So, today I went to Best Buy to buy christmas presents.. Yes, I know I’m a little late, but the people I was buying for are away having Christmas with family and lovers and whatnot and so I wasn’t really able to give them their presents before Christmas anyway. But that’s not the point of this post.. which, I gather, is the first one I’ve posted for half a year. More on that later.
The point to this post is that Best Buy in Seattle has a little mini-guitar center inside. So I go in, and play with assorted keyboards, and participate in a brief impromptu jam session with some Best Buy employees, and this one guy is totally blown away by my chops on a AX-7 clone that has a synthesizer in it, and asks if I’m in a band. Well, no, I say.. but I’ve been in a few.
And this is where it gets a little weird for me. I’ve always thought of myself as strictly the bottom of the barrel garage band musician, but the most recent band I was in has a song that was downloaded a hundred thousand times this month. Granted, we didn’t make any money for any of those downloads, but still, a hundred thousand times.. that’s gotta be a bit more than a garage band. But.. I was once accused of having delusions of grandeur by someone who completely misunderstood my metaphor for talking about being a rock star. To be fair, I wasn’t myself, or even sane, at the time. But it does beg the question, when does one become one? A million downloads a month? Ten million? Or must I actually derive some revenue from it?
So far, HWGA2010 has made $7. The MC album has made.. I’m not sure. No one bothered to keep records. But I think it’s safe to say both of them have not even remotely approached their publishing cost, much less the cost in time to make them.
It’s a problem. The world has lots and lots and lots of good music. More than any one person could listen to in a lifetime, I’m pretty sure, although you’d have to ask a <sic>library scientist</sic> about that. So people will pay me to write medeocre java, but not – thus far – music that is getting increasingly on towards good. Still, it’s my creative outlet, and it gives me another language to speak to people in, one that’s sometimes better suited for expressing my emotions.
Which reminds me. I’ve become increasingly suspicious of english. I’ve written emails to people – and posted blog posts – that I don’t feel like capture me. I’ve written some that I hate, some that don’t sound like me to me, some that I recognize where I was coming from but no longer represent how I feel or what I think. I haven’t been blogging much because I’m not sure that the part of me that blogs and the part of me that walks around and does stuff is actually all that connected. Originally, my theory was that blogging was going to be good for me. Then I tried writing emails to a single, trusted friend (the designated /dev/null inbox has changed a few times) and I found that much more helpful both in terms of arranging my thoughts and in terms of feeling some human connection. That the people in question may have never read most of the emails wasn’t the point.. in fact, sometimes I found it more helpful to write the emails and then *not* send them. (I’ve stopped doing this after a few mortifying times that I out of habit or technical incompetence or misunderstanding of how my phone works when composing emails in offline mode actually ended up sending them anyway). Sometimes I even contemplate writing letters and then burning them.
All this is to say, I’ll blog new music, and shows, and occasional updates, but my deepest intermost thoughts are generally things the world can live without.. and in many cases, I’m happier not having them lurk in a database somewhere, because I can think that they are gone, forgotten, and possibly never to trouble me again.
Happy 2011, people. As of today, I’ve not been a addict for 8 months. 4 more and I can get a cake or something.
T
