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If you’ve never seen The Matrix then my illustrated synopsis below will likely spoil the movie for you. If you have seen it, then I’d like to apologize in advance for this. Either way, Happy 20th Anniversary to one of the most groundbreaking films of March 1999!

In the year 1998 a young man named Mister Anderson lived alone in his apartment. He liked to hack stuff on his computer and then sell those hacks on his Etsy shop. But he was always wondering about a mysterious Dream Man and something called The Matrix.

One day some people came by to purchase some of his hackery. They noticed Mister Anderson looked tired and pale and they were all like, “Hey Mister, why not go do the party stuff with us!” And he was all like, “idk.” But then he remembered his computer told him earlier, “You go do the party with the people!” And so he went to that party.

While at the party, he ran into a woman. She was a hacker too, or at least used to be, but she went up to Mister and said, “Hey Mister, my name is Trinity.” He was all like, “Trinity who?” And she said, “Uhhh, Trinity Jones? Anyway, I’ve got the answers to your questions.” Something about the Dream Man and the Matrix.

So later on Trinity Jones picked up Mister in a car and said, “Like, hey don’t want to scare you or nothing but you got some kind of a robot bug in you.” And he’s all like, “I dreamed about a robot bug! That can’t be real!” But you know what? It was real. And they pulled it out of him. Which was good, because who wants a robot bug running around inside them. #amirite

After that Mister met the Dream Man. And he’s all like, “Here are two pills, dude. Which one are you going to take?” Because one was a rabbit pill and the other was a placebo.

Mister thought about it and then he ate the rabbit pill and then he turned into a mirror and then suddenly he woke up in a bathtub. And he was hooked up to all these tubes and wires. Then a big robot bug noticed he woke up and flushed him. And then he went down the water slide into a pool and a claw grabbed him and suddenly Mister was on some kind of space ship. Yeah, I did not get it either at first.

The ship was a big change for Mister, who’s real name was actually Neo and who actually was the One. The Dream Man and Trinity were on the ship. Also Tank, Rocket, Sprout, Blonde Lady, Other Dude, and as you might expect Bad Man.

The Dream Man wanted to train Neo. So he put wires in his head and zapped some Kung Fu in there. I guess this was some kind of standard procedure because everyone else got excited when they heard it was happening. They dropped their spoons in their Taystee Wheat and ran to see Dream Man and Neo fight.

At first, Neo wasn’t good. But then he was really good. He got a lot of arms and punched fast and everyone was all like WHOA. But then he tried to jump across a building and he fell down bad. And then everyone was sad. Especially Trinity.

Oh I almost forgot, there are these Men In Black guys who were also trying to find Neo. The Dream Man didn’t want them to get Neo. He wanted Neo to beat them. But nobody beats the Men in Black. You see one of them and you RUN.

Eventually a bunch of stuff happens and then the Bad Man on the space ship talked to the head Man in Black, Mister Agent Smith. The Bad Man was going to hand over the Dream Man in exchange for some kind of super rabbit pill. And so he told Mister Agent where he could find him.

In the meantime, Neo went to meet the Cookie Lady who could tell the future. She said Neo wasn’t The One but he should have a cookie as a consolation prize. Neo ate the cookie and felt right as rain.

But suddenly — WHAM! — the Men in Black attacked the space ship people. And the Dream Man sacrified himself so that Mister Neo could get away. But Neo’s all like, “No man! Don’t do it! I’m not the guy! I’m just a cookie-eater!” But the Dream Man wasn’t having it, and so he fought by himself. But he lost big time and he got caught.

Everyone else escaped, but before they could get back to the ship, the Bad Man killed almost everybody. Except for one guy who you thought was dead but he wasn’t and grabbed a space gun and — BZZZZZTTT! — he got the bad guy before Mister Neo died. Take that Bad Man!!!111

Now they had just one goal: get the Dream Man back. Meanwhile, Mister Agent Smith was asking Dream Man for his laptop password so he could somehow end this conflict. Smith was very motivated because he didn’t like the smell! But the Men in Black couldn’t break the Dream Man! Eventually Neo and Trinity showed up and shot off something like twelve billion bullets. But one of the Men in Black showed up and started shooting back. Neo dodged some bullets and then they stole a helicopter! And then after an exciting sequence, they saved the Dream Man!

You might think everything was over at this point, but you’d be so wrong. Because Neo still had to defeat the Men in Black.

He went back to a hotel to catch a phone call but instead he caught a bullet! Right in his chest. And he died! Oh no! But he didn’t really die. Because Trinity was all like, “The Cookie Lady said you and I would get married and so you can’t be dead!” And then Neo woke up! And then he doubly woke up because he realized the whole world was just glowing green letters. #wokeaf

But oh was Agent Smith pissed! He ran right at him to punch him. But Neo was not having it. Neo fought him. He fought him like without even looking at him. Then he kicked him down the hall. And jumped in him. And just, like, exploded him.

The leftover Men in Black saw that and they were all like, “We gonna GTFO now. kthxbye…”

Neo made it back to his space ship right after that. And just in time too! Because the giant metal squids that I forgot to mention earlier were tearing the place apart. With Neo back, they hit the red button and that stopped the squids and everything was okay.

At the end of the movie, Neo was talking on the phone and — you won’t believe this part — he turned into Superman and flew right into the sequel!

Okay, so that’s it. It’s a very good movie. I think you should see it.

My recent post on travel phrases, and French in particular, wasn’t out of the blue. As Chandler Bing might say, it was smack dab in the middle of the blue. I’ve been learning the language a bit over the past few weeks. Or, I should say, re-learning.

Back in seventh grade, we were all given the opportunity to start learning a foreign language. Three were offered: French, Spanish, and Klingon. I hadn’t really started watching Star Trek yet, at the time, but I still knew that Klingon might come in handy. Spanish was recommended by many, since there was a higher chance of actually using it in an actual United States situation. But French? I can’t explain it, but it really just called out to me. Maybe it was my Northwestern Europe DNA reaching out to me again.

So I took it for two years. My primary memory was an exchange one day after class between me and my teacher.

Me: I know how to say grape in French!
Her: Good! How do you say it?
Me: “Grape in French”
Her: Yes, how do you say it.
Me: “Grape in French”
Her: [facepalms]

Yes, I’ve always been annoying. I’m going to blame genetics on that too. Because it’s definitely not my fault.

In high school, I tested out of French I and took French II through V for the next four years. I learned a lot about the language. I learned syntax, and grammar, and idiomatic expressions. I learned the rules, I learned the exceptions. In fact, I learned just about everything there was to know except for one small problem: how to speak it.

I did not take any more formal classes after high school. And it wasn’t until nearly seven years later or so that I got my first real opportunity to use it again. I worked in the International Operations area of my company and regularly came into contact with people all over the world. Communicating with them was just part of my job. But for the people in France, it was an opportunity to correspond in French. Except for one small problem: how to speak it.

But that problem was easily solved using this cool new invention: email. I couldn’t rattle off a French phrase in person. But I could get 40% there on my own, then use my French books to help finish the rest. (And yes, they were books. Made out of paper and everything. The internet hadn’t quite come together yet at this point in time.)

Years later, I took a couple evening adult classes to help refresh my memory and maybe learn some more. But to be honest? There’s only one way to truly learn a language. Traditionally, this has been immersion. But ain’t nobody got time for that. What I do have time for, though, is YouTube. What better way to immerse myself in a language than by watching five hundred thousand videos containing, “Excuzes-moi, monsieur! Où est la bibliothèque?”

Just kidding: there’s actually some pretty good materials out there. So I listen to them in the car and from time to time when I go for walks. And just yesterday it hit me: I can understand French. Like, not just listen to something and translate it in my head:

“Où” . . . uhh, okay, that means “where”
“est” . . . est, is uh, oh! that’s “is”
“la” … pssh easy! “the!”
“bibliothèque” . . . um, oh, I know this . . . library!

And then a minute and a half later, I realize my friend, who has long walked off to ask someone else, wanted to find the library. No, I hear it and understand it instantly without going through English first. That’s like, a big deal.

So why can’t I “speak” French? And why do some (well, many) conversations still confound me? Well, in a word: vocabulary. The syntax, grammar, idioms, rules, and exceptions are all there in my head. It’s solid. But there are upwards of 130,000 words in the French language. The average adult speaker requires some 30,000 of them to function on a daily basis. I probably know maybe 3,000 words — tops. Which means, although I’m on the right track, a good ninety percent of daily conversations are still over my head.

But I have a solution! I am going to learn all the words. I have YouTube. I have my headphones. I know they’re out there. My plan is to simply learn one thousand new words each day, and in a month I should be set. It’s fool-proof!

And today begins with the French word for “grape.”

Longtime readers know that I have several novels sitting in various stage of unfinishedness. One thing almost all of them have in common, apart from the not-very-done part and the not-very-good part, is that they’re set in and around England. (And, in one instance, a fake version of England.)

I’m not really sure why. I’m not from there. I’ve never been there. But I can’t deny I don’t possess an unusually strong affinity for the geography. Not to mention Monty Python, J.K. Rowling, Doctor Who, The Who, Yes, Maisie Williams, Mr. Bean, and Graham Norton. You know, just to name a few.

I say I’m not from there, but only in the sense I wasn’t born there. Growing up, my dad always said our family was “Scottish, Irish, English, and German,” and always in that order. And, just like all of humanity did for tens of thousands of years, I had to take him at his word. People could only trace their families back using the traditional combination of word of mouth, birth certificates, and framed Coat-of-Arms prints.

But no longer! This is the twenty-first century. We now have the technology to spit into a tube, send it off to a multi-billion dollar company (who “promises” not to do anything bad with it), and ultimately receive the information that we inadvertently married our first cousin.

A while back I went through this process myself. Good news! I did not marry any close family members. My wife and I are 13,784th cousins, twenty-seven times removed. But what the DNA people did deliver was the following information:

England, Wales & Northwestern Europe 38%
Scandinavia 29%
Ireland & Scotland 18%
Europe South 6%
Europe West 5%
European Jewish 3%
Europe East 1%

Biggest surprise? Twenty-nine percent Scandinavian. Huh.

Biggest non-surprise? Well, I see a lot of “Scottish, Irish, English, and German” in there, (where “German” is likely represented by “Northwestern Europe.”) So maybe the word of mouth, birth certificates, and coats-of-arms actually work.

Some months — maybe a whole year — later, I logged back in and they said, “We’ve got updates!” Not unexpected. The more data they collect and analyze, the more chances that the interpretation of the data can change. Eager to see the update, I clicked “OK” or “Next” or whatever button they put in front of me and received the following info:

Hawaiian 61%
Egyptian 22%
Peruvian 10%
Yemeni 8%

Wait a second. No, that’s not my account. Hang on. Okay, here we go:

England, Wales & Northwestern Europe 77%
Germanic Europe 18%
Sweden 3%
Ireland & Scotland 2%

Huh. While it looks like Sweden took a dive (29% to 3%) my guess some sort of Viking-like componant got reclassified. The good news is, I can probably still say “Scottish, Irish, English, and German,” but clearly the order needs to be rearranged. But the biggest thing is that “England” is right up there on top. And I’m okay now saying I’m kinda from there and will happily use that to explain my affinity.

Fun Bonus Story

I logged back in not to long ago. Something they update far more quickly than my ethnicity analysis is DNA Matches: the list of other spitters who match me with a certain amount of genetic probability. Anyway, I logged in to find a new match:

  • Possible range: Parent, Child – immediate family member
  • Confidence: Extremely High
  • Relationship: your Mother
  • Shared DNA: 3,453 cM across 59 segments

I can’t believe it! I found my birth mother! Of course, this customer also turned out to be the woman who raised me from birth, so no real surprise here. But isn’t it kind of cool to know that science supports it? 😉

The sun set hours ago. I may have spent the evening working or relaxing or designing the perfect geopolitical solution to achieve world peace. I’ve brushed my face, washed my teeth, and pulled on my Christmas pajamas. Yes, I realize it’s not Christmas. However, I’ve heard that when we look back on our lives, we regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do do, so dang it, I’m going to wear my Christmas PJs whenever I feel like it.

After I climb into bed and flush my brain of the day’s thoughts I look ahead eagerly to the next few hours of entertainment: dreams.

I wonder what they’ll be about tonight. Anything cool or fun or useful? Hopefully it won’t be my brain dragging my anxieties into the show. I get enough of that during the day.

I try to count down to curtain time. One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Nine . . . ty . . . what was that thing again . . . a meeting . . . I need to talk to . . . ninety-seven . . . maybe pizza . . . no, how about a . . . ninety-eight . . . where was I . . .

And then everything goes to black. Whether this takes a few minutes or a few hours, I don’t know, because my brain compresses it all into a single “blackout event.”

But then they begin. All sorts of cool things. And fun things. And useful things! All of which I would go into amazing detail right now but for one small problem.

I wake up.

For a few seconds, the last part of the most recent dream feels vivid. I think, “Okay, that one was different. I’ll totally remember it. But then, like a match, it flares up and is gone in a tiny puff of smoke. There was that one part where . . . no. I think I remember something cool. Maybe . . .

I mean, I must be dreaming. I have memories of everything about the dreams, but not the actual content. Seems kind of unfair. I’m pretty sure I’m doing my best work in there.

Happy Friday!

I had a post planned for this week, but it got a little bit more involved than I expected, and I ran out of time. So I thought, “No problem! I’ll just go through draft pile, dust one off, and just go with that.” But these posts were either too much to quickly top off or just didn’t interest me. So then I thought, “Just make something up! Right on the spot! You can do it!” Sadly, I could not do it. My brain is just all over the place.

So until my planned post is finally done and ready to go next week (fingers crossed), I leave you with this. Spend the next week contemplating how we turned wolves into this:

Or, feel free to contemplate how this “quick” post still took me forty-five minutes to put together. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or, if you’re still looking for topics to contemplate: how is it March already?

When I worked at a Korean-based company, I took it upon myself to learn a little bit about the language. I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics. Thinking back on my language career, here are some of the highlights:

  • Working on my own conlangs for my fiction
  • Picking up some Latin and Greek in high school while studying etymology
  • Starting on French in junior high
  • And becoming fluent in English at a very young age

I had (quite wrongly) assumed that Korean was another logographic language and that I’d never be able to learn thousands of unique and complex symbols. But one day I picked up a short book about Hangul and realized it was an alphabet. An alphabet! I could learn that! And so I did.

But what I had trouble with is what linguistic experts call “everything else.” This included grammar, vocabulary, verb conjugations, and the most important thing of all, asking for “two beers please.” Granted, I didn’t try very hard. Mostly because I knew it would require a time commitment I just didn’t have. There was a lot of real work to be done punctuated with naps that had to be taken.

Anyway, one day, an English/Korean travel phrasebook appeared in our midst. It contained, for the most part, the usual travel phrases (“Where is the train station?” or “How much does this cost?” or “Who shaved my head last night?”) But it also went above and beyond by supplying a few irreverent phrases: even pickup lines. I read aloud a few Korean phrases, haltingly, while a fluent coworker laughed until she nearly cried. Some of it, for sure, was my pronunciation, but I admit I did go for the more absurd phrases in the book.

But a particular thought struck me at the time. And it struck me again just this past week or two. You see, I began listening to some French videos on YouTube: a number of which also contain helpful travel phrases. My issue? Well, it’s pretty simple. Travel phrases are completely useless. Like, what’s the point of learning a particular phrase if you have NO chance whatsoever of understanding the response?

Think about it: if I blindly memorized the phrase for “I lost my passport,” what good will it do me if the person understands me and replies, “Je suis vraiment désolé. Vous devrez vous rendre à l’ambassade ou au consulat des États-Unis pour obtenir de l’aide. Montez cette route sur deux kilomètres, tournez à droite, passez devant l’endroit où ils ont détruit le McDonald’s, tournez à gauche, puis trois blocs plus loin sur votre gauche.”

If you’re not prepared to grok the response, then there’s really no point in asking the question.

Fortunately, if I ever find myself in this situation, I have a fool-proof plan. I will ask my question in English, and then hand the person my phone which has been pre-loaded with Let Me Google That For You. If you’re wondering why I don’t just Google it myself, the answer is easy: where’s the fun in that? 🙂

The release of Continuum: Decade in 1997 pretty much signaled the end of my music run. Family, work, more work, eating and sleep consumed all of my time. All the plans I had for this endeavor unceremoniously tapered off to nothing.

To be fair, it wasn’t nothing. Sure, here and there I’d press the “record” button and play something random for a minute or two. But the years flew by and I had effectively nothing to show for it.

But in January 2015, I finally decided it was time. I would reassemble the studio, make the necessary hardware and software updates, and get serious about this decades-long affair.

Decades.

As I paused and reflected on the passage of time, I began to think of all the technical and cultural changes that had taken place since I started Continuum:

  • 1987: Computers aren’t just for nerds anymore
  • 1991: The Internet as we know it
  • 1992: JPEG
  • 1993: Jurassic Park
  • 1995: Amazon
  • 1995: Burning CDs at home becomes a thing
  • 1995: Pixar releases its first feature-length film
  • 1997: DVDs become a thing
  • 1997: The Dot Com Boom
  • 1998: Google
  • 1998: Harry Potter
  • 1998: Netflix
  • 1999: The Matrix
  • 1999: Wi-Fi
  • 1999: Y2K
  • 2001: iTunes
  • 2001: The Dot Com Bust
  • 2003: MySpace
  • 2004: World of Warcraft
  • 2006: MySpace Facebook
  • 2007: Netflix as we know it
  • 2007: Our high-end cameras can now occasionally make phone calls
  • 2008: Bitcoin
  • 2009: Tall blue aliens bust the box office
  • 2011: Burning CDs at home is no longer a thing
  • 2012: Keurig machines head home
  • 2014: DVDs are no longer a thing
  • 2015: Doc and Marty arrive in Hill Valley

It’s an impressive list, and something we don’t really stop to think about day to day. Billions of people making trillions of contributions. And in 2015, suddenly finding myself “in the future,” I decided it was high time to buckle down and do something myself.

As I reacquainted myself with the past, I decided that in addition to working on new material, I would also clean up and re-produce some of my older work that felt deserving of my twenty-first century time. I’d already digitized most of my old analog home recordings; an effort that not only gave me the chance to listen to it all over again but also divide it into two groups: 1) songs worthy of rebooting, and 2) the other 99.9%.

What’s in a Name?

For the first time in history, my Continuum project would have a web presence. For the first time, people other than my immediate family might actually hear what I recorded. My name was now important.

I first thought about grabbing a domain name for the project. Hmmm. Rats. Looks like continuum.com was registered in 1992. Just missed it. But honestly? The project name is more than just buying an available domain.

Between 1987 and 2015, the world population went up 45% from five billion to over seven billion. The world wide web population rose from zero to more than three billion. Over that same period, the lovely word continuum had been used many, many, many times for various music projects (albums, bands, and even a new musical instrument). What sounded cool and unique to me in college was now boring and overused.

Except that I still liked the name. So I took out a pen, grabbed some paper, and started brainstorming. Long story short, I settled on something very simple and very descriptive:

It might not be the most imaginative thing, but in a online world of billions, it’s a little better than what I had before. Plus, it reflects reality. The original Continuum was a lifetime ago. It’s time to see what’s next.

During the first few months of 2015, I finished two songs and part of a third. But then in May something happened. “Let’s go look at houses,” Laura requested on Mother’s Day. Fast forward thirteen months: we moved into a new house. To say I got derailed would be an understatement.

But even after we were done, the move continued to suck up time. Then life happened again. Work happened again. All my other interests happened again and I lost my reboot.

I can’t believe that four more years have now passed since my last “reboot”. I would love to say THIS IS IT, this is the year it’s FINALLY going to happen, but we all know the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Eventually the wolf showed up. 😉

This post is one of a multi-part series:

By this point in my journey, I’d self-produced two albums. While those words in that order are true, they do give the wrong impression that I’m some sort of Peter Gabriel churning out music in my multi-million dollar studio and selling copies by the hundreds of thousands. Close, but not quite.

The first album (Eclipse, 1987) was nothing more than a brain dump. I carried a boombox into the university’s music room basement, placed it on a practice piano, and recorded everything my head was holding in at the time. Later, in my tiny-but-growing home studio apartment, I finished my second album (Interactions, 1989).

A couple of years after that, I moved onto my third major project. But it wasn’t under the Continuum name. Nope, Laura and I were getting married and I wanted to write most of the music for the ceremony. Since this music would most definitely reach the ears of more than three people, I spent more time on the production quality. It still wasn’t perfect, but the project did come with a pretty hard deadline. The following track contains a series of seven excerpts (you should be able to pick them out in the wave form display) from the near one-hour of music I wrote and recorded for it:

From that point, I expected I’d just keep going and improving. I knew without a doubt I was still miles from reaching my full potential, both in production quality and musical execution. I no longer wanted to just “dabble.” I wanted to practice more, procure more better equipment, and ultimately produce something I would proudly foist upon my fellow earthlings.

Instead, the majority of what I recorded during the next period went like this: turn on the drum machine, loop a bass line, and then play a solo synth part over the top. And then do this for many, many minutes on end. These tracks aren’t songs, per se. More like experimentation with the intention that something would eventually come of it. But nothing ever did.

By the time the third Continuum album was “supposed” to come out (meeting a purely arbitrary schedule in my head) I realized all I had were hours and hours of these test recordings. So I punted and released Continuum 2.9: Sketches. And when even more time passed and it felt like it was high time for yet another release, out came Sketches: Volume 2. Here’s a 10-track sampler of music from this era:

So what happened? Well, life happened. A wife, two kids, a house, and a job. Two jobs, actually, since we started a video production company. Worst of all? It was around this time that I got the idea I could be a novelist. And we all know how that turned out.

For Christmas 1997, I assembled a “multimedia fun pack” as a present for my dad. I decided to put together some audio, video, and print that represented my best work. The music portion ended up being a series of cassettes called Continuum: Decade. It was half “greatest hits” and half “never before released tracks” and it was all good. We had no idea at the time it would be his last Christmas, so I’m grateful that I did this when I did.

What’s odd to me today is that in 1997 I believed that “ten years” was a long period of time. There were times where I would begin a recording by saying, “It’s me again. I know it’s been a long time…” when in reality only three months had passed since the last one. Sheesh. I’m at the point in my life now where it takes me three months just to pick out my dinner selection from a ten-page menu.

I’ll throw in two more tracks, which stand out a bit more from the above work. At one point, I wanted to record some Christmas music. This is as far as I got:

And this track from 1994, named October, almost signaled a return to this stuff. But like everything else, things fell apart soon after and I never even finished just one song, let alone a whole album’s worth:

Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of this exciting series!

This post is one of a multi-part series:

Voiceover: Previously on Charlie’s Blog. Charlie began to tell the tale of his musical life story. He stopped talking about it when hit with the one-two punch of NaNoWriMo and The Holidays. The previous episode ended on a cliffhanger: Charlie was about to buy his first multitrack recorder.

This is it. This was my big step forward some (*cough* *cough*) years ago:

The Vesta Fire MR-10B was about as entry-level as it got in the multitrack recording business. It was, if I recall correctly, only a few hundred dollars. But that figure was anywhere from one-half to one-tenth of the price of real gear at the time. Yet it still allowed me to make true, honest-to-goodness, multitrack recordings.

“Multi,” in this particular device, meant “four.” It used a standard, compact cassette tape:

This was a great choice. They were cheap. They were plentiful. And they already supported four discrete audio tracks. For most use cases this meant a stereo track on Side A and another stereo track on Side B. However, if one recorded to both “sides” of the tape simultaneously, one could record four monophonic tracks.

After wanting this type of audio capability for years, you could imagine how fired up I was to finally unleash my full recording studio potential. I ripped open the packaging (some two decades too early to upload an unboxing video to YouTube), plugged in all the wires, and . . .

“Hmmm,” I thought to myself. “What should I record?”

This “Hmmm” phenomenon would prove to be a repeating pattern in my life. Before purchasing a new piece of audio anything, I always think, “Oh man! I NEED that thing! If I just had that thing, I could record all the things!” And then after I obtain the desired piece of gear, I realize that the equipment itself doesn’t magically bestow creativity upon me.

I can’t recall what I recorded first. But I can tell you it likely involved a kazoo or a bongo or perhaps just me “singing” four parts of The Oak Ridge Boys’ Elvira. Rest assured, whatever it was, it was worth the expenditure.

I really didn’t come into my own until 1988 and 1989. At this point I was young, out of college, had my own one-bedroom apartment, and a real job. My home recording studio peaked with the following gear:

  • The Vesta Fire multitrack recorder
  • Yamaha pf85 digital piano (this post’s featured image)
  • Roland D-10 synthesizer
  • My mom’s old classical guitar (let me know if you still need that back)
  • Westone Spectrum bass guitar
  • The crappiest drum machine in the world

Apart from the piano, which was a real splurge at $1700 or so, everything was bottom-of-the-line. But it didn’t matter, because it was mine, and I’d gathered it all in one room, and since I was young, single, and basically had all the time in the world, it actually got used.

The following is the title track from my second Continuum release entitled Interactions. Like the first release, this meant copying all the songs to a single master cassette, then making a copy of that cassette, and hand-drawing the artwork right on the paper insert. Here is the original track listing in all its glory:

And without any further ado, I present the title track. It’s seven minutes long, so your options right now are:

  • Close your browser
  • Leave the browser open, but go see what’s happening on Twitter instead
  • Grab a drink, click play, and sit back:

See you back here next week for the next exciting development in this long and self-deprecating story! Maybe. Looks like I have a pretty busy week or two coming up, so I can’t make any guarantees.

This post is one of a multi-part series:

One year ago I broke a long-standing tradition of mine when I published my annual-ish Happy New Year post and refused to list my goals for the upcoming year.

My reasoning? Well, according to an old TED talk, telling someone your goals makes them less likely to happen. Yep. In the vast mystery that is the human brain, just telling someone about a goal can stimulate the same gray matter as finishing the goal. The act of putting it out there is enough to check the mental “done” box.

So after years and years of divulging my great plans to the world and accomplishing nearly nothing, I thought I’d keep it to myself for once and see if that changed anything.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

I won’t rehash all the reasons here, in this post, but a great deal of it was out of my control. (At least that’s what I tell myself.) The year, for better or worse, came and went and most of the “done” boxes went unchecked.

So I’m kicking off the new year in my usual gloomy and defeated mood, reflecting on a list of goals for the new year which look disturbingly similar to nearly every previous year. And I don’t know what to do about it. Like most regular people, my list of obligations far exceeds my allotment of free time. My favorite commentary by The Onion still reads like an autobiography.

As my existential nihilism continues to play leapfrog with my desire to create something, I’ve been looking for ways to beat this and come out on top. And I think I found a good one.

Fans of the television show Friends may remember the episode The One Where Ross Finds Out. Ross travels to China for business, and in his absence, Rachel falls for him. Unfortunately, Ross returns with a new girlfriend and Rachel visibly struggles with this unexpected and unwelcome development. While on a date one night, she realizes her problem is she never got closure. I’ll leave the rest of the episode for you to watch.

Closure! That’s it.

So here’s my grand plan for 2019. I’m going to fall for Ross while he’s in China, hate on Julie, go out on a date and get that closure I so desperately need. At least that’s code-speak for what I actually intend to do. Sadly, the real plan must wait for a later blog post. At the moment of this typing, I have a very important obligation to attend to. Time to go to sleep!