"The Long and Winding Road" or "How I Stopped Worrying and learned to Love Not Knowing What The Hell I am Doing"

I feel like I have too many plans and desires for the future.  Hell, I have too many plans and desires for the present!

   Musically, I want to make a living playing drums at least part of the time.  Whether this means playing on the street 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, finding my way into studio work, club work, band work, pit work, or simply teaching remains to be seen.
   Playing on the street would be the easiest, it seems - pick up a few showmanship tricks and play around New York on my days off either to drumless tracks of classic songs, or with other musicians.  This will push me to get better in every area of percussion until my talent forces the hard-earned money out of tourist's wallets. This sounds ideal - at least part-time it could be a healthy chunk of supplemental change.

Alternatively, to get myself into studio or pit work, I will have to take lessons to get much better than I am now to keep up with the caliber musician with which I would be surrounded.  As I understand, getting a foot in the door is the slippery part - apparently remedied by taking on drum teachers in the NYC area involved in pit or studio work and ingratiating myself to them until a job comes down the line that could possibly be passed on to me.  

A busking or studio gig supplemented by tending bar sounds like a much more viable and satisfying option.  Getting a bar job in New York is, as one may gather, not a piece of cheesecake.  Apparently it helps to have an 'in' to the bars with which I'd like to be in, which involves no end of wheeling, dealing, and verbal canoodling.  Alternatively, I could drink repeatedly at the bars in which I'd like to work, hoping all the aforementioned schmoozing would lead to at least a barback position from which I could work up to bar tender.  This seems like a long and treacherous road, but maybe it won't be, if I'm lucky enough to woo somebody who believes in a long shot.

So I have unconsciously decided to do a little of everything - in bullet form!

• Build a travel-ready drumkit to take to the streets with optional musicians
• Petition connected drummers in the NY area for lessons - I'm looking at you, Tommy Igoe!
• Audition - who else but Blue Man Group would take me?
• Alternatively pay for lessons at a school - Bang!  In Brooklyn or Julliard Evening Classes?  Oh the options..
• Continue informal lessons with neighbors - also useful for bartering.
• Work with new bands and fresh artists for reputation building.
• Involve myself musically and bartendrally with local business .
• Fluff my resume with NYC bar experience - for the craigslist.
• Schmooze and booze at bars where I'd like to work - subject to financial and physiological limitations, inefficient, but fun.
• Start from the bottom again - In keeping with "never move backward, always forward" mantra, convince myself that a potential Barista job in Brooklyn is a step forward from Waiter in Manhattan (which I had to previously convince myself was a step forward from Bartender in San Francisco) and that it can eventually lead to tending bar - It's pretty much an assured natural progression
•  Step 9: Profit.

Yeah, so I don't know if anything I'm doing will ultimately lead to where I want to be, but it can't be any worse than graduating after years of school only to find the economy of your field has withered with the supersaturation of overqualified talent.  And at least my way is exciting sometimes.

In my country, psychoactive introspection drugs will be required at age 23

Growing up, I had it easy.  I figure if I lived as part of the upper 10% for the formative years of my life and I still  feel screwed up, I don't know how anybody makes it through this life in one piece.  I guess some don't.

Why is recognizing our collective fucked-upness such a difficult task?  Why do we allow advertisements and television shows to fool us into believing what constitutes normalcy - a perpetually bright life surrounded by toys and friends who look exactly like us?  It's obvious from our own perspectives there is very little normalcy - we have our individual collections of neurosis and should extrapolate that every single other person with whom we come into contact is just as crazy and/or unhappy as we are.

Shouldn't we recognize this image of a chemically-induced happiness as bullshit, that dissatisfaction it is a universal human experience?  Could we recognize that most of us have been duped by our parents, government, or peers into believing everyone else is normal and we're the crazy ones?  If we threw out the myth of relative happiness, could we all see each other as brothers and sisters trying to do the best we can with the cards we were dealt?  As if any of us had a choice in being born the way we were.

Given the choice, I would probably would have chosen to remain stardust.

The Adventures of Lolo 2: Electric Boogaloo

I won't lie, it's a pretty rough day.  It's grey, hot and moist outside - a quintessential summer day in Brooklyn.  It's the perfect day for a novice debate!

I'm blessed.  I think it's taken me this long to seriously consider the existence of something "behind the scenes" of  what we can see with the tele- and microscope because I have a hard time believing that a Greater Force could grant somebody like me so much while others are given so little.  It's a truth of life that some people are born with the deck stacked against them and others are born on third base and assume they hit a triple.  I feel like I was born on second and have spent my life trying to figure out how the hell I got there.

I've never had to want for money.  Since I've stopped going to school I've had to ask my parents for some money to get by a few times, and I always know I can ask if i have to.  Most people, I imagine, don't know what that kind of security feels like.  It feels like a miracle.

So.  If I want to believe in something greater than myself ("The Universe", "God", etc.), I have to find a way to pay back the miracle of a situation into which I, apparently by no choice of my own, have been born.

Or, maybe there is nothing behind everything.  There's no Soul, we're just animals endlessly reproducing with an insatiable appetite for perceived  improvement.  My sense of "calling" is nothing more than a series of neurons wired together, connecting the concepts of  "playing music" (an umbrella for the summation of certain muscle movements tied to satisfaction of learning, the rush of entertaining, and a history of repeated positive reinforcement for doing so) and "guilt" (related to the aforementioned history of familial, financial, and health-related stability).

Digression: Probably a stupid question, but is faith really  necessary to "get into" Heaven?  Like it's a club.

Since the Bible's been rewritten a few times and a religion that espouses the sanctity of human life can be bastardized to convince people to murder their countrymen in the street, I feel like I can make my own calls in the deity arena.

Maybe I will never have utter, unshakable faith in the existence of a Great Hereafter or a Heavenly Ruler or even an unknowable Master Plan.

But I'd never completely throw my weight behind a solely empirical world, either.  I don't think I'd be in any way satisfied if we learned tomorrow that yes, the Rules Of The Universe are guided by science alone,  Randomness prevails, and when you die it's eternal sleep without dreams and nothing else.

So what's wrong with hedging your bets?  What religion includes accepting a higher power into your life to help while allowing for the possibility that every idol is bunk?  If religion is an eternal debate, at least I'm doing something right.

Just do you

The Busker

A bronzed pool of lamplight
Sirens blow by
A young man on the street corner
Giving all he's got

To whoever will hear
His story as best he recollects
His father was there
and then he was gone

This too shall pass.

His bike got stole
His job got sold
His shoes got holes
Water in a bowl

This too shall pass.

So he's facing the night
does what he knows to remind

Nothing changes but the leaves
Nothing returns but the tide
After the night, after his shoes
After the father, After the light

After the bugs
After the blues

This too shall pass.
By slowly or by brief
This too shall pass.

Lend me your ears.

I wanted to start writing in the morning, so I am.  I should have a steaming hot cuppa coffee next to me, but I'm a little finance-jittery, as we spent some cash on a new drumset, at 1968 Ludwig Jazz 3-piece:

She's a beaut!  I changed some hardware around with my mobile kit, which I'm selling on Craigslist (in case you're interested), and this little beast soon to be a-whollopin'.  Carried her down a fourth floor walk up in the Lower East Side.  

That was right before I picked up a new loveseat for our apartment.

Cozy little number.. I rolled it across Crown Heights on a dolly with the help of a friend, dodging strollers and cars - an adventurous day.

I'm trying to keep the faith on this roller coaster of a life I chose.  One moment I feel like everything is within my grasp and I can see 'the plan' clearly.  The next moment I feel like a vortex should suck me down into nothing so I don't have to think about all the real or imagined weights piling up on my shoulders.  Money worries, doubt, fatigue, and somehow, boredom.

I've got to find somebody to talk to.

Operation: Fugedaboudit

I have a vision.
A band.  An organically-grown band.

The Crow Hill Greens

Working name of course.  If you've seen The Commitments, you have an idea of what I'm imagining.

1.)I have a new drum set on the way:

2.) I've got permission from the Breukelen Coffee Shop folks to store her in the back of the coffee shop which is (for now) under construction.  From there, I can see a long way.  

3.) Collect musicians from the neighborhood - I've gather there's at least 3 guitarists, one other drummer, and a trumpeter in a one-block radius of my apartment.  We can without doubt find audio engineers to soundproof and record. 

4.) Create

Who knows the extent of the talent we can find unless we look?  In this neighborhood, fugedaboudit.

Soul, Rock, Blues, Hip Hop, Jazz.  Walls of sound, screaming highs, throbbing lows and everything imaginable in-between.  It'll be a indefatigable, unignorable whirlwind of local talent.  

Or something.  

The seed of an idea just needs time to grow.