Sometimes, I get into a fit about finding information about something, and I spend forever doing web searches and reading through endless pages of material for no reason. Right now, I’m in the middle of searching for the name of the doctor that invented flouride. He died on 11/27/96, but I don’t know his name.
I’ve been on and off sick all weekend, and I’ve been buying more CDs. I finally found a copy of the Queensryche “Sign of the Times” single, which I wanted for the Japanese-only track, which it turns out, sucks. I did get the new Ozzy CD, which is noteworthy for its 1970 rehearsal tape versions of 4 old Black Sabbath songs, including a verion of War Pigs that has different words. It also has some multimedia stuff on one of the discs, and I tried that out yesterday. I think this is my only enhanced CD.
Okay, I’ve given up on the fluoride search and I’m just listening to the White Album, eating applesauce, and doing what I do every time the sun is out and I’m sitting in my office – thinking. It’s cold and shitty outside, and there’s some pretty thick and high clouds; when I got out of bed thismorning, it was like some weird lighting effect – the sky dark, but sun poking through my blinds and illuminating the bed in thin strips.
I’m thinking about what to do beyond work today. I wandered into a music store yesterday and looked at all of the basses and drums and guitars and minidisc 4 tracks and keyboards and wished I played SOMETHING. I’ve learned my lesson about buying musical instruments and trying to learn – I don’t have the discipline. But I want to be in a band and write music and record stuff, and I’ve felt like this for a long time. That’s why I bought and sold a drumset, a guitar, several bass guitars, and a cheap synth in the last 10 or 15 years.
And when I think about this, I think maybe writing is my substitute for that. I know Mark Leyner talks about that a lot, and I’m sure other writers feel that. I can’t keep a beat, but I can fill up 500 pages without too many problems. So if I say “okay, I’m a writer. Instead of another Electric Ladyland, I’ll produce another On the Road” or whatever. Well, this begs another question: what am I doing with myself right now?
Writing takes as much skill and dedication as playing guitar in a band. You spend hours a day practicing or writing or rehearsing or whatever. And right now, I’m spending a few seconds a day writing. I should be writing 3, 4 hours a night, but it’s always some excuse. Granted, being sick all of the time is a convenient excuse, but even if I’m sick, I can at least sit in front of the computer, put in a CD, and press the B key for 45 minutes, just so I’m used to being in front of the computer. I keep thinking about musicians like the Beatles, who produced about 79,000 albums in only 10 years, or people like Zappa who produced 2 or 3 albums a year, toured a few hundred dates, produced other albums, wrote soundtracks, etc etc etc. I need to be working like that, and I’m not.
Why do I think about this when the sun is out but it’s cloudy? That part was a lie – I think about it a lot, regardless of the weather. This weather makes me think of Indiana winters, to some extent. I should take back what I said – the sun doesn’t appear to be out anymore.
An aside – I just found out that as of last Saturday, I have been journaling on paper on a mostly daily basis for 4 years. Maybe when I get home tonight, I’ll pull out my old spiral notebooks and take a look back through them. It’s weird, because on a related note, I’m trying to fill a notebook before the end of the year, and I don’t think I’ll make it. I usually fill two notebooks a year (120 page, writing on both sides), but this year has been slow, mostly because I seldom write when I’m at Karena’s for the weekend, and on my weekends alone, I’ll write more on those days then I do during the whole week. So I’m trying to double up my writing volume. I’m a few pages shy of the 2/3 mark. I might make it if I break out into a short story one night or something…