It's so silly. I ought to be ashamed of myself. I can be so dense, so obtuse in the way I get things into my brain it's embarrassing. Sometime i think that's why I live by myself, so nobody can witness what an idiot I can be about some things.

I found this ear-training program crafted especially for the Mac that officially goes by the title of aural skills training. It's called Aquallegro and I like it very much. It boots up quick and works exactly like it was designed to. The author, Andy Van Ness, doesn't call the various parts of the program exercises. He calls them tests. That makes sense to me, but I don't care one way or the other. I do test my knowledge of whatever the part of the program I'm using. The part I've used most, and get the most satisfaction of, so far, shows a note on a musical staff, either treble or bass clef, and then I'm required to click on the correct piano key to indicate my answer to Van Ness' "test".

Today I got my digital keyboard hooked up to my computer via USB. Now I can either play my keyboard to indicate the answer or click on the dynamic image of a keyboard that comes with Aquallegro. If I play or click on the correct piano key, then a dialogue box pops up and tells me I am correct. The Preferences of the program let me set how many guesses I get on each test of my keyboard acuity. At first I set it to five guesses, but that was just too much slack, so I changed it to three.

One of the goals I have by using this program is to overcome the hesitancy, and downright lack of confidence in naming the written note and putting my finger on the right key to pass the test. When I'm on a roll I'm doing about ten or twenty of these tests a minute. I don't use my digital keyboard because it's a little distracting to reach awkwardly to my left to strike the keys. I use the mouse to click on the virtual keyboard on my monitor screen.

I get fascinated by how slow and awkward this is for me. It's been a lifelong problem. I have a hard enough time spelling out the name and keyboard location of one single note on a musical staff, much less have any success instantly reading a four-note chord at a glance.

That's how I think I'll know I'm making some progress with sight-reading. When my practicing gets me to the point when I can start recognizing the elements of fairly easy chords in a nice, easy tempo.

I spent about an hour and a half this afternoon working this exercise/test, I got better as I settled into it. The idea of being able to read the chords on that twelve bar blues sequence I posted a link to the other day just a little quicker would mean a great deal to me. I messed with it an hour or more yesterday just trying to figure out the notes for both hands. By the time I got one chord figured out, and went to the next one, I forgot the notes of the previous chord.

It's my highly disregardable opinion that the feedback I get from Aquallegro is gonna get me there one day. It's the craziest thing. I can't get it through my head that each note on the staff means I'm supposed to strike a very specific key on the keyboard. My befuddlement has always been about the location of a note like C. There are a lotta Cs on an 88-key keyboard.

The software program displays a musical staff with either a treble or bass clef sign on it, and one note. It's always confused me to see all those additional lines on top or beneath the two clefs. I had to spell out the lines and spaces one by one to figure this out. it has been driving me nuts. But with the feedback I'm getting from these tests lets me know immediately if I guess right, and it's starting to look like my guessing is less and less of a guess.

The most helpful image I've encountered in working this aural skills program is that on the virtual keyboard located immediately under the staff where the problems appear, middle C is labeled C4. I don't have a piano teacher, how the hell would I know that?

Knowing Middle C is labeled C4 helps because when i miss the answer (after three guesses) a dialogue box pops up and tells me I've run outta guesses and the correct answer. Like Bb5. or C#2. I began to figure it out. those numbers indicated the notes in between the octaves of C on the keyboard. Bb5 is in the octave above Middle C, and C#2 is two octaves below Middle C.

It's still dawning on me that every note on the staff indicates a specific key on the keyboard. Some times when I get the Correct! dialogue box (which also indicates the octave above and below Middle C the note is located), I get tickled because i find myself astounded that such is so. This might be simpler than I thought. All I gotta do is figure out which note on the staff indicates which key on the keyboard to strike, and I'll be able to make sense outta what's written on a sheet of paper. Oh, the wonders of the sensory dimension!

Nobody can tell me these things. I won't listen. I just hate it, but i gotta face facts. I've been listening to people try to explain this stuff to me for at least sixty years. If telling me anything worked, even in the slightest degree, such success oughta have shown up by now. I have to discover how things work for myself through repetition and redundancy. Don't even imagine I don't know how stupid this makes me look.

If learning how to read and write music came easy to me I coulda been a contendah. I actually was a contender when I was younger because i could play music by heart and wrote my own songs to sing and play as I traveled on my thumb around the country, but i couldn't play with anybody else because i couldn't hear them telling me what I needed to do next to fit in. I wouldn't listen. I had my own way, and I didn't even know what it was. What a drag, man.

I honestly don't ever expect to be able to sit down at a keyboard, put a piece of sheet music I've never seen before in front of me, and expect to just rip it off like reading War and Peace in a couple of hours. I never expect to comprehend what's on the written page fast enough to play it even fairly well in real time. But, if i could figure it out after a coupla days of trying real hard, that would be wonderful.

The major and minor scales are coming along pretty good. They're not pretty or flowing yet, but I've memorized all of them now and have the fingering about figured out, so it's time to move on a little. I found an example of the twelve bar blues in the key of F that I started working on memorizing.

http://www.apassion4jazz.net/blues2.html

I can't write anything down on the music on the web site, and it's a photographic type file anyway. Even if I copied it and put it on my desktop, I can't separate the photograph of the sheet music into bite-sized parts, so i copied it to the empty staff booklet I bought for such purposes. It's quicker to spell it out by hand than to go through all the changes it would take to make it useful to me. Besides, I don't know how. I'm a great believer in copying stuff in order to memorize it. Works for me. I really copied it so I could use a pencil to label the notes in the chords if I want to. That's kind of cheating and probably not helping me to learn to sight read, but I'm a novice, a hobbyist, and I'm hoping that will come in time.

It's strange for me to think of people not having to learn how to write their native language by hand. It seems inevitable that it'll come to that. i hardly ever take pen in hand anymore myself. If learning to print and write cursive becomes passe, it'll be fine, but writing things by hand has been an exotic art form for centuries. Up until now, practically anybody who learned to read and write used a primitive form of calligraphy. That's all there was for millennia. Damned printing press!

It may seem like strange behavior to some people, but I copied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes with each hand on one boring job. Twice. Then I copied it on two separate legal pads using both hands simultaneously. That's so last century! Copying is like a sort of meditation for me. This is what makes me think I'm struck with the Asperger's Syndrome thingie. I seem to need something to concentrate on persistently or i can get edgy and hard to get along with. If you interrupt me and break my concentration when I'm performing a chore that can't be bought for love nor money, that can lead to distress. If you're important to me, I take all the time required to lay it out as plain as day. When i get that way, don't rock the boat. Kick back and wait until I regain the beta state and I'll make you glad you did.

There is this focus thing that can't be bought and paid for by either love or money. People just won't do it. It takes more than they're willing to give. The guy I got this description from is now on trial for murder. Reiser. This guy created a file system for computers that's used as the default file system for the Linux Operating System. He has an interesting Bio. The situation which caused him to describe not being able to hire people to do certain types of bug fixing in his file system showed up in his blog. Tracing the bugs in this file system was so persnickety that he couldn't get anybody to help him. His hired help could only take it so far, and then he had to do the final analysis by himself.

For some reason this makes perfect sense to me. I think it's pretty much true for anybody who has a project that only upsurges into manifestation... because it's their baby. People can't get that pedantic about details unless it's their baby, and nobody else feels that strongly about it being done right. Especially something like an operating system's file organizer. As Reisner said himself, it doesn't make any sense to have a buggy file system.

I've watched this happen with a person who has that sort of ability to focus and get things done for a long time because what he's working on is his baby. He paid a lotta money to get professional help to make things work right with his baby. But there was only so much the other can do when they're only doing what they're doing to bring home the bacon. What he was paying them to do could only go so far, and then, because it was his baby, he buckled down and took the extra step that couldn't be bought for love nor money.

I used to think what I said had to mean something. That what I communicated to other people represented my side of a participatory process that led to some logical end point. What a fool I've been. It doesn't seem to matter about what I say or write presently. It hardly makes any sense to anybody but me. Nobody knows. They can only project what they might mean themselves if they said or wrote the same words I did. Whoever reads or listens to what I put out there to amuse myself is going to interpret and make it into their own version of reality, and I'm quite helpless to do anything about them doing that. Why would I bother to look for reasons to exact blame? How can either one or the other be blamed for something that has no me-and-thee-ing? I interpret everything I experience sensorially myself, to mean what i thing the data means, no matter how it rat-a-tat-tats on my aged modalities. I see and feel and hear and smell exactly what I filter for. I'd bet good money most everyone else does too. And I did just that according to the dictates of the rules of conscience I adopted to make myself into the kind of person I most admired in the other.

The thing about this blues song, like Adam's Apple, is that it measures out to twelve bars exactly, and some blues and jazz songs don't. Fine with me, it's just that I want to get the twelve bar sequence down pat in a bunch of different keys to sort of spread the wealth. Since I've been working on the scales so much, I've practically forgotten the chords I learned for Adam's Apple, but it won't take long to bring it up to snuff.

Buying this Yamaha keyboard was important to me even thought it was a real hit on my budget. This keyboard is probably the cheapest one Yamaha makes that has the weighted keys. There are a lot of choices one can make, and maybe on down the road I'll explore those options more, but right now what interests me is the one black button that's labeled Portable Grand, and the drum machine that's actually about as much use to me as an elaborate metronome. There's a metronome too, but i like the drum machine as a tempo reference for right now.

The reason I like that Portable Grand button is that when I punch on it I get Yamaha's best imitation of their acoustic grand piano, and it sounds really swell. There are all this other settings and other instrument samples I can choose among, and there are so many I get confused about how to get back to the grand piano patches, and that black button goes straight to it from anywhere.

The link I provided above also has a page with a chord generator that has most of the scales and chords I'll ever run into. I've been using those charts to practice the pentatonic scales in all twelve keys. I don't think its something I'm gonna have to memorize so much as be able to recognize where I need to go in each key to play the melody line for the blues. It's much more cut and dried than I ever thought it would be, and finding it by hunting and pecking isn't that difficult at all.

I feel like I'm learning right much about the various relationships between the various keys just by playing the scales. The major scales all sound alike, but in different keys. My fingers are beginning to understand this better than my conscious efforts can keep up with. I figured this might eventually happen from my experience playing other musical instruments. The redundancy and repetition of playing or practicing something daily pays off in mysterious ways.

I don't think I'm gonna be happy until I learn more about the theory of chord progressions. Sure, I can figure out the chords like in the twelve bar blues chords linked above, but I wanna know why one thing follows the other better. I know that memorizing that particular song will help me have something I can play about any time, but I don't wanna be stuck to how somebody else puts chords together when I can learn enough about how chords progress one to the next and decide for myself what's what.

I enjoyed watching the James Taylor special on PBS tonight. He was singing "Steamroller" and since my keyboard was right there beside me, I tried to figure out what key he was playing in. I was surprised I found it right off. Bb using the pentatonic blues scale as the melody line.

I've been practicing the pentatonic blues scales recently. I've stated previously that there I could sing the blues, but found it impossible to keep up instrumentally. Something was missing for me. I didn't know for sure what it was. I kept guessing whether it was this or that, but it turned out to be my ignorance of the blues scales.

For some reason I couldn't fathom the integrity of something that skipped that many notes in the chromatic arrangement of things. I still don't get it that well, but at least when I'm trying to play along with recorded stuff, the blues scale aligns with all the familiar riffs like ringing a bell. I'm thinking the several songs I wrote with the intention of them sounding bluesy can be reworked without much trouble at all.

I changed practicing on my keyboard from doing it in the morning until night. At first I didn't understand it, but i do now. It fills a void. At night i find it difficult to entertain myself out here in the woods by myself. I used to watch some television, but then I noticed that basically my "television viewing" amounted to no more than the set being turned on with the mute button on most of the time. To face the television set I have to turn completely around from facing my computer, and most of the time I don't bother.

Practicing the scales after eight o'clock at night works out well for me. In the interim between sessions of playing, I can listen to the neighborhood dogs bark and get as much out of it as watching the most acclaimed television programs.

Learning to play the major and minor scales on the piano keyboard was always something i thought would be THE one thing i could do to help myself musically. I never learned the scales, and my not doing something i thought would be real good for me seemed atypical for me. That wasn't enough to push me toward doing right by myself.

I don't have to use artifices to play the major and minor scales now. It's still a tedious thing for me to do. I'm slow as mud at it, but I'm fairly persistent at doing it every day. I know from experience that if I continue to apply myself they'll come around. It probably won't be long before I start learning how to play appegios. it's just something to do. Like having something to say when silence becomes awkward.

The idea of learning to play the scales was based on the idea that if I learned to do that, the doing of it would open the door for me to understand musical relationships I might not be able to understand except through collective intuition.

I think about my parents more frequently now. Especially today. My middle daughter wrote me and said she was planning to get married in August, and that she hoped I would travel out to Washington state to witness this occasion. She added that she had talked over the possibility of me coming out there in person with her mother and her sister, and they thought that would be okay.

This was a shock to my system. I haven't seen any of these people since 1982 and I never expected to see them again in this life time. I guess I'd given up hope even though I am their father, and the only man their mother will ever love. I had to go for a long walk back in the woods by myself so nobody would see the reaction the very thought of it evoked. It didn't work out like i'd hoped. My other sister-in-law came by on her Tennessee walking horse, and I had to wave her on by without talking. I guess that was fine with her. She probably had her own reason for being there.

Maybe that's why I thought of my parents this afternoon. When I grew up my family didn't own enough land to take long walks in the woods we owned. It probably doesn't mean as much to me as it would to someone who was born into it. My parents gifts to me only makes me realize I don't have anything to give to my own children except what I was given, and they don't seem to want anything to do with that. I have to assume they're independently wealthy.

I'm not much use to anybody because I've been so selfish all my life. The truth is that i got nothing to be selfish about. I seem to have made sure of that. The people who miraculously have anything to do with me at all seem to value my presence in their lives. i don't know why, except that i always take time for them, and don't claim their time in return. I'm pretty used to that.

I was talking with my friend at the cafe the other day when she stopped by the booth I occupied to chat for a moment. In time our conversation came around to massages. Her rich boyfriend had bought her a number of appointments to get a massage at the health spa she goes too. She asked me if I liked getting massages.

I described how I had learned how to give massages by getting them in Japan while i was in the Navy, and that the people I had given massages to seemed to think I did a pretty good job relaxing them and helping them to release the tension they held in their bodies. She asked me if i still gave people massages. I replied that I didn't. She asked me why not, and I told her because i was an adherent of the Golden Rule. In this capacity I did unto others what I wanted them to do to me, but they never did. I began to feel like a fool for even trying.

That is not the real reason. The real reason I don't give people massages any more is because there is no one I am personally close enough with enough presently to , touch that intimately, and there hasn't been for a long time. My alloneness seems so odd considering how touchy feely I've been in the past.

In the past, I considered keeping significant others in my life as comfortable as I could, to be a sort of duty of mine toward them. A backasswards duty to myself as it were. All for naught. I guess I was too eager to please. Showing gratitude might have seemed passe. There was probably no way to pay me back tit for tat, so why try? That's how it goes with desperadoes possessed by a fear of abandonment. Maybe she felt obligated to offer me the nothingness I expected in return.

Maybe it's not so much that I'm not lovable as much as it is that I'm so self-contained and sufficient unto myself. I was raised to be poor and to do everything for myself by myself. I don't wait for other people to love me if loving is what i need to make it through some edgy situation. I go ahead and provide myself with what needs to be there. By the time some other realizes they could have been more useful to me in return, I'm not able to respond to their belated ministrations with undying gratitude, and get treated like a jerk for my troubles. No blame.

Whoever I was or thought I could have been in this particular lifetime died in 1982. She stopped loving me when I turned out to be all too human. No blame. I don't know if I'm capable of bringing whoever that fool was back into ex-is-tense for the sake of our now very adult, but still innocent victims.

Music as a "rote motor skill" seems like an apt manner of describing how the non-thetic mind (as I describe it) works. It seems eager to please the other, and doesn't seem convinced it particularly matters if it occasionally makes "mistakes" if it's part of what it takes to find a rewarding flow, and/or causes the tip jar to be filled to overflowing. Who cares? Right? It's the end result that counts.

The non-thetic mind is a little like a woman who, for whatever reason, likes (or aches for) a bit of pain to get her over the hump when push comes to shove. This brings the Golden Rule into play. If she thinks you're the kind of man who will slap her around a little when she needs it to get off, then 'when she wants to' get off, she's gonna do unto you what she wants done unto her, and so she beats you up in order to make you hurt her. Harmony through conflict or a lemming-like suicide pact?

The thetic mind might appear to be over the top when it's need to control every aspect of a musical presentation with such persnickety precision that the players come to expect to be rewarded for their technical prowess instead of moving their listener's hearts. I suspect it's the thetic or theoretical turn of mind that learns from the feedback the non-thetic consciousness generates through sheer, animalistic enthusiasm. Wisdom strengthens while impulsiveness wanes, until one day neither seems enough, and then "nobody knows you when you're down and out. Brother, can you spare a dime."

To me, it's what the thetic mind learns from the feedback generated initially by the intuitive awareness of the non-thetic mind that matters in the specious present, but later, even the added value of that wisdom doesn't matter so much, because the youthful enthusiasm that generated and supports the results of that initial feedback plays out the sa-me way of all earthly things, dust unto dust.

Do you suppose a coherent relationship exists between the rustic saying, "You gotta make hay while the sun shines", and Shakespeare's advice to "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." I try to balance believing the temptations of the future will eventually absolve the guilt of my sordid past by eating wot's sot before me right damned now.