter how much he may or may not love his partner.  But for the normies, the backlash of not making some effort to rise to the holiday's demands is far worse than the the actual ritual, so flowers and cards are purchased, dinner reservations made, and so on and so forth.

For urban monks, Valentine's Day is a sort of smug validation of our choices - while we've had to suffer the normies' condensation and pity and sometimes even hostility for our choices, we finally get our revenge and get to watch them suffer the unfulfilling consequences of theirs.   

The power is off in this building - this is what's possible with natural light when good design is applied.

I got up at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. to drive to central Georgia and inspect this enormous building: 320,000 square feet all under one, albeit leaky, roof.  Great fixer-upper for the very ambitious artist who wants lots and lots of space and great natural light.  Or maybe a robot assembly plant.  Your choice.  Financing available.

I suspect I'll be in bed before 2:00 a.m. tonight.  

My Discontentment

The so-called President's 2019 budget reportedly includes an expanded border wall, more immigration agents, and more immigration judges, while most other federal agencies would see their funding cut, some by as much as 26% (looking at you, EPA). 

About $1.6 billion of the budget is allocated toward building 65 miles of wall in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the easternmost section of the border and the one that historically has seen the highest number of undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S.

The idea of a border wall is ludicrous to begin with.  Although the Rio Grande Valley has historically had the most crossings, most undocumented immigrants are here simply due to people arriving and then overstaying their visas.  In the face of a $1.6 billion wall, people who wanted to come here illegally would simply arrive at airports and then disappear among the general population.  Others who couldn't afford the airfare would hire traffickers to bribe security agents along the wall to look the other way as groups pass through, or use any combination of boats, tunnels, and small aircraft to get over, under, or around the wall.  

The ludicrousness of the wall is made even more apparent by the so-called President's empty campaign slogan that Mexico was going to pay for it.  Even though he was never able to explain how or why Mexico would pay for the wall, his followers fell for the fantasy of the skilled, art-of-the-deal negotiator who could pull off the seemingly impossible, but now it appears that we Americans are going to have to pay for the 1.6 billion Rio Grande wall, along with the rest of the $18 billion over the next 10 years to build additional walls and fences along the border.  Maybe the negotiator was skilled after all, and somehow hoodwinked a nation into paying for something they were tricked into believing Mexico was going to pay for. 

But here's the really sad part:  the wall, even if built, will not last long. The next Administration, certainly the next Democratic Administration, will take it down, and there's a whole generation of millennials and post-millennials who want no part of walled nation-states and will have it taken down at the first chance possible. So 1.6 to 18 billion dollars will have been wasted on a stupid, ineffective, and ultimately meaningless political gesture to temporarily satisfy a small, aging portion of the electorate.

But the damage caused by the off-setting cuts to other programs, like the EPA, may not be so easy to reverse, and it may take decades to reverse the harm caused by the lapse in environmental enforcement.       

Do I allow myself to sleep in late on Sunday mornings because I allow myself to stay up late on Saturday nights, or do I allow myself to stay up late on Saturday nights because I allow myself to sleep in late on Sunday mornings?

Anyway, one way to avoid waking up at 4:30 in the morning and thinking about all those things that you can't possibly achieve at 4:30 in the morning is to stay up until 2:00 a.m. drinking old pals and playing video games, let the cats sleep on the bed with you for the one night a week they're granted that privilege, and then lie in bed doing the NY Times Sunday crossword until noon the next day .   

Here's a lovely song by Jens Lekman that's not exactly on topic but close enough.  It's not about 4:30 a.m. anxieties but is about having the same dream 730 times over.

 

Success has many different flavors.  So does failure.

Dreaming of the Masters

You know, sometimes we're not prepared for adversity.  When it happens sometimes, we're caught short.  We don't know exactly how to handle it when it comes up.  Sometimes we don't know just what to do when adversity takes over.  Heh, heh.

Here's the  irrepressibly exuberant Cannonball (Cannibal) Adderley, along with his brother Nat, keyboardist Joe Zawinul, Victor Gaskin (bass) and Roy McCurdy (drums), performing Zawinul's composition Mercy Mercy Mercy in 1966 live at Capitol's Hollywood studio with an open bar and quite possibly the best-sounding audience ever.  

The song's a mainstream jazz classic and became a surprise hit for Adderley, reaching #11 on the Billboard charts.  It's far from the avant free jazz or Eastern-influenced spirituality of previous posts here, but it's still a killer song and well worth remembering 52 years later.

Progress

I worked from the home office today, and in one small step forward toward relieving late-night anxieties, I found a few minutes to go outside and clean the badly-clogged gutters by the kitchen door, which rain got beneath last weekend.  With rain in the forecast for this weekend and next week, it's at least one less thing to worry about at 4:30 a.m.

Late-Night Mind

Be me.   For no apparent reason, wake up at 4:30 a.m. for the second night in a row.  Roll over to go back to sleep, but the mind won't let me go and keeps me up worrying about random things.

It's really time to get a new roof, my mind reminds me at an hour of the day where there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.  It knows a new roof's expensive, but it reminds me that I've been putting it off for years now with the excuse that I needed to take down the big tree overhanging the house first.  But now that the tree's finally gone, I have no more excuses, and I've lately noticed some new water stains on the dining room ceiling near one of the leaks that I had patched up while waiting to take down the tree. And the gutters are almost useless and rainwater virtually pours off the roof in sheets now, and the other day it leaked in underneath the kitchen door.  Yup, time for a new roof.  And new gutters.

Plus, I need a new dishwasher.  I've been washing dishes by hand for over three years now since my old dishwasher died.  And even though my washing machine and dryer still work, they keep tearing holes in all my clothes and need to be replaced too.  More expenses.

And my car's nearing the 100,000-mile mark.  How long can it keep running before it starts constantly needing repairs?  Should I go buy a new one now, or wait until I've spent some small fortune on replacement parts and maintenance?  Or see it getting hauled off to the junkyard on the back of a tow truck?    

Not to forget that I also need new glasses.  Haven't been to the optometrist in ages, and I can tell that the old glasses I'm still wearing are no longer right for my current vision.  I'm constantly taking them on and off.  But who's got time for the optometrist?  

Not to mention the dentist.  I have a lot of dental issues - a few chipped teeth and a cap that's fallen off, not to mention I haven't had a good cleaning in years.  It's been so long since I've been to the dentist that ironically I'm now ashamed to go because my teeth are in such bad shape that they'll think I must be a meth-head.

Similarly, I've been putting off going to the doctors, knowing that they'll just tell me my blood pressure's too high, my cholesterol's too high, I weigh too much,  they're not happy with my PSA, and have I seen a specialist yet about that mole on my back?  And whatever else they can dream up. I feel fine and think I'm healthy, but I know no one's going to live forever and everyone's body eventually declines.  But I fear that loading myself up on medications and prescriptions will only hasten my demise, not delay it.  But still, I really should get a check-up sooner rather than later.

So that's what my mind tells me at 4:30 a.m., and try going back to sleep after all that.  And while tossing and turning and trying to tune out all those anxiety-ridden thoughts, my mind reminds me that lack of sleep is as deadly as cigarettes, and can lead to early-age dementia and stroke.  Terrific.      

I wake the next morning tired and groggy, barely able to make it through the work day and too exhausted to take care of any of the concerns brought up by my late-night mind.   My only hope is that by nightfall, I'm so exhausted by the time I hit the bed that I can sleep through the entire night without the late-night mind waking me up with it's random anxieties.  

For the Lulz

Sometimes, we just need a laugh . . . .

Well, my team lost yesterday. Again. In Super Bowl LII, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots, 41-33.

I wasn't happy about it, although I can still find a quantum of solace in the fact that Tom Brady and company have already won five Super Bowls, have established themselves as an all-time dynasty, and in all likelihood will be contenders for future championships, even in the event of inevitable future personnel changes. But it still hurt.

After the defeat, I wanted to run somewhere and do something stupid and destructive.  Get it all out of my system, if you will.  Not that violence ever solves anything, but I got some degree of catharsis by finishing my old pal, teaming up with my big green companion, and proceeding to maim and beheaded several hostile Raiders with a bladed tire iron.  Not literally or in real life, of course, and not Oakland Raiders, but marauding Raiders in the virtual Fallout video-game universe.  No real persons were hurt and no laws were broken, but it did allow me to blow off some steam.  I even snagged a video of the mayhem I caused with my Not-So-Jolly Green Giant companion for your viewing pleasure.

The loss still hurt, though.  Here's to better times next year.

"Fun Week" caps off tonight with the Super Bowl (or Superb Owl, depending on your internet meme preferences). New England vs. Philadelphia, but you already know all about that.  Nothing I can say here that hasn't already been said many times elsewhere, but tonight we'll be cheering for The Patriots  and their truly historic record of victories.  

I have to say that I have no antipathy toward the City of Philadelphia.  Any city that's given us the Sun Ra Arkestra, Kurt Vile, The War on Drugs, and the Mandrake Memorial Band can't be all bad, but I guess someone has to lose to New England this year.  Last year was the Atlanta Falcons' turn, this year the sacrificial birds are the Eagles.

I know that the vast majority of America hopes the Patriots lose and is cheering for the underdog Eagles and I can understand that.  But I hope that no matter who you're cheering for, even if it's for both teams to somehow lose, you still enjoy the game.

Go Pats! 

I said it was going to be a fun week, and as proof, last night we had a front-row spot to watch the symphonic Portland folk-rock band Typhoon perform at Atlanta's Terminal West.

First, though, we had openers Sunbathe, another Portland band fronted by singer and guitarist Maggie May Morris.  We had not heard of them prior to last evening and for some reason our expectations were low, but we were most pleasantly surprised by the quality of Morris' singing and playing, and their poise and confidence on stage.  Their music might be called indie pop or dream-pop and with their too-short set, we were off to a good start to the evening.

Next up were Minneapolis' Bad Bad Hats, who are fronted by singer and guitarist Kerry Alexander.  We missed them when they came to town touring with Hey Marseilles in 2016, and were glad to finally get a chance to hear them.   The quality of Alexander's singing and playing were not unlike Maggie May Morris', which is to say good, but they had better-written, more complicated songs to perform.  In all, it was a second good set, embellished as it was by Alexanders' goofy nerd banter between songs.

The headliners, obviously, were Kyle Morton's band, Typhoon.  They're a large ensemble - last night they had seven people of stage including two drummers, and I've seen them in their hometown of Portland, Oregon with as many as 11 people on stage (I'm sure the cost of touring limits the size of the band Morton can afford to take on the road with him).

One of the many things I like about Typhoon's music is the variety of textures in their songs. Rather than have his large ensemble roar at you full blast for the duration of the set, Typhoon's songs have a wide range of dynamics - at some moments, it's just Morton and his acoustic guitar (for the record though, he played electric all night last night), and as the contents of the song require, he'll add two, three, five, or more instruments to the mix, and yes, at times there are cathartic moments of everyone on stage going full out simultaneously to make some dramatic point or another.

It was a fun set and it was nice to see Terminal West at full capacity for such a fine band.  But rather than try to describe the experience of a Typhoon show, here's a wonderful La Blogotheque video of a performance by the band at maximal personnel playing on a cold winter's night.

And because we're such hams and can't restrain ourselves, here's Typhoon performing at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge during MusicFest NorthWest in 2011, and dude, we were there!  That us somewhere there in the audience, hearing Typhoon's music for the very first time in our lives!

Dreaming of the Masters

Last week, I said that nobody went deeper into Middle East music that John Handy.  That's not true.  That was an overstatement to make a point about that particular post, but it's simply not true.

The jazz guitarist Jon McLaughlin at one point abandoned his highly popular fusion outfit, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, to form an acoustic band with tabla player Zakir Hussain.  Their music was deeply Asian, so much so that it became hard to call it "jazz" anymore and it's usually filed under "world music" these days.

Similarly, the band Oregon had strong Indian and middle eastern elements to their music, mixing sitar with jazz guitar and Indian percussion, but that band took some odd turns along the way and played music that most people now recognize as "new age" rather than jazz.

John Handy's Karuna Supreme was definitely a jazz album, and Handy's alto most decidedly swung in front of a backdrop of Indian rhythm and in counterpart to Ali Akbar Khan's sarod.  But Handy also maintained an career playing outstanding post-bop and hard bop jazz, so it's hard to give him the title of the one who went deepest into the Eastern sound.

Meanwhile, the innovative trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry also incorporated Indian, near- and mid-Eastern, and tribal elements into jazz music, producing a sound that was original, informed by various cultures, but still recognizably "jazz."  I don't know if it's even possible to say who went the deepest into Eastern music, but no meaningful conversation on this topic can exclude Don Cherry and have any credibility.     

Here's Malkauns from his mind-blowing Brown Rice album, featuring the impressive bass playing of Charlie Haden and daughter Moki Cherry on tambura.

Fun Week

What a fun week!

I understand that many people look suspiciously at adults who play video games.  I don't care.  But sure, what with all of the real-world, grown-up crises and responsibilities we all have to face, isn't it just a little, to say the very least, trivial?, to play video games?  There's mortgage payments, health insurance, civic responsibilities, and other matters to attend to.  What's wrong with you sitting at your computer all night shooting imaginary enemies with imaginary weapons in an imaginary world?

Sure, I get it, but as I said, I don't care and I'm having fun, and besides, all those so-called "grown-ups" find time to play golf, watch sports, binge-watch Netflix, and have sex (sometimes all at the same time), so it's really just a matter or which diversions we choose, isn't it, and not so much whether or not we're attending to the "important" matters in life.

So with that off my chest, I wrapped up playing Fallout: New Vegas last Sunday and on Monday evening, after work, started replaying Fallout 4 for the third time through.  To my surprise, the game felt quite fresh and new again, after having been away some six months or so.  It was a lot of fun to play again, and I ran through the initial, early quests that night (from escaping the vault to killing the deathclaw in Concord).  

It's also finally the start of music season again, and Tuesday night I went to my first show of the year - Jens Lekman at The Earl.  As I reported yesterday, it was an uplifting, happy show, enough that I didn't miss playing more Fallout that night.

I got to make up for my missing Fallout playtime Wednesday night and Thursday (tonight), and tomorrow, I have another show - the orchestral Portland folk rock collective Typhoon performing at Terminal West (just down the road from me!).  And then the weekend, and with a forecast for rain on Sunday, I can anticipate another hygge weekend of  domesticity and game playing.

And then the Super Bowl on Sunday!  The New England Patriots (Yay!) versus the Philadelphia Eagles (Boo!).  This week just keeps getting better!  

Fun week!