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There is a camaraderie that happens in places like the 'blood work' room at the hospital. During my last visit, just before the holidays, I was swapping stories with an older man who had one of the leukemias. He said: "When I first learned I had it, I figured I had about six months left. That was three years ago!" I told him my story was similar, and here I am -- three years ago, yeah. When I saw Dr. Pearse afterwards, he noted that there continues to be some low-level (very low-level, yay) myeloma activity, but that the Revlimid has been working to keep it in check. I couldn't stop myself, and I asked one of those unanswerable questions: "How long do you think the Revlimid will continue to work?" Roger smiled, he and I both knew he couldn't give a definite answer. But he did say "I have an induction patient on Revlimid who has been in remission for six years now."
"Wow"! I thought, "Six years!" And then on the way home: "wow..." I thought, "six years..." My oh my, how the scale has changed.
I'm not being morose about this, though. Being here -- now -- with Lian, Jill, Daniel; seeing my mom/dad/sis-and-her-family has been wonderful. Last night with friends and neighbors here in Roosevelt, and I just finished a smallish piece of music using some new software I'm testing, and, and, and, (and I've written this here before): this is a good life. Another three years would be great, six years would be fabulous, and ringing in 2020 would be amazing. Who knows... beyond? The platitudes fill my mind: make the most of every moment! every second is precious! life is a gift! Maybe so, maybe so. In the meantime I'm happy. I like this new decade so far.
... but I did run across a set of glorious astronomical pictures accompanying an article in the New York Times discussing a new book titled Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle by photographer/filmmaker Michael Benson. I was particularly intrigued by this photo:
Once sci-fi speculating starts, it's hard to stop. Building an 'experience translator' is one thing, and then the next is to find a way to project my consciousness out beyond the wavefront of information emanating from our planet Earth for the last week of December, 2009. Then I could re-experience the joy of this past holiday season! Project out farther beyond the spreading info, and I could do it again and again!
I thought this, and then I thought: "Jeez, who would want to do that?" First of all, the operation is a complete exercise of egotistical narcissism. How fun is that? What a waste of time. Secondly, a total re-experiencing through some strange reconstitutive immersion would be blindly redundant. I think when we say we want to 'relive' something, it has more to do with an interpenetrative nostalgia, a remembering that re-lives through a filter of experience, a way of heightening what the original episode meant.
Music obviously does this for me, and books too. I read this from Wisconsin writer Michael Perry's book Coop the other day:
Maybe that's what my hopes are for this blog, a way of tracing out things-that-happened that will allow a future-informed reading. Maybe for me, maybe for the kids (although they're building their own experiences, and I doubt they can have the vivid recollection of "a thick sachet of alfalfa and manure" like I do). Whatever. I know I probably tend to make this all a little too "rosy colored" (a habit I get from my mom), but maybe not really. I do find that I can go back and read parts of the past three years here and remember: "oh yeah, that was what it was like to sit on the couch and think that my body was falling apart." It makes me different now.
I'm quoting a lot from books lately. I've had some free time to read. Here's another -- it may or may not be apropos, but at the end of the Times article I mentioned above about the Benson space-photo book, there was this quote:
Not only music, not just text, but life itself. Shortly after I had
written the previous blog entry talking about the Michael Perry book,
I came out from swimming some laps at a local indoor pool, and the
clouds, the sky, they had a character that immediately transported me
back to a generically-crisp midwestern March
day in High School. Driving home, I snapped some photos of the sky:
Here's something: Douglas Repetto and his wife Amy Benson
became new parents two days ago! Now that's a memory.
Speaking of family, I haven't had a chance to talk with my Dad about the latest Supreme Court nonsense. Corporations now can give unrestricted donations to political campaigns. Seems that these downtrodden corporations are just like us normal people, too, and they are entitled to First Amendment protection of their right to speak. And speak they will, I am sure. I recall when Dad ran for Governor of Indiana, one of the big factors that caused him to halt his campaign was the scale of fundraising that was required to become a 'representative of the people'. And that was over two decades ago! This latest malformed decision is from the George W. Bush-laden Court; the worst president ever just seems to keep on giving and giving...
Speaking of governors, the valiant (yes I am being sarcastic) new chief executive of New Jersey, Chris Christie, has posted his 'transition documents' on the New Jersey Governor web site. The one focused on the Department of Environmental Protection is just fascinating. My poor wife, the awards she has won for her work protecting the health and environment of New Jersey citizens, the time she has spent on the Science Advisory Board for the US EPA, her involvement in anti-terror/homeland security radiological activities, it's all wrong. See, she was basing her work on faulty science, because "real" science dovetails nicely with the core mission (little did we know!) of the Department of Environmental Protection, which is to help developers and business interests do what they want in New Jersey. Yeah.
Finally, my selfish, personal favorite badness of the week: the death of health-care reform in the US. In an almost classically cruel/ironic twist of fate, the late Senator Ted Kennedy's senate seat was filled via a special election in Massachusetts by a Republican candidate who has vowed to halt health-care reform in Congress. With 41 votes now in the Senate, a filibuster -- something that used to be called the 'nuclear option' when the Democrats were in the minority because it essentially shuts down government, but in Republican hands it's simply another procedural tool to be used as a matter of course -- can be used to stop any further action on health care.
I think back to the two-month argument we had with our insurance company over a $10,000+ bill. While in Switzerland, I was hospitalized with a life-threatening dental abscess (in retrospect I can see it was probably due to my increasingly myeloma-compromised immune system). The company claimed we were liable for the full amount because the doctors used were "out of network". Well duh... I was in Switzerland. They eventually relented and reimbursed us for the bill (Spital Interlaken required us to pay up-front: "Vee are so sorry, Herr Garton, vee haff had much trouble getting monies from US insurance companies, so vee do not deal mit them"). I think back to the nearly $5,000 we were billed for the implantation of a central-line catheter for my stem-cell harvest. The procedure itself was pre-authorized (I made sure of that), but -- silly me! -- I forgot to get the anesthesiologist and anesthetic pre-authorized. Next time I'll be sure to get the hospital gown 'pre-authed' also. I think back on just two weeks ago, when we had a change-over in our prescription drug benefits plan due to a renegotiation by the State of NJ (oh that wonderful "choice" we all get with our current health insurance system!). After about two weeks of phone-calls from both me AND Dr. Pearse's office, they finally got set to deliver my Revlimid. The two-week delay the company insisted was necessary meant that I would have missed an entire cycle. They suggested I go to a nearby specialty pharmacy to get a one-week supply to 'tide me over'. Would they reimburse, as they are providing the drug benefit now? Oh no, the drug has to come from their approved pharmacy. How much would a one-week supply cost? Only about $4,000. Dr. Pearse's office called again (isn't there a better use of their time?) and they did indeed get me the drug with only a few days' delay.
The reason I'm dumping all this out is to explain my depression and occasional ranting about the health-care legislation. I don't rant as much as I used to; life is too short(!). I've also tried, probably less successfully than I think, not to inject too much politics into this blog. This week has piled it on, however. and I need to say this: The health-care reform bill that would have passed is indeed flawed, but it had at least two components that were near and dear to my selfish heart: no cap on lifetime benefits allowed, and no denial for the infamous pre-existing conditions allowed. It was at least a start.
Now that the health insurance industry realizes it can shut down
any attempt at reform, what's to prevent the corporations from
acting with impunity? Heck, they can already speak out loud with
billions of dollars (see above). Look at the history I've
already had dealing with relatively 'good' health insurance plans,
what do you think I can expect in the future?
As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it:
One of the ineffectual and probably inappropriate responses I often have to bad news is to write some music. Coupled with a desire to just drift away, I wind up with a piece like this new one:
We're supposed to get a fair amount of snow later today through tomorrow. Snow!
Now this blog-space has become more a way to record how life is unfolding, I suspect primarily for myself. I can go back and revisit events, re-align my memories, and affix in words the way things were for me at a particular point in time. I report mundane life-occurrences here, with much more an emphasis on the the simple 'log' part of 'blogging' (I still dislike that gross-sounding word). When I set the site up, I did it -- contra- most contemporary blogging software -- so that it would read first-to-last in time-ordered sequence. I figured it would be a grand linear narrative, building with each entry towards, well, something.
The good news is that something hasn't arrived. The arrow of time I had anticipated has flown nicely off-course. As a result, my blog has degenerated into semi-chaotic ramblings about daily life. Like most Real Blogs, I guess. Now, I worry, is when things will dramatically change: when I least expect it! But hey, that's the way life is, eh?
In the meantime, it's still fun to post random thoughts and (b)log events and happenings here, for friends and family. When I started this blog I wrote:
1. The Snowstorm(s)! -- yikes, we know have about as much snow on the ground as I've seen since I moved to New Jersey in the early 1980's. We were hit with one storm last weekend that left about 8-10" for us, and then through Tuesday and Wednesday another storm came up the coast with an additional 15-18" of frozen water. Pictures here:
Jill and I remember watching the Olympics with Lian when she
was young. Every two years we would avidly follow all the latest
summer or winter Olympic news, recording programs when we couldn't
watch so we could scan the highlights later (we're doing the same
with Daniel even as I type this). And now, here she is, surpassing
(yeah!) her parents and being able to attend the Actual Thing.
This is as it should be.
3. music... -- This has been a surprisingly productive
period for me, musically, and I haven't done a very good job of
coherently posting recent work. Although I have linked most
the pieces I've done in the past month here, the links have been
relatively imbedded within the text. Here they are again:
Is this possible? Can we secure particular moments, hold them fast against the entropy of time? I'd like to think so, my life has been happy. There are parts I would like to keep, even though their distinctive character probably only exists in the instant of living them. It's pleasant to pretend that we can halt life at the high points, but the halting would certainly negate what makes them high. Oh well, at least I was there once. Maybe I can draw on a stockpile of happiness to help through any rough times ahead.
I like the sound of the snow, but the "sound" is actually an absence. As part of the transformational magic the snowfall brings, it dampens the standard sounds of the outdoors environment. I wanted to record this, to do my own audio version of 'freezing the moment'. How do you record silence, though?
This past Wednesday I went in for my monthly check-up with Dr. Pearse. All the stats were approximately where I've been for awhile -- my "M-spike" is very low but detectable (different than complete remission). This measures the amount of monoclonal antibodies that my bone marrow is producing. Monoclonal means they are bogus, they are being produced by myeloma cells. So the myeloma is active, but is being kept in close check by the Revlimid. This is not an unexpected state-of-affairs, and hopefully it will continue for a long time. The other statistics that they watch, my white blood cell count, my red count, were slightly on the low side. But this is also 'as expected', typical of people on long-term Revlimid.
Essentially I'm doing well. No other big problems detected, and the drugs are doing what they should. The "ouch" above is because I had my Zometa (bisphosphonate) infusion therapy the day before yesterday. Zometa halts bone degradation and repairs bone lesions caused by the cancer. Initially I had this done every visit, but now I do it every six months. I forget how much it knocks me down. I also forget that it takes several days after the infusion for me to feel the effects. Last night I met a small group of my current and former grad students for dinner over at Princeton (Jason Freeman, now teaching at Georgia Tech, is doing a piece with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. Current CMC grad students Dan Iglesia and Jeff Snyder both have jobs at Princeton now. Go Lions! Jason's student Akito Van Troyer was also along). I started feeling pretty lousy through the dinner, and when I woke this morning my body pretty much ached all over. Not fun. Now that I recall how it goes, I know I'll be feeling like I've got a nasty body-flu for the next few days.
Fortunately what I have to do in the near-term involves a lot of sitting
around. This is the season of our graduate admissions review, and
we have about 125-130 applicants in music composition for our
grad program. We'll probably be able to accept 3 or 4. Lots of
listening and reading on tap. Ouch indeed. The drugs continue
to work.
The drive over, especially along the southern part of I-74, was strangely interesting. I had made this trek a number of times in my past, but not so many times that it had become blandly familiar. I would travel this way in college to attend concerts, we would sometimes book air travel through the Cincinnati Airport (back when it was a less-expensive option), and one of the most memorable trips was for my job interview at the Conservatory. I recall driving to the interview, passing different neighborhoods, scanning houses on hillsides and thinking: "I wonder what it would be like to live here?"
There is also something about the scale of the land, the gently rolling Ohio valley hills and the particular slant of light that immediately propels my consciousness into my past memories. I wouldn't call my drive yesterday especially intense; it wasn't that kind of remembrance. But it produced a certain pronounced resonance with the life that I have lived.
I managed to turn the resonance into a veritable echo chamber by deciding to listen to some earlier music I had composed. I put on a set of pieces I had written that more-or-less initiated my musical collaboration with Gregory Taylor, my "gresponses" (pieces are linked here or on my music page).. This piece:
One of the strong memories I had while driving was thinking -- in the past -- about where life would lead. Like I said, "I wonder what it would be like to live here?" I often tried (and I still do) to project myself into the future, to imagine what it would be like to be different people, to construct different lives.
Indeed, "what would it be like?" Listening, remembering, now knowing, I can answer that question: it is utterly unimaginable.
The first trip was when I went to pick up Jill from visiting one of her friends who was studying briefly at the University of Cincinnati. It was Jill's first time out to the Midwest specifically to see me. When I travel back to visit CCM, there is one street corner in particular that I can recall from that visit to get Jill. I round the corner and I still feel a flash back to that thrill of life-adventure.
On the way back from visiting with Mara, I took a small detour. I stopped the car and took this picture:
Then I ran across this poem:
The notion that my body hatches something that houses my death -- or that in this it is only being itself, putting itself to the test, holding itself in check, this body, already become through me so dearly devoted to itself.Sheesh! That surely captures something, doesn't it? And then there was this line from another poem:
Why is it like this; and when will it stop being so?I still feel and think this on occasion. A feeling sneaks up on me, usually when I'm feeling low, like this whole myeloma thing is fake. I want it to just go away, I want to awaken from all this ... and when will it stop being so?
But this past weekend was not one of those occasions. The weather was glorious, the minor flood (heavy rain last week!) washed away, and springtime landed firmly in our yard. Daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses, even some forsythia all burst through the ground. Daniel did an excellent job in a school play Friday night, health-care reform just passed Congress, I've gotten a lot of work accomplished during Columbia's spring break... Yeah, my feet and hands (and brain...) are kind of 'tingly' from the Revlimid, but dang it is good to be alive!
Here's one more line from Faverey:
Oh, if only death would outstare itself for ever in its iron mirror.
The dream-debate was about whether or not to put in a cryptic entry, something
like I look through the square of our upper window, the trees
against the stark blue of the sky, or come up with some tortured
faux-profound observation: Life changes, our surroundings shift; a
flood in our home warps the floorboards. I shave them and place them back.
We always have to work to make 'experience' fit into our existence.
The third option was a simple reporting of a few things that have happened
recently, and that's probably the best re-entry into the blog I can
imagine. So:
Fortunately nothing of real importance got damaged. We hauled our soaked rugs (they were heavy!) outside when we returned home. We ran fans and opened the windows (gorgeous weather, again see below) to remove the smell. The main damage was the oak parquet flooring. After being soaked in water for several days, our floor turned into a mini-mountain range model. Neighbor Eric has been an invaluable resource again. He has been letting me use his mounted power mitre-saw to trim the warped parquet floor tiles. I just now have most of them put back in place, and the rugs are due back from the cleaners next week. Back to normal.
I dreamed I wrote in this blog last night. I dreamed that I wrote of the dogwood blossoms, appearing early this spring because of the uncanny warm weather we've been having. Last night before I went to sleep, I was sitting on our upper back porch among our dogwoods. As the twilight deepened the white blossoms took on an almost luminescent glow, a delicate white light against the pervasive, darkening blue. I dreamed this as a metaphor, of course. Now I've written the truth of that dream.
Our term is ending, the rhythms of academia reassert themselves. We've had quite a group of students this year, both graduate and undergraduate. I was particularly impressed by a concert several Fridays ago (April 30). Three of our graduate composition students presented their dissertation works, Michel Galante, Victor Adan and Daniel Iglesia. I arrived in a terrible mood, the normal 1-hour commute stretched to almost 2 and a half (Yankees Game traffic, arg!) and I didn't get a chance to eat any dinner. But the concert was stunning. I was really impressed by the work being done by the 'gang' we have at the Computer Music Center these days. Taken with others on-the-scene at the CMC (Jeff Snyder [tomorrow to be defending his own doctoral work], Sam Pluta, Damon Holzborn and others), I think we're doing something right. What's interesting to me is that much of what is being done through the CMC is very different from anything I do myself. I find this strangely gratifying. I find myself justifying my existence as being an "enabler" of activities at the CMC, semi-tangential but still connected. Not a bad way to be as the years build up. Things continue to move forward, the young are young again, graduation approaches, and ... jeez this is getting pretty darned cliched! That time of year.
Another big chance to wallow in mawkishness is also coming up. My 35th High School reunion is scheduled for June 19. Several very close friends have gotten in touch with me saying they plan to attend, so I booked my flight last week. I wonder what the texture of those memories will be?
I'm already pretending to be young again. I bought a guitar!
The reasonably good news is that the lab results from my blood-work came back today and the "M-spike" was holding steady. It hadn't decreased, BUT it hadn't increased either. This means that the Revlimid is still apparently working. Yay! I won't have to increase drugs, etc., plus another month to add to my total. Boy oh boy, nothing like a slightly-updward-trending chart to remind me that these days won't last forever.
I sure wish some of them could last forever, though. Actually, not the days per se, but moments and feelings that make life a truly wonderful thing. Here's one:
And my family. We had a terrific Memorial-Day weekend with Lian visiting. I watched Jim Nabors sing Back Home Again in Indiana at the beginning of the Indianapolis 500, great Roosevelt yard parties going on, Jill cooking fabulous dinners, the laughing and sharing, this is the stuff to hold in our souls forever. Yes I have a bad cancer, but I sure do feel like One Lucky Guy.
Then when we took Lian back to the Philadelphia airport, Roosevelt
received a freak thunderstorm (something like 2" of rain in about an
hour), and our house flooded again. Time to find a drainage
contractor!
Funny how the weather, the slant of the sunlight, the green of the plants, triggers such tangible memories for me. This spring has been strange in that way. The weather has been really "blocky" -- one week it will be stormy and cold (floods!), the next it will be an uncanny 90-degree F (in the middle of April!), feeling like deep summer but with the foliage registering only early spring. And then days like this, when it feels like October but it's mid-June. It all seems ... strange. Maybe that's how life will be now. Memories collide and intersect, they stack up.
I finally got some recent musical activities up on-line. Here they are:
We've also had changes happening around the house. We had a large pine tree removed, the one that lost many branches this past winter (photos of that damage on-line here, scroll down a bit). We're also getting bids on possible drainage solutions so we don't have to deal with our house flooding with every "100-year" flood that now seems to occur every few months. I'll get pictures linked up here soon.
Yes, now I link in pictures of our house, I report on recent activities, Weill-Cornell visits, this blog has shifted towards a somewhat mundane repository of ordinary memories. Here is my recent life, in all it's conventional glory. I don't mind this so much, though, especially if the alternative is the 'excitement' I felt when I first started writing this; a text-generating compulsion fueled by a feeling of looming death (my own!). No, I don't miss those days. But that feeling does still inform haphazard thoughts that drift through my brain. I figure that this silly blog can also continue to function as a dumping-ground for a few of these random reflections. It was originally intended as that kind of record, after all.
For example, not too long ago I was talking with my good friend Judith Shatin on the phone. She's been dealing with health issues of her own, and she commented "I feel a victim, not of the mind/body problem, but more like a mind/mind/body problem -- I have my 'real' mind that is disconnected from the mind that inhabits my body." I knew exactly what she was talking about -- I think it more accurately described as the mind/mind-body/body problem (if "problem" is even a correct label here). Mentally, the 'mind' that I feel is me, Brad Garton, feels just fine. I'm really enjoying what I do, what I read, my family, friends and neighbors, life-in-general. I mean, heck, I gotta guitar! Then people ask me: "hey Brad, how do you feel?" and the mind that is more directly connected to my body reports that sometimes I don't feel all that great. And then the body, well, it's getting old and falling apart.
The random meta-reflection that results from this is a recognition of how skewed my self-image can be, specifically related to my sense of age. For some reason, I always feel like I'm about 27 years old. Why 27? That was an age of transformation for me. I was entering grad-school, I was marrying Jill, I felt like I could Change the World. Jill and I both did. Who knows? Maybe we have. But we honestly can't approach life in the same way, with the semi-real fiction from those days that we have many decades ahead of us. When I imagine what to do now, though, I adopt that mid-20s stance: I can change the world, and I got plenty of time to do it. I guess perhaps it's best to maintain this fiction. The psychological alternative isn't very appealing.
It is appropriate to be speculating about mental age-image right now. I'm out in Indiana having a nice visit with Mom and Dad, but the excuse to be here is my 35th High School reunion tomorrow evening. 27, no I'll be 17 tomorrow! I'll get some pictures for sure. Plus my parents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary yesterday, another fairly important(!) event in my life. Happy 55th Mom and Dad!
In the dream, however, it wasn't a Facebook "profile" that had been deleted, it was actually the memory of my entire past. The bulk of the dream I recall was attempts to find a back-up copy of these memories, or considering strategies to reconstruct them. It wasn't really disturbing or nightmarish, no frantic searching through old hard drives -- or hard lives -- or anything. It was more just a matter-of-fact contemplation of what my past, my history, might mean. Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? Yikes, I sound like Ross Perot's running mate.
I am sure this dream was also fueled by my recent 35th High School reunion attendance. Certainly my becoming active on Facebook was bootstrapped by the event. Lots of good friends with whom I had lost touch said "hey, we're all hanging out at Mark Zuckerberg's place!" (well, maybe not in those exact words...). Catching a glimpse of your life as it is reflected in the best friends of your youth, it is a perspective informed by memories of delightfully naive dreams. The things we were going to do! The plans we had! However, it all turned out... different. Not bad, just different. In my case, I rather like the memories I've stockpiled. I think that's probably true of most everyone who was at the reunion. Several of my friends had gone through what had to be difficult changes, some quite recently. But I also suspect they have a fair share of things they would want to keep in a "profile". We are our past, and we will be our future. Woooooooooooooooo!
Two of my closest friends from High School/College were in the process of reinventing their lives in various ways. I wonder what it would be like to start again, not so much with a 'clean slate' but maybe with an altered slate. It made me feel relatively immobile in comparison, more anchored to a particular life. I don't mind that anchoring, though, and to be honest it doesn't really describe my present reality. Yes I still work at the same job and yes I still inhabit the same home/family/social-group/etc., but much has changed. Heck, the genesis of this blog grew from a pretty radical rearrangement of the conditions of existence.
For me, the issue is what to do now. When I ask those who-am-I/why-am-I/how-did-I questions above, the missing and vital query is: Where do I go from here? I really don't know. Too often I tend to retreat into sound-worlds and let externalities push me around. That will get me somewhere. I'm lucky to have a position that allows that, but is that what I want to do with my remaining time here?
At least I still enjoy making up silly answers to silly "profile" categories. I'm not sure what my contribution will be to the vast Facebook data mine, but I bet they probably have a category for those of us who don't take it very seriously. Hmmmmmmmm, what do I want to do?
Jill and I are taking this time to do some serious real-estate shopping. My lease on the Columbia apartment is up in September. Instead of continuing to pay rent, we decided that the NYC market conditions might be good to invest in a place of our own. We've been pleasantly surprised by what's on the market, a number of nice places not too far away. My sense is that we'll make the jump -- not a bad investment, I think. It's kind of fun to go around to see these different condos and coops. Our real-estate broker seems excellent, and the whole thing feels like one of those snazzy HGTV "House Hunter" episodes. But it's reality TV! It's interesting to project yourself into potential spaces, potential futures, possible lives.
Next week I start a big CMC cleanup and revamping. It desperately needs it, and we need to start getting set for the new "Sound Arts" program we're launching. Not real intellectually- or creatively-engaging work, but it should be satisfying in a wow-looky-what-we-accomplished way.
These things propel me along. Soon I have to think about what do do in Portugal, then a few trips in August, and then the summer is over. What will I feel then? Did you do much, Brad? How many more summers will there be? More and more of these moderately vapid questions begin to pile up, but they take on a quality of authenticity when you believe that your life is at stake. What if I just sit on our back porch and listen to the cicadas and tree frogs, watch the fireflies, gauge the dimensions of dimming twilight? I don't know, but somehow that all seems really important, too. I think of it a lot. I doubt it will make me rich and famous, though.
Then there are times that sneak up on me, like driving over to pick up our pizzas last night. It was approaching dusk, and I was listening to some new music in the car. The road was unusually free of traffic, and the slant of the sunlight, the sound of the music, the wind through the car, it all melded. My identity seemed to disintegrate, my awareness dislocated until "I" didn't seem to be a perceiving entity any longer. "I" was a part of all that surrounded me, like water, like air.
This happens sometimes, especially with music, and through these
feelings I think I find peace. How can I experience more of these moments
of fluidity, and less of the stupid ego-wallowing? The trick is
probably not to play the monkey-games. But there they are.
I also missed a few birthdays here in the ole blog. My nephew Stefan turned 17 (yikes!) the last day of June. My sis Brenda just had her birthday yesterday. Happy Birthdays! My other nephew Bo has a birthday coming up. It's quite a birthday time-of-year for John and Brenda.
We've been completely stripping and cleaning the studios at the Computer Music Center. It's not that much fun, but at least the timing is good while Daniel is at Columbia. We found more asbestos contamination, oh joy. At least we had some good A/C installed last month, and with a few record (100-degree-F +) temperatures last week it was not that bad to work indoors.
My iPhone app was accepted for sale through the Apple App store! The pennies are rolling in! Check it out here:
At least there have been a handful of nice reviews of the app. I'm also happy witg the work that went into producing iLooch. The audio foundation for the app is the RTcmix music language, ported to the iPhoneOS. This should allow easy development of more audio apps in the future. The iRTcmix link is here:
You hope that the values and the morals you have tried to teach through the course of a young life provide the fabled strong foundation. You hope, and you hope. You don't know what else you may have taught inadvertently, or what unknowns they may have learned. How else can it be? It certainly isn't easy.
What's odd is that the dream has really stayed with me through the past week. I have this experience in my mind, and I can't tell anyone what it is. I can't even tell myself what it is.
We heard an odd sound outside, a rustling in the leaves
and a soft bird-call. We raised our heads, and four wild turkeys were
strolling across the lawn.
As I listened, I realized that what attracted me so powerfully to this music was that it was such a departure from my childhood expectations of music. Each record was a new surprise. They were always trying new stuff! The music metaphorically showed me that life could be constructed differently. Through music, I learned that things didn't have to be the way they were. It was possible to do something new. The world could be changed. Heady stuff for a Hoosier teenager.
I took the metaphor seriously. And there I was, sitting on a flight to Portugal, to play music I truly enjoyed playing,wa with friends, among friends. This was what I did. How did I get here? I was extremely lucky. Maybe the world did change, too.
Progressive rock also endowed the world -- or at least the semi-rural Indiana world I knew -- with a compelling (even if imagined) magic. Music magnified things, made them signifiers of some deeper meaning. Listening on the plane, drifting in and out of night-flight consciousness, I recalled the sight and smell of fresh pools of water back in the woods near our house after a rain. They were so clear, they sparkled, they were magic. These sensory impressions meant something to my teenage mind, and that over-the-top progressive music sounded that meaning.
One other aspect of my early infatuation with progressive rock was the world of possible sounds unleashed on many of my favorite records. My friend Pat Kennedy and I went to see Genesis perform live in Indianapolis on one of the band's first US tours. Only 3-400 people turned out for the show, so we were able to get excellent seats. I remember the absolute, soul-grabbing thrill when I heard the choir sounds being played live on a keyboard! as they started a song from their (then) new album:
I think again about my life: how did I get here? I was dazzled, I was
enraptured. I could change the world. I hope I can revisit that
feeling of infinite possibility again.