Hope this “three things” isn’t getting tiring, because I’m quite enjoying it.
MUSIC: Yesterday I whinged a bit that being suddenly snapped out of a 4-month-long nostalgic gloom might cause my creative impulses to dissipate.* I got home from work, ate dinner, played with my kid, kissed my wife, and then headed into the music room, and about 2 hours later I came out with something that I’m still genuinely excited about. I haven’t been this excited about something I recorded in a very long time. It’s not finished, of course, and I have to keep reminding myself of that; this is normally the part of the recording process where I get excited about something and then listen to the mp3 about 500 times and then everything else gets derailed, and I’m very much determined to not let that happen this time. If anything, I’m more excited than ever to get back to the music room tonight and pick up where I left off; last night’s demo is something of a departure from how I normally work and what I normally sound like, and I really like it, and I’m really anxious to get back and make more of it.
BOOKS: It’s possible that I was in such a good mood because I’d finished Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please” on the way home from work. (Did I really read it in less than a day?) I’ve been a fan of Poehler since the ASSSCAT days at the old UCB theater in the late 90s; my friends and I would catch the free show (and then sometimes the paid show) every Sunday night and it was the best. Man, I miss that comedy scene. I was at Luna and Fez and UCB all the goddamned time, and even entertained the idea of taking improv classes (though I was still very much convinced that rock stardom was only a few gigs away). The point is, a lot of Poehler’s early NYC days that she talked about is stuff that I might’ve been physically present for, or certainly I understood and related to her situation in my own broke-musician way. The book itself is maybe a little uneven, in that certain sections feel a little formulaic and rushed, BUT a lot of it is really quite wonderful, and the chapter towards the end about her kids and her divorce and her trip to Haiti is fucking magical and beautiful and gorgeous and cathartic and OH GOD I WISH I WAS FRIENDS WITH HER. Now I’m reading Richard Powers’ “Orfeo“, which I’d read quite a lot about last year, but never actually started.
GAMES: Earlier this morning I ended up buying Sunless Sea as a present to myself for yesterday’s recording; that’ll be my post-recording wind-down process. I also somehow managed to get The Talos Principle to start working again; every once in a while, one of my Steam games refuses to launch, and it drives me crazy. Anyway, it decided to launch successfully, and given that I was somewhat jazzed with adrenaline after recording, I was needing something to wind down with, and Talos’s puzzles are a pleasant enough way to do that. Solved a few rather quickly, actually, which was weird, given that I’d stopped playing around the point where some of the puzzles were breaking my brain in half. So maybe I was just in a good thinking place, or something. I’ll take it.
TONIGHT: more of the same.
* I’m not going to get into what happened; I’m just acknowledging that something did happen, and even if I’m not totally 100% certain that I, specifically, represented the punchline of a tweeted joke, I’m nevertheless taking it as a sign that it’s time to move on.
Shouts From The Couch 
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