Post dramatic breath

Spent from sheer elation, my essence stretched around the open air of careful minds expanding. There sits my audience a breath away from sentient cousins once removed. Its members know but dare not name a certain yen for meaning. Some of them ignore the pangs. They reach for comfort food, the confluence of friends and conversation. Heady stuff, this syrupy concoction brings them high without a whiff of expectation.

There are questions in the songs my band and I infuse into the smoke-free wonderland of sound. We are not gods and goddesses; we only whirl the orb within the dervishes' devotion. Few embrace the madness in the songs but these emerge eternities the wiser.

The nether realm entrusted to a troika such as our emancipates the neurons ever after, nature's soft impressions in the snow.

What -- again?

Yes, again. Happily. Because of the lovely encounters with good people this process brings me. Take this conversation with John, an elderly gentleman at the pool.

"Would you cast a vote for me, John?"

"Sure, I'll vote for you. You know that Mitchell's Icecream? They won an award for their store. I didn't think much of their icecream until they won the award. I went back and tried it and it was pretty good!"

Sanity bastion

Ninety nine percent of all live rock concerts are stupidly and dangerously loud... It seems the height of folly to have a musical concert be so loud one needs to wear earplugs to mute it and then hear it with the sound messed up.
Bob Ludwig, Recording 9.06

Music is not my quintessential sonic form. First comes silence. After that I'm fond of wind and water, birds and bugs do a nice soundscore and the human voice intrigues me. Music has a tendency to mess with my neurons. I never was a background music lover.

Music gets to me completely. I create it out of self defense. I have a useless mental filter. Bad music -- lacking soul and depth -- does not engender boredom in my psyche. It's more like sitting my brain cells in a waiting room with a TV set on soaps, no place to hide. Excruciating.

I want to enshrine Bob Ludwig in the sacred halls of musical integrity. No need -- with mastering credits including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, Steely Dan, the Police, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Nirvana, the man is already there. I once assumed the point of pulsating rock concerts was to merge the listeners into a gelatinous mass of frayed ganglia, a kind of communal electro shock treatment. But if the music isn't good enough to transmogrify individuals into world class citizens, making it louder won't help.

Are we all ad-slingers on the lost highway, riding techno bare back? No. But the voices in the wilderness are few.

New Year Resolution USA

The average weights of American men (191) and women (164) have increased 25 pounds since 1960. And according to one study, in 2003, Americans' 223 million cars and light trucks burned an extra 39 million gallons of fuel for every additional pound of passenger weight. So Americans are using almost a billion gallons of gasoline more each year than they would if they were as (comparatively) svelte as they were in 1960.
-- George F. Will, The Washington Post