Weeknotes: August 26-30, 2024
Monday, August 26
"Do you know your way around here?"
"It's my first day!"
I'm comforted to see another older student struggling to find the right building on the directory map. I've just finished my first class and offer to walk her over to where I think it is. Her name is Norma and she's probably a few years older than me, using the GI Bill to finish up a degree of some sort.
I steer her to the incorrect building and she ends up walking back to her car to drive to the other side of campus. I was trying to be helpful, but I hope I didn't make her late.
Weeknotes: August 12-16, 2024
Weeknotes went on vacation last week. Weeknotes thought about becoming Campnotes for a moment, but decided that being nothing was healthier. Now Weeknotes is Weeknotes again.
Monday, August 12
After four nights of camping, it's a luxury to wake in my own bed. The morning is cool with a slight blush of autumn. I love this time of year. It’s the start of harvest season, wildflowers are are at their peak, and as summer winds down, there's a bittersweet breath of change that never fails to electrify me. I'm most activated in the calendar's borderlands. Late August, November, April, early June, these are peak awareness periods for me. When the fullness of each season has yet to come, that's when the interesting stuff happens.
Weeknotes: April 29 - May 3, 2024
Monday, April 29
I'm sleeping with the windows open again and the birds wake me around 5:30. It's always robins. The local harbinger of early morning. There are days when I'd like to sleep in longer, but spring feels especially friendly right now and I'm happy to hear my neighborhood come to life. The lilacs on my street are in bloom and the volunteer tulips next to the sidewalk have risen to attention. Rain showers move through as frequently as trains. Everything is leafing out and I'm into all of it.
I listen to Mdou Moctar's wild Funeral For Justice album while Islay and I meander up the street. She pauses and sniffs every invisible station while I vibe to the North African guitar shredding lighting up my synapses. After work I sit on the bed and email venues, trying to put together a small weekend tour in July. Soliciting gigs a thankless task, but I'm trying to keep my calendar relatively vibrant, so I soldier through it.
As evening rain comes and goes, I record a demo of a song I wrote in 2022. I have so much unreleased material right now, I'm trying to get it all down and figure out what to do with it. It's humid and warm and I keep the studio window open, allowing the night sounds to permeate the tracks.
Afterwards I watch Top Chef. I'm not much for reality TV, but I started watching this show for first time last spring while ramping up for my album's release. It became an easy stress reliever and now I just enjoy it. Kristen Kish is still getting her rhythm down as host, but I like her. And I like that the new season is in Wisconsin, a state I have a lot of affection for.
Weeknotes: March 11-15, 2024
"How dare you." This, grumbled to my red Newgate clock as I return home from an afternoon walk. Daylight savings and poor time management have made me irritable. It's 3:30 and what have I gotten done?
The sun glinting off an old antique gum dispenser on my living room shelf was the first thing I noticed this morning. It ignited a previously-simmering desire to install a mantle mirror behind that shelf and open the room up to more light.
Weeknotes: March 4-8, 2024
A couple hours into the workday I pause to add some synth parts to a demo I started recording over the weekend. It was a song idea I got while running and I had to keep singing it to myself until I could get home and could do something about it. This happens to me a lot and I doubt I'm alone. Many of my best creative breakthroughs have come while running or walking. Being ambulatory jiggles the mind in a helpful way and I sometimes feel like I can hold very elaborate concepts in my mind while on foot, but as soon as I'm back home amid familiar sounds, objects, and needs, they quickly dissipate. If what I'm imagining seems particularly exciting or urgent I try to condense it into bullet points as I near my house so I can quickly jot them down as soon as I get inside. It's a debrief that often usurps even the need to drink water.
Weeknotes: February 12-16, 2024
"I Want You To Want Me is one of my least favorite songs." Unbidden, 9:18AM.
This statement launches the liveliest of my various group chats into its morning of banter. There are certainly better Cheap Trick songs, though I find it hard to be too critical of this enduring 1977 earworm. I've always enjoyed hearing the Budokon version with its enthusiastic callback lines from the crowd. Honestly, I can think of so many other repetitive pop songs by lesser groups that stoke my ire. The other offending songs posited are Concrete Blonde's version of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" and Patience and Prudence's "Tonight You Belong To Me." I have some nostalgia for the former which reminds me of the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. The latter, while painfully precious, is so brilliantly immortalized by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk, that I can't really hate the song itself. All three strike me as odd bugbears, but then I've got plenty of my own.