The Intergalactic Cowboy

I had a better than average sitting this morning. A sitting is a meditation that practicioners of Guitar Craft engage in at the beginning of their day. It involves progressive relaxation from head to toe as well as an awareness of a living presence inside of one’s body. After a long period of daily practice, it can lead to transcendant states of awareness, which in my book is rather cool.

This has been a good year for me and I am feeling a sense of contentment about that. This year is really ending well. Perhaps this even constitutes a completion… Today, I will run sound at the Methodist church and have a rather mellow New Year’s Eve evening. Perhaps I will read some Aldous Huxley. Perhaps I will go to the DGM site and re-read some of the forum posts by a Mr. Whitman who occasionally posts over there. He talks about things that I am interested in, but in a way that is different from what I have heard before.

Happy Old Year !

I.C.

With the help of some aspirin, my right wrist is now able to move up and down enough to pick the strings of a guitar. I am still only exercising my lower body at the health club. I don’t know when I will take a chance and test the right wrist by putting any pressure on it. I do need to exercise as much as possible right now; I was given four boxes of candy as gifts. The platter of cookies was eaten with the help of several other people. I guess that I could give the chocolates away but my tongue is lusting after them.

The cartoon network has been doing some late night marathons of some of their most offensive cartoons, including The Boondocks and Robot Chicken. Last night they showed a series of episodes of The Squidbillies. The Squidbillies are these North Georgia Rednecks who get jacked up on crystal meth and go steal the copper pipes from underneath peoples houses in order to support their habit. In one episode last night, they left the meth outside, and the pigs that live outside the house got into it and turned into emaciated, skeletal pigs who had the shifty eyeballs of animals that might be experiencing paranoia. I don’t know who does the voices for the characters in this cartoon, but the accents are rather authentic.

On New Year’s Eve, there will be a marathon of the cartoon that is about the speed metal band. Oh, what is the name ? Is it Megalopolis ? This cartoon is kind of like the Spinal Tap movie in that if you have ever been in a band, you can really see the humor in it. In one episode, the singer is adding vocals to a speed metal song and while he is singing,  the producer is talking to him through the headphones saying ” Find the downbeat; Find the downbeat; Find the downbeat.” This cartoon takes potshots at every cliche’ in the rock music world.

Happy vegetating !

I.C.

I have only received three messages today from Mr. Spammy.  Despite the annoyance of these messages, I do hope that he is not in ill health today. Perhaps he is feeling lethargic from overeating and dishwashing, as I am.

Would you believe that my Mom had two lunch guests over yesterday ? She invited them to eat leftovers from the Christmas dinner. She also wanted the leftovers served on the china, crystal, and silverware that I had painstakingly washed and put up the day before. So, I had another huge meal and subsequent huge cleanup.  Although there were only four people at this gathering, there was quite a lot of work involved. I succomed to the temptation to eat Christmas cookies which, along with the bloated stomach of a heavy lunch, caused me to stumble back into bed after the guests departed. Two hours later, I arose; drank coffee and went to the health club. My workout was more zealous than usual, so as to make good use of the food that I had consumed. Retiring early last night, I noticed a little wrist pain. Today the wrist pain is intense !  It hurts to move my right wrist, even the least little bit. I must have strained it on either the bench press or the parallel bar. I hang from a parallel bar and then raise my knees to waist level. This seems to lengthen my spinal column and help my back to feel better. But anyway, the right wrist is the wrist than moves when I pick the strings of my guitar. It also receives stress and pressure when I work out. These two activities are two of the most important part of my day and now they are compromised.   Grrrrr….    Although I am not a bodybuilder, I do enjoy pumping a little blood into my muscles each day for general health reasons. That kind of exercise helps me to stay in touch with my body as well. My Guitar Craft practice is also a major part of my general health, not to mention an essential part of rehearsing for this gig at Smith’s Olde Bar on February 17th.  Grrrr…. I hope that this pain goes away in two or three days. I need to go to the drug store and get one of those elastic bandages that you can wrap around your hand to minimize the motion of the hand.

With controlled frustration,

I.C.

What a work filled 48 hours it has been. It must have been busy for Mr. McPoop, because he was only able to send me twelve spam messages yesterday. My guess is that he needed an excuse to get away from some obnoxious family member that was visiting him and said ” Please excuse me but I have some business that I have to take care of.”  And today, he was only able to squeeze off three spams !  Amid all of the gift opening, he must have felt a need to engage in some sort of income producing activity and sneaked away to the computer to send out a few token messages as a symbolic gesture of the importance of daily work.

Believe me, my last two days have involved almost constant work. My Mom’s Christmas dinner was a success, much to the enjoyment of the eight people who attended. The cleanup and dishwashing afterward was neverending. China plates, silverware, dessert plates, silver drinking glasses, crystal wine glasses, all of which had to be put back up into their special resting place in the dining room cabinet. On Sunday morning, I had to get up early to run sound at the Methodist Church. On top of that, I had to run sound at three other services at this location, for a total of four, all in one day.  Two of the services were easy; two were a little more involved, with special microphones being needed to mic soloists. I was able to do a good job with only about three lapses of attention.  When you total in the time needed for the sound checks, I worked for about six hours yesterday. But, if I hadn’t been involved in this, what would I have done with my time ?  I probably would have sat watching t.v., stuffing my face with cakes, cookies, candies and sugarized drinks.  I would have ingested enough sugar to have given diabetes to an elephant !  So, to be honest with you, it has been a more healthy Christmas than I normally have around here.

Happy christmakwanzahannukah !

I.C.

Hmm…  Mr. McPoop only sent me three spam messages today. He must have had some last minute Christmas shopping to do…

My Mom and I are preparing for an early Christmas dinner tonight. There will be about half a dozen of her friends attending. I am in charge of serving wine and grape juice. Mom’s best friend will be greeting people and hanging up their coats. Mom will be cooking dinner and putting each dish on the serving table while the rest of us mingle. For me it will be quite tedious but she does need my help in order to pull this off.

Since my last diary I have listened to two more FM broadcasts that I did in the past. The WRAS performance / interview is mostly in tune but with slightly unsatisfactory guitar tone. I will probably not release it since I am basically just playing the Beautiful Cowgirls material exactly like the studio versions; nothing extraordinary.  Now the WREK broadcast is releasable if I want to. I had two loops going in stereo with lead guitar and voice panned to the middle. The loops are panned extreme left and right. Since the loops are left and right I can make them louder in the mix by boosting the lower frequencies of the recording. The guitar is in tune until the end of the sixty minute set. A little pitch correction will take care of that problem. The recording is mostly instrumentals, with only four vocal songs. The final vocal song is an early version of ” Something About You ” with vocals that are so off pitch that they are almost atonal. How could I have been so inattentive ? I don’t know if even pitch correction could save them… If I do master these recordings, it will no doubt be after I put together a Nobz collection of studio and live recordings from 1979. We Nobz had graduated from Punk and entered the class of New Wave at that time. The production on our recordings had improved dramatically from the previous recordings. The singer on some of these recordings is now a familiar t.v. personality to the people of Atlanta. I am refering to Joy Barge, whose voice and body have been heard and seen on both radio and t.v.  She is a traffic reporter and has achieved  quite a bit of notoriety and success in this field.

Now, back to work,

I.C.

Hmm….   There were no diary entries today by C.G. and R.R. over at the Guitar Craft site. C.G.’s entry yesterday sounded like it could have been a swan song. I hope not !  His insights into the practice of Craft are quite educational for his readers. The daily musings about the people at Cafe Laddro and Melvin the cat have been fun to read as well, not to mention the parakeet that sometimes visits him. It is just comforting to read these and to know that he is alright. But whatever happens, I do hope that his happiness is served by doing it. I don’t know if R.R.’s commitment has been completed or not.

Last night I lay in bed listening to an FM broadcast that I did in 1998 at WRAS in Atlanta. It was a thirty minute broadcast on the Georgia Music Show hosted by Michael Overstreet. I would play a piece and then be interviewed for a couple of minutes. I was listening in order to ascertain whether this recording was releasable or not. My guitar was a little too out of tune that day for any of this to be released without pitch correction. Sure, I am almost always a little out of tune but my 5th and 6th strings were more sharp than I remember at the time. This predicament caused the bass lines to the guitar parts to be sharp, as compared to the treble parts; unforgivingly so. The heat in the control room fortunately flattened the bass strings toward the end of the performance and improved  my tuning to an almost acceptable listenability.This was my first broadcast on this particular station, which can be heard all over north Georgia. It was even heard by a person here in Thomaston, whom I didn’t even know at the time. There was a lot of pressure on me to play well, since the audience was potentially so large. The sound check must have been short because my loop was set at too fast of a speed, faster than I could keep up with it seems because I flubbed a couple of guitar parts. At one point, I pressed the wrong button on my loop and the sound went off completely for a couple of seconds. It is ironic that I remember being proud of myself for pulling it off well, when I left the station that day. Tonight I will listen to my second broadcast at this same station, which occurred a year or two later.

Looking back with fondness and criticism,

I.C.

I hate to sound like a broken record but this cold is still with me; eight days after attacking my stomach, sinuses, ears, throat, larynx and now the bronchial tubes. The bronchial tubes have invoked a choking sensation which has interfered with my sleep for the last few nights. The Christmas Cantata had to go on today and I rose to the occasion and performed my role as soundman, taking on a cheerful attitude despite my misery. When I arrived at 9:30 am the musicians were already rehearsing at the front of the church.  Two of the musicians looked as though they were even more ill than myself. I bet that they have this same, neverending cold. They also performed their responsibilities as an act of suffering, in the service of the aim of performing music for the benefit of the congregation. Quite admirable; they looked too ill to actually enjoy the event.

I wonder what Aldous Huxley has to say about suffering ?

     ” Where there is perfection and unity , there can be no suffering. The capacity to suffer arises where there is imperfection , disunity and separation from an embracing totality; and the capacity is actualized to the extent that imperfection, disunity and separateness are accompanied by an urge toward the intensification of these creaturely conditions.”

     ” For the individual who achieves unity within his own organism and union with the divine ground, there is an end to suffering. The goal of creation is the return of all sentient beings out of separateness and that infatuating urge-to-separateness which results in suffering, through unitive knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal reality. ”

     ” The selfless and God-filled person can and does act as a channel through which grace is able to pass into the unfortunate being who has made himself / herself impervious to the divine, by the habitual craving for the intensifications of his / her own separateness and selfhood’

     “  That which converts the victims of self-will is the divine charge that the saintly individual carries, the eternal Reality for which he has become the conduit. What saves is the gift from beyond the temporal order brought to those imprisoned in selfhood by these selfless and God filled persons, who have been ready to accept suffering, in order to help their fellows. ”

In the spirit of cheerful suffering,

I.C.

Now I have laryngitis. My cold has moved from my sinuses, into my throat, and now as far down as my larynx. (sp?) My throat is stinging and burning. As luck would have it, I missed the 2nd and last dress rehearsal for the Christmas Cantata on Sunday. Not good for the accomplishment of good sound reinforcement. Doing a sound check in this situation involves shouting from the balcony to the performers at the other end of the sanctuary. This would have been a painful and impossible task for me tonight. But being silent is not all bad. Let’s read what William Law and Aldous Huxley have to say about silence :

” The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will be often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us… We may have a great deal of talk, but will have little converstion in heaven. “ - William Law

” Words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason, but merely for the sake of making a distracting noise are idle words… They tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity.  They are impediments on the way of the unitive knowledge. ” - Aldous Huxley

Silently,

I.C.

Would you believe that I have another cold ?  It has only been a month since the last one. I was too ill today to run sound at the dress rehearsal for the Christmas cantata at the church. This cantata is an opportunity for spirituality to be expressed in a medium other than words. And speaking about the limitations of words, let me quote Aldous Huxley from The Perennial Philosophy :

        page 129 ” Preaching is beset with dangers. If the enlightened did not preach, there would be no deliverance for anyone. Some adherants to religion are enlightened and delivered because they have chosen to act appropriately to the words of the founders of the religion. Others achieve a partial salvation by reacting with partial appropriateness. Yet others harm themselves and their fellows by reacting with a total inappropriateness _ either ignoring the words altogether or more often, taking them too seriously and treating them as though they were identical with the Fact to which they refer.”

If this statement makes you feel like you should give up on whatever religion or discipline that you have been studying, listen to what Huxley says about the relative worth of texts :

        page 131  ” The science of aesthetics is not the same as , nor even a proximate means to , the practice and appreciation of the arts. How can one learn to have an eye for pictures, or to become a good painter ? Certainly not by reading Benedetto Croce. One learns to paint by painting, and one learns to appreciate pictures by going to picture galleries and looking at them. But this is not to say that Croce and his fellows have wasted their time. We should be grateful to them for their labors in building up a system of thought, by means of which the immediately apprehended significance and value of art can be assesed in the light of general knowlidge, related to other facts of experience and in this way and to this extent explained.”

“In no cirmumstances , however, can the study of theology or the mind’s assent to theological propositions take the place of what law calls ‘the birth of God within.’ For theory is not practice and words are not the things for which they stand.”

So don’t tear up those Bibles and monographs yet,

I.C.

Today I attended a sad funeral. It was the funeral of a twenty year old woman who was tragically killed in a car wreck here two days ago. The funeral was good except for one thing; the minister. I have never seen such a train wreck of a funeral service. The minister had some sort of reading difficulty which made it difficult for him to read Bible verses at any level greater than a third grade education. He then picked up the obituary from the local newspaper and haltingly read it; mispronouncing certain words and family names. He then proceeded to preach a sermon on the saving of peoples souls, including anecdotes on his own religious conversion, making little mention of the deceased person in this monologue. Two of the pall bearers got up and left the service after a few minutes of this unbearable excuse for a eulogy. I have never seen such a thing happen at a funeral before !  The couple sitting behind me started to groan after every irrelevant point that the minister said. Although ministers can be allowed to make a religious point during a funeral, this minister seemed to think that the funeral was about him and not the deceased. This, on one of the most poignant days of the family’s life… It was an absolute atrocity !

One of the few advantages to living in a fundamentally religious community is the overabundance of Christmas lights that are displayed in the evening hours around here. There are two neighborhoods that take this custom to the extreme. One is a street called Christmas Lane, on which each house and yard overdecorate with hundreds of multicolored lights, and floodlighted yard decorations. The people of this community drive down this street frequently during this season just to witness this over the top display. Another neighborhood that indulges in this custom is called Triune Village. This neighborhood is the nicest housing project for the poor that I have ever seen. Instead of people living in brick dormitories or in high rise apartments, this project is made up of duplexes, with front yards and driveways. These people scrape up the money to illuminate their yards and houses with megawatts of colored lights, inflatable Santas, and Christmas trees with sequenced lights, going around in spirals. It is a delightful spectacle that never ceases to amaze.

Season’s Greetings,

I.C.