Psst. Hey you!

Over here!

Sorry to trouble you. Just wanted to let you know that I have finally established a permanent home on the web. It is mine, all mine, so you won't have to update your bookmarks anymore. I hope you'll join me there--thank you for taking the trouble.

Click here to visit my new homepage.

Frogsong

I'm at my desk under the roof upstairs. It's the first night of frogsong so far this year. That was a pleasant surprise at sundown--and they're still singing out there. Love it.

This is the first time in seven years that I've lived with a television. When it's off I have no problems leaving it off, but when it's on I have to stay out of the room. It is loud, mostly meaningless, and full of advertisements for things that I don't need. And I am all too susceptible to television's charms. I stay away because I would rather not find myself becoming emotionally invested in soap operas or The Parent Trap or whatever. I'd rather not find myself on the couch welling up with tears at the end of some cheesy movie at 3am.

For the same investment of time, I could listen to three John Coltrane records. I could read a substantial chunk of something life-changing. I could write an article that teaches me something I didn't know before. I could actually talk to another human being instead of watching their glassy-eyed ghosts on that screen.

One way that television sucks us in is by constantly changing camera angles. We are hardwired to pay attention to sudden color changes and visual surprises and volume fluctuations. Television tycoons have made their fortunes in large part by exploiting this evolutionary quirk.

I can watch the tube for hours--just like I can watch a fire or anything else that flickers and glows. The difference of course is that a fire actually gives off warmth, gathers us together socially, and doesn't try to sell me fabric softener.

* * *

It's now morning and I'm sitting by the front window of the cafe with a dark cloud of espresso spreading through my bloodstream. I got exactly one hour and forty-five minutes of sleep last night. The sun is bright and I'm listening to Smokey Robinson. Sounds good. Feels good. No complaints.

My mother was born today. We're going out to dinner tonight and that will be a blast--but I'll be a happy man when I can finally crawl into bed later this evening.

* * *

It's well past midnight. The last notes of Sinatra's 1955 album "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" faded away a few minutes ago.

Often at the end of the day I feel a hanging tension, some dissonance inside of myself unresolved, and I cannot sleep. For the past few weeks I've been restless this way, getting no more than four hours per night. I am starting to feel the burn.

Soon enough my body will reach its limit and I will just fall in my tracks for a day or two. I am looking forward to that. Until then, thank you for reading my bleary ramblings.

It was… uh… a “fitness nap.”

It's 11:00pm and rain's tapping at the skylight above me. I laid out a bed for myself on the floor downstairs and I hope to be crawling inside of it soon here.

The words came slower than a glacier today. I wrote half a page of questionable text in five hours. Some days, the gears just don't turn as smoothly as others.

I did run for about half an hour today, though, and I'm pleased to be a bit sore. It's always amusing to lace up sneakers while some frantic part of my brain floods me with excuses and suggestions for other things that I could be doing. Yes, lazy brain of mine, I'd love to eat cookies or read The Grapes of Wrath or play guitar or write a song. Let's do all of those things! ...after I run.

All this exercise is partially for strength, partially for discipline, and partially a deliberate attempt to tire myself out. I have still not been sleeping well but I think I'm finally exhausted enough to start getting better. Yesterday after my final set of push-ups, I laid down face-first as I always do--to wait until my arms and chest regain a little strength--but this time I stayed down for about half an hour instead of half a minute. Zzz... Zzz... Zzz... Oops.

I should really wander downstairs and try to recreate that happy accident. I’m taking The Grapes of Wrath with me. I have to lure myself into bed, using books as bait: the eight-year-old in me never stopped hating bedtime. He is alive and kicking tonight, as he is every night.

I hope you've had a good weekend. Goodnight.

Jazz and Insomnia

The sun's just getting started but I am already on my second cup of coffee. I haven’t gotten more than four hours of sleep on any given night during the past week. Last night I managed to get two hours. If I should spontaneously combust at any point today, you'll be able to read what happened by the coffee grounds that you find scorched into the wood of this desk.

On Saturday I saw the Al Corey band in Augusta with my grandfather. He hinted several times that he was worried about the music boring me. There was no need to worry. I wasn't humoring him; I really love that music. Every morning over breakfast I listen to jazz that my grandfather would consider old-fashioned.

I did happen to mention Miles Davis and it was interesting to see his reaction. To my 88-year-old gramps, Miles is still just a kid and a newcomer: his work registers on the radar, but only as an unidentified blip. How great is that?

Anyway. Al Corey Band. The music was great. At one point I opened my eyes to look around between songs and realized with a sinking sensation that out of an audience of 150 or 200 people, I was the only one who had yet to earn his first white hair. Where were all the young people? Too busy digging their pop radio, I suppose. The church venue was gorgeous and cold; husbands and wives huddled together for warmth. For about two or three full songs during the second set I retreated to the hallway to be a radiator barnacle.
I hung around after the concert for coffee and home-made baked goods and chatted with my fellow concert-goers. It made me a bit self-conscious to realize how conspicuous I'd been while listening. I close my eyes at concerts and keep time with my foot, see. And my body moves. Not dramatically, but apparently enough to be comical to others. I don't know how to dance and I articulate the music awkwardly. The women seated behind me got a kick out of it.

My former music teacher, John Foss, was in the band playing trumpet. It was a great surprise to see him and to briefly catch up on his life between sets. The man looked great. He's seventy-five years old, and he's building beautiful stone walls and man-made waterfalls on his own property. By hand. Right on, man. Look at you go.

My ear has been all over the place this week. I spin early jazz in the mornings, then I blast punk and dark ambient music depending on what I'm doing throughout the day. By evening I've switched to jazz or Debussy or Chopin nocturnes.

Lately the electric guitar is never far away. I've been drilling myself hard on jazz arpeggios, melodic phrases, and chord voicings. There's pleasure in the discipline. It is difficult and time-consuming and I hope it continues to bat me around for a while yet.

There's more on my mind but I think this entry is long enough. I hope your week is going well.

-Tozier

Letters From Everywhere

      After a year and a half of hard work, after writing 200 songwriting articles, my songwriting website has begun to get traction, with about 1,500 daily readers. Along with the increased traffic I've begun to receive letters from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Germany, Singapore, Russia, Kazakhstan, Sweden, and Lebanon. This is all very exciting to a boy from the woods of Maine who has never known any other place or culture. I love getting letters from strangers saying, "Hey, your article helped me out. Thank you." I'm glad to be useful. And I'm even more glad that a few people have said, "Hey, you promised you'd have music recorded and released by now. Where's that album, Bucko?" Thanks for calling me out.
      Recent world events have gotten me thinking more and more about how I fit into the world. How I can be helpful. How I can contribute to the wellbeing and happiness of others. For now there are more questions than answers and I am comfortable with that--but I am not going to sit still while I could be helping my neighbors. Now that I'm writing to friends all over the world, it's impossible to shrug off bad news just because it's geographically distant. It's impossible to look away, impossible to excuse myself from pitching in. As a species, we face enormous challenges both now and in the future. Some from the atmosphere, some from asteroids, some from disease, some from ourselves.
      The question that haunts me is: what's my role? What can I contribute? It's an important question. But the need is immediate, and I'm not going to spend very long deliberating.

Was it Just a Story?

      A friend of mine said something beautiful recently: “I thought for years that I was a novelist, but then years went by and I still hadn’t written one and I wondered whether this thing about me being a fiction writer was just a story I’d made up about myself.”

Eating Cake with a Future Supermodel

      Last Summer I made friends with a lovely young girl--Riss!--who was just beginning to carve out the beginnings of a modeling career for herself. I found myself at her send-off party just before a national pageant. Go Riss.
      The room was packed with former schoolteachers, fellow models, friends, and family. Mostly family. Riss modeled some dresses for us from a corner of the conference room that had been decked out with red carpet and a camera tripod. I learned what a $10,000 dress looks like. It was interesting to experience that while wearing a button-down shirt from the thrift store. Being untucked, it covered the bit of rope I'd used to improvise a belt. Back then I looked more or less like an unmade bed everywhere I went.
      I hovered around the edges of the whole gathering, taking notes, talking to strangers. The idea was to write a memory piece for the family to keep. The party marked an important moment for Riss. She had one foot in rural Maine, the other in L.A. or N.Y.C. or wherever opportune winds might blow her. At her incredibly young age, Riss was tackling an intensely judgmental and selective career, where the barrier to entry is high.
      Suddenly the photographer shouted "Get your picture taken on the red carpet!" and Riss stood waiting with her cocktail dress, measured pose, the incredibly consistent smile. I laughed with a few of the men in her extended family and her mother and scratched notes about the line that formed next to the photographer's tripod: little girls and boys, an uncle, a pair I assume were Riss's grandparents. The line formed loosely, then gradually dissolved as the gang shuffled forward to meet the lens and the flash. Hard-working Mainers, all. I felt right at home.
      Until an arm slipped between my elbow and body, seized me by the wrist, and started dragging me forward through the crowd. It was Diane, a dress shop owner from the town I lived in at the time. Her shop neighbored the cafe that I managed. Diane's a wonderful woman.
      But at that moment she was my jailor, dragging me toward the blood-red carpet with startling strength. Already in motion toward the expensive cameras and dresses, with no hope of escaping, I had to scan my surroundings on the fly for a spot of open table surface to drop my notebook.
      "Oh my God," said Katie, then Miss Maine, as she saw me coming. I'd served her coffee before. I think I fell while I served her. Buster Keaton-style.
      "Remember me?" I asked.
      She laughed. "Yes."
      And then I was pushed out onto the carpet between Riss and Katie. Diane stepped over to the other side of Rissa and there we stood, smiling in a row. Am I the only one without a sash? Where's mine?
      "Hi!" Riss said.
      "Hi," I said. I wanted to ask whether her cheekbones hurt from smiling for the past full hour, but I didn't have time.
      "Look this way!" Cried the photographer. I shut my mouth and awkwardly obeyed his three or four commands like a dog that hasn't quite learned the difference between "sit" and "roll over" yet. I am not a natural.
      Flash.
      "Take one of Norissa and Nick together!" said Diane. She and Katie abandoned us on the carpet. Uh-oh. Six dozen family members staring and sizing up the scruffy longhair standing next to their Riss. No, no, that's fine. Really. Just shoot me.
And so the photographer, Akers, did. "Don't puff out!" he said from behind the tripod. Now when I look at the photo I see what he meant. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but I was pushing my chest out so I look like one of those lizards that inflates to make itself look scary when it's threatened.
      Flash.
      "Don't move yet!"
      Diane steps toward us again, puts one hand on Norissa's leg and one hand on mine, and presses our sides together. Laughter in the room. Oh come on!
      Shoot me again, sir, please. The first wasn't quite fatal.
      Flash.
      Riss's mom--Cynthia--from the back of the room: "Now tilt your heads toward each other juuuuust a little." The room roars.
Riss's hands go up and she laces her smile with a mock-angry scowl. "All right!" she says, thrusting her palms out. Akers, mother, and Diane relent, and we slink away.
It's time to cut the cake, which has a black shoe made of spun sugar on top. "I might have seconds," jokes Riss's dad while waiting for his first piece. The family is clearly celebrating. The clock spins.
      Then, finally, a chain reaction of goodbyes. The room thins, then empties. About ten of us remain. We pull a few tables together and sit. The pageant looms. It feels like we're eating cake on the edge of the world. I wonder how Norissa's feeling, and look around. I turn just in time to catch a purple streak as Riss tackles her sister with a crazy hug that threatens to take them both down. Her hairpiece goes awry.
      "I love you!" She yells into her sister’s shoulder.
      "It's neat that you're here," Cynthia says as we sit. "You know, because sometimes people meet by chance in life and wonder what it would have been like to know one another. And here you both are."
      I don't remember how I responded. Norissa was seventeen then. I was twenty-five. I still don't understand what made Cynthia and Diane want to marry us, or what Norissa made of all that silliness.
      But I'm grateful that I was invited. The cake was great, the family welcoming. What a blast.
      Now that I think about it, that same bit of rope that held my pants up at a party for future supermodels now holds my beaten-up copper guitar together. But that's a story for another day.

The Urge to Flee

      The urge to give up is strong when I first plant my palms on the floor. As I start pushing, though, I gain momentum. The middle, in a way, the plateau--that's the easiest part. I find a rhythm and for maybe sixty seconds, the movement is easy.
     Then my arms and chest start to tear. I want to run from it; instead, I push harder. I push through the pain one, three, five, seven more times, then--splat--my arms give out and I'm left gasping like a carp, facedown in the imprints my hands made in the carpet, red-faced and growling and happy.
      Comfort isn't happiness. I know that much.
      Working muscles builds strength, but only if you push until your body begs and, finally, bails out. And each time you ride it out just a little longer than you expected to.
      I meet resistance too when I discover problems in my guitar playing. I hear a fast melodic passage like birdsong in my head, but one of my fingers--usually the pinky--mumbles and slurs and some of the sounds never hit air. The songbird’s voice cracks. And there's always a half-conscious, millisecond-long battle in which I decide whether to try it again or play something safer, something easier, something I can already play perfectly.
      But of course, you'll never grow by playing that same old music day after day.        It’s hard work to keep pushing, to keep reaching. But as you climb into bed after nightfall, satisfaction always wells up to fill that space you carved out for it during the day.

A Most Unusual Bookmark

Over at my songwriting blog, the spam comments are relentless and usually dull. They exist mostly just to nickel-and-dime my life away.

But this one took my eye. I nearly choked on my tea, in fact:

The first verse is forever tainted, sir.

Confound it all.

Swallowed Whole by Books Without Pages

Come with me. We're going back to the days before Facebook, before Myspace, even before the Internet. Back, back, back to the days when computing involved a keyboard and a terminal. No mouse... just a black screen with green text.

........In this seemingly lower-tech time, there existed "Text adventures." Upon booting one from an enormous floppy disk, you'd see a short paragraph or two of descriptive text. Something like:


You find yourself in a field of knee-high grass, hearing birdcalls and buzzing insects. The sun falls hot on your shoulders and forearms, bearing down from directly overhead. In the shade of a tree to the west stands a slumped old shed, gone dark with years of weathering. One of its doors stands halfway open. To the south, the field slopes downward to the treeline, where the forest begins.

........And then the game was afoot. You'd simply type what you wanted to do, and a text parser within the game would process that and give you more information. Let's say you typed:

>GO WEST

........This would prompt the game to print a new paragraph describing what happens next:




You stand in front of the weathered old shed. A rusted padlock sits broken on the stone step. The shed's door hangs half-open; it's all dark inside.


>EXAMINE PADLOCK


The metal is crumbling. It's old, but still... this padlock didn't break itself.


>TAKE PADLOCK


You pocket the rusty padlock.


........I love the writing style of these games: at its best, terse and vividly sensual. And knowing that you can explore and examine anything that's described definitely changes the reading experience to something even more lifelike.
........In a text adventure you might also talk to fictional characters; you might take, carry, and use tools and objects; you might solve puzzles and mysteries; in some stories, you might even die if you made poor choices.
........When I think of these games now, I go a little soft inside. There was such pleasure in being able to carve my own path through a story. Such pleasure.
........Thankfully, text adventures are alive and well today. To learn more about playing modern and historic interactive fiction, or to learn about what it takes to write your own, visit brasslantern.org.

Head Space for Writing.

The beautifully simple text editor pictured here: Darkroom. Totally stripped-down, with no buttons visible, no distractions at all in full-screen mode.

I cleared my desktop, then tweaked Darkroom's transparency. Here's what I got (click the photos to enlarge).

Not a bad way to write.