The vernal equinox arriving earlier than usual this year seem to catch me by surprise. Presently, it's only about 6 hours away.On the east coast of the U.S. it happens at one o'clock tomorrow morning? For some reason I keep thinking Spring is further away, but the astronomical event that represents the first day of Spring is undeniable. March did come in like a lion. The wind is roaring outside even now. I'm glad that chilly breeze that has a hard edge to it is gone for a while.

The last couple of days have been sunny most of the time, but there was this incessant, lingering polar influence that made the objects laying around in my yard look shiny. I stayed inside all day. Beware the Ides of March. Why would I not? It's easy enough to jump on my Cardio-Glide and pretend I'm training for the Olympics. I figured I could wait winter out. It can't stay cold forever. Where is the global warming when we need it? The equinox is immediately upon us. Granted, there could be a hard frost or two before the dragons emerge from their dark lair to bring their electrical storms and swirling winds, but come hell or high water, Spring has definitely sprung in my neck of the woods!

Like any other occasionally sane person I realize that a late frost could still descend and nip the new vegetation in the bud. It happened last year and killed most of the early blooming fruit trees back to square one. My fig tree just outside my house never recovered in time to bear much if any fruit. Besides having a late spring frost last year, it was also the beginning of the longest drought in the recorded history of this area. The plants of all kinds suffered last season. Only the hardiest grass types that had deep roots stayed green last summer. The figs that somehow survived had a rubbery consistency when I tasted them. Trying to eat them was like trying to chew stale Gummy Bears. There wasn't enough rainfall for the second-try figs to plump up.

I get a little obsessive about my fig tree. It's one of the only plants I've ever had much luck with over the years. In my world, it's the little engine that could. I've suspected for years that I planted it over some hard pan clay that keeps it's tap roots from going straight down. Compared to the growth of the cutting my youngest brother planted about the same time, my fig tree is a scraggly dwarf. His fig tree is now almost as big as his house. My fear of a late frost is real. Somehow I find being possessed by this worrisome mood about a stupid plant is amazing. It's like finding out I'm a real person and experience real emotions like regular people. It makes me feel like I'm okay. I'm not made of wood. I don't have a long nose. Besides, I have a history with this plant that is more stable in my childhood memories than all the houses and little towns we constantly moved to when I was a kid.

My father planted cuttings of this plant everywhere we moved to along with his milk cows. The original cutting came from his father's farm in Mississippi. His father's plant was brought to Mississippi from the cotton plantation his father owned just north of Mobile, Alabama. After my older sister got interested in genealogy. some of her research revealed discrepancies in the stories my father told about the conditions under which he was raised. It became apparent that he liked to embellish the grandeur of his agrarian upbringing. It was a different world in that part of the country back then. The Civil War was still less than a hundred years old even when I was born. We lost the war, and with it the economy the people in Mississippi depended on resolved to slim pickings. My great-grandfather himself never recovered from the Battle of Petersburg, and died, they say, from shell-shock and a broken heart. Everything he worked except the land was lost in the Civil War.

I don't actually know what the truth is, I'm not sure I want to. The embellished stories of my father are great material for me to embellish even further. Why would I not? Any ol' lie my pappy favored is a good enough lie for me. Two of my grandfathers before my great grandfather was said to be living around here on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. One story is that the original guy to come to America fled through the coastal swamps to this area when he jumped ship in Charleston Harbor.

A goodly number of the old families in this immediate area immigrated in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Several of them claim their original ancestors got here by jumping ship in Charleston. Some say they knew their destination when they jumped and ran. What allowed them to get away was the same swamps the Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion of South Carolina was famous for. The Swamp Fox. A man can't be chased on horseback through these swamps unless the submerged high ground is known.

The original ancestor who lived here on the coastal plains as a runaway, eventually had a mess of children who in due time got a land grant in the western territories for fighting in the Spanish American War. The western territory back in those days was Alabama and Mississippi just east of the land bought in the Louisiana Purchase. It was my great-great-great-grandfather who brought a cutting of the fig tree from here in the coastal plains to the southern part of Alabama in the vee-shaped delta between the Black Warrior and Tombigbee Rivers.

Nobody knows. When I bought this rooted cutting from Lowe's, they had fifty other plants of the same variety as my so-called family fig tree. One way or the other, it makes it easier to understand why lying comes so natural to me. According to some, I was a child prodigy at it. '-)

According to my older sister, a scholarly Aquarian who studies genealogy as a fashion statement, I come from a long line of liars and loud-mouthed braggarts who were reputed to possess ancient secrets about potting grains to see what come outta the other end of them weirdly shaped pipes. Their occupation was said to be exposed by the ruddy colour of their skin, especially early in the morning hours before they took their first sip of their own makings. Buffoons, country lawyers, and stern-faced preachers that liked to stand tall on fresh-cut stumps and concoct morality plays in the spur of the moment just to see if it would bring mo' money to the offering plate.

The offering plate was often the only possession some my ancestors owned, so it's said, along side their revered family Bible, and what passed at the time for a pickup truck, to haul what they needed in this granular spiritual endeavor from the flatlands to the glens and hollows that's hard to pick through without a trustable guide. Their innate abilities to give spring water an added value was as guaranteed as a knockout punch.

One of the false impressions my parents appeared to have about their heritage was that a lot of it was supposed to be Scotch-Irish. As in actual Scots from Scotland, but who were forcefully migrated to Ireland, where it is rumored they weren't very well liked at all. After the western immigration began in full swing to the western hemisphere and Australia, they fled here to escape their indentured tribal misery. The problem with my parent's reckoning is, this particular migration happened much later than the religious persecution that drove our original ancestors here a hundred fifty years previously. The Scotch-Irish were a kind of second wave that happened around the same time as the Potato Famine.

According to my sister's research, it's possible our blood line has a smidgen of Scotch-Irish blood, but surprisingly not all that much. There was considerably more French Huguenot blood on my father's side, with a mainstay of Anglo-Saxon. Sphinx. My grandmother's maiden name was Sphinx. I never knew her. Two of my direct grandmothers who married the men of my family name were of French blood, but according to my sister, that only happened after all of them got to America. None of these people come from hoity toity families. They were pretty much Celtic tribesmen without much education. From the handed down stories, they came here less to follow their own heathen religion practices, and more to escape being the victims of the Inquisition and life-threatening persecution from the Druids who had now turned Papist.

I don't know the particulars, but recently the trial records of the Inquisition were opened to the public. There was some serious ethnic cleansing going on in the nayme of God. There always has and always will be, I suppose, but reading a little about what my ancestors were facing if they didn't get the hell outta Dodge helps me to understand why they might overcome any inclination not to leave any way they could manage it.

I'm disclaiming the truth. I don't know what it is, and if I wait for it to arrive before I can properly amuse myself, I'd never write nothing. I'm playing around with my own facticity, when probably don't contain many real facts at all. I'm reinventing myself by reframing my personal history. Why would I not? Nobody knows. Nobody can know, not even for love or money. When my readers read, they "see" what they might have written if they wrote what they opine I wrote here. They have to interpret everything just like me. If they don't, it doesn't matter. When they explain myself to me I'll make what they say to mean exactly what I think it does. Only this, and nothing more.

I bought a new fig plant from Lowe's. It's the same variety as my old fig tree. I keep calling them trees, but they're really just large bushes. There are really huge fig trees along the Congo River in Africa, but these ain't that variety. They're brown. How's that for categorizing?

I won't say that I've suffered this new plant into being healthy. The people who grew the cutting had practically everything to do with that. I just dug a hole for it, and observed the instructions that were printed on the shipping container.

I watered it faithfully until the rains came. Along with a grape vine I bought on the same shopping spree. I still can't tell if the grape vine is alive or not. Nothing on it has turned green. Buying two plants in one day ain't exactly a shopping spree for ordinary folks who have a stable cash flow. I don't... and don't... and probably won't.... aaiiyyyeeee... even manana!

The extremely candid entry I wrote for my other blog this morning revealed something to me that I've carried hidden inside for a long time. I don't like having the skeletons in my closet being rattled any more than anyone else. My selfishness and uselessness to the other is a plague to society, and a personal blindspot. It's not so much that my past has caught up with me recently, but that my past has always caught up with me at the worst possible time. I can't deny that I've tried to feign innocence in many cases when misunderstandings arose, and it worked just fine. In other cases my pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears. So?

I watched this woman's video of her talk at this gathering of intellectuals about what happened to her. She was a brain scientist who realized she was having a stroke because of a blood clot in her left hemisphere. She describes what happened to her:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

I empathized with her visible struggle to describe what happened to her. I felt like I subjectively understood every phase and aspect of her physical situation, and her seemingly detached, but somehow unconcerned knowledge that she needed external assistance as soon as possible. I found myself weeping with her sense of loss, and then her exhilaration that she had survived.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by other people's joy and pain. I bear it as if it were my own. I don't deserve to have this thrust upon me as a punishment, it's real pain, and yet, I know I do deserve whatever punishment is meted to me. It's as if I deliberately instituted it myself, and yet I know full well I didn't. This double bind seems to be the foundation of the Existential Movement in the years after World War Two.

The most damning aspect of this perspective is the unavoidable realization that any aspect of what's what could go any ol' way on the turn of a dime. It's absurd. No, really, it was also called The Theater Of The Absurd. This is the opposite of practically everything I was taught in my formative years to hold an ideal by which to guide my life. Since I was in my impressionable youth during the most active period of this philosophical movement, even though I was raised in a series of villages and small towns on the coastal plains, I was somehow made familiar that it was happening in real time somewhere else. The reading assignments of social studies and literature I guess.

Recently, while I was reading Sartre''s Being and Nothingness I stated that I hadn't read Sartre much, and that was true then. I followed up on the ideas of this Existential movement in college because it made me feel important. It was definitely not what the other kids was reading. I read Jean Genet's stuff, and acted in several one-act plays written by some of the popular dramatists considered to be associated with the Theater of The Absurd.

I don't think I obsessed on Existentialism like I have other topics, but enough probably to allow myself to entertain the absurdity of nay-me-d objects and shape-shifters. It might take something that doesn't change to observe change, but I can't figure out what difference it would make if such were observably so?

I don't know if I perform tacit favors for people that they cannot easily repay with either love nor money, and yet I do regularly as a mere aside. I can hardly believe it myself when I watch it happen, and my first thought is usually, "That didn't really happen. It couldn't be me.", and yet it is. Occasionally I can even stop doing it and it doesn't happen any more. Nobody knows. Not even me. But, I would say that, wouldn't I?

The absurdity of it is that I expect to be appreciated for something nobody can know i go outta my way to make happen. I'm not going to tell them! I don't really believe it myself. Since I appear to slothfully allow this odd "don't ask/don't tell" dynamic to break my heart, you might think I shouldn't complain, and I can't really, but I do. Sometime long and loud. Instead of gratitude, I get the opposite response for what I honestly deserve for being considerate. Simultaneously, and to my utter amazement, I know perfectly well i deserve to be ignored as a supercilious ingrate.

Just to amuse myself, I pretend to disagree with someone that they're an ignorant slut. In that moment of confusion (who expects to hear that?), we both know they really are nothing special, and generally consider themselves as dumb as a box of rocks. But, since there's nothing else to say, I just say no. "You're not an ignorant slut. You know better than that. You can't fool me, you sly devil.").

They immediately become clever to keep from proving me wrong. How many people argue with a person who claims they're not as stupid as they look? Once I stop supporting their sudden burst of ingenuity, however, they immediately return to being an ignorant slut. Let it be. More often than not, it hurts their feelings to have realized they were cheating themselves out of being-for-themselves.

It's still strange to me it comes down this way so predictably. I watch myself do it too. What continuously amazes me is that I can trick them into being-more-of-themselves-for-me, but they wanna trick themselves and leave me out of the equation. That's what i want too. But, they can't know/see themselves that way. Nobody can. It takes two to tango. By themselves, by ourselves, we are the moving target we're trying to stand back and shoot at.

People generally don't understand nor can they unless something drastic happens. Lightning bolts? Car wrecks? Shot up in a war? Suddenly, they did something they didn't realize they could do, and now they can't do it of their own volition. Do I get any thanks for tormenting them? Of course not. Nobody loves you when you're down and out. But, some people won't listen to anybody who ain't been there.

Life is made simpler by fifty cents words because they're so confusing to more people than some might think. Induced states of confusion create hypnotic portals that come tailor-made with their own possibilities. Possibilities that can be anticipated because they're designed to announce their arrival to the designer just in time, who can then act like it's a gift of prophecy for whatever the traffic will bear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Saturday night home alone. Nothing on television worth watching. I'd like to see the Duke/Carolina game, but it's on ESPN and I only get over-the-air programming. I've had a sinus headache all day. Must be coming down with something. I can feel it in both ears. I gotta do the salt treatment on my sinuses.

The wind blew hard all day bringing in the cold front. It's about stopped now. It not gone get super cold tonight, just down to freezing, and then it's supposed to be moderate for the next week or so. I put foam earplugs in this morning to keep from hearing the wind howling. Between the ear plugs, having the television on the basketball games, and playing the drum machine on my digital keyboard, the sound of the wind didn't freak me out like it usually does. I must have some kind of phobia about the wind howling. I don't even like it blowing in my face. The idea of riding a motorcycle don't set well with me because of the wind.

I guess I've just spent the entire afternoon occupying myself in small ways to take my mind off the wind. I might as well say because of death. I already know the wind will be howling the moment I croak. It has every time i've died so far. It's been that kind of day. I'm probably just gonna go to bed early and get this day over with.

It's been an odd weather day. It rained all morning and much of the afternoon. It's supposed to rain some more before daylight. This is just what we need around here. We're in the worst drought in history, so any rain is good news. They say the reservoirs up around the Triangle have filled up with enough water now to get through the summer. That's much better than it was 2-3 weeks ago. The drought sure brought the fragility of our water supply to everyone's attention. In this drought-stricken area, water is the new oil.

I've switched my piano practice from the mornings to the afternoons and evening. It takes too long to write my morning blog to push it in order to play the scales. The writing always comes first. Practicing the scales is about all I'm doing with music right now. I am playing the pentatonic blues scale more often in addition to the major and natural minor scales. Presently I'm only practicing the Bb pentatonic scale, but I intend to learn pentatonic scales of the other eleven keys and make it part of my regular routine.

I intend to get around to studying chord progressions once I feel satisfied I'm making progress playing the scales. It's not proceeding as fast as I hoped it might. Some of the scales I can play at a fair clip, but the ones I have trouble with is a different story. Sometimes I feel like I've learned the scales of a particular key, and the next time I get around to it on the Circle of Fifths, it's like I never played it before. I don't have a clue why that happens. Today I spent at least an hour playing the E Major scale over and over. I tried to play it correctly at the tempo of that 8BeatModern drum machine setting i like so much. That's what took an hour. Playing it at that tempo and finally not making a mistake.

I may have to go through all twelve keys that way. it's not really a case of "have to". I seem quite sure the speed will come in time. I just kinda like it when it finally happens that I can keep up with the 8BeatModern tempo and not make any mistakes. By the time I get it right, my fingers are warmed up and it feels like I'm flying. It's the fingering deal that's still in transition. I don't even try to follow the fingering system I found on the internet so much any more. Even when I seem unsure of myself and look it up, I'm right more often than not. I've just gotten to the point where I understand why it has to be done a certain way. There may be exceptions to the rules, but i can take that into account later if I need to.

There is a reason why I'm spending so much time learning these scales and making sure I use the right fingering. I wanna know what to do so well, in this regard, that i can literally forget about the scale fingering, and concentrate on speed. I'm starting to do that already, but it's a little worrisome. Sometimes my fingers go faster than my conscious mind can keep up with where my fingers land. There are occasions when i realize that I'm not doing it right. Then, I have to slow down and play the problem scale slowly and surely until I can do it correctly at a fairly fast rate of speed. I love doing this remedial work. It's a lot like editing these blog entries. I enjoy the editing part a little more than the writing part.

Learning to play these scales brings the thetic and non-thetic consciousness' into direct confrontation. My non-thetic mind wants to go out on it's own and fly, but it doesn't care if it makes careless mistakes, and it doesn't want to conform it's efforts to play with other people. My thetic mind does. That's where my thetic consciousness has to intercede. I want my non-thetic mind to woo my thetic mind. I want it to dazzle it with it's brilliance. My thetic consciousness is somewhat sadistic. It demands more and more discipline from my non-thetic consciousness, but my non-thetic consciousness is up to the task. It can be excruciatingly seductive. Oh, happy day. ;-)

Stutter-stepping like a weary old man comes natural when walking uphill. Especially in uneven terrain where unknown pitfalls might lie beneath some lovely blades of lespedeza. I was out walking around the farm just now. For the most part I stuck to the driveways and dirt roads close to the house here. I intended to walk to the back of my brother's hayfield. There is a well formed farm lane all the way to the hay field,and then the sandy track of the roadway dissolves into an even spacing of coastal bermuda grass that's cultivated for mowing it for hay. The regular cutting of it in the summer keeps it looking less like a lawn, and more like the rough grass along the fairways of a golf course.

In it's dormant season coastal bermuda turns a mottled color of mixed browns. Since the hayfield is not a golf course there are streaks of taller grass the mower missed that make odd patterns. Those streaks of mature, unmowed grass provide various types of birds and small animals camouflage to hide in temporarily, but they don't fool the red-tailed hawks for long. It depends on the time of day and how much of a shadow the angle of the sunlight creates for them to hide in.

For the last couple of weeks my brother has invited a group of rabbit hunters to cruise through the whole farm with their miniature beagle dogs that can go anywhere a rabbit can. They're cute as a button until you realize they're there doing their very best to track down and kill the easter bunny. That's enough to turn an egg-based Easter back into a quiet religious or astrological observation.

I don't know why the science boys are trying to figure out what happened to the dinosaurs when the answer is so obvious to every predator known or not to mankind. Not only did they taste like chicken. They were chickens. Every meat-eater on the planet wanted a slice of that. Especially the white meat. Then, as now.

The breast meat on a healthy dinosaur must have fed a pack of hyenas or wolves two miles wide. Why live dangerously on the periphery of a migrating herd of grazing animals, when the carcass of one dinosaur or mastodon would feed the whole neighborhood including the scavengers for a couple of days or more. That's what happened to the dinosaurs. They found those same mushrooms Alice ate, and turned themselves into gamecocks, then moved to South Carolina as mascots.

Small is better in guerilla warfare when bullets are flying everywhere. There have been times I wished there was a piece of mushroom I could eat and shrink down to the size I'd need to be to hide in a rabbit hole like Alice did. My biggest problem is that I can't believe it's actually happening when it is actually happening. I run around giggling as if trying to realize it's not something I'm reading or dreaming about instead. Bullets aren't hungry carnivores seeking you out for sustenance. it doesn't bode well to make yourself big to scare them away.

There are certain sacramental mushrooms people imbibe that might allow them to shrink in size enough to hide in rabbit holes, but for me that feast is wasted on getting small. I was born a shrinking violet. I've explored everything small. Not enough curiosity about the microcosm bides my time for it anymore. Once I divide my prey enough to conquer, I find no rhyme or reason to get jiggy about conducting an audit of the spoils of my victory. That's what ghouls and buzzards are for. Have you ever argued with their union stewards?

The macrocosm is just too voluminous and overwhelmingly ponderous for me to imagine cutting it down to byte-sized bits I can process to make my mark in an unstoppable world of constant change. Occasionally I lie outside and stare at the sky at various times of the day and night. I am not particularly amused. I'd like to be. That's why I do it or tell myself so. Okay, sometimes I do it because I'm tired of walking the back forty.

Especially in the remote hay fields when it chilly outside, and the afternoon sun can feel so warm while I'm stretched out on the protected leeward slope. It's easy to lay there and fade to nothingness out in the open where no human can see me or know I'm there. Nobody knows or cares. Freedom can't not be free. Which begs the question in such open air: Have I transcended the need for transcendence or unknowingly succumbed to the unyielding bombardment of those pesky, blind-siding neutrinos?

Finding something that might fascinate me about staring out into space could possibly solve a lot of my personal problems. Such as why I get drunk or stoned to excess more frequently than respectable, and have to take off my shoes and lie flat of my back in order to keep from dying with my boots on. It's as if I become a part of everything I'm not usually, in order to unite with life watching itself in the reflection of my false death.

I get a better idea of why I'm attempting to learn more about how to play a piano and teach myself to play the major and minor scales now. It's something to do to taking my mind off stuff that really matters, but it doesn't help to dwell on.

Today I found out my daughter has some undefined health problems, and my state of poverty (that I seem so smug about) ain't no help to her. From what she writes it's as though not having health insurance is more troubling to her than actually being sick.

I don't think I would be much help making myself sick over not being able to solve her financial problems by writing a check. I can't even do that for myself. I was dirt poor and living catch as catch can on the streets when i met her mother. Her leaving me put me right back into the financial nowheresville she found me. My daughter is probably gonna have to work the system. I hate it for her. That's a blow to anybody's dignity, but an orderly retreat is a strategy, not an admission of defeat.

She don't have a clue what's going on with me, health-wise, and neither does anybody else. Another episode with my heart yesterday has me convinced I won't be of any help or of any detriment to anyone sooner than later. It doesn't matter.

I'm more convinced that ever this stuff travels and runs in families. My conclusions about this is probably just more of my hocus pocus, but I'm convinced I'm more likely to heal my daughter through healing myself than any other way. I don't actually have a Plan B. I feel pretty helpless to help others when I refuse to help myself. Fatalism is a hard row to hoe.

The learning curve is catching up with me on the piano scales. I seem to go backwards and forwards trying to make recognizable progress playing them. This afternoon I kept working F major, Eb Major, C# major, and Bb major over and over redundantly. At the time, it didn't seem like all that repetition was paying off for me while I was doing it. My experience playing musical instruments allows me to know it is gonna most likely pay off for me later, but I'm a glutton for immediate gratification. Human beings don't have a choice about living in the past, since it's impossible to live in the unformed future, and doubly damned hard to stay centered in the right damned now.

The one thing about practicing anything with an attitude of sincerity, is that's practically guaranteed the practicing is gonna make it easier down the road to do whatever it is you wanna get good at. Presently, to an outsider looking in at me banging away at my digital keyboard, it might appear that the only thing I'm ever gonna get good at by doing what I do, is playing the major and minor scales, and not much else. I hope they won't feel deprived if I announce to them that's okay with me. I never took the time to learn to do them before, when knowing how to play the scales would have been a mo' bettah. That was then. This is now. It virtually enchants me to sit here and do them methodically over and over again, just because I can.

The only method to stay centered in the flow of not this/not that which seems to work for me is to treat the entire onset of life's unknowable possibilities as plausible, but not convincing. The temptation to take hope in some enticing notion of what could be under more optimal conditions... someday... somewhere over the rainbow... for a price, immediately removes any option I have to stay in the flow that changes me to what life demands of being.

The only attitude that has won the day for me, in this regard, has been to realize in the immediacy of whatever prevailing influences carry the moment, and despite my abject despair at being totally devoid of hope, I still have a right to be here. Freedom, under any proposed constraint, is still not free, to not be free. Does not Ka, the world serpent, guarantee it's unchanging demeanor?

Unless you consider all serpents one snake, I've met a few reptiles in the dreamtime that distinctly do not favor or resemble the traditional form of Ka. Maybe the appellation Ka was chosen by the Magi as a universal tag for all reptiles in some prehistoric oral tradition. Oddly enow, I might swear I've seen neon serpents that innocently cause death by the initial shock and awe caused to a neophyte first realizing their actual, non-thetic presence in the seemingly eccentric dimension of the ex-is-tense.

Avatars. It's like finding out you've been lied to, and there really are snakes in Ireland.

The new aural skills software program I downloaded is more challenging than the online version i used for a couple of months. There are days when I feel like I'm going backwards and getting worse at this than making progress. I've been so lazy today it's taken me all day long to work through the major and minor scales. It was difficult for me to stay focused on what I was doing, so I took a brief nap and felt better.

Trying to practice the scales on my new piano in between watching college basketball games can get testy. I felt compelled to watch as much of the games today as I could. I haven't been able to see many college games this year before March Madness officially cranks up. I root for the ACC teams, of course, with Carolina being my favorite team. I was able to see the last half of Carolina vs Boston College, most of the Duke vs NC State, but not much of the Wake Forest vs Miami games today. It oughta be a fun year for the ACC teams.

I went to the cafe to eat lunch today. There weren't many people there. I sat in a booth by myself and had plenty of time to work on my crossword puzzle. The only person I spoke to beside the waitress was a woman I've been friendly with for a couple of years. She stopped by my table on her way out and sat down with me for a few minutes. She has a rich boy friend I get along with okay. We flirt some, but never see each other outside of the restaurant. She's true blue to her boyfriend, and I wouldn't have it any other way. This is true for most of the people I see at the cafe. It seems like sitting together there at the restaurant for an hour or so occasionally is enough socializing for many of us. I returned home after I ate lunch. That's about it, it hasn't been an extraordinarily exciting day. Just another Saturday hanging around the house amusing myself catch as catch can.

This has been a pretty slack day. I got so hyped up yesterday trying to rationalize my odd behavior that I think I had to compensate with a little down time. A perfect example of how the day has been for me was that just now i realized I'd let a perfectly good cup of coffee get cold before I remembered it was there. It doesn't matter because i like coffee just as well when it's cold. Luke-warm is a little disgusting.

I did most all of the scales this morning. My heart wasn't really in it, but I finally managed to finish them. Then, just to get out of the house, I drove over to the cafe where I've been a fairly regular customer for many years. Just not lately. The problem is that I've set these daily chores for myself, and sometime performing those daily rituals goes right on past my usual time for going to the cafe. Besides, many of the people I used to enjoy talking with are no longer around. The people I still know there at the cafe seem to show up just to prove they're still alive. I guess that's something to live for. I'm not sure whether I'm still alive or not. I've lost interest in many things. Nobody knows about me any more. Many of them got dead in one way or the other. They don't care about me and the minimalist world I live in either. How could they possibly?

The people who have lived in this little town most all of their life don't know what happened to me all the time i was gone from here. Besides that, I never got here until all the lifelong cliques has been formed. I was an outsider practically everywhere I took up residence. My natal family didn't have any kinfolk who lived around here for a thousand miles. There were no family ties outside my parents and siblings. We had moved in at least four other towns and as many as seven or eight different houses by the time my parents settled here. This town is not home for me like it is even to my younger brothers. The were much younger when we moved here. My older sisters? Like my mother, they wore 44E bras, that's all that mattered to the boys. They were never strangers long. Not with the boys anyway. I was never attracted to women with large breasts, I knew the downside of it.

I found it difficult to hear both of my parents and older sisters talk about Mississippi. My parents were born and raised in the same house and were surrounded by extended families. They seem to think we ought to feel bound by the same principals they were taught to value, but we weren't raised the same way. They didn't raise their own children they way they claimed was best for children to be raised. I'm convinced they wanted the best for us, but there was no family around after they moved up here to restrain or support them.

I remember when both of my parents got old and senile and wanted to go "home". Taking them to Mississippi never satisfied either of them they were home. If I live long enough that will happen to me too, but there will be no one to try to calm me down. They'll probably just put me in a straight jacket and gag me just to shut me up. That's not a lot of fun to contemplate, so I don't. I try to keep busy doing something to occupy my mind.

I wrote a poem in my early thirties that still haunts me. Sometime i think I shouldn't have written it because it seems to have acted as a mantram:

Where do you go
when there is nowhere to go,
and the place that you're at
is kind of blue,
and you've been everywhere
but the stars up above,
and you feel like
you've been up there too.

There came a time in my life when there was nowhere else to go. In deed I had been practically everywhere but the stars up above, and I'm more sure all the time that I've been there too. Whatever reasons I once had for doing what I thought was right no longer has so much value for me when the years add up. The future must be now or not at all.

I don't know how to describe what it's like to try to learn how to play the scales on the piano when I got nobody to show off to. Buying this new keyboard is very sad for me. It was a stupid thing to do. Nobody knows or cares what I'm doing out here all by myself. Not even me most of the time. The people around me in this small town think about me about as much as I think about them. Surprisingly, not even my own siblings. They're old too. They don't care any more whether what I do is a reflection on the family. They got their own families to be proud or ashamed of. Outta sight. Outta mind.

I didn't know how getting older would affect me. I am older now, and I've gotten a better idea of it. Life has a long tail, but the future grows shorter as the years add up. It's not the way the body deteriorates that's so troublesome as much as how the inevitable arrival of an eventual death becomes more prominent in this specific way. When a person gets old, they are forced by circumstance to give up all say so over what happens to them. That's not an appealing reason to live.

it's probably a little like what Fidel Castro is going through as he finally decided to retire. Dictator or not, he had to give it all up. We all have to give everything up as the years pass. What has happened to me after I turned sixty was that it became undeniable that death of natural causes loomed closer. I'm almost nine years older than that. Old people don't make new friends for the same reasons survivors in war don't make friends with the replacements. Why bother?

Death is not something I'm particularly willing to be a good sport about. Despite that, all my efforts to hold on to life is just as ludicrous as all the efforts of the people I've seen go before me. Since I don't have many resources I can't imagine the medicos will keep me alive to milk me dry. I don't seem all that worried about the prospect of getting old and dying, but what if I live? That's the tragedy of old age.

Yesterday I wrote of catching up with myself playing the scales on the piano keyboard enough to return to the online ear training exercises I was working before. There was something irritating about the blatant banner advertising that competed with my attention while i was trying to get the answers to the exercises right. I decided to do another search for a different system of ear training, but instead of using "ear training" for my search query, I used "aural skills". That got more specific responses. Probably because that's what the academics call their classes on ear training.

I found a couple of free software programs designed specifically for the Mac. I downloaded a program called Aquallegro authored by Andy Van Ness.

http://andyvn.ath.cx/?sect=tech&cat=soft&topic=aqu

I made a mistake when I first installed it, and couldn't get it to work right, so I fired off an e-mail to Andy who promptly replied. He suggested a few things I might do. I figured the code got corrupted in the download, so I ended up deleting the original installation and tried again. The second time it worked just dandy. I'm pretty happy it did too. It's a really neat program. I've worked some of the exercises and figured out how to use the preference settings to suit my level of understanding.

Once I got the hang of it, I quickly became addicted to trying to keep the percentage of my correct answers high. I was happy that I got about ninety percent of the intervals right. This well-designed program is easy to operate compared to the online program.

The program is more predictably responsive than having to send my responses over the internet to find out if my answer is right or wrong. According to the traffic on the online servers, the response might take several seconds or more. It broke my stride often. With Aquallegro I make a decision about what I think the interval between the two notes might be, click on the radio button beside my choice, and the feedback is practically instant. I move on to the next exercise without hesitation. There is no spam to distract me when I work the exercises. The graphics are first-class. What's not to like? It reeks of a craftsman's pride and pedantic care-taking. I might have to make a donation out of pure admiration for his handiwork.

I worked the Interval exercises for at least an hour just now. The program plays two notes and I have to guess how many whole or half steps the notes are apart. It's a lot like the online program in that respect, so there wasn't much adjusting to do in order to work the exercises. Did I mention that it's fast?

The most noticeable part of using Aquallegro was the clarity of the notes the program provides for the exercises. The acoustic piano sounded like it was right in the room with me. It was so much more audible than the online program it appeared to have a positive influence that brought my guesswork up to the ninety percent level. I'm still grateful for the online ear training site. It's responsible for my realizing something important in my musical education was missing.

It's beginning to work out like I hoped it would. My fingers are beginning to understand where to go next on their own while I'm playing the scales. They're beginning to reach for the next note before I can think it there. That's pretty heady stuff for me. My plan is working.

I have the major scales pretty much memorized and can play all of them with both hands at the same time. The minor scales are coming along. I'm still using the letter names of the notes to make sure I stay in the minor key, but the fingering is something I'm just learning how it's done by myself now. That's lots of fun. It's my sense of things now that my fingers are showing me what's what rather than the other way around.

I've been wondering how to include the minor scales when I play the major scales following the Circle of Fifths. I play the major scale, and then the relative minor following it, then I go to the next major scale on the Circle of Fifths. I don't know if this considered an acceptable way a certified piano teacher would do it, but they had their chance at me and failed. I'm doing it this way so I'll be able to know what the relative minor to each major scale is. I want it to become second nature for me to just reach for one from the other handily. If I run into a better way to do it later on I'll change to that.

I've been hiding behind learning to play these scales for a couple of weeks now. I still think it was the right thing to do. I didn't have any approach to how I should finger the notes on the piano keyboard. That was a problem for me even though I only tinkered around with C Major and just the white keys. What I've accomplished so far in learning how to play the scales using the classical method of fingering is really giving me a solid idea of how to approach playing a particular passage in a way that I don't fumble all over myself trying to do it.

I stopped doing other exercises to learn to play these scales. It won't be long until I know how to play the scales. When I do have them all memorized, than I'll have not excuse not to return to the ear-training exercises and playing along with blues videos again. I feel like I'm really learning something by memorizing and playing these scales. Relationships I've only suspected are popping up all over the place. I find myself saying "Aha!" a lot. I wish I could come up with something a little more original.

My friend asked me the other day why I don't spend more time playing with other musicians like he does. He doesn't understand that I've already been crushed by my ignorance too many times to take any more chances with other musicians. It's sorta not fair to them to be held back by my ignorance.

I've been through these kinds of situations before. I know what I have to do to be comfortable trying to play with other people. I have to be able to understand what they're asking of me when they take the time to show me where they're at with what they're doing. I have to take the approach I'm taking so I can understand their lingo. I got gifts and talents to offer other musicians. They're usually patient with me because of that, but it's me that get all frustrated with they start describing what they expect from me in terms I oughta understand, but don't. If I can get the lingo down, I might not get so intimidated by my ignorance that I walk away.

I wanna be able to play anything I can play in any key or rhythm. I wanna be able to transpose whatever music I'm playing instantly to any key the other desires without a real preference that I'm more comfortable with. Nobody has ever suggested I might wanna do that. I made up my mind on my own. I hate rejection. I don't wanna experience it just because I can't play in any key requested. I've been the ignorant slut the other has had to adjust to because I didn't know how to play in but a few keys. I don't care if the other is so limited, as long as it ain't me.

If this progresses like it has in the last month or so i may just buy me another classical flute. If I could imitate the scales I'm learning to play on the piano keyboard and learn to do what I'm doing on the classical flute, I could have me a bunch of fun. Creating a visualized image of a piano keyboard in my mind's eye as a reference tool for figuring what to do next is the best thing I've done for-myself in a long time.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. The nostalgia the PBS fund drives toss out to get them pledges. Tonight's episode was on The Mommas and The Poppas. At least half of them are dead now. Heart attacks. What a way to go. Why not? You gotta go. What difference?

It hasn't been a real fruitful day. I spent a good part of the afternoon trying to upload some new sound files in my synthesizer. It didn't happen. I'll have to delete everything and try again. It appears to be a time for learning curves. All the learning curves I've encountered recently have to do with my latest musical binge.

Besides learning the major and minor scales on the keyboard, I'm attempting to learn how to download sounds over the internet and install them in the internal memory of my synthesizer. I subscribed to a discussion list about the synthesizer to get some help. They're trying to help me.

I also downloaded the Finale Notepad music publishing freeware. I'm trying to make time to finish the tutorial on how to use it. From what I've seen so far it's a matter of learning to use the command line to make things happen on the worksheet. I never realized composing music could be so easily digitized. These people seem to have thought of everything.

The best I've been able to do with composing is writing the words and guitar chords down on a legal pad or in a spiral-bound notebook. I used to do that a lot. Hanging on to stuff like that frightens me. It seems like my trying to claim it as my own stops the flow. If I were to dare to "make something of it", my creative abilities would dry up and blow away. It happens all the time. I know of whence I write.

That's not exactly true. I don't leave things to nature. I create the future in a way that I'll recognize it when it comes along. A prophet with an audience of One. Just in the same way I wake up in the night from a dream and wanna remember it. To remember it, I'll throw something i usually keep near my bed (like a sock or a shoe)across the room. When I have to look for it the next morning, because it's not in it's usual place, I might remember the dream from earlier on.

That's dealing with what I drempt as history. As yesterday's news. Lucid dreaming is the only real-time way to do the dreamtime. Where everything I encounter there is taken as plausible, but not quite convincing. As if I were actually there, yet aware that I'm dreaming. I sorta believe I am. I act like it's so, but i wouldn't swear to it in court or try to convince an ardent unbeliever. I choose myself over them.

I think I can and do manipulate events in my dream time dimensions just the same as I do in this sensory one. As far as I can tell (Remember my disclaimer. I'm prone to delusions of grandeur and claim it's positive hallucination), I live simultaneous lifetimes, and dreaming either at night or by day is how I segue from one lifetime/dimension to another. "Breaking up is hard to do."

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.