A couple of months ago, I developed a sore on the second toe of my left
foot.  No pain, so I didn't think too much about it.  Well, it got worse
and worse, and when I arrived out here in Whidbey I went to see my doctor.
He *very* quickly arranged for X-rays and an MRI, and I found myself in a
podiatrist's office a few days later.  My toe infection had indeed worsened,
and in fact (for various genetic reasons) the bone in my toe had become
infected.  Apparently this is a potentially serious problem (osteomyelitis),
so the podiatrist said "we'll get you scheduled for surgery".  I got out my
calendar, thinking it would be sometime the first week or two of January.
She said:  "put your calendar away.  We're doing this tomorrow."

So New Year's eve I got the tip of my second-left toe removed.  Now I sit
at home with my foot up, waiting for it to heal (should be in a couple of
weeks).  It was out-patient surgery done in their clinic, so I was able to
get home to watch the Times Square ball drop.  Whoo-hoo!  The good news for
me was that there was no pain through this whole episode.  Pain is not good!

I'm thinking about getting a golf tee and cutting it in half, mounting it
on my amputated toe and asking people to refer to me as "Peg-toe Brad,
Scourge of the Computer Music Seas"!  Yarrrrr!

TheyShotHerInTheFace

I had done a set of pieces the week prior to the Minneapolis shooting, but I hadn't really sent them out into 'the world'. They're based on an idea I had almost 50 years ago:

Ambient Bach

I've been walking more, and I just returned earlier this week to Island Athletics to swim laps. I'm out of shape, of course, but it wasn't as bad as I had feared. I'm back on my 'maintenance dose' of Lenalidomide (formerly Revlimid) after pausing for the toe antibiotics. Just like normal!

I've been crankin' out the hits again, too. I mentioned the Ambient Bach pieces above along with the anguish of TheyShotHerInTheFace, but I've also done the 'try-out-the-new-synthesis-modules' thing resulting in these:

modmod

I went down to my office for one final go-through to grab anything I wanted to keep. When the weather is nice, I often (used to!) walk from our apartment up at 181st street down to the subway station at 168th instead of catching it at the 181st street station. For the walk, I played this piece through my headphones:

AUG-2016-thur-PGT1

The IU talk/meetings went well, and things actually went well with Dad. Each time we visit he gets a little farther away, but all-in-all he seems relatively stable and happy at Traditions.

I also posted some new music on-line today. Here it is:

piano-synth

My father died. I've travelled to Sweden to see my son in his exciting new work. He's a researcher at the Karolinska Institute. Lian is now a Vice-President at Amazon. My sister has retired. I've had surgeries, all small, but they happened. Much of this I may have posted here already. I'm going to go back and read through them. But for now, I'm working on continuing to construct my life. I've finished a number of new pieces, some good, some mediocre. I can't tell which is which at this point.

Columbia is in a kind of free-fall. But I just now while writing this took a small break to look out over Puget Sound. It's really gorgeous. At times like this I sometimes hear the chorus of the Beatles' song It's All To Much reverberating.

I should probably start with Dad, because that's a biggy. After we got Dad placed in a good dementia care facility, things ultimately settled down a bit. The people at "Traditions" (where Dad was now living) were terrific, and we settled in to a semi-stasis of sorts. Brenda and I knew we were living on borrowed time, but we could handle it. Mom was doing really well in her new living situation in Massachusetts. Each visit we had with Dad, each phone call, things got a bit more 'fuzzy', but it was manageable.

In mid/late April, Dad had a night with several falls out of bed. He was taken to the hospital to be sure there was no serious complications, head trauma, concussion, etc., and everything seemed 'normal'.

Except for Dad. He never quite recovered from whatever happened, and his dementia took a precipitous dive. He no longer made sense, he was hallucinating and apparently in great pain. My sister and I tried to talk with him on the phone. Occasionally it was fine, but more often it was harrowing.

Ultimately the Columbus Regional Hospital decided they couldn't do anything more for Dad, so they discharged him to e rehabilitation facility to get his strength and capabilities back so he could return to Traditions. My sister and I had no idea how bad things were. We are disgusted with the 'care' he received at Columbus Regional Hospital.

During all this, I flew back to New York for a conference on RTcmix, the computer music language I had developed.

Talking with some of the care-people we trusted (mainly at Traditions), Brenda and I realized that things were dire, I changed my flight-home ticket to stop through Columbus for several days, and Brenda made plans to get there at the same time.

Dad was in terrible shape. It was very painful for us to see. BUT we did get to say our good-byes and tell him again how much we loved him and how proud we were of him. I like to think that he was aware of these things.

Yeah, there's a lot more I should be doing, and soon enough I perhaps will be. But I can imagine this extending, going on and on, music compositions happening, books unfolding, life being good. This can go forever, right?

Went outside to sit and enjoy the fire, write a blog post, read some stuff, and then... yes, it started to rain. Very slightly, but enough to suggest "you should probably go inside now".

I did get a good photo of the setting, though, before water fell from the sky.

Maybe what I planned to type had to do with re-discovering (poetic) prose. I downloaded a new release of Annie Dillard's writings and I've started reading them. I was (still am!) a big fan of her work. How does she come up with those sentences, those 'descriptions'? (Scare quotes because they seem so much more than mere reportage.).

I wrote things in this blog that I imagined reflected this text-aesthetic, although I know that to be silly. But I read the early blog posts now, and they do seem to carry a charge (this is from my very first blog-post):

Confronting your own mortality in a really direct way like this does give you a clarity, a focus, that you didn't have before. We all pretend we know we're going to die, but when the news comes hard and you realize you do indeed have a finite and circumscribed time, you rearrange priorities in a way that isn't all that bad. It's Christmas Eve, and the time I've had with my family (just got back from my sister's, and Daniel is in bed, Lian wrapping gifts, Jill winding down for the night) has been resonant in a surprisingly wonderful way. It's hard to describe, but cliches' like "perspective" do capture a part of it. What an amazing thing it is, to live a life like this.

I've also had two, almost opposite psychological reactions to my mortality-realization. I can label them "freezing" and "flow". Here's an example of the "flow": the day before yesterday I was walking down our street in the late afternoon. It wasn't really dusk, but the light was beginning to wane. I looked up to see the trees semi-silhouetted against the sky, and somehow everything seemed liquid, like water. Not that things blurred and bled into each other, more that all the component parts were connected, like molecules in a fluid. Things come, things go -- they flow.

A good "freezing" example happened tonight at dinner. Jill, Lian, Daniel and I were discussing our plans for New Year's Eve, and all of a sudden it became almost like a cinematic trick. I could stop time. It was such a wonderful scene, I wanted to commit it to some eternal memory. Like I could float around and tangibly feel the familial joy we shared. Fixed forever, to be revisited again and again. This makes acceptance possible, I guess.

Sorry to be a little maudlin here. I'll say more in the next few weeks, I imagine. Nothing terrible, but a bit of a reset.

Here it had endured, with the beautiful speckled glaze Jill was using at the time. It was a way of marking existence, a way of staking our claim on the evolution of the world.

That makes us somewhat sad now, too. Daniel and Lian have grown into astounding adulthood, but this was not the world we wanted to bequeath to them. What happened? We worked hard to make the world better.

I'm going through a rearrangement-of-sorts. I guess because I realize that I won't be going back to teach at Columbia this fall, it makes me aware of questions like "What does it mean to write music? Who am I out west here, where the codes and institutions I used to define myself have little currency? What am I doing?"

It's both sad and liberating when I meet someone new here and (eventually, sometimes not-at-all) they ask what I do. I tell them 'music' then 'computer music' which often leads to a blankness. Sometimes I qualify it by saying I was Director of the Columbia University CMC for nearly 40 years, but the blankness doesn't really change. I mean, it was something, right?

Work on building a community, a vehicle for promoting the goodness to replace the blankness. I set down a few notes for future postings about a week ago. Here's what I had written:

what does it mean to write music?

East coast vs. West coast

How do I define myself?
        -- community
        -- jonathan
        -- music technology