It rained all morning off and on. It was a "good" rain because it fell soft and often. As dry as it's been there wasn't a lot of runoff. I don't wanna listen to the weather reports for a few days. They're gonna be real practical and remind everybody we need a lot more to make up for what's not there. Some daring fellow dared to allow that the only way this drought could be ended would be to have a couple of good hurricanes. That wasn't so brave a prophecy. The natives have known for generations that we depend on the rain from tropical storms and hurricanes to farm around here. Much less maintain golf courses and lawns galore. If I were a young man I might start a business to build cisterns for people to save the water that runs off the roofs of their houses. If the ban on using sprinklers continues, people gone get the water for their plants anyway they can. They will have to have cisterns to store the black market water they'll pay for to have brought in secretly in fake automobile gas tanks like back in the bootlegging days. Water is the new oil.

I find myself in a sort of quandary about how to practice scales on the keyboard. I'm wanting a routine I can live with. A group of habits I keep melding together to grant myself my best hope for squeezing what I can out of repetition and redundancy. I've been doing some research on the internet to see if I can find a ready-made routine that appeals to me. I don't feel the necessity to reinvent the wheel.

Encountering the notion that there are several kinds of minor keys is a little disconcerting. I just didn't expect it. I only thought there were major keys and minor keys. I think there are just one kind of major key. It's when the minor keys come along that things get kinky. None of the different types of minor scales I've run into require changing much from the natural minor scale. Just a half step here and there. I don't know whether to practice all the various types and modes as I go through the Circle of Fifths or to practice the various types of minor keys and modes as part of the routine I use to practice the major and minor keys.

It doesn't really matter right now. I've barely memorized how to play the major and minor scales with the correct fingering patterns. I could practice just those scales for months and not perfect them. My seeking a practice routine that does what I want it to doesn't have to be all that lucid presently. I'm reading some articles from this online jazz book:

http://www.outsideshore.com/primer/primer/index.html

I don't know anything about the author other than the fact that his book is online and available free of charge. He offers it for sell if there on the site if you want a hardback copy. He is fairly easy to read. Even though I don't know what he's describing a lot of the time, I appear to get something from reading his opinions each time I dial in. The link above has the Table of Contents of his book if you scroll down. I read the content haphazardly. Whenever I'm in the mood I go there, click on some article or the other and just read for a while.

When I went to the grocery store this afternoon I made uncomplimentary remarks to a group of people who stood around in the middle of an aisle without thinking about other people (me), and I deliberately spoke loud when I asked them to please allow me to pass. Some shuffled out of the way indifferently. Some barely complied but with a sullen attitude, and others were embarrassed to think they had been impolite and slipped away.

As I passed through them this young black dude made some remark I didn't know how to take, and I whirled back on him and belligerently asked for clarification. He said he had told me that I didn't have to be so grumpy. How would he know? I thought I must have needed to be grumpy or I wouldn't have.

It was a stupid thing for me to do. Nothing was stopping me from turning down one of the aisles to either side and avoiding the entire situation. I could have gotten my block knocked off for being a blowhard. I probably wouldn't have thought much about it if that guy hadn't have said something. I probably was grumpy. I've been that way for several days.

It's silly I know, but sometimes I think I have to get grumpy to balance out when I'm really having fun. I'm not just having fun. Sometime I literally experience ecstasy when I reach a certain understanding about how the piano keyboard works. It sort of shocks me to realize it was actually designed to accommodate the hands of a human being. I don't know the history of how it got to be the way it is today, but my hat is off to whoever contributed.

I kind of bragged a little a couple of days ago that I had been able to play a couple of the key scales with both hands at the same time. I admit to being pleased about that. It's getting to the point now, however, that when I approach to practice playing the scale of a specific key it's a pretty sure thing that I will play it with both hands before I move on to the next key.

That's what excites me now. Today before lunch I started to play the scale of the key of E Major, and I didn't even get all the way through it before I threw caution to the wind and started playing it with both hands. Then, I immediately went to the key of A major and played it with both hands from the gitgo. That's heady stuff for me.

Now I know why I wouldn't learn this stuff as a kid. Nobody would have been able to live with me. I would have been so filled with hubris and pomposity I might have gotten shot with shit and killed for stinking. As just another old man I get grumpy instead, and yell at people at the grocery store in order to get brought down to Earth by a stranger.

There are times when I realize that it's not so much other people who take advantage of me being so gullible. It's me. I can be a rabble rouser to myself. I can pump myself up into a multiplicity of states of being from which I can act out my foibles without fooling anybody but myself. Nobody knows. How could they possibly? How can I know?

I can know because what i realize as my possibles are self-created possibles I conjured up to make my dreams come true. Nobody can know what those possibles are even if I describe them most eloquently. My audience of listeners would only hear what each of them interpret me to be saying. If I was out in public and could be seen and heard, then my audience would only see what they thought they would look like if they we me saying the same thing, and they would only hear what they would mean if they spoke the exact same words I did.

It might seem that even if nobody else knew what I was saying because they have to project their own idea on to what they might think they said and did, that i would know what my actual possibles were, but that's not true. I'm projecting my truth on what my audience actualizes for themselves through projection, but I'm perfectly aware I made it up just to have something to say.

I create my own abstract world to dwell in as I will. That doesn't mean some ignored physical object is not upsurging as a possibility for me and I don't get it. It probably is. I'm always the last to know. The abstract strategies I constantly devise to provide myself with trendy pacifiers is just something to say to divert my attention from my actual helplessness before the forces of nature.

It's those very pretenses that might eventually be the death of me. As slack as I can get sometime, it's very likely that I would be listening to that voice I'm feign to entertain myself with instead of running for the high ground just previous to a tsunami. If I had been in one of those islands where the tsunami reeked devastation in the fairly recent past, I would have been one of the victims. A false blip on the radar screen of life.

Not learning how to play the major and minor scales using the Circle of Fifths on the keyboard when I was a kid might have prevented me from getting murdered for being an arrogant snot, but it would not save me from the terrible wrath of a tsunami.

My animal instincts appeared just as far away from me as anyone else's until I received my remembering vision. It made me realize it doesn't matter what I think one way or the other. Ideation is just the latest fad or phase life provides itself with as a passerby. It's like sticking a feather in yo' hat and calling it macaroni.

It was a good bit cooler today. Not bad for winter weather. It's a little frightening for it to be as warm as it's been in the last week or so, and they're promising more warm weather for the next four or five days. This is gonna confuse the hell outta the fruit trees. I truly hate to see them killed by frost again this spring. There is not much to be done about it though.

I planted the grapevine and the fig tree I bought a couple of days ago. Both of them called for a sunny place with protection from the north wind. I put them on the north side of the house in the south edge of the woods between here and the paved road. I'll have to keep them watered for a while. If they take, they take. Other than me watering it to get it started good and fertilizing it a couple of times a year, there isn't much I have to do for the fig tree. The grape vine is a little different. It has to be pruned. The fruit only grows on new wood.

I was a little surprised that the instructions printed on the plastic bucket these plants came in said the fig tree needs pruning too, and for the same reason. I never pruned my old fig tree until this year. Even then, I didn't prune much of it. I took some cuttings that I then coated with the root hormone powder, and jammed them into the ground to see if they would develop roots and grow. I've watered them pretty good. I can't imagine it could be that easy to provide myself with new fig trees.

I woke up with another sinus headache this morning. This sinus problem doesn't seem to be going away. The headache was fairly debilitating until I popped a bunch of ibuprofen to beg it to go away. The headache really got in the way of my enthusiasm for playing the scales this morning, but I still got through most of the major scales with separate hands, and then surprisingly, I played three more scales with both hands.

It's become more obvious that I can't practice playing the scales with visitors around. I can no more do that than I can write blog entries when someone is here in the house. Even if they're out in the yard. Before I saw how Sartre used the "for" words I thought my preference for being alone to write amounted to no more than just a subjective decision I arbitrarily made on an impulse. I considered my apparent need for seclusion to have a touch of pomposity about it, as if giving myself airs for the pure amusement of it. I don't believe that now. Currently, and due to the direct influence of my reading how Sartre used the "for" word, I'm considering that I don't have any real options about how i respond to the presence of another. I probably never did have the choice I thought I did.

The notion of doing-for-myself or doing-for-the-other has possessed my curiosity more strongly than I first imagined it would. I had already gotten cautious about judging my behavior so damnably before I reflected on it's unfolding through and through. What can appear to be an act of selfishness might not happen due to my say so. Reading Sartre introduced me to the possibility that the presence of the another affects my behavior whether I want it to or not. Sartre states that being-for-oneself is irresistably interrupted if another person comes into the room. You can pretend they're not there, but can you completely ignore them? He appears to state one has no choice but to accommodate the other's presence no matter what. One can't do for themselves if they think or suspect another person is in the room, even if they're not actually there in person.

I've consciously observed how I react to visitors when they come to my house since reading Sartre's ideas. I'm alone 95% of the time. It's not like people are buzzing in and outta here, so when someone drives up to my house, I stop whatever I'm doing until they leave. What I'm doing when nobody is here is usually something I'm doing for myself like writing or playing music. When and if some visitor shows up, I immediately abandon what I'm doing for myself, and spontaneously create a persona I embody I hope will serve well enough to appease the other until they leave.

I used to think letting go of my self absorption to accommodate the other was because I was taught to be polite in my formative years. I know when I am being polite. Just not always why. Most of the time I'm waiting for whoever it is I've become something else for to leave. It's not like I prefer for them to leave. I like the people who visit me well enough. It's just that i can't do for me while they're here. I have to become something for them. That's what's so surprising about using Sartre's perspective to reflect on my ingrained behavior patterns. I figured I had more choice than I actually do.

By teaching myself some music theory and how to play the major and minor scales, I think I'm creating possibilities for the future that I can recognize in real time then. This is a dynamic I've had some insight into for a long time. I believe it's the same dynamic that is behind the Biblical notion of storing up treasures in heaven. When we do for the other it's like we're storing up treasures on earth, but when we do for ourselves, it's like we're storing up treasures in heaven.

This is a cockeyed idea. You should remember my disclaimer. I think Mozart was able to write his first symphony when he was five years old because he already learned how to do that in his previous lives. Lives in which he stored up treasures in heaven. Treasures he stored in thetic consciousness that might possibly survive physical death.

For the sake of argument, temporarily accept the notion that going to bed at night and going to sleep is somewhat similar to dying. I play these scales the best I can one day and go to bed. I lose consciousness of being alive and having a body I'm teaching to play scales on the keyboard until the next morning when I upsurge into consciousness again. Then, I play the same scales I played the day before, but a little mo' bettah. If I repeat this process over and again, eventually I'll play the scales as well as I'm able, and then eventually I die. When I upsurge into physical life again, why would I not just continue playing the scales?

There is a brisk wind blowing outside. The space I opened up between my house and the pond by clearing out the underbrush is twinkling with the late afternoon light being reflected by the water. The Sun is still setting too far south for it to set directly over the pond. but still reflects off the water up through the trees. The light seems to be refracted by both the small wavelet on the pond and by the leafs on the evergreens in the woods.

As the Sun progresses in it's yearly sojourn further north, it will soon set in that part of the horizon directly opposite my house over the old pond. For a few weeks in the late afternoon, the colors of the sunset are reflected by the waters of the pond up through the woods to strike the sides of my house from below and softens the shadows of the direct, lingering light of the day. Depending on the atmospheric conditions, I suppose, my weathered wooden house can appear for a few minutes like it's painted neon red. This only happens in late winter and early spring when the Sun sets at just the right angle over the pond.

That's why I cleaned out the underbrush. Back before the twin hurricanes wiped out the old pine forest my house was built in, the only obstacles for that spectacular phenomena was the trunks of the pines. There wasn't much underbrush back then. The overhead canopy of the trees limited how much sunlight got to the floor of the woods.

I planned a combination of Mars and Venus when I built my house. I only cut enough of the large pines for a small house and a yard. Pines are ruled by Mars. I went down by the river and cut cypress trees to cover my house. Cypress are ruled by Venus. Moonlight through the pines. All gone now. At least I can see the sunset over the water again.

I surprised myself by figuring out how to solve the fingering problems I encountered playing the minor scales. I tried to play c minor with the provided fingering, but it was written for a harmonic minor. I figured out the pattern for how I would play the notes of a regular minor scale by the experience I'd gained from playing the other scales I've been practicing. That made me feel pretty good.

I have good times and bad practicing these scales. It's like absorbing them has it's own schedule for me. Maybe it's because I only have two of them, but having to play only white keys with my thumb has made it easier to understand why the fingering charts have to be the way they are. When I'm learning a new scale, if I can figure out which keys my thumbs will have to play, then I'm more than halfway through understanding the scale.

It's kind of a big deal to write about this. To see what I say I have to say what I see. I can't have One without the other.

It's the ups and downs of this music thing that gets to me. I resisted practicing the scales all morning and wrote a long blog instead. Then, i went for a walk and did some grocery shopping. Finally I sat down to it, and brought up the fingering charts I made on my computer monitor and went at it. I just needed to get started.

I worked on pretty much the same major scales I worked on yesterday. I looked at the charts and played the F Major scales several times single handed before i tried to put them together and play both hands at once. It wasn't such a smooth transition, and so I went back to playing one hand at a time until I felt more comfortable. Soon enow, I was able to play through the scales several successful times playing with both hands together.

Then I tackled the Bb Major scales again. I read about something called Fake Books that have a lot of old time jazz songs in them. I glanced through the article even though I don't have the slightest intention of playing somebody else's old songs. I wanna make songs up as I go along, and then let them land where they may without taking the slightest responsibility for what I just played, than for yesterday's newspaper. Do you really think I'd go to all this trouble just to play somebody else's music? Bah... Humbug!!

One of the details I noticed in this review of the Fake Books was that the songs were usually written in Bb and Eb. I don't know why. It implies to me that Bb and Eb are probably among the favorite keys to play jazz in. Since they might be, and I gotta start memorizing scales somewhere, then I figured i might as well begin with these scales. I play through the other scales for the sake of familiarity a little while each day. When I at least go through the motions, no matter how long it takes me or how tedious it is, the next time I get back to something I've played before it gets a little easier.

I'm concentrating on a couple of sets of scales each day, and playing through several more less familiar scales briefly. After I have played for a while and my fingers get more nimble I get a sort of physical high when I recognize a pattern in the scales. These patterns in which the scales are written and played make more sense to me as I go along. I get excited because when I recognize some pattern I realize in real time that recognizing the pattern is gonna be helpful down the road. I don't know how it's gonna be helpful yet.

I'm fairly familiar with about five or six scales now. I've played three of them with both hands. Granted, it was a fairly clumsy effort, but it's coming along. I have to look at the charts for longer than I like to get started. It was my first impression that I was gonna have to get off these charts to really start learning, but I could be wrong.

I'm learning something pretty special to me even at this early stage. I don't know how to describe it yet, except to say that I'm learning something I've wanted to know for most of my life. i get so excited that I'm actually doing what knew I should have done a long time back, that i have to stop playing, and engage in another activity to calm myself down.

The tritone in music fascinates me to some degree. I've written a little about it. It has an eerie sound when played in relation to the root note. The other day I was trying keep up with some conversation about how to use tritone substitutions. I didn't get it. The author was writing over the top of my theoretical depth. Just now I was reading on this web site, and in the section on the Circle of Fifths the author points out tha the opposition note or chord in the Circle of Fifths is the tritone of the other. This helps me a lot.

The Circle of Fifths is drawn like the Zodiac. I've spent a lot of time drawing up Zodiacs. Decades. It's the oldest memory system in ex-is-tense. All the symbols in astrology are used as "hooks" for memory system associations. This is gonna be fun associating the zodiac with the Circle of Fifths. I bet the history of the world can be derived from it. If I learn this well enough I should be able to play the music of the spheres.

I spent part of the day reading here:

http://www.outsideshore.com/primer/primer/ms-primer-4-1.html

The information here is written in a way that appeals to me. The business about the tritone is very useful because several of the articles I've read keep bringing it up. Knowing how to locate it by opposition on the Circle of Fifths is a neat trick. He has explained several aspects of phrasing and writes out the exact notes of the chords he writes about so even I can play them to try and understand his point.

I've been practicing the major scales and some of the minor ones I've written out by letter name and fingering number. The name of the scale is the piano key I put the starting finger on, and then I have to look at the charts on my computer screen to play the piano keys by sound and feel. Here is a partial view of the minor scales I created for convenience sake. It's what I'm looking at when I play the c# minor scale currently. I had to chop them off to get them to fit on the page right.

c# minor-Right Hand *

c# d# e f# g# a b c# d# e f# g# a b c# b a g# f# e d# c# b a
3 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 1 4 3 2 1

c# minor-Left hand

c# d# e f# g# a b c# d# e f# g# a b c# b a g# f# e d# c# b a
3 2 1 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 3 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 1 2

I feel less intimidated by the prospect of learning how to play the major and minor scales on the piano keyboard. I got used to playing some of the scales long enough to look at my hands part of the time instead of the charts. I began to see how the fingering moved around to always place my thumb on a white key. The fingers are number 1-5 with 1 representing the thumb on both hands. the 4 finger mostly gets used to get around the grouping of three black keys, and the other grouping of two black keys. I'm beginning to see how this works.

One of the biggest deals in learning these scales is where to put my fingers when I play in different keys. Until a couple of days ago I had no idea that playing the black keys the thumb is taboo. Now I feel like I gotta put the other stuff I was doing on the back burner until I memorize these scales. Nothing is lost.

During the research I did to find a fingering chart I could use to practice the major and minor scales on the keyboard, I read a comment that stated the Bb Major scale was the most difficult to memorize. How would I know? I guess that's why I practiced it so much tonight. There is another reason I worked on memorizing the scale fingerings for Bb Major. It's because the blues song I have practiced the chords for a good while now, Adam's Apple, is written in Bb, and I already have the left hand part worked out enough to put together some blues song I can play with both hands.

One of the elements of what I'm trying to do to learn how to play keyboards caused me to stop the direction I was going until I memorized the scales I wanna play. I started out rotely learning the blues chords to this one blues song I've never consciously heard in my life. After I learned the chords and practiced them enough to be able to play the twelve bars of the song, I realized that if I wanted, I could play the left hand part I learned for this blues song, and make up lead lines to fit in with the bass line in Adam's Apple just by playing the notes in the Bb scale.

I started messing around with that idea. I played the left hand part for Adam's Apple like I learned to. When I could count it out while I played it for 3=4 weeks and it ended exactly at end of twelve measures, I figured I had practiced it enough to keep the left hand doing the twelve bars over and over again while I tried to find some blues type melody lines with my right hand. It worked pretty good. I'm not ready for prime time yet, but if I was patient enough with myself, I could kind of make it sound sorta like the blues.

I soon realized that I was going to have to learn a proper way to finger the scales I proposed to use as a way to practice something on the keyboard every day. During the time I was making up some solo stuff for my right hand, I played the same notes with different fingers in a very haphazard fashion. This made me realize I needed to learn the scales first so I would use the same fingering I used to play the Bb scales as I did when I doodled around using the notes of the Bb scale to create melody lines, even though I had already formed habits about the way I played the bass line with my left hand.

This might not be as difficult for me as I originally thought. After I had practiced the Bb scale with both hands separately for an hour or so tonight, by the time i got through I had picked up enough of the pattern of the fingering for Bb that I didn't have to look at the notes and fingering charts on my monitor. It's doable. Even me...

Some might think it took an odd motivation for teaching myself to play the scales on the keyboard. One day I realized I had been advising a friend of mine that's what he oughta do to improve his musical technique. Besides pompously telling him that, the next moment I was telling him that he should make a practice of following his own advice. I can be such a thoughtless jerk sometimes even with my friends. Finally, I realized I wasn't practicing what I was preaching. i wasn't doing for me what I advised him to do for himself. I had painted myself in a corner by jacking my jaws. What else could I do then to justify what I told him he should do, but to follow my own advice and teach myself how to play the scales. I'm utterly pleased I finally got around to it.

In my death process I don't want no stragglers popping up here and there to distract me from the main chance. I think that's why I'm spending so much time trying to get the things done musically i put off most of my life. It's like I'm trying to organize all the sounds I've had to deal with in this specific passage before I completely lose my hearing. Strange things are happening for me now aurally. It's like I'm hearing the same old stuff, but through a hollow drum that has a white noise drip.

This afternoon I've been working on getting all the elements together I need to play the major and minor scales correctly. I researched what needed to be there for me thoroughly enough to satisfy me, and made the necessary decisions to move on with it. I chose a fingering method to use to play the scales. I don't expect to get too good at this, so pretty much any reputable system of doing it is good enough to keep from forming any really bad habits for a mere hobbyist.

The problem confronting me now, is that I don't have all this technical jargon down pat enough to remember one part of it to carry it with me to the other parts of it, in order to put them together to form a greater whole. What I ended up having to do is to write out the minor scales individually on staff paper by hand. I can't add comments to the GIF files, After I wrote out all the ascending and decending notes on the staff, then I wrote down the notes by letter name beneath the notes I drew on the staff, and finally, the number of the finger I'm supposed to strike it with below that. Just writing down all of that for two minor keys has taken 3-4 hours.

This is very tedious for me. I don't eagerly anticipate finding out how dense I can be about things like this, but it happens a lot. I have to make myself do it whether I like it or not if I want it to become second nature to me. As far as I'm concerned, I could go the rest of my natural born days in total ignorance of what needs to be there for me to honor my ancestors, but it's the only way I know how to get things like this done.

There is a method to my madness. Maybe it's not that great a method, but it works for me, and learning another method might take another complete lifetime, so I'm stuck with what I've got. Eventually, I wanna get to the point where I can hear a little tune in my head, and be able to write it down on the spot even when there is not an instrument available to assist me in working out the details.

It seems like to me that if reading and writing music is anything like reading and writing words, then at some point I oughta be able to write music down as well as read it. That's one of the things I practice here with writing my unlikely opinions. I capture drifting thoughts by writing them down, and then publish them on the internet for posterity. They're not my thoughts any more than the music I hear is my music.

Learning I don't own the material I conjure was tough for a double Taurus whose keywords are, "I possess." Possession is nine/tenths of the law, but the ten percent that requires letting go of my ideated children when they're grown can sometimes be my downfall. I attempt to transcribe the music hear in the same way I transcribe the drifting thoughts that pass through my psyche.

The more I try to figure out what those drifting thoughts mean, the less clear or lucid they appear to me when I'm trying to hold them in place long enough to go clickety clack on my keyboard. It seems like or can appear occasionally like I am turning some sort of unstoppable impulse of white noise and static into words, at least that's what I think I'm doing. I don't have time to seek the authority some might need to proceed, and that's why I blow it off and do what I gotta do without approval, else, it'll never get done. Nobody knows.

One facet of this automatic writing that's clear to me, I can't interpret the value of these drifting thoughts, and write them down at the same time. The saying "Be passerby" from the Gospel of Thomas makes sense to me or from the Book of Changes: The superior man lets many things pass without being duped. I've had difficulty letting things happen without trying to spin my take on whatever it it that catches my attention. Letting go of some duplicitous need for ownership is a way of "seeing" with soft eyes.

In the same way, I can't edit while I'm writing when I'm writing or the writing stops. I can and do edit in between my brief urges or impulse to write. Then, when I run outta steam, I don't care if I ever see what I've transcribed ever again. To be sure, I don't wanna discuss it or accept comments on it. Let the dead past bury it's own dead.

I might be exercising some sort of catch and release ritual. What I really get outta doing this has nothing to do with what you see here. It happens in an outta sight/outta mind sort of space that I only catch glimpses of, and even then, to get a small icon or wisp of of what I see there, back across the veil of forgetfulness, is a rare event indeed.

I decided on a fingering system to play the scales. I spent some time this afternoon playing some of them. They're separated into six different groups, and I played most of the major scales, but I'm going to have to work at getting the minor scales figured out. I didn't realize how different they are from what I had a assumed earlier.

It's gonna take a while to memorize just the major and minor scales, much less the others. The largest group of these scales are played pretty much alike and once I learn the fingering for one or two of them the rest will be fairly easy. I don't know how long it will take me to memorize them, but I've wanted to do this for a long time.Maybe my determination with allow me to stick with it.

My e-mail friend out in San Francisco defined what I'm after by learning the scales when he said that when he forms a chord on the guitar, he sees how to do it on the piano keyboard he installed in his mind's eye. That's what I intend to do. The keyboard is so finite and graphic, but how it can be used has an infinite quality to it that lends itself to visualization.

I have been feeling Russian for the last month or so since it's gotten cooler. Right beside my desk two windows that run pretty much from the floor to the ceiling. There's two more of them upstairs. They used to be doors to some business. Ben and I drilled holes in the frames and used them for our own purposes.

The Russian part is that recently i've bought a couple of bottles over vodka and sat them one at a time in the bottom of the window beside my chair where it gets cold as ice. Occasionally I reach over and take a nip of cold vodka to clear the taste in my mouth. I don't care much for warm vodka, but there something about cold vodka that appeals to me. I might drink a pint of it every couple of weeks Tasty!

I wasn't even watching television, but it was turned on in the background. Something was said that moved me, even though I wasn't paying that much attention, and then I found myself weeping. I think it's the idea that I'm doing the ground work in music I should have done a long time ago, but that's not what touches me emotionally.

It's the fact that I'm doing it even though I don't intend to perform. I've always prepared for public performance. My family insisted on it from childhood. I don't know why I'm doing this stuff if I'm not going to play for the other. I'm not confused. I'm sad because I understand.

I've reached some point of understanding about where I need to go with what I'm trying to accomplish musically, and it's kind of sad and anticlimactic in some ways I hadn't expected. All that is left to do is just to do it. I don't know why this isn't more exciting to me than wot's currently on the front burner.

One of the bleak facticities of my terse, frenetic behavior is that I'm not preparing myself to perform before an audience, and my awareness of that is a little unsettling. I seem a little desperate. A little too eager to stay busy and keep my mind off of what's coming down the pike. My sentiments reminds me of this old song I used to know and sing from memory.

Streets of Laredo (Cowboy's Lament)

As I walked out on the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.

"Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the Dead March as you carry me along,
Take me to the green valley and lay the sod o'er me
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong."

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/song-midis/Streets_of_Laredo_(Cowboys_Lament).htm

I played the pentatonic blues scale on my synthesizer keyboard through the Circle of Fifths again today. It took less time than yesterday, but how much less would be hard to say. I did it in between some other chores I was taking care of simultaneously. Also, Ben stopped by for a while during this effort.I felt like I understood a little more about how the pentatonic scales are patterned, and with practice it'll come around just fine. Surprisingly, I knew when I made a mistake and struck the wrong key. I thought that might take longer to evince itself than on my second visitation. I don't know why I'm surprised. Like everybody else, I've heard this music all of my life. I just didn't know the lingo used to describe the specific sounds.

I'm playing the scales with a purpose now. I guess there were some things I didn't realize about playing the scales previously. What I feel like I've gained in this regard may not be all that important to a sight reader, that's not me, but as a person who plays by heart, it's a big deal. It's liberating to realize that playing the notes of the various scales over and over again familiarizes me with most of the notes used in most melody lines when I'm playing in a certain key. If I understand the relation of those particular scale notes in one key, it's comforting to know they will have the same relation to the root note in every other key.

I needed to be able to play any kind of music in any key back when I was floating around from place to place. In my role as a nomadic wanderer, I was the one who would profit most from being able to sit in with local musicians and play what they played. Many times that wasn't possible because i only knew a limited number of keys I could play in. I was perfectly aware of the hazards of attempting to get them to accommodate me on their turf. Why am I always the last to know?

I suspect it may be because I was raised a Protestant when Protestants were getting the rug pulled out from under them by the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. In the same time period, the Jim Crow culture I was raised to accept as the status quo got criminalized by an act of law. I was twenty-two years old and full-growed. That not-so-simple fact didn't make me feel any more secure about my future either. I didn't know how to act anymore. Maybe that's why I decided to study Speech and Drama in college.

I didn't know what to care about anymore. How can a person have careactor when they don't know what's right to care about anymore? I didn't create the Jim Crow culture. I was barely old enough to vote in my first Presidential election when the values I was raised to hold dear was declared illegal. My values had been disenfranchised, and I was forced to put together a completely new persona to get by as best I could in a world where people like me were now legally considered the bad guys.

After I joined the Navy to establish my right to make my own decisions, right or wrong, and to protest, by God, having my viewpoint decided for me by the other, when all I did to deserve that was to get born in a particular area of the country. One of the first projects for reframing my outlook from the way I was raised, was to learn how to speak in a more neutral voice than the Southern slang I slung around with the best of 'em.

I started mimicking and imitating other dialects and brogues as I traveled from place to place. I learned some new and unlikely lingoes to toss around in a typically un-Southern manner. I tried to pass myself off as being from anywhere else but the South. I stayed away for nearly twenty years, and still traveled around the country to work frequently, even after i built my house where it is next to family. People from around here who I grew up with still ask me occasionally, "Hoo doo yoo think yoo are... tawkin' lak that thar... boy?", or "Cuz... yoo jest ain't rite... I hope my die yoo ain't. Hae yoo got the ears to hyah me now, boy?"

Not much happened around here today. I went to eat at a new franchise restaurant that opened here, and then walked around a while before I bought a few groceries and came back to the house. I spent about two hours or better practicing the minor scales using the Circle of Fifths. I was right pleased with that. I've known I needed to memorize at least the major and minors scales, but never got around to it. Now that I find myself interested in playing the blues I have realized I'll probably have to learn the pentatonic scales too.

It's come in real handy for me to have learned the blues chords to the song Adam's Apple. It got me started and helped me to realize the bass line in most of the blues songs I've seen spelled out are generally about the same, and the lead line is pretty much the notes in the pentatonic scale. I've been practicing that a bit in several difference chords, and although what comes out is as simple as it gets, I'm still playing the twelve bar blues with two hands on the keyboard.

I started playing guitar in the Navy because there was a friendly guy with a real bubbly personality who played guitar on the ship we were both assigned to, and I liked the attention he got when he played it. I never learned much about playing the guitar during that period. The guy who was showing me how died in an onboard accident. He was shorting out some capacitors in the sonar room with a screwdriver, and the discharge was so powerful it melted the plastic handle off the screwdriver and literally blow him into smithereens. They say his head was blown plumb off his shoulders.

I've probably mentioned it several times, but I made a bad habit when I taught myself to play guitar that I found it impossible to straighten out later on. I held the neck of the guitar in the web of my forefinger and thumb, and that made it difficult to play bar chords. That awkward habit stopped me from playing instrumental leads in between verses of the songs I wrote, and even though people seemed to like hearing me sing, without breaks it got tiresome. Eventually I gave up the guitar because of that very thing.

I don't know how other people deal with playing musical instruments, but if I don't continuously learn something a little bit different I eventually lose interest in playing a particular instrument. I've played a series of them. One of the problems with me learning new material was that I moved around so much. I never stayed any place very long until i built my house here. Now when I wake up, everything is right where i left it when I went to bed. When I was younger, I'm liable to hae woken up in a different place every morning of the week, with only the stuff I could tote in my bare hands to make my day with.

I liked moving around and being a stranger in a strange land. There were hard times and periods when I suffered deeply from poverty. I stayed hungry a lot and seemed to never get enough sleep. I pretended it was all necessary because life was merely a great adventure. I romanticized the hard times, and claimed I was on a fast when I was actually starving. I was half crazy from chronic fatigue much of the time. Yet, the whole time I lived that way it was done from my own volition. Nobody made me do any of that stuff. I'd just get itchy feet and begin roaming across the country.

I have realized my true religion is that of a Protestant. It's not necessarily about Christianity unless the notion of a docetic Christos is brought into play. What I really mean when I say that I'm a Protestant is about my right to protest other people deciding what anything means to me. Not just scriptures, but history, science, sociology, music, and any other topic or subject that comes down the pike. In all those situations, I choose myself over the other.

I'm losing interest in many activities that fascinated me previously. I just surfed over to youtube to watch the Eric Clapton video so that i could play keyboard along with it. When I logged in to youtube there was a dialog box informing me that a group I had subscribed to a while back had a new lecture video onboard for me to look at. As much as six months ago I might have found the topic of this lecture interesting enough to sit through it, but not today.

Aside from the sheer weight of the increasing numbers that incrementally sneak up on a body, there is this other aspect of aging to consider. Anything that's gonna take ten years to appear on the consumer market bears no interest for me. If I'm not dead from some horribly painful disease or laid up by some debilitating accident or being out and out murdered by premeditation ten years from now, there's a good chance I'll be incapacitated by senility and won't know my ass from a hole in the ground.

I've never considered myself a Michael J. Fox fan, he was after my time, but I like his work as an actor when I've seen it on TV. I don't remember exactly what sort of crippling disease he came down with, but he comes to mind when I listen to the trumpeted news reports that suggests some miraculous cure for whatever disease he's got has been discovered, and then feel humiliation for them when they close the sound bite with some understated, almost confidential comment, that it will be at least ten more years before it can possibly make it through the bureaucracy of the FDA, and then the news reader moves on to the next item on the teleprompter as if no harm was done.

I empathize with anybody who is tempted to false hope by this sort of thoughtlessness. I'm disgusted myself, so It's hard for me to think of the possible response of Fox and other people with this sort of problem watching this kind of news report. I painfully imagine them reflecting on what has happened to their body in the last ten years, and trying to guess what it'll be like in ten more years, if they survive long enough for this "miracle cure" to get through the bureaucratic rigamarole in Washington and help them.

Worse, a lot of this miracle crap is vaporware. It never gets to market after all the hyped up hope it was supposed to offer. That's out and out cruelty, pure and simple. I blame the media, not the researchers or their sponsors. I think being cautious about what gets fobbed off on the public is necessary. Why do the media do that to people? Just to have something interesting to say on the six o'clock? Do they announce it just to assure the people who don't have the disease that if they do get it, down the road, there'll be a cure for whatever it is. Doesn't that consider the people with the disease as throwaways? It's a disgraceful practice. There oughta be a law.

This situation reminded me of one of the more odious duties of politicians. Normally, I cop a fairly sarcastic attitude toward politicians, but I don't envy them one bit. What if it should fail? They're the first ones marched to the guillotine. When I consider what they might have to deal with when the family members of thousands of constituents who have loved ones with fatal diseases come to petition the government to miraculously legislate a cure for whatever ails them, I'm pretty sure my response would be to sarcastically suggest a mercy killing, and reach for the bottle in my bottom desk drawer. It's situations like this that makes it easy for me to ignore the very idea of devoting myself to public service. I'd become a dyed-in-the-wool drunk in a short amount of time.

I choose myself over them. All I have to do to convince myself I took the right path is to imagine myself sitting in some government office all day, listening to people piteously demand the government help them save their loved ones, when it ain't gwine happen. I'm glad I was born in Spring when the path of inwardness dictates a spirit quest instead of offering oneself up as being-for-the-other. I'm not jealous of the Fall and Winter folk who can be naturally obsessed with this socially-oriented behavior as I am with individuation. No blame.

I've finally found an exercise I like to do. It seems silly, but I get fascinated to see if I can actually pull it off. I've been thinking about how I need to learn how to play stuff using the circle of fifths, and I ran across this article that suggested that one could play simple tunes like nursery rhymes, but play them in every key using the circle of fifths as a guide for where to go next. I don't even know the name of the last song I was playing. It was a familiar tune I had on my mind. I played it through with each hand separately until I got pretty good at it in that key, and then counted out to a fifth below the root of what i had just played, and figured out how to play that simple melody in the new key, until I'd gone through all the keys.

I love doing this playing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. There are so many classical songs like Beethoven's Ninth that are grounded in this nursery rhyme ditty. Copland's Appalachian Spring steals from it flagrantly. I read an article yesterday, as a matter of fact it was in that book I downloaded, that people remember what they memorized before they were twenty years old easier than material learned after that. I've found that to be pretty much true.

The idea is to be able to transpose from one key to the other with some degree of ease. Using the songs you learned before you were twenty years old. Fortunately, I had to memorize a lot of songs before I was even out of high school. If I learn enough about music theory to write down the music I've already composed I'll be delighted, but if I'm able to use the music I memorized before I was twenty as a source for going further than I've dreamed, I'll be ecstatic. It doesn't take much.

Earlier I practiced playing the blues pentatonic scales in four different keys. I'm beginning to understand why I can sing the blues, but it's always been difficult to accompany myself instrumentally while i sing the blues. I can easily see why I have to become totally familiar with the pentatonic scales, and probably the other ones too. Other ones? Today I read where at some conservatory a student had to demonstrate familiarity (to whatever degree) with 61 different scale systems. I'm only beginning to learn how ignorant I am about what's what when it comes to music theory.

This new web site I discovered the other day is very helpful in learning how to play the various scales. It has this chart where I click on the specific type of scale and the key I wanna play it in, and it highlights the keys on a keyboard graphic. Not only that, but it has a separate dialog box that spells the notes in the scale by their letter name. It doesn't show the notes on a staff, but that's fine with me. I'll write them all out, and that way I'll become even more familiar with what the notes and spelled out chords look like at a glance.

I don't know which picture I posted. I've never possessed any control over my photos. That's probably why I haven't used my camera very much.

Yesterday was tres manic/depressive. I was sad that I'd bought that cheap plastic thing from Best Buy, and then happy again that I was able to find a BIOS battery locally. I was happiest of all when my brother soldered in the new battery, we turned it on, and my synthesizer cranked right up like it was a brand new machine. I've already run through some of the ear-training exercises this morning. I probably won't do anything any differently than I've been doing it, but I got the right stuff to make what i wanna happen to happen.

When it comes down to it I had troubles with input devices. Both called keyboards. The Apple Bluetooth keyboard just doesn't work as advertised. I liked the feel of the keys, and when I went ahead and bought the new Apple USB keyboard I got reliability. I don't have to deal with the "Connection Lost" dialog boxes 20 times an hour that interrupts my creative flow.

I never realized how sweet the keyboarding action is on my old synthesizer until I went out shopping and touched a lot of different brands of digital keyboards. It ought to. It cost three times as much twenty years ago. I got nothing against the new synthesizers. I'd buy one in a New York minute. I just can't afford one that's at least equivalent to my old one. Not that it matters all that much. I don't use 80% of the features on this old one.

It's the same way with my computer. When push comes to shove, my computer merely replaces my typewriter just like my synthesizer replaces a piano. The digital version is way better and easier to manage than the analog devices, but my first impressions were created around the analog strategies, and it's hard to get past that baggage and use them for what they offer beyond merely replacing an old technology.

It takes too much time to try to get beyond these imprinted behaviors. They are deeply embedded habits that merely date me. They are not any better or worse than other ways of eating wot's sot before me in the specious present. I use all these mechanical/digital devices for the same purpose. To address the external world. A couple of sticks and a hollow log to beat on would accomplish the same purpose.

The older I get the less sense the world makes to me. There is no behavior whatsoever that's gonna change anything or any reason for anything to change. I particularly question whether human wisdom amounts to a hill of beans. Life screwing itself to make more life. Speech is the slime the snail oozes out to crawl on. It has and needs no me-and-thee-ing (meaning) to it. I see what I think is over there where you are, and you see what you think is over here. We both see in each other what we have made ourselves into for the sake of the other, and that's all there is to either of us. Whatta drag, man.

I'm feeling a little smug tonight. I took care of some things today I've let slide a little too long. Ben had to go to Fayetteville to run some errands for his wife, and he asked me if I wanted to ride along. I sure did. I needed to get some things that's a little harder to find in a small town.

The wonderful part of shopping today is that I didn't actually intend to do any of what i accomplished except to buy a wired Apple keyboard to replace the Bluetooth one I've been trying patiently to use. Ain't gwine happen. I've been driving myself batshit crazy about computer keyboards recently. All Apple keyboards. The first one I got was mechanically inferior. The Bluetooth one was esthetically pleasing, but technically inferior. Like with the three bears, I'm hoping this wired replacement keyboard is just right.

I think maybe I expect too much from wireless gadgets. I expect they to perform as promised or at least as well as the wired stuff. Sometimes they do. For a while. If everything is just peachy. Even I perform well under favorable conditions. The unfortunate side of this predicament is that my experiences with wireless devices tell me they are not reliable as I expect reliable to be.

For the last fifteen years I've been keyboarding so much in it's like i think with my fingers. I pretend to use writing to direct or instruct my intention to where I want it to go. I won't swear it works, but my directions to my intent either happens in real time right before my eyes or not at all. If I complete the details and logistical considerations of a strategy and sit back in my chair to reflect on what I've written into or out of my life, it doesn't interrupt my creative flow very much either pro or con. If my creative flow gets interrupted through no fault of my own, or if it miraculously turns out that Chicken Little was right all along, my creative juices can get out of whack, and I feel two bricks short of a load.

If I converse with another person face to face, I deliberately attempt to back off in order to encourage them to have their say. Why would I not? I have everything to gain by listening to what the other believes to be God's own truth. But, once they enter the fray, i expect them to hold their own and do what's right for them. I got my own fish to fry.

Contrarily, when I compose the thoughts drifting through my mind by writing them down, I don't have to consider what other people think at all. They're not there, and can only speak of their own experiences. I'm not trying to tell my own version of truth as much as i am trying to say what I perceive beyond the pale of my subjective vision. i don't have a clue what any objective truth is, except maybe in the specious present, and if I cling to that beyond the pale of it's believability, then I usually end up humilated for letting myself get drawn in to a fool's game.

Another thing I did today that I've meant to do for some time now was to buy a new set of sheets. I live alone. I have to do everything that gets done here, and without anybody to remind or nag me to remember all the little things I need from time to time. I kept forgetting to buy new sheets while I was out and about. That's not so unusual these days. Many times I shop by impulse and at odd opportunities. i go out and about to perform one specific chore, and then decide to stop by some store on the way home. The only shopping list that works for me to write the stuff I need down in the palm of my hand, and that way I don't forget my list when I pop into the store unexpectedly.

The staff notebook I bought a month or so ago has been an irritant to me because the staff lines are drawn too close together I have a difficult time seeing the notes that have to be crammed together to fit inside the staff lines. I went to a nearby music store to see if they had any staff books with wider lines. Fortunately, they had one booklet that had wider lines, and five or six other staff books with the narrow lines. I guess the narrow lined ones are more popular.

The ear training exercises I do are helping a lot, but not necessarily with sight reading. I am going to start spelling out all the chord variations in note form so i'll become familiar with what they look like. I was fairly successful learning the key signatures that way. I wrote them out time and time again until they were easy to remember.

When I realized I had to move on to the next step in doing the ear-training exercises I was sort of intimidated by the fact that the next logical step would be to take on the Jazz Chords. I dialed up the first set of exercises and what I hoped would be fairly simple process to practice. I was wrong. I was back to square one like i was with the inversion exercises. I didn't know what any of the chord options they provided to choose from. Okay, maybe one or two of them. I already knew what a minor seventh should sound like.

The 'Fixed Root" option would apply, so all the exercises would be based on that fixed root. I needed a way to figure out what the chord names meant before I could work the exercises. I backed out of the ear training sight and decided to Google up "Jazz Chords" to see if I could find some information that would resolve my dilemma.

I got lucky. The second link in the result page turned up this site:

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

It not only provides names for all the possible chords, jazz or not, and shows which piano keys to press to see what it sounds like. I intended to take the information this site provided and spell out the chord options provided by the ear-training site. I bought a staff book for this very purpose, but the staff lines in it are printed so close together I can't draw the notes in, so I used some graph paper and drew out staff lines big enough for me to write out the chords. Then, I penned in the chords with the labels I got from the ear training site and looked them up on the "a passion for jazz" site. Hopefully, one of these days I won't have to stop to look everything up each time I need it.

I began to understand what was going on much quicker than I expected. I figured out which chord the server played by looking at the chords I spelled out. I could have gone back to the chord chart site where it showed the exact piano keys to press, but i wanted to read the stuff I drew myself to see what happened.

I was able to follow the same process I used to figure out the major, minor, diminished, sus 4th, and augmented 5th chords. I had to put my fingers on the right keyboard notes and play them to figure out my answer. I started out with the root triad, which in this case was C#, and figured out which fingers I had to move or add to come up with the same sound the server provided. When I got eight out of ten right the first time, I knew I was on to something. This was doable.

I don't know why I didn't realize the next step would be based on the last step. It always has. For me, anyway. I got so happy when I figured out for myself the fixed root was C#. I think doing this stuff with a piano keyboard is one of the main reasons I've been able to understand the little bit I have. It's so right there in front of me, and all I have to do is count out the notes one by one if I have to, at least I can, eventually, and that's a big deal to me.

All of this still serves the single purpose I have in trying to learn this stuff. I wanna be able to sit down in front of a keyboard, lay my fingers randomly on the keys, and start figuring out where I want to go from here for as long as it pleases me. If what I do next is jazz or blues or blue suede shoes that's just fine. I got a feeling that where this takes me might end up being a big surprise.

I finally saw the trough that drains where those big mountains were east of the Appalachian range on Google Earth. It drains into the Pee Dee River basin. The Appalachian range ain't all that young, but it upsurged into being in between the western slope of this huge extinct mountain range. There is not much left of the old mountain range. What's left of the old peaks can be seen when approached from the west on U.S.64 just before you descend into the Yadkin River valley.

There is not enough left of the old mountains to suspect the original upsurge went as high or higher than the Himalayas. Right here in North America. It may not be all that unusual for mountains to reach for the sky like that over the eons, and then tumble back into the oceans. The southern end of the Andes mountain range is said to be approaching the height of the Himalayas right now. People are having to find another place to live. Hasn't it always been thus? If it ain't one thing, then it's another.

There are a bunch of programs on PBS about what's going on in North Carolina. They are made locally and seem a little hokey, but some of them are fairly informative. One of those programs is about the new grape wineries locating in the Yadkin River valley. The Yadkin River is what drains the western edge of those old worn down mountains and the foot hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are a part of the Appalachian Range.

The land they're growing grapes on now with such success in the Yadkin Valley is some old dirt. It's what's left after all the rocks rotted and eroded away. What don't rot or are the last to rot away are sometime semi-precious stones. Even high quality emeralds and some diamonds. This only happens on really old dirt that used to be mostly rocks. It apparently takes a long time for the lesser stone to rot away from the jewel stones.

This area seems like an ideal place for growing wine grapes. Probably better than California. When I win the lottery, I'm gonna buy all the land I can get in the Yadkin Valley. It's relatively cheap now, but it won't be for very long.

They grow grapes here on the coastal plains too, but it's really too muggy here for anything but the native grapes like muscadine to thrive. The rotting in the swamps here on the coastal plains literally heats the air just above it and it hangs in the air because it's so flat. People get fungi in their lungs here from constantly breathing this trapped swamp air. According to the seasons and the various spores floating around in the bottom of the barrel, they can turn into vampires through positive hallucination. European grape stocks seem to need more drainage than we got here from the air and water. They both move too slowly here. The delicately refined European rootstock find it difficult to reproduce here because literally get the vapors.

My hands are dry and slide across the keys easily. Low humidity. Low temperatures. Winter. The forecast is for it to get cold and stay that way for a while. I've got my own ideas about that. My forecasts are as good as the professionals if not better. Half the weather report on the six o'clock is these guys teaching us about their new toys. I think they've got too much information to make sense of any of it consistently. People get too serious about the weather. It's just something to talk about. It's just something to say. It's just another birdsong that never was meant to have any other meaning except as it relates to procreation.

I don't look at weather the way I used to. I've spent much of my life outside. I never actually intended for it to be that way. I've never had any problems with being inside or with sitting on my ass for long periods of time. I bummed around and traveled as a homeless person for at least a decade on and off, and then when i finally became a journeyman craftsman it was working a trade that did most of their work outside in the open air. Some jobs were inside, but most were not.

I never meant to work in the construction trade as a pipewelder/fitter. It was just easy money. I knew how to survive in that world. To me it was a good way to get some money pretty fast. Practically every job I worked on for over twenty years was always gonna be the last one. Most of the time I worked for the large construction companies. They pay the most money when they're hiring. They're the quickest to lay you off when the dealings done. That was a good thing for everybody. It's a tough world where the hard part is to stay emotionally uninvested.

The first job I got as a pipewelder was with the shipyard that trained me to be one. Previous to their hiring me I was just a dependable hand with basic welding skills and no experience. I showed up. That was ninety-five percent of holding on to your job. As far as I was concerned, they were giving money away. I wasn't about to miss work if they were going to pay me just to show up.

I was thirty five years old when I first learned to weld. Most of the jobs i had before I learned to weld were equivalent to being a burger flipper or some sort of assistant manager's job where I got sick of being there for the little of nothing they paid me. When i started welding my pay even as a green hand was at least twice the minimum wage, and the people I worked for acted pleased to have me there.

I got paid every Friday, and it was enough to pay our bills and put a little something back for a rainy day. Working at that shipyard was some of the happiest marital periods of my life. It was a steady job that paid decent money. Who can't have a good marriage when the bills get paid? Apparently me.

It was the money that pipewelders made working industrial construction that attracted me. I was making decent money at the shipyard. My family was living in one of the first decent apartments we'd had for a year or two. I didn't leave well-enough alone. I wanted to be where nobody knew my name. I can not be there when you need me with the best of 'em.

The Winged Seraph

Where in the void of thoughtless passion
can the passion of thought be called love?
In the passion of love no limits of ration
can surpass the peace of a dove.
That a dove is at peace is apparent
when seen in subliminal flight,
and it flies without reference to thinking,
and it's instincts make love out of sight.

January, 1972

I never actually knew why I wrote poetry. I stopped writing after I got up with the woman who was to become my second wife. The poem above was composed to contain an attitude. I wanted to preserve the attitude the poem contains for selfish reasons. By reciting the poem as a mantram or chant I can reinstitute the original attitude, and by displaying that attitude in the prevailing situation can turn it about in what some take to be fair play. It allows me to let a lotta things pass without being duped.

Poems can act like force fields might if force fields were actually real. I don't try to change the world to suit my needs. Some people do and doing that works just fine for them. I change my attitude, because in essence that's all it is that I am.

I had to look up the term "dissemble" in several dictionaries to satisfy myself with what it was supposed to mean. In the way I had seen it used, it means to feign insanity, but it could also be used if the pretender wasn't pretending.

Feigning insanity can act as a very powerful mojo. The only real problem in pulling it off as a successful strategy is being able to come across as the real deal. If such can be made so, however, many, if not most, people will respond to the possibility they are confronted with an insane person, as if they encountered a deadly snake. That's a very desirable response sometime, but only if my act works, and I appear plausible and convincing.

The term "ring-pass-me-not" may not be clear as it could be to me. I remember it as a phrase that implies a specific distance away from a starting point at which an airplane leaving New York on a transatlantic flight to Paris can't turn back to New York, because after a certain distance away from New York, they only have enough fuel to get them where they're going.

It's about the same way as when I need people to think I'm insane for my own selfish purposes. Once i commit to the role I have to carry through all the way to Paree.

I drove up to Raleigh today to get another keyboard. This bluetooth keyboard is a good idea if it would just work as advertised. I spent $20 worth of gas to have the Geniuses put new batteries in it and told me it was fixed. I tried to buy a keyboard with a USB cable, but they wouldn't sell me one. They insisted my old keyboard was fixed now. I should quit acting like a crotchety old codger and quit bothering them. I got so disgusted with their patronizing attitude i just left the store.

I like this little keyboard. It has a small footprint and don't take up so much space on my desk. I never used the calculator keys on any keyboard I ever owned. They're extraneous and wasted on me. I'm not denying that if I had ever had a reason to use the calculator keyboard for any reason and go used to it, it might be very useful. My brother seems to use it a lot, but he uses a spreadsheet program a lot too. It's a business tool.

While i was at a large shopping center I looked for a new mouse. I scoff at the very idea of using the Apple Mighty Mouse. I'm addicted to the Logitech mouses. There was a large Best Buy store near the Apple store I went to about my keyboard, and the only mouses they had were the wireless type. I'm getting less and less fond of wireless devices, but it's all they carry on the store shelf these days. I ended up not buying a new mouse. They did have the Apple Bluetooth keyboards exactly like mine, but they didn't have the USB wired ones. Foiled again.

I was amiss the other day when I said that I was waiting to see if Apple would come out with a small computer that used a SSD storage device. I ignored the fact that the Asus EEE laptop comes with a small capacity SSD. The highest capacity they offer is 8 GB, but it hasn't come out yet, They have a 2GB model that sells for around $300. This seems like to me a development that will finally kill the desktop, except for people like me who use a computer for little more than a communication device. I am hoping next week Apple will announce a tablet computer with the same features as the iPhone, but just a little bit bigger and use an SSD exclusively for storage.

I'm beginning to realize that owning an iPhone might be all the computer I need. For good or ill, I only use a computer to be online with. I hardly ever get e-mail anymore, and oddly enough, have gotten fairly used to that. I realized the potential of a personal computer as a communication device very soon after I first went online. When I bought my first computer, a Mac Classic with a 9" B&W screen (but one of the first hard drives that was a huge, huge 40 MB capacity, I had some strange ideas about what I could or would do with a personal computer.

I couldn't really afford to buy that computer. I just wanted it. I was totally amazed that i could go to the store and buy one for myself. I can't even say I knew it's true value. My reasoning was that unless I owned my own computer I'm never know. I don't know now. I never truly understood what possessiveness meant until the fire was lit under my desire to own a computer. I never used my first computer to go online with. It was far too slow and didn't have enough memory to handle the traffic of a modem.

That's not exactly true about being possessive only about getting a computer. I wanted to own my own EEG machine with at least as much intensity. I become engulfed by sheer, unadulterated lust. I'm loath to admit that may have been the whole point. I used to love being consumed by lust. It was to die for. Literally. I took huge chances to experience uncontrollable lust. There was hardly any act of selfishness I couldn't lie at it's door without blame. Maybe I oughta be ashamed of my expressed wantonness, but it worked for me. In the past, it truly crippled me and made me so helpless to resist it's temptations only divine intervention could have helped.

Sometime, I think I got driven to those extremes by prejudiced, unseen witnesses just out to prove to me that I could do better outside of the safety of my familiar old rut. Usually, I will not to be driven out of my flow or my groove or even my own way of picking cotton. I like ruts, but getting stuck still happens occasionally. I like letting the reins go slack to allow the horse to find it's own way back to it's warm stall. i like grooves even mo' bettah than ruts. For some reason they just seem more elegant and sophisticated. I have mentioned my delusions of grandeur, have i not?

When I write about having spent nearly a decade bumming around the country hitch-hiking, I may not have made it clear how moving around like that most every day for sometime years could keep me from falling back in the ruts I was taught to think was okay for being a homeboy. I caught one ride in eastern California with a man who was driving to his mother's funeral in South Carolina, and it took less than three days to cross the entire country. Conversely, I have left the east coast and not gotten to the west coast for months, and then not leave the west coast for a couple more months, before taking six months more than that to get back to North Carolina.

I might catch 5-10 rides a day and travel anywhere from having to walk five miles to get across some large town to the other side where I could catch a ride, to riding 500 miles each day for a week in a row. I might ride with 50-100 different drivers a week, and one size did not fit all. I've lived a wasted life making no bones about it. it has been an absolutely wasted life. I haven't left much room for guessing about that.

I just watched a local program on PBS I've seen several times. It's about four fiddle players who basically play blue grass. The final fiddle player featured is this young guy from Marshall, North Carolina, and he's the reason I watched the show again. The interesting aspect of how these fiddlers are compared comes to the fore with this young fiddler. It seems very obvious to me that he's had classical training. It shows. I like to watch lots of different kinds of performers who have done their homework. It seems to happen the other way round too. Players who don't have much formal training seem to seek it even after they've been successful in the business.

I'm very impressed with how doing the exercises on the ear-training web site has changed how I think about music. The most impressive aspect of it is how it's improved my hunt and peck sort of playing the keyboard. I'm still pretty bad at it, and any improvement no matter how small would be a blessing for my neighbors, but I do seem to be striking the exact right note on the keyboard more often.

I've been doing the exercises labeled Perfect Pitch not because I expect to find out I have perfect pitch, but because the exercises are there, and because I understand the instructions. There are other exercises on the web site I have not been able to practice because I don't understand what the criterion is.

The Perfect Pitch exercises is just what you might expect they would be. The server plays a note and the participant checks the box of the note they think it might be, and hit the Submit button to see if you're right. These exercises are the only proof I need that I don't have perfect pitch. I miss getting the right answer a lot, and so far practice don't lead me to think I'm ever gonna be perfect.

But, what else I got to do? Sometimes I actually guess the exact note and get a disquieting sort of "atta boy" from the server. I'll take all the atta boys I can get from practically any source at this juncture. I'm doing these exercises on the presumption that practicing them repeatedly might improve my sense of relative pitch over time.

That's what's going on with learning blues chords. I've been playing the chords to that one blues song for a few weeks now. I thought I'd be less patient than I have been to get the first song under my belt, and move on to conquer the known blues world in a few short weeks, but no, probably not.

I really struggled with getting my fingers to go to those strange keys on the keyboard, but as expected, over time, making my fingers obey me got a little easier. The most difficult part of the ordeal for me has been to get my fingers to go to the right keys, and to go their fast enough to make sense of what I was playing. The criterion for this specific endeavor being just to keep up with the same chords being played by the server.

I've gotten even more used to playing the chord progressions to Adam's Apple, and I've played them for so long now that I can not only keep up with the tune as it's played by the server, but am able to put my own hooks in where the idea appeals to me. What i haven't yet been able to do is fit a traditional turnaround in the 11th and 12th measures in place of the chords I've been playing.

One thing about this that tickles me more and more is that with the passage of time and the redundancy of my practice I am playing different parts of this blues song with more confidence, and that allows me to concentrate on the other parts that don't yet come as natural to me as I would like.

I have worked out a standard twelve bar blues progression with a standard turnaround for the left hand that counts out perfect every time to twelve bars. The turnaround is divided evenly between the 11th and 12th bars. I try to stick to an exact count so that I''ll be able to see what mistakes fits in when I'm practicing. I love making mistakes that sound interesting. It's the only way I know how to compose new stuff.

I sure got up early this morning. I performed my morning routine before nine o'clock. Ben has been in and out several times today. He got something evil and probably sinful on his mind. I know all the signs and omens. It's no damn fun for him if he doesn't think he's getting away with something.

I know a lotta people like that. Myself, for one. I think I burned out on what I thought fun was by the time I reached the age of forty. After that I had to reinvent myself to have fun. I became what i needed to be to suit the occasion. What I do to amuse myself has gotten simple and easy. I know what counts, and only do that. Since it's my rules for what having fun is supposed to be like, and i can change them as I will in midstream, then, why would I not?

It might appear as if I might seem inclined to make up my mind about what the truth of any situation might be just from the sheer presence of it. Sometime i act like what's in my face is all there is to it. That, there is no wizard behind the curtain. I could swear that I see objects without the presence of they history or what they might become if I were god. The things I find sot before me are good enough until the moon comes over the mountain. Until then, I'll bide my time, and watch and prey.

Capturing drifting thoughts by writing them down is not in all ways the cat's meow. It's like trying to still remember last night's dreams at lunchtime. Dreams are drifting thoughts too. All the images we make into what we want them to be for our sake comes from the same source, and it's like an ever-flowing spring.

I experienced genuine hallucinations a lot even before I began using the sacraments. I've written more than once about having a heat stroke while I was plowing cotton with a mule when I was thirteen years old. I'd be glad to call seeing that puff adder a hallucination if it wasn't for the fact that the mule stopped and turned around to look at it too.

That's how I saw the snake in the first place. I followed the mule's gaze, and there it was. Yet, when I walked over to look closer at it, it was gone. It was fresh plowed dirt, and not nary a sign of no snake. No snake could have crawled on the fresh-turned dirt without leaving a sign.

The next thing I knew about was getting water poured all over me to cool me off. They found me unconscious at the end of the row. Dropping 400 micrograms of ol' Lucy is a lot easier on my body, and the snakes I see are psychedelic colors that glow in the dark. Sometime I form the opinion that all the neuronic movement in my brain and nervous system oozes throughout my body like disjointed snakes crawl. I think that's why real snakes can scare the shit outta me. How did they escape? It's hell doing the Medusa gig on cue, but turnabout is only fair play I suppose.

Some of the snakes I see while upsurged into an altered state of consciousness apparently don't appear to have to be snakes all the time. It wouldn't surprise me at all if my experience of winter was just a spell cast on me by the snakes taking residence within me during the cold months. When they return to they own cold bodies I feel like a boy again.

Saturn used to rule both Capricorn and Aquarius. Winter. Old age. Senility. Soft, crumbly bones. Repatriation. Mindlessness. Hopelessness dancing on the edge of the great abyss as if deprived of they senses. Then, a newly discovered planet called Uranus became the ruler of Aquarius, and they've been confused ever since. What happened to their snakes?

An interesting thing happened. The LiveJournal blog I've been writing on got sold to the Russians. Not that it means anything. I'm sure things will stay just the way they have been, but I was raised during the Cold War and all that propaganda must have prejudiced me. So, I started looking around for maybe a new place to write, and since Google bought Blogger.com the situation has really changed here.

I decided to go to the Settings and check out the changes. Everything about how this account is managed has changed. It's a lot easier to change things around now. I changed one of the links to represent my LiveJournal account on the right side of the page. That turned out well. I'm not competent in HTML, but it turned out okay.

In the picture I posted below of my class picture from the fourth grade, I'm the fifth kid from the left in the third row. This was the last time I was ever actually happy as a child. It astounds me there were so many Indians in the class. They didn't have a separate Indian school in that village. I was punished once for playing with one of the guys in this picture. I'm glad things changed. Children don't know they're supposed to discriminate against people until they're taught.

I'm impressed with what Google has done with Blogger.com. It's pretty easy to use by comparison when I set this account up four years ago. I've changed the settings to disallow comments here also. I don't give a damn what you think about the drifting thoughts I capture. I still love you, but I ain't about to be yo' bitch.

I gotta write something here just to keep this blog alive. This was the first blog I had. It has historical importance to me in that sense. I haven't taken any photographs lately. Buying a digital camera turned out just like i expected it to. I like to look at other people's photographs, but taking pictures of things just doesn't do much for me in place of the real thing.

I took this picture in a shallow gully to make it look like mountains. It didn't exactly work, but the idea took.

Well, I can't upload any photos. I don't know why. C'est la vie...

I don't know exactly how I got to this blog site, but since I'm here I might as well create an entry to keep the site updated. This was my first blog site. In the archives are a lot of stories about the weird places I've slept. The child in the picture is my grand daughter. I've never seen her in person.

This is the bonfire we lit for the winter solstice over at Rainey's house. This excellent photo was taken by Rainey Parker.

I've been taking some pictures of his little Buddha statue next door at my brother's house. It seems like a fun thing to do during various times of the year.

My new interest in photography seems a little forced. I reasoned that I owed it to myself to give it a whirl. I might appear to be obsessed with my house, and I am I suppose, because I take a lot of photographs of it. The ones I'm taking now has to do with the recent renovations to this house. It's mostly noteworthy because I began building this house over twenty years ago. I have lived in it during the entire construction of it, however slow that might be. This renovative work is the first real effort I've made in a long time. I seemed perfectly willing to let it rot down around me. Im not sure I feel any differently now.

This house is about all I've ever created to represent me when I'm gone. It will exist as my only remains as long as it remains. Frequently, I entertain the concern that this house will serve as my crematorium. Not intentionally, but because I'm getting older, and displaying the forgetfulness of the elderly. To what degree, I have no way of knowing. Everything I do makes sense to me most of the time. It's a little difficult to justify complete confidence in my competence with my collection of burnt pans and boilers laying around. Forgetting I've got stuff cooking on the stove is not an infrequent event. Each time it happens I renew my vows, but then it happens again, and I find myself sighing in comic relief.

This picture just stood out among most of the pictures I took around this time. The browns and reds in a warm light stand out against the gray of the windows. The window behind the chair used to have leaks all around it, and the window on the right just wasn't there. This is my sitting area. It looks much neater than it used to. Look at the same chairs in a pic just below.

I finally arranged my photo albums so I could post a specific picture. It all has to do with my ignorance of the iPhoto program on the Mac.

This photo shows the new decks we built on the east side of the house. The remodeling work on the southwest corner of the house can be seen. That's my friend Ben up on the second floor deck.

I cannot for the life of me get my library of photos to come up among the selections I can choose from on my browser. I get the same titles whether I've deleted them from the iPhoto program or not. This is messing with my mind. This is definitely not one of the plans that have come together for me. Most all of my photos are labeled with the numbers the program assigned them when I downloaded them from my camera to my computer. It's laborious just to hunt through them and find the ones I wanna write about. I end up just picking any photo that shows up when I click on something. Whatta drag...

I'm having problems uploading pics. It's gotta be my ignorance of how to catalog my photographs on my computer. Anyway, this is one of the shots of my house at some stage of development. There is more done than this picture shows. Maybe I can figure out how to get my logistics correct somewhere down the road.

These three girls taught me a lesson I'd been learning all day. Today was the first time i've taken my new camera out in public where there were a lot of people around. The occasion was a local barbeque cookoff. The building behind the girls is the county courthouse. I saw two of the girls standing near a temporary stage the sponsors had erected in their dance leotards. I asked them if I could take some pictures of them. They giggled and started posing right away. Then the girl in the center approached and asked if she could be in the pictures. Just to see what would happen I began to ask them to move this way or that, and they seemed to have a really good time posing for a perfect stranger. This was a real informative day. I'm beginning to understand why some people are so attracted to photography.

This is a shot I took from the north end of the family pond just west of my house. I take a lotta pictures of this pond. The surface of the water is always changing and there are a few stumps sticking up out of the water here and there that make for a good focus point. I took this shot from the paved road. The land behind the pond goes on for a mile or so and joins my younger brother's property. If you could follow to the right of the picture you would see how the land gradually slopes down to the river where we own both sides of it for a while. Most of the land along the river is swampy and floods every time it comes a good rain. It's just beautiful to me down there in the swamp. I'll go down there and take some pictures as soon as the bugs go away. We had a couple of hurricanes through here a few years ago, one following the other. The eye of both storms passed right through here and tore a lot of the trees in the swamp down.

The pond is there because my father and two younger brothers built the dam for it while I was away in the Navy. My father bought this property during that same period. I was raised across town on a much smaller farm. He sold the place I was raised to buy more land here. I was a little disappoint they sold my home place, but it was only a place we lived for 4-5 years so I wasn't that attached to it. I don't possess the sentimentality for this farm my younger brothers have. It's home to them from an early age. I am attached to my house. It's made of cypress trees I cut down in the swamp and hauled to the sawmill.

This is a picture of the drum I play each day. I might miss playing a day occasionally, but I'm real committed to playing it regularly. The blue chair came from my mother's house after she died. It was a gift to her from her children. It has motors in it to either use it as a LazyBoy type of recliner, but the real feature is that it will tilt forward to assist older people get out of the chair. This feature makes it possible to adjust it to a comfortable seat to play my drum.

The other articles in the picture won't be seen in this particular arrangement again, because while remodeling my house things got moved around. A lotta stuff finally got thrown away during this transition, and will never be seen again.

This is a test run to see what the page looks like with a photograph on it. If this works and it looks right, then I'll be posting a picture and writing comments about the picture. This shot is of the remodeling I'm doing on my house. This shows the lastest work I've done on it. Maybe this will work for me or it won't.

I switched over to the new Blogger format. That should renew this old account and get things started. I guess I'll have to get with Rainey to figure out how to post photographs here. My plan is to post one photograph and write about the content of the photo.

I don't know whether this blog is still working for me. I haven't posted for a long time. This message is just to see if it still works. I wanna put some pictures up.

I sorta intended to put some photos on this blog, but my interest in photography seems to be lagging. My brother loaned me his old camera for me to figure out whether or not I wanna buy one for myself. It keeps shutting itself down after each picture I take, even with new batteries. That's discouraging, but it shouldn't intervene if I really wanted to take photos. I have a difficult time trying to figure out why I'm taking pictures of stuff. Meanwhile, you can see some excellent pictures at my friend Rainey's blog at:

http://raineyp.blogspot.com

It's about time to write another entry to keep this blog current. I've been writing on livejournal, but now I have use of a digital camera, and I may want to put some of the pictures I take here. Of course, I have to figure out how to do that first.

I'm occasionally writing a blog over at:

http://home.earthlink.net/~fe1ix/

Most of the stuff I write is at:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/fe1ix/

I keep these older blogs up just so I can download copies if I ever take the notion. I enjoy the livejournal format for blogging much better because it comes with it's own comment section and allows me to edit blog entries after I've published better. Any comments that show up on the livejournal blog sends me an e-mail with several options in how I can treat the comment section.

The summer heat has backed off for a week or so. I haven't really been suffering from it all that much because I stay in the air conditioning that's at least moderately comfortable. It does lock me in to being inside though. If I go outside for over 15-20 minutes I start perspiring like crazy, and it takes at least a half hour to cool down again once I go inside.

The activity that has suffered most as a result of the heat has been my drumming. It's hard to get up the energy to deal with the heat and the physical exertion of playing the drum. The more I practice the less energy it takes to do the same thing. Ben and I played for about an hour this morning and I could tell I hadn't played as much since it got real hot. Ben has been practicing by himself a lot recently, and he sounds a lot more confident in his abilities. Exploring the drum has been one of the more rewarding things I've done in a long time.