I’ve been feeling kind of lackluster lately when it comes to being a “musician”.  I suppose that lackluster feeling is due to not really feeling like a musician.

In my younger days I used to write two or three songs a week, and be in a band.  We may not have been the best band on earth, but it was a fun way for us to get together and make (what we thought was great) music.  I don’t have that anymore.

I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to get a band together, but I honestly wouldn’t know how to go about doing it.  I have some musicians that I’m friendly with, but they’re all in bands already, which makes it hard to get them to join me. “Hey, I know you’re in a band already, but want to quit and join mine? I haven’t been in one in 16 years, but I’m sure I’m still pretty awesome to jam with!”

I’ve been getting back into writing lately — starting out with blog posts to get the creative juices flowing, and eventually I’d like to get back into writing as many songs as I once did.  (Note to self, I have to finish digitizing the rest of them.  That file storage box is staring at me.)  I feel better when I’m creating things.  Not to say I don’t feel good otherwise.  I just feel, I don’t know, free when I’m writing.  It’s an escape from the things I think and feel, even if those things aren’t daunting or scary.  It’s just a way to get down on paper what’s in my head.  (Or in this case, get them down in WordPress.)

Sometimes I read over some older songs that I wrote, and it’s almost immediate that I know what a particular song is about.  Spoiler: most of them are about girls.  Lesser-known-spoiler: a lot of them are completely fictional and aren’t based in fact at all. I’ve found that it’s easier for me to write a song about something (or someone) that’s completely made up, versus something that’s real.

Take, for example, Subtracted:49.  I wrote this back in 2001 during my “I’ll write stuff that isn’t real” phase.  If you read through the song, it’s very easy to interpret it as a son telling his father that he’s grown up, and is his own man.  The song ends with the line “I still feel it hurt, like the day you died.”  My dad’s not dead, he’s still alive and healthy.  Clearly this is a song created out of a fictitious story in my head.

I like to write songs that tell a story (which is clear if you read through anything I’ve written).  Whether that story’s obvious or not is up in the air.  Sometimes I like to leave songs open to the listening/reader to discover themselves. (Much like a Christopher Nolan movie.)  This particular song, Subtracted:49 tells the story of the young man telling his father that even after he’s passed away he should still be proud of his son.  The title, which I’ve never really explained before, is just a math problem.  At the time I wrote the song, it’s how old my dad was.  If you subtract the year I wrote the song, from the year he was born, you get 49.  (Which in hindsight I realize is incorrect. He’s two years older than that.  Younger me was either bad at birthdays or bad at math.)

It’s always fun for me to go back through stuff I’ve written.  While it never really took me anywhere, I like to think that I am a pretty good writer.  Sure I have my bouts with typos, but when you’re flying along at 120+ WPM, you’re excused for not being perfect.  I should get better about editing my own work, though. I’ll admit that.

In summation, even though I’m not in a bad. Even though I don’t write much anymore.  Even though I don’t practice as much as I would like to or should.  I am a musician.  And being a musician is something I’m proud to be.

That image there is the least graphic representation of a train wreck I could find. I didn’t want to use a real one and offend anyone.

Let me start by saying that I’ve been “online” since the late ’80s. Back when internet was dial-up, and you paid by the hour.  That’s to say that I’ve been around the block for many years, and am not some person in a third world country that just got a computer.

The longer I’ve been online, the easier (and more affordable) it’s become for anyone to get online.  Any by “anyone” I mean people who have less intelligence than I feel should be required to be online. Granted, “the internet isn’t a spelling bee”, or whatever other lame excuses these people use for not knowing the difference between their, they’re and there.  It’s just sad, and frankly a little appalling how uneducated some people can be.

Granted that there can be a difference between making a typo and simply not knowing which version of a word is correct, but c’mon.

I went through my Facebook wall the other day, and was viewing some of the “Friendships” that Facebook lets you peek into — you know where you can see various things that you’ve posted back and forth with a specific person.  It made me do some more digging into some folks that I have known for many years.  And what I found wasn’t impressive.

Not to single any one person out, but I went to a Technical high school.  That’s generally seen as a school where you learn a trade, and the focus isn’t on academia.  That doesn’t mean everyone that goes to a technical high school is a moron.  I went to one, and I feel I turned out pretty well, and somewhat above average in the intelligence pool.

What I found by digging into some friends from high school (I’m going to use the word friends loosely as the people I’m secretly referring to here weren’t really my friends — I didn’t have many of those back then. Still don’t, but this time voluntarily) was that many of them come across as being dumb.  Sure, people type on their phone and fat finger things.  People are in a rush to comment on something.  Whatever the excuse is, certain people just come across as dumb.

The prime examples I’ve seen are comments that have no punctuation.  Every time I see this, I flash back to seventh grade English class, where we watched Flowers for Algernon, wherein the “dumb” guy (who becomes really smart.  Come to think of it, it’s quite the great movie) is presented with a sentence:

that that is is that that is not is not

This a test of his intelligence.  It’s only when he’s “smart” he can decipher that the sentence makes no sense without punctuation.

For those following along at home, the sentence reads correctly when you punctuate it: That that is, is. That that is not, is not.

See what a difference two commas and a couple of periods can make?

I wish some of these people that I read comments or posts from every day remembered that movie as well as I did.  Perhaps they’d realize that not only do they come across as dumb, but also their posts and comments are almost unreadable.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a sweeping statement of the people I’m connected with on Facebook.  Most of my friends are quite intelligent, and actual people I wouldn’t ignore if I ran into them in a grocery store (which I’ve honestly done in the past).  It’s just amusing the things that you can find online when you look around.  I, apparently, find unintelligence amusing.

I’d include some other amusing things I’ve found online over the years here, probably some photos of funny things. But let’s face it, I’m lazy, and this post is already long enough.

… I’m posting another blog post!

I also made a change to my theme since the old one was a bit stale.  The same content’s here, with the addition of 5 new songs that I wrote last year and never got around to publishing.  You can check those out on the 2012 Music Page.  Not my best work, but it’s fine to try to get back into the swing of things after years of being stagnant in life and not writing anything new.

The new theme’s not completely finished yet, but it’s close enough. It’s also responsive, which is a new and fancy way of saying that it automatically resizes itself based on the size of the screen viewing it.  View it on your  iPad to see what I mean. It’s pretty awesome.

It’s Friday, which means I get to head to my drum studio to smash expensive shiny things (the drums, der) to relieve some of the frustration and stress that builds up during the week.

That’s it for today.  Nothing exciting. (Which could be said for the entire blog here, but whatever.)