Weeknotes: September 9-13, 2024
Monday, September 9
I'm about to go to bed and make an early night of it. As I’m switching off the lights in my studio I realize I haven't touched an instrument all day and it bothers me. I pick up my guitar and sit casually atop my desk, thinking I'll just strum through a quick song as a matter of principle. An hour later I'm still up and have the bones of a new song in place. Whenever this happens, I think what might have happened had I just skipped the exercise and not played. When a song is new, it's always your favorite one.
I take it as far as I can, then stay up past midnight reading Leif Enger's marvelous I Cheerfully Refuse. It seemed like it was going to be a special book when I read the flap and I was right.
Tuesday, September 10
My back-t0-school experiment really kicks in this week. I'm taking an Introduction to Graphic Design class. I've been making posters, album art, stickers, and assorted graphic media for most of my life, but never learned any of the fundamentals. Whenever something gets too technical, I have to farm it out to someone more experienced. I've also never left the safe harbor of Photoshop. Illustrator always seemed like calculus to me. Ironically, calculus is the mathematics of change, so of course it fills me with fear. I tend to find something that works for me and stick with it for eternity.
But I signed up for this, and here we are. It’s Illustrator day in class. I'm immediately lost. All around me I hear the confident clicks and scrapes of mice by digital natives who hadn't even been born the last time I was in a classroom. The old panic and shame that kept me from formal schooling all these years returns in an instant and I want to disappear. I want to go home and work on my new song, write in a notebook, build something, anything but this wonky program with its perplexing menus and unruly pen tool. But I stick around and fight through the anxiety. My comfort zone will be there when I need it.
Later, after band practice, CC is meeting up with a couple other musician friends at a bar down the street and invites me along. My first real test. I know one drink would turn into two and then it's 11:00 and I'd have to do my homework tomorrow morning. I decline, open up Illustrator and spend two hours wrestling with the pen tool until I turn a corner. I'm suddenly the student I never was.
Wednesday, September 11
It's a long rolling wave of busywork, assignments, and self admin. It starts at 7AM and never really crests. I exit the house exactly three times: two brief neighborhood dog walks and a six mile run. The run unfolds my desk-creased body and stretches out my mind. No headphones, just footfalls, rush hour traffic, and a few deer. After dinner, to prevent myself from working into the night, I assign a pleasure task which is to rearrange a small bookshelf in my bedroom.
When I first saw these built-in shelves I was overcome with joy. A house that anticipates books is truly a home. The lowermost shelf has until now been a sort of ad hoc power station for sundry electronics (smartwatch, near-obsolete iPad, alarm clock, bluetooth speaker). Its only other landmarks are a small wooden humidor built by my father, a Port Charlotte scotch tin filled with spare change, and a small hunk of birch log that props up the alarm clock. Restless books have piled up around the house and this small shelf is the last bit of available real estate. It's a reverse gentrification. The revenge of analog coming to reclaim its neighborhood from the tech usurpers. Ideally, they will share the space and live in harmony.
When everything is neat and tidy I revisit a half-finished preroll I found in the humidor. It's called "Nic the Bruiser" and incited crinkly faced laughter during last month's camping trip.
Thursday, September 12
It's 5:30 and I'm still neck deep in biography updates. There's no end in sight. I feel frazzled from a long day that just won't end. When out of the blue I get invited to a pub quiz, I jump at the chance to abandon work and do something fun. I would have said yes to almost anything, but this quiz is hosted by my friend Christian whose droll asides and immaculately curated soundtracks are their own draw. In the parking lot John and I do a brief record exchange before heading inside. Over beers we catch up, make a decent showing on the quiz, and formulate a plan to take a Grand Rapids day trip in the coming weeks.
Afterward, I log back in to finish my work and listen to the Moody Blues albums John gave me. To Our Children's Children's Children and A Question of Balance. The Moodies in their creative prime. They are a band I've loved my whole life and return to whenever I need a dose of earnest English grandeur. In their later, post-Mike Pinder years, they lost their edge and got a little too saccharine. I saw them live a couple times in the mid-'90s, sitting up on the lawn at Pine Knob. Justin Hayward wore his billowy-sleeved poet shirts (a look I emulated in high school) and vendors walked around selling roses during the ballads. But in their late-'60s/early-'70s heyday, they were a groundbreaking force, intertwining English romanticism and psychedelic spirit within ambitious prog-pop suites. I know the hardcore proggers consider the Moodies too lightweight, but I don't think they get enough credit. They were a unanimous favorite among my bandmates, a common influence we all agreed on. Just recently, I cited In Search of the Lost Chord as a mixing reference. Just listen to the crazy master fader work on “The Best Way To Travel.”
Friday, September 13
Errander. This feels like my real occupation sometimes. I have to write down all the stops in my little notebook so that I don't forget any. It's payday and I'm out restocking my life. It's only a four-stopper today, but it still wears me out. I make a gametime decision to skip Trader Joe's when the five cars ahead of me all turn into its famously bonkers parking lot. I can live without my frozen garlic naan.
By accident, I spend my evening playing another pub quiz in a different town with different friends.