blogging again, after a hiatus

I'm having some pleasant solitude again, at my favorite coffeehouse. My friend M has her PhD. I'm down 65 pounds from summer before last. All is well with the world.

All but one thing. My greatest, most-difficult-to-suppress, most neurotic fear has materialized. My daughter has slammed her finger in the car door. I was away when it happened. My wife had to run around the car to her and unlock the door. It must have felt like an eternity for my girl. When they returned I made some apple juice & motrin and gave that to her. I went to the store and bought more of that, plus some ice cream. We got her her favorite meal from Sonic and let her watch TV, although she'd used up her ration for that (2 hrs) already. She spent the evening zoning out.

The injury's not too bad - it caught the tip of her index finger, and it doesn't appear that there's anything broken or hemoraging in there. There's a mark on her fingernail that will slowly grow out as it heals.

We can't protect our children from everything. I've tried, with anticipated terror, to keep her little fingers out of doorjams, watching vigilantly as she gets into the car - the door edges on the car body might as well be highlighted in an augmented reality display as far as my vision is concerned.

Before I was a parent, I once slammed a child's hand in a car door. Fortunately he was very young, and his hands were still mostly cartilage (or at least it seemed that way). He didn't take any lasting hurt.

I might as well be a diffferent person now - the conditioning of being a parent (and of transforming from a pleasure-seeking missile into a hardened silo) makes me think of others instead of myself.

Once, when studying neuroscience (never more than dabbling in it), I read that the study of the nervous system starts with the neuron, but that all the action is in the synapses - the gaps between the neurons. Life is like that - we start with self-involvement, self-nurturing, self-defense, egotistic posturing, preening - but we move on in life, and eventually our lives become all about our relationships with others.

Still, I'm envious of my friends who have remained single and self-involved. They have less conflict, I think. They're all artists of one kind or another. They've been able to accomplish more. Like my friend M, who got her PhD this week. She wrapped up her dissertation in a three-month bout of continuous typing, and began a course in Cisco networking at the same time.

Or my friend BR, who is a hell of a talented composer and a deeply spiritual person. And a physicist with a PhD! And a faculty member at a state university. Now that he has a career though, he's composing less often. But he would never have generated that large body of work, or gotten his advanced degrees, saddled with a family.

It's OK with me. I love my family. And I'm progressing on keyboards quite nicely. Improv in the early morning, sight-reading during the day, and technique at night. I love sight-reading too. The better I get, the more unexplainable is the phenomenon. My ego disappears into it, if it's going well. I've begun using a metronome - that's a new dimension in difficulty!

I had a breakthrough in improvisation today. I chose a single mode - F#sixth mode melodic minor, which Dan Hearle loves to call "superlocrian" - locrian with a raised 2nd. In the past I would have written out all of the chords - triads and sevenths, and then progressions in fourths, and stepwise progressions. This time I determined to commit all that to memory, and had quite a wonderful time. My right hand improv was simpler than ever - I just played Somewhere over the Rainbow, and Summertime by Gershwin - but my left hand accompanying patterns were awesome (for me anyway).
So much fun. F#half-diminished to G# half-diminished, with wide voicings, D7 to E7. Bminor7 to E7 to Aminor with a major 7th. C augmented major 7th. It's so good!

There's so many ways to play! Melody in right hand, melody in left. Moving bass lines with chords in right hand. Bass against melody. Melodies in both hands with identical rhythm. Playing four voices at once. I'm going to love exploring them all.

I'm no longer ashamed to play in a tonal manner, which I'd absorbed through my skin in college. That whole Schoenberg thing poisoned the well, although if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else. I've had thirty years to forget the straight-jacket of music school. Still glad I did it, but it never helped me to be truly creative. Only I could do that, and the last lesson I learned - just recently - was that I had to give myself permission to do this. It's easy to not realize it when you're busy with scales, arpeggios, and repertoire. The will to mastery can obscure the goal. One has to let go of egotistic concerns and let the music be the raison d'etre.

Well, time to study networking. I hope M reads this...

Life is so interesting!

Life is so interesting. Everything happens at once! We just have to pay attention.

Yesterday was interesting - the whole family was working on the house & the yard. My lady, despite being sick, felt invigorated by the work. My kid sprayed and scrubbed some chairs. Pool work, picking up branches, dog poop, detritus, etc. Mowing the grass with a manual mower. That last bit is my favorite, but I'm going to have to give it up. It takes four hours to do with that little push, spiral-blade affair, but a powered lawn power would eat it up in 45 minutes. Too bad - it stinks, and tortures my eardrums. But I just don't have the time anymore.

I worked hard, and felt tired, but when it came time to do Jazzercise, I felt like I hadn't worked at all. I came back stronger! Great - consolation of age - I can't get any younger, but I can get thinner and stronger. The instructor nick-named me "Royalicious". Ah, vanity.

By coincidence, my percussion instructor in college nick-named me "Roy Aloysius", so it was a bit of synchronicity.

Then back home, and, with a phone call to my sister-in-law, the evening was done - too pooped to mow any more. That'll have to wait 'till tonight.

R.I.P. Hal David. I'm listening to "I Say a Little Prayer". Try counting it sometime, next time you listen.