I am Now Self-Actualized

I think I have the pizza-pan situation figured out. I need thin steel, not cast iron. And I need three sizes. First, 12 x 18, to serve more than one person. Then 12 x 12, for a serious meal for one person or a small meal for two. Then 9 x 9, for a normal meal for one. Cast iron is out. Steel works, so there is no need to look for another answer.

I don’t know what to do with all this power. I pretty much have pizza under my thumb, so I can’t continue eating it every day with research as my excuse. I guess the smart move is to bag and freeze the cheese and sauce and have pizza maybe twice a week.

I’ve reached a point where it’s hard to think of anything new I want to learn to cook. I guess cheese poori and certain Indian appetizers and entrees would be good, but I can get a good cookbook for that; I don’t need to be original. Same for Chinese.

It’s unbelievable, now that I think about it. I can make the best pizza in Miami. I can make the best cheesecake anywhere, as far as I know. My barbecue is the best I can find anywhere near me. Prime rib is a joke. Aged steaks are simple. I can cook everything I really care about. God has really blessed me.

If only I could eat this stuff every day.

I guess now I should focus on small, healthy meals that are easy to fix. To me, that means meat or fish, plus non-starchy vegetables. Dull, but cheap and fast.

My dinner menu is embarrassing. Here’s the kind of thing I fix: two tiny pork chops fried in olive oil with no breading, half a can of greens, and Brussels sprouts with salt and butter. I really can’t eat more than that without fattening up. My current routine (admittedly derailed by pizza research) is one serving of oatmeal at breakfast, a sandwich and some pickles at lunch, and a little-bitty dinner. I’m changing that now; the small, sad-looking dinner, which is the largest meal, will come in the middle of the day.

I like vegetables, so eating things like greens and sprouts is not a problem. As far as I know, all Southerners like vegetables. I don’t know why. I always hear about people who won’t eat vegetables. They hate broccoli. They hate spinach. I don’t get it. No one in my family is like that. One of the best Southern meals is hot cornbread, soup beans, and fresh, raw vegetables. Southerners aren’t fat because they don’t eat vegetables. They’re fat because they also eat Moon Pies and chili-cheese-slaw dogs.

I’ve been watching Ken Burns’s Jazz for a few days. I love this documentary. I own a copy. Sometimes the BS can be hard to take; I don’t know why so many successful young black men talk crap, when their achievements stand for themselves. But generally, it focuses on the music, with a surprisingly fair approach to race relations.

Actually, I do know why so many successful young black men talk crap. It’s because Martin Luther King died and Jesse Jackson lived. They pattern themselves after the sideshow act, instead of the greater man who preceded him and died without leaving a substantial video or audio record. King didn’t live long enough to make the kind of impression Jackson has. That’s truly unfortunate. Slogans and chants and doggerel and transparent sophistry are no substitute for character, brains, and dignity.

Now that I think about it, Malcolm X was about fifty times the man Jesse Jackson is, and he died young, too. He had a weakness for slogans, though.

Anyway, I keep watching these videos and marveling at the music. Louis Armstrong is astonishing. He’s like Mozart. He was so good, it didn’t even make sense. Greatest jazz instrumentalist who ever lived. Arguably the greatest vocalist, although you would never know it from garbage like What a Wonderful World. I think THC had pickled his brain by then. They say he smoked every day. Some defend his later work, but far as I can tell, he said all he had to say before he hit middle age.

And people say dope won’t hurt you.

I’m glad I never cared for drugs enough to stick with them. I have never understood the appeal of pot. Sometimes I think other people smoke dope to be more like people like me. Some people have no sense of humor and no creativity and no ability to relax unless they’re high. If you have those things naturally, maybe dope seems pointless. People take drugs to compensate for shortcomings, so my theory makes sense to me. I admit, I’d love to have natural self-confidence comparable to what stimulants provide.

To get back to jazz, Bix Beiderbecke was another superhuman talent. Seems like he could do absolutely anything except quit drinking. He didn’t consider himself a pianist; his instrument was the cornet. But I have a couple of his piano recordings–stuff he played on the spur of the moment, almost as a lark–and the things he did are like nothing anyone else was playing at that time. It’s like a fusion of Debussy and Thelonious Monk.

He was never able to get it together, and he drank himself to death before he turned thirty. Maybe some people are too talented and too creative to lead happy, successful lives. Maybe the human body can’t contain them.

As I listened and watched, I wondered why Christian music couldn’t have this kind of quality and creativity. It’s not as if musical creativity didn’t exist before jazz. Stuffy classical musicians killed it, out of ignorance and misplaced worship. In the times of Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin, a classical musician was required to improvise. It’s virtually forbidden now, but the greats used to sit and make up melody lines on the spot, just like jazz musicians do now. Liszt could take sheet music for an orchestra and play it on the piano, at sight, while making suggestions and criticisms as they occurred to him.

American popular music was pretty weak (Turkey in the Straw, heaven protect us) before jazz and the blues, and improvisation in classical music was essentially banned, so it’s no wonder most popular music, including the Christian variety, is second-rate. Why can’t a Christian pianist sit and improvise brilliantly during a worship service? No reason at all. They used to do it. Maybe blue notes and certain jazz rhythms would be somewhat out of place, but those things aren’t essential to spontaneous music.

I keep banging away at sight-reading. Yesterday I amazed myself by playing a triplet correctly, while staying in time. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before. I used to break measures into twelve beats and practice slowly, I think. I need to start journaling my progress, so I don’t get discouraged. I still can’t play anything, but I’m making substantial headway.

I should thaw out some tiny pork chops. I hate to miss out on a fine feed like that.

The Future is Ours

I had to skip piano practice on Friday because I was busy working on Haiti stuff for my church, but last night, I got back to work. I took out my book of Bach sinfonias and inventions and worked on sight-reading. It was remarkable. I went maybe an hour and a half, and it was not particularly tedious, and it got easier and easier as time passed. I did not make music by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt like something had broken loose and I was finally on my way.

This happens when you try to develop skills. I remember reaching a point in my physics studies where things started to flow. The variables seemed to move around on their own, instead of requiring me to push them. And when I used to play the guitar, I got to a point where my hands sometimes took off by themselves.

The only other skill in which I have this feeling is writing, and the breakthrough has become permanent, because I stuck with it. I write effortlessly now. I don’t think about it. It just appears on the screen. If I could get to the point where I could compose like that, it would be as great a gift as I could ask for. Writing is great, but it’s an extremely difficult skill to market, and unless you hit it big, you don’t touch many people or accomplish anything worthwhile. I’d get more satisfaction out of creating music. I can get words out of my head just fine. The music is still stuck in there.

I screwed up when I was studying physics, even though I had reached the point where I was working pretty fluently. I got burned out after several years of accelerated study, and I couldn’t catch myself no matter what I did. The people at the University of Texas could not have cared less. They didn’t want a troubled student inconveniencing them, so they gave me no help, and they waited for me to give up. I’m sure they were relieved when I quit.

I think I would have been fine had I listened to my own mind. I had found that the way to solve problems was to stop thinking and wait for the solutions to appear through creativity, not analysis. That was the most reliable thing I had going for me. Stop thinking, and wait. But I couldn’t make myself rely on it. It was too weird.

I’m wrong; that wasn’t the real answer. Ultimately, the problem was that I was away from God, so I had plenty of enemies but no help. I prayed, but I didn’t try to change my life fundamentally. So nothing happened. It was as though the ceiling were made of brass and the prayers bounced off of it.

What an idiot. I was in Texas; there were probably great churches all around me. But it didn’t occur to me that I needed to go in and recommit myself to God and get the help I needed.

God will let you flounder and suffer. Under some circumstances, he will let you die while you wander in confusion. You can’t always expect him to wipe your nose for you. I was in a mess because I had done something stupid. I knew better. I had no right to expect to be rescued.

People let me down, too. I’m sure there were people who were supposed to pray for me and reach out to me, but they blew it off. Fixing the world is our responsibility, even though God gives us the power to do it. Bad things happen because there aren’t enough of us on the job.

When I left my church in Miami before taking up physics, I didn’t get persistent calls, asking if I was okay. People didn’t come to see about me. The friends I had made didn’t bang on my door and ask to pray for me. Now that church doesn’t exist. No surprise. Church isn’t primarily about getting miracles and prosperity and growing a giant congregation and getting on TV. I think those are things too many charismatic churches focus on, and that was definitely the case when I was involved twenty years ago. Church is about seeking God’s face and doing what is right. My church wasn’t there for people who needed help, and God wasn’t there for my church. He let it dry up and vanish.

I blew it. My pastor blew it. The other members of the church blew it. I ended up wasting about eighteen years, and during that time, my mother got lung cancer, and my sister continued the smoking habit that eventually gave her lung cancer, and things went badly for my family.

I don’t condemn anyone. It seems like the body of Christ has been burdened with ignorance for about 1900 years–blinded like Samson–and things are still being restored. I know the people in my old church would have done the right things, had they been better informed. I sure would have. I can’t condemn them, when my own performance has been so bad.

Unity is important. Predators usually won’t plunge into cohesive herds. They look for animals that wander off on their own. It’s stupid to think the mission of a church is to build a big facility and get lots of video coverage for a fast-talking pastor who hawks dubious DVDs with his leering, comb-overed photo on the boxes. You look after the members first, and you try to do God’s will. A church is made of members, not bricks. Let Satan get at the members, and the church will fall.

The church I go to now does a better job of binding its members together. There are lots of prayer groups. There are activities and outreaches that get people together. It could be better (and I know it will be), but it beats what I’ve seen in the past.

Piano practice is going well. Lots of things are going well. I think things that have been taken from me in the past will be restored as time goes by. Maybe not everything, but many things. Then when my life is over, I’ll be free from the struggle forever. The vicious, parasitic spirits that torment us like horseflies seem powerful now, but they will be like ticks and worms compared to us, and they won’t be able to follow us where we’re going.

It’s a good deal. Freedom from persecution, and public execution for our enemies. You can’t beat that. We’ll be like Mordecai and Esther, living in safety and peace while Haman and his dead sons were publicly impaled on high poles.

Plus Pizza Ruminations

Tragedy is always with us. Back to lighter topics.

I had a big–HUGE–breakthrough last night while practicing the piano.

I recently decided to resume piano, but instead of trying to learn pieces, my only goal was to learn to sight-read fluently. If you can’t sight read (and you’re not a savant), you can’t truly understand music, and composing will be very tough. It will be like using the hunt-and-peck method to type a novel. That’s not the only reason I wanted to learn. My memory just isn’t good enough to allow me to store piano pieces over the long term. I was advised to learn to sight read in order to be develop the ability to play things I had learned in the past. The sheet music helps you over the rough spots.

For weeks, I’ve been using a boring sight-reading book for an hour a day. That’s all I could stand. I put in fifteen minutes of note reading with each hand, and I also did half an hour of timing training.

I got to the point where the book was frustrating. There was very little material in it, and I had a problem with the exercises getting into my memory. Once that happens, you’re not sight-reading. You’re playing from memory, so your sight-reading skills get no workout.

I moved on to a boring book of horrendous Bach pieces, plus a book of easy classics. That helped a lot, but I was frustrated because I wasn’t yet mixing note-reading with timing practice. When I practiced timing, I used the sight-reading book, which features a bunch of exercises using one “A” key for each hand. When I practiced note reading, I ignored the timing, because I couldn’t focus on timing and finger placement at the same time.

Last night I found some very simple pieces in my books, and I started putting the notes and timing together. It works. I played abominably, but I managed to get through the measures. I only used one hand, but it was still great progress. Now I don’t have to suffer with separate exercises for notes and timing, and what I play sort of resembles music, so it’s not as boring. It goes much faster, and it’s much more satisfying to do. And I’m not forced to rely on a training book. Instead of gritting my teeth and quitting the instant the timer rings, I enjoy this enough to go past an hour. That should make a gigantic difference in my progress.

I’d like to write some Christian music. The industry seems to be in a slump right now. It could use a shot in the arm. Maybe I could make a contribution. I ask God for his help all the time. I ask him to help me master music. It seems to be paying off. Whether or not I ever publish anything, at least I’ll be able to read music properly and write it without struggling. That’s a tremendous gift. I’m thrilled about it. Last night, in my head, I heard the wildest variation on Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy.” I’d love to put it in MIDI form, just for fun. Can’t do that if I can’t write music.

Christian music sounds dull, right? Wrong. Amazing Grace. Handel’s Messiah. Good Christian music appeals to everyone. Only the lame stuff is dull.

What else is going on? I still struggle with pizza. I flirted with cheddar for a while, but then I got some more Costco mozzarella, and I felt like a philanderer. That’s some cheese, that Costco cheese. Might be better if it had a little more sourness to it, but it’s just about perfect. Adding cheddar is just about pointless. I can use it straight.

The problem with that is that it affects the sauce. Mike advised me to use white vinegar in my tomato sauce, and it works, but recent pizzas lead me to suspect that the main reason the vinegar is necessary is the inadequacy of the cheese. When I use Costco cheese, I have to cut way back on the vinegar. Today I plan to make a pie with no vinegar at all. It’s not gluttony. It’s research. I am actually looking forward to eating something else for lunch. I love pizza and I want it constantly (even while I’m asleep), but even a small one makes it necessary for me to watch my intake for the rest of the day, and it makes my diet unbalanced.

Another odd thing: better cheese seems to reduce the need for sauce.

I’m thinking I might start making tiny pizzas with half a cup of flour, but here’s a funny fact: to test a recipe, you need a certain amount of food. One bite doesn’t tell you much. A 12″ pizza is about the minimum for a quality trial. If I halve the flour, I’ll end up with pizzas about 8 1/2″ in diameter, which is not too bad, but not optimal.

The dough is also on my mind. I’ve been using bread flour and no fat, and then I’ve been putting olive oil on the outside of the dough so it won’t crack when I toss it. But I had a lot of great biscuit-flour pizzas in the past, and I’m wondering if I should try it again, with the oil on the outside. Low-gluten biscuit flour tends to crack more easily than bread flour, so it may be a challenge.

Today I’m going to make a biscuit-flour pie with little or no vinegar in the sauce. I guess I’ll learn something.

It’s good that I exist to do all this testing. I think I’m bringing the world valuable information. Imagine having to do all this for yourselves.

To the best of my knowledge, pizza is the single hardest food to make well. I have never come across another culinary challenge that even came close. I suppose this is fitting, because pizza is the best food there is. Some would say it’s wrong to claim one food is better than all others. That it’s subjective. No; pizza is king. That is an absolute truth, predating the creation of the universe. If I denied it, my head would explode.

Where is Doc Severinsen?

Yesterday I read Conan O’Brien’s statement about leaving The Tonight Show, and I thought, “Wow, I admire his grit. These guys have no idea what they’re doing, and he’s absolutely right.” Then I thought, “Wait. Conan O’Brien hosts The Tonight Show? Jimmy Fallon has a show?”

I know Triumph the Comedy Insult Dog. That’s about all I can tell you about Conan O’Brien. Triumph’s performance with the Star Wars nerds was on a par with Olivier’s Hamlet. Maybe he should host the show.

I still won’t watch it.

Last night I wrote a piece repeating my contention that Bach is boring. Then I fired up Glenn Gould’s 1981 Goldberg Variations, to make sure I was being fair. As I heard the first few minutes, I thought, “Hey, this stuff is actually really good. I was way off base.”

Then fifteen minutes later I realized I had forgotten it was on, and I tried to listen again, and I said out loud, “I can’t take this stuff any more.” Apparently my brain had built a temporary shield to protect me from the boredom. I don’t think I suffered any real damage.

Doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly DOO.

My New Favorite Composer

I used to catch a lot of flak for saying I thought Bach was boring. That hasn’t happened in a while, so I thought I’d stir up the fuss again.

I’m working on sight-reading now, and it’s hard to find good material. I need stuff that’s repetitious and not too imaginative.

Hmm. What composer fits that description? I wonder. I wonder.

Oh, come on. You know it’s Bach. I just got out a book of his inventions and sinfonias, and it’s MADE for sight-reading practice. He repeats patterns over and over and over and over and over with little bumps up and down in pitch. I love it. It’s ten times better than my sight-reading book.

I just don’t understand what people see in this guy. Okay, sure, he wrote pieces with five voices in them. So what? Isn’t that pretty much what any choir director does, when he tells people to sing harmony? “Here’s the main melody. Here’s a high harmony part. Here’s a low harmony part. Now sing while I go to the coffee machine.” I’ll bet I could compose a piece with four or five voices tomorrow, and I know virtually nothing about music.

Bach’s notes are perfect for note-reading practice because they’re predictable yet too boring to memorize. The timing is perfect for timing practice, because it’s simple. Sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, sixteenth note, quarter note…just kidding; it’s a sixteenth note. Pretty wild stuff, J.S. Hey, they have a new thing called a DOTTED note. Some day you might want to try one. Maybe you can’t do them on the harpsichord.

My dad calls Bach “finger exercises.” I didn’t know how right he was.

I still maintain you can sing this to almost any Bach piece: “Doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly doo. Doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly doodly, doodly DOO.” Try it. It works. You may have to change the number of doodlys, but that’s about it.

Give me Chopin or Debussy any day. You never know what those guys are going to do next.

No; That Would be Crazy

This week at my prayer group’s Saturday meeting, I learned that our leader had suggested we keep journals. This is pretty funny, in my case. I’ve been blogging since late 2002. If you bound my Internet writing, it would be thousands of pages.

Nonetheless, it makes sense to keep a private journal. I would have a lot more freedom.

He said we should write down three goals every day. One for our church and two for other reasons which I forget. Because I didn’t write them down. Couldn’t find my pen, which was jammed down in the corner of the pocket of my George Bush chore coat. I have to email him and get him to repeat it.

Lists are great. You get things done when you make lists, provided you make an effort to do the things you write down. Three goals…that’s a list.

Back when I was Piano-Obsession Man, at the end of every day, as I lay in bed, I listed the musical accomplishments I had achieved that day. It was a great way to maintain motivation. Unfortunately, I eventually realized I could not remember piano pieces the way I used to remember pieces for guitar, banjo, and mandolin. I quit playing. It seemed pointless. Learn a piece, learn another piece, and forget the first piece, because I wasn’t practicing it. I had a two-tune repertoire because I couldn’t hold the pieces in my mind. I figured it was senility.

A while back, my second cousin (married to one of the finest classical trombonists) suggested I learn to sight-read, in order to compensate for the memory problems. Recently, I decided to give it a shot. I’m making progress. I think this is one of the things I could write about in the journal. It would be nice to be able to compare one week’s entries to those of an earlier week. I feel like I’m getting nowhere, but I know that’s because I haven’t documented the improvements.

Practice is strange. It breaks down into note reading and timing practice. Note practice is extremely tedious. I’m just figuring out which key to hit. I have to be at a keyboard for this, because I have to move my hands around. Timing practice is very different. I just have to hit one note, over and over, at the correct times. I don’t really need an instrument to do it. If I were pressed, I could do it in my head, holding the book in front of me while sitting in a chair.

Timing practice is less tedious, because the beat pulls me through it. I think it’s also the most important part of the venture. Timing is extremely complicated, and you have to be able to do it instantaneously. Notes…there are only nine on a staff. Surely note reading has to come together faster.

Today I realized I can now imagine musical measures in my head and hear the timing. Very odd. Maybe I can eventually practice my timing without piano or music. My head will be like the Matrix. More than it already is.

I have to figure out how to keep a journal in Microsoft Word, without losing my mind. Imagine keeping track of 365 documents per year.

Warding Off the Prince of Persia

I am trying to figure out what to do for the next 40 days.

Every year my church has a 40-day thing. You can fast for 40 days or make some other sacrifice during this time. You’re supposed to sign up. I was sick all week, so I forgot about it until I went to church on Sunday. They had a form to fill out, and there was no way I was going to come up with something during the service, so I held onto the form. I guess I can turn it in this weekend.

I decided to spend one hour in prayer every afternoon until February 12. That’s a good one. This illness has wrecked my prayer routine, and I am desperate to get it back in shape. Mid-day prayer is very powerful. But that still leaves the question of fasting.

I considered doing a “Daniel fast.” This means you cut out bread, flour, rice, meat, wine, sweets, and all beverages other than water, for 21 days. It was tempting at first, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds like a giant bummer. And I don’t have a lot of faith in partial fasts. I got fantastic results with a water-only fast this summer. I was relieved of some self-control issues, including a lifelong tendency to overeat. But would I get that kind of payback from a Daniel fast? Not sure.

I already have regular fasts built into the month. Maybe I should add one day a week.

Fasting with no particular goal seems like a dubious practice.

Maybe the prayer-hour thing is enough. You can make yourself crazy with unnecessary asceticism.

In my opinion, this stuff means nothing unless accompanied by prayer. Perry Stone seems to agree. He says that when you fast, you’re not supposed to lie around watching TV, waiting for the day to end. The point of the exercise is to enhance your communication with God, so I guess it should be obvious that the prayer part is more important than the fasting part.

Now that my illness is fading, I’m going to get back on track. I’ll be able to get up earlier and resume my morning prayer routine. That will set me up great for the afternoons.

My Fein Multimaster arrived. I have no idea what to do with it. It was really just a way of avoiding letting credit-card points expire. I should find an excuse to plunge-cut some holes in something.

I guess it was a reasonably smart buy. There is no way I would have spent actual money on this thing, so this is the only way I would ever have gotten one.

I’m taking a break from sight-reading practice. I think I finally figured out how to practice correctly. I should have listened to my piano teacher. He said he would open books of sheet music at random and just play. I tried software and sight-reading books instead. For the timing, the programs and books are fine, but they don’t work for note-reading. Why? Because they’re repetitious. Sight-reading is playing music at sight, which means “not by memory.” If you play a sight-reading exercise twice, the third time, your memory kicks in. That renders the exercise useless. You need a continuous supply of unmemorized material. That’s why random sheet music is better.

Boy, was I stupid. I didn’t understand the importance of what he was telling me. I don’t think he did, either. When you’ve always done something right, maybe it’s hard to guide people who do it wrong.

Memory doesn’t seem to interfere with timing practice. I guess it’s easier to memorize pitch patterns than time patterns.

If this works, I won’t have to break the piano up for kindling. I’ll be able to use it. That would be a dream come true. I am hoping God will help me become a competent musician so I can make use of my gifts. Wasted potential is an ugly thing. It would be a thrill to compose some decent songs. I’d love to be able to write music fluently instead of one note every five minutes.

I was insanely gifted at languages when I was a kid. I barely worked, but I won prizes. My college French instructor asked if I had lived in France. Then I got old and my memory weakened, and memory is a big part of it. If I can get my memory working halfway right again, I should regain a lot of my ability to learn symbolic systems. And music is a symbolic system, very much like a language. Maybe ability will trump old age to some extent. I seem to be picking sight-reading up pretty quickly now. Tonight I found myself skipping pieces because they were too simple. These were really easy pieces, but still.

I’m hitting the B1 and sleeping long hours and losing weight. I memorize psalms every day. I can’t think of anything else that might help, except for gingko biloba, and I’m afraid to take it because I have no idea what it does.

You can’t cry about lost opportunities. You have to strengthen what remains and keep moving. I managed to do a good job of maximizing my writing ability. That’s worth something. A lot of people would be happy to do one thing well. Maybe some day I can find a young person who is wasting his talents, and I can kick him in the rear end until he realizes what he has. If you can’t be a success, you can be a warning to others.

I make a great cheesecake. When I question my self-worth, I can always remember that. And maybe music will still pay off.

Bedeviled by Sean Connery’s Catchy Mantra

Here’s a near-paradox. I love sleep, but I hate rest.

I felt pretty cruddy when I got up today, so I decided to do two things: rest, and stay warm. I think it was a mistake to be active yesterday. And the hotter I get, the better I feel. Except for smelling and sticking to things.

What do you do when you rest? I hate lying around watching TV. I don’t have enough character to do something productive while I rest. This is one of those times when the Internet is actually good for something.

What can I blog about? Here’s something fun. I never, ever redeem my credit card points, and they keep expiring. The stuff you can buy with them is usually not very interesting, so I forget to redeem them, and I lose them.

This year I decided to redeem them for a Sears gift certificate and see what I could find. I decided to get a Fein Multimaster.

This is one of those tools no amateur buys for himself, because they’re insanely expensive for what you get. But when you have a pile of old credit card points and nothing else to do with them, putting them toward the price of a Multimaster seems almost justifiable. It beats not using the points at all.

I have no use for it, as far as I know. Detail sanding, I guess. Cutting things in awkward spaces. That’s about it. I think it’s one of those tools that come into play at random moments, when nothing else works. Like a Dremel.

Maybe I should go lie on my back and listen to religious CDs. I actually enjoy that. If you’ve never had an experience you considered supernatural, this kind of thing can be boring or silly, but when you’ve seen a few kooky things, it’s comforting to hear other people talk about their own manifestations.

What else can I do? No cooking. I’ve gained two pounds. Was it the holidays? Partly. Mainly, I’ve been eating too much because I feel sorry for myself. If I can’t do anything or go anywhere, I should at least be able to eat ice cream, right? That was my line of reasoning. But I am not willing to gain weight, so I had to quit.

I could practice sight-reading, which is like studying Harry Reid speeches while eating liver and waiting in line to have your driver’s license renewed. I’ve decided I’m going to do one of two things: learn to sight-read and give keyboards another chance, or give up the whole keyboard dream. A cousin of mine is married to a famous trombone virtuoso, and she suggested sight-reading as a way of compensating for my deteriorating musical memory. Can’t hurt to try. If I can make myself do it, I might at least be able to compose efficiently, even if I never become a good pianist. Composing was my original goal.

I’m working on improving my memory. I memorize scripture and I am fanatical in my efforts to get enough sleep. And I’m losing weight. I have this idea that being fat is bad for the brain. I’m also taking B1 again.

God gave me a big pile of gifts, and so far, my biggest achievement has been creating the world’s best cheesecake. I realize that’s a major feat which, on its own legs, justifies my elevation to sainthood. But I can’t help thinking I should be accomplishing more. “Cheesecake” makes for a short resume. I hear such beautiful music in my head; surely I was intended to write some of it down.

Christian music was great for a few years, but it seems to be in a slump. Some of the songs they play at my church are so monotonous, you wonder why anyone bothered paying for the copyright registration. If I wrote a song like that, I’d delete it from my hard drive without telling anyone. Christians ought to have quality music again. We don’t want to spend eternity busing performers in from hell whenever we have a party.

I could practice. Or I could go look at YTMND.com for six hours.

That Felt Wrong

In an earlier post, I referred to a problem that made it impossible for me to drive to church, and I said there had to be a blessing in it. And I was right, so I’m going to blog it.

There was some kind of screwup with my insurance confirmation when I renewed my car tag this year. I didn’t find out about it until two months later. I couldn’t drive until I cleared it up.

I attacked the issue about nine different ways, faxing, calling, and emailing person who could conceivably help, in Tallahassee and also at the company that insures me. I was a bit crabby about it, although I did try to stifle it. You know how motor vehicle departments are. Draconian and perpetually wrong. And when they do wrong, sometimes you’re the one who gets punished.

Today a lady at the department called and said there was inaccurate information in my record. I’ve had a chronic problem with my car insurance failing to register in the records in Tallahassee, and judging from this lady’s remarks, the problem was worse than I knew. Even though I had cleared it up over and over, there were erroneous records of suspensions. This can affect the price you pay for insurance, and your ability to change companies. Knowing the incompetence of the credit bureaus, I would not be surprised if it can affect credit ratings.

I had my insurer fax the government approximately a ton of documents today, and soon this incredible nonsense will be off my record. I was inconvenienced for a couple of days, but something good came of it.

I should not have been grumpy with the government people. It serves no purpose, and in the end, they did much more for me than they had to. I always try to remember to be nice to low-level people who have to answer for problems they didn’t cause and/or can’t fix, but I fail sometimes, and it’s an ugly thing to do. Other people in my family have this habit, to a much worse degree than I do, and I am very aware of the pointless suffering it causes.

I was furious about this, but it looks like God’s hand was in it. So maybe I was angry at other human beings over something God put in motion to help me. That’s not good. That was stupid.

My life used to be under a curse. I don’t care how crazy I sound when I say that. It’s true. Things went wrong over and over, even when I did my best and deserved better. This insurance problem is a great example of the kind of thing that happened to me. I didn’t even know it had happened, and I had done everything right, and it should never have occurred. But there it was, waiting to jump out and bite me in the future.

These days I see the curses rising off my life. My existence is not like it used to be. It’s hard to get used to it–hard to trust it–because I’m so accustomed to being blindsided. I’ve done plenty of stupid things in my life, and I’ve caused problems for myself, but many, many things have gone wrong when the facts said they should go right. Not just little things. Important things.

According to what I have been taught, virtually anyone can receive salvation without a great deal of effort. But getting God to bless you in this life is another matter. You have to change what you do and what you think. Works and feelings are important. And you have to look back at your family and see the things your predecessors and contemporaries have done wrong, because in doing so, you will see that you do some of the same things, even if you don’t realize it. You have to repent. You have to ask to have curses removed. You can’t just sit in a pew once a week and expect things to be okay. That is my belief.

This is one reason Jesus told us to consider our own faults when rebuking others. It’s not that it’s wrong to point out other people’s failings. We’re required to do that sometimes. When we don’t tell people they’re doing wrong, and they continue, we share their guilt. The bigger point is that when you examine yourself, you find things you can repair, and if you do, you will be blessed. More and more, when I pray for other people to realize what they’re doing wrong and stop doing it, I find myself saying, “While you’re at it, please give me a dose of the same medicine.” I think that it you can’t ask God to give you what you ask him to give others, you are usually asking for the wrong thing.

This weekend I read about the story of Cornelius, in Acts 10. He was a Roman centurion. He worked for an empire that did a great deal of evil, including oppression, wholesale murder, and torture. He was a Gentile. But God noticed him because he prayed regularly and was generous to the Jewish poor. An angel came to him and told him as much. And he and members of his household became converts to Christianity without the usual Judaic background,and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. You can’t earn your place in God’s kingdom, but how you live and what you do still matters a great deal. You can attract curses and blessings. And if your ancestors attracted curses, you can expect some of them to befall you as well. People dispute this all the time, but the Bible is packed with examples, and so is my life, and I have seen it in the lives of others. They don’t just fall off the first time you enter a church. You have to put out an effort. When you do, the curses become gifts. The effort of working to undo them improves you and gives you power.

I am free to drive now. I might take the Harley out just because I can.

By the way, I started practicing the piano again. I quit because my memory was not adequate to allow me to remember the pieces I learned. That may have been caused by sleep deprivation, and now I sleep better. It may just be another example of something going wrong in spite of my own best efforts. It was exactly like many other failures I’ve experienced. Whatever the explanation is, my life is different now, so I’m giving it another shot. I’m going to practice sight-reading and nothing else. It’s supposed to be the best way to compensate for memory problems, and you can’t really understand music without it. We’ll see what happens.

Yesterday I bought a tin whistle, after listening to the Uillean pipes. I could not help myself.

Pour Yourself a Shot and Listen

My dad forwarded one of those Powerpoint inspirational things to me today. Very nice nature photos, backed by a Uillean pipe solo. If you are not familiar with Uillean pipes, the best way to describe them is “the kind of bagpipes that don’t sound like a bunch of cats trying to claw their way out of a hot oven.” Depending on which web source you check, “Uillean” is pronounced “illan” or “illyan.”

Found a nice Youtube for you. This is one of those instruments that make you want to run out and buy one the first time you hear it. Check it out.

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Cheaper way into the same type of music: the Irish tin whistle.

Worse Than Herpes

Thanks to a Youtube video with a certain song in the soundtrack, I now have “Bumble Boogie” stuck in my brain.

AND YOU MUST SUFFER WITH ME.

This is the original, which is pretty simple, but it’s much better than the Liberace version. Maybe old gay Polish classical musicians aren’t the best choices to express the boogie feel.

Check out the Jools Holland versions on Youtube.

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Albert Ammons (L) and Pete Johnson (R) play “Boogie Woogie Dream.” Pete Johnson was the best boogie woogie piano player who ever lived.

Back to Finale

A few years back, when I first got interesting in writing music, I got a program called Allegro, which was the wimpy version of a program called Finale, which was a piece of composing software. I could not make heads or tails of it. Everyone on the web said Sibelius was the way to go, so I tried that, and it was not fun. When I sat down with the computer keyboard, the MIDI keyboard, and the manual, I was able to use it, but it was counterintuitive, and after a certain amount of time away, I forgot everything I had learned.

Today I decided to check out another Finale product: Finale Songwriter 2007. They have a fully functional demo you can try. It takes a month to download, but once it’s set up, it seems to work extremely well. It appears to be a very easy-to-use notation scratchpad, with MIDI playback and printing. Hard to complain about that. I have seen comments about it, saying it’s hard to do musically sophisticated things with it, but if you can print with it, presumably you can then scan the music into a more complex program.

Seems like a good choice so far.

Sibelius = Ulcers

I am totally determined to write some music. I have never been able to make much sense of Sibelius, but then I didn’t really try all that hard. I have moved it back to this computer, and I’m going to give it another shot. I’ll have to get the manual out. It’s like 9000 pages long.

I was probably stupid to buy Sibelius. The reviews said “Intuitive!”, and I believed them. There is nothing intuitive about it. Computer users don’t start with notation software. They start with word processors. Therefore the people who write notation software should fix their programs so they work like Word. Things like cut and paste should be available, and you should be able to put a cursor wherever you want and enter a note or a rest. Sibelius isn’t like that. It won’t let you copy notes at random and paste them where you want them; you can only put them where Sibelius thinks they fit. You can’t put more notes in a measure than it will hold, with the intention of removing the extra notes later. You can’t easily copy a measure and paste the copy where you want. You have to learn a bunch of weird rules that are hard to remember because they go against common sense.

I’m sure that if I used Sibelius every day for eight hours, at the end of a week, I’d be able to use it, but the pain of the first two or three days is pretty bad.

I used to have a cheap program called Rhapsody, and it was easy to use. As I recall, you could pretty much put notes where you wanted them. There must be something else like that out there. I used Rhapsody to create this soon-to-be-Grammy-nominated piece of music:

loobner4

I realize this is the most annoying non-Kenny-G. song ever written, but I had a reason for writing variations on it.

If I could write music that simple and add lyrics, I’d be thrilled. Maybe Sibelius is too big. I think you can use it to create orchestral scores.

I’m going to root around on the web and make sure there’s no better software out there, and then I’m going to get to work. I can’t take this any more. I have to make this work before my head explodes.

No Bells Ringing

Yesterday while I was at church, the pastor dealt with a very serious climate-related topic. I refer to the murderous cold snap South Florida is currently enduring. He said we were somehow managing to hold on, even though it was a couple of degrees below seventy.

I got up today at 5:30, and it was 58 degrees here. This was even colder than Sunday. It looks like we’re headed for a solid work week with lows under 60. What a relief. I can get some things done, without filling my shoes with sweat.

I’m all excited because I got to wear pants and shoes. I put on jeans and my Danner work boots before I checked on the fruit trees this morning, and I even got to wear my Carhartt chore coat.

I hate cold weather. I hate ugly cold weather, in particular. Clean, fluffy snow with sunshine is not so bad. Grey snow, brown mud, and clouds…you can have it. My mother always said Kentucky was brown for most of the year. She did not miss that. My father said his outlook improved as soon as he got to Florida, because the sun was brighter.

When I lived in New York (as part of the same Columbia class as the Astroturf Messiah), I did not think much of the weather. It was just as brown as Kentucky, but it was a little colder, and the wind was nasty. On top of this, it somehow managed to rain when the temperature was below 32 degrees. Nobody believes me when I say that, but I remember it, so leave me alone. I also remember feeling the wind coming at me directly from the sides of buildings. I can’t figure that out to this day.

I heard from my college friend Dave last week. He said his friends (mostly liberal and/or gay) could not believe he didn’t remember going to school with Obama. I can’t believe the insane expectations and impressions this unremarkable man generates in the minds of the herd. I guess Dave’s gay and female friends have the hots for B. Hussein, and the straight ones have man-crushes. We went to school with lots of other people who, like Obama, were very ordinary; why is it no one expects us to remember them? Obama was a cipher in college. He had to transfer in order to get in, even with heavy-handed Ivy League affirmative action. It’s not like he had a halo.

I remember Stephanopoulos because he lived across the hall and was very small. He was also at the top of our class; Dave told me that. Obama? No clue. He was invisible.

I told Dave the reason we didn’t remember Obama was probably his self-proclaimed aversion to white people. In his book, he talked about his hostility to Caucasians. He probably stayed in his room, muttering about how he wanted to punch all of us. I don’t know why a person who got so much help from Caucasians would be so angry at them. I wish I had had people of other races, scrambling to pay my bills and make me succeed.

Dave is a gay conservative. He must be real popular.

I am moving Sibelius to my main PC today. Yesterday, while leaving church, I heard a wonderful song in my head, and of course, I forgot it. This morning, it came back. That never happens. I am going to try to capture it.

I can write music via trial and error, but I still don’t understand what I’m doing. For one thing, I don’t know how you look at a piece of music and figure out which chords go with the measures. Maybe it will come to me.

I’m concerned that I may end up writing something somebody else has already written. You never know what is stuck in your unconscious mind.

The odd thing about writing music is that it’s easier for me to come up with tunes than lyrics. Go figure. I write all day; you would think the lyrics would be a cinch.

It would be pretty sweet, if I could get something published. Making money while doing something useful would be a dream come true.

Sad News

Jerry Reed is dead.

I am going to be up-front and admit that I never bought his albums, but I really enjoyed his acting. He was wonderful in The Survivors. And he was one of those celebrities you just can’t help but like.

I have a cousin who is probably mourning tonight.

Here is proof that the man could play the guitar:

Damn cigarettes.