the dime things turn on

I have other things to blog about. I’m behind, actually. I actually have a particular habit of telling a particular person I’m going to do something and then futzing out because I get sick. So I have a few things to do.

Actually, I have a ka-ZILLION things to do and no brain to do it in. I can feel it sooooo slooooowly coming back; but it’s a gradual process. I should be through the whole medical silliness I allude to sometimes in the next eleven weeks or so; but who’s to say?

Here I am though, thinking about these things. These little things. And worrying over people and my STUFF with them. It’s more important that I am in a state of okayness. A state of rest. A state of balance. I knew this yesterday.

People get into near misses all the time. I have problems that make me feel a lot of complicated things about life. But a person almost killed me on the road yesterday. I braked. That’s essentially it. If I hadn’t braked, I would be in the hospital with something wrong; if lucky. Or dead. If lucky. Anything directly under that is unlucky, and the luck increases once you get to the point under “I’m incapacitated, but can still write songs and play the piano as normal” … over that, I will have a hard time feeling much about my existence. I would learn, but it would be a Hard Thing.

Next January, it will be the 20th anniversary of my stepmother’s death. I drive down the road where she died every day. If the road looked like it does today, with all the shops and development; it wouldn’t have happened. There’s lights and a median. It was essentially a country road. But a woman who will never forget that day and whose name I don’t remember reached down to steady her coffee and drifted into my stepmother’s car. Both the passengers in the hit car died; my stepmother instantly. The other woman, survives.

And she may have looked up quicker. My stepmom may have swerved somehow. These are the dimes things turn on. My dime could have been so different. Dimes are so thin.

As well as thinking about death or injury, I wonder how things would be here. What would I leave behind? Am I READY to go? Have I DONE enough? I pulled over to the next road and felt this horrible sense of loss and fear because I am NOT ready to go and I have MUCH more to do. I need my brain and my body to cooperate with me and I wish that I had control over the stoplights. I wish that I had control over the random satellites that fall from the sky.

It is all too easy to judge. I know why the idiot on the wrong side of the road didn’t kill me; because I know I’ve been such a nervous and jumpy little thing lately. I thought, there is no purpose for your paranoia, your hyper-vigilance. Nothing is going to happen to you. That feeling on the back of your neck is nothing.

Fate. God. Who knows why these things happen? My blog purposely doesn’t deal with this. I have my thoughts. I do not discuss them unless I am in places of safety. But I do know that much, much later – because my father had quite a bit of thinking, mourning, living, and being to do; he got married again. Strangely, the day after the day I DID not die on a road parallel to that OTHER street – it is my father’s wife’s birthday.

My stepmother.

No one can replace a person, but maybe there is something preventing horrible things from happening sometimes. Even though sometimes, you hear about these horrible things happening in serial like the one that didn’t just then.

Maybe it’s a sign for me. Heaven knows I’ve ignored enough of the positive ones to need a crack over the head. Whatever is sending them.

Maybe this is partially what angers the dryads whose land our house was built upon; and upon whom we impose our technology so that we must make offerings of gnome statuettes.

Anyway, the feeling of being watched and of another shoe about to be dropped is gradually dissipating.

And I’m feeling a little more .. relaxed.

Repetition and Crazy

1. We’re going to eat Dim Sum this morning
2. I am REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY tired because I’ve been helping a … uh….. “colleague” with a “thing.”
3. I am still calm because I got a Mario Mushroom. I will post photos of him in his natural environment.
4. Blogging angry is not a good idea. So I won’t do it.
5. I do have a fight or flight response. To danger. But the danger I’m in is hard to pin down. Where does it come from? Is it inside me?
6. Flight doesn’t work. Fighting is dramatic. This is pretty much true of life’s little situations that miff us off.

A good word I learned from a tweep I still owe a blog to (ack!) is “meh.”

Apathy, my friends. When you don’t have any effect and you are basically a tablecloth or a piece of wallpaper…

Remember you have two feet and you’re not furniture. There’s a dynamic world of people out there who want to hear my next song; my next sentence.

I will not lose hope or heart.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Any Day List

1. I am trying to write a post explaining how I feel and am once again revealing too much.
2. I’m not in a bad place. This is a good-feelings post. It sucks a little when you can’t share good-feelings-things because you are a deeply personal alien and you have to wear your armor at all times. The exoskeleton is hard to remove.
3. I am thankful for what I have. My life has not been like this before. I feel that I have reached a place of safety.
4. There are people who try to understand me
5. There are even people who trust me. Even though trusting someone who is a ticking time bomb is a scary thing.

Maybe this is why when I stop and really think about it, every day for me I have a beating pink heart and a thankful red center. Because I feel very loyal and very loved. And if my loved ones don’t feel loved back it’s because I am a crazy person Right Then and have put on a rubber mask with nine eyeballs and hair and worms and I do not look like my Xondorian Self. Perhaps I am hard to see, that day.

But you could read this and it would be true any day.

so lucky

I feel lucky today, or blessed, or whatever.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have any problems. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have a very confusing life. Sometimes I feel really lost sometimes.

Mike and I don’t celebrate valentines day. We’re probably just going to make pasta and watch TV. We used to throw parties and do things with and/or for our single friends. We tried to celebrate once or twice. We are not a traditionally “romantic” couple. We had a couple of years of that sort of thing. You change over the years, if you are in a very long term relationship with someone. I am not sure what we will be like eight years from now, which will be the twentieth year of marriage. It’s a strange thought. I hope I’ll have more substantial, real world asset to bring to the table. I feel like maybe I will.

I feel thankful today.

We keep a lot of secrets, him and I. Other people’s and our own. He’s got his own things that he does and I don’t pry. We have mutual respect for one another. He supports my pursuit of success in this “thing” I’m trying to do – whatever it turns out to be. I am slowly piecing it together. It looks and evolves differently every day.

The word evolve has love in it. It’s hard NOT to notice this when you are typing that.

I have not been focusing on my own solo things much lately. I need to make some changes in that vein. But this does not bother me that much. And there are many reasons for this.

1. I have been Not Well, and am only now starting to emerge from it.
2. I have to continue to take things slowly
3. I am going to have to build back up to where I was on a lot of my material, especially the piano
4. I’m going to have to reconstruct contacts and a lot of my fanbase, especially the real people fanbase.
5. Honestly, I’ve been trying to make Duality stick, because I need it to work.

Why do I need this to work? Is this a question that I am supposed to answer? Is it anyone’s business? Is it even MY business? What is the difference between the work that we’re doing and what my own stuff looks like? What’s the difference between one of his tracks, one of my tracks and a Duality track? What’s the difference between the two of us? What are we making? Is it worth saving? Is it worth growing?

The tracks we seem to like the most, that resonate the most; are the ones that other people have the least amount of feeling for. Or that have been criticized the most in the contests. Things that have been debated around a bit. Maybe this has been time constraints. Production. This sounds familiar to me because of how my first Spintunes contest went. The one where I fizzed out in the third round.

I think maybe this is not just a Duality thing, but this is something that affected Joe because of me. This routinely happens to me a lot, because I often like tracks that are not understood by others. I was talking to a friend in our artificion community tonight and told her that I had 4 strong songs, no make that five with Joe. I really think it might be more like seven if you count Duality in there. But those aren’t necessarily my favorite.

I really like the instrumentals that I do and that is what I wanted to do when I was young. I wanted to compose. Conduct. Control orchestras. Make them do what I wanted. I see extras on movie box sets, the soundtrack portions; and I get jealous. I think that should be me up there, doing that… if these series of stupid things hadn’t happened… it so WOULD have been…

Anyway …
‘Triangle.’ Would that have been a Denise Hudson track with a sampled guitar (ft. Joe ‘Covenant’ Lamb)? No. I wouldn’t have put it out that way. We have other stuff coming up that might be things we do ourselves that we’d use each other on. I used Joe on my taco track (he didn’t like it) … but he didn’t even HEAR ‘Triangle’ until the listening party – I arranged the entire thing. Methodology-wise, very much a Denise-Hudson track. But it went to Duality, because of the way that he put together his guitar track, completely experimental, not done “correctly” recorded from far-away, with a new amplifier … just a jam, with a pick..

I am not sure what makes something a Duality track except that I feel that we have a mission. It’s a place to do things we can’t do alone. We are talking about freedom, and love, and fear, and sadness … we want to hit things that one would normally avoid, perhaps. We go on a bit too long. We are a bit too epic or soaring or lengthy. Saying things that are a little uncomfortable. The lyrics are a bit too abstract. Or they cut right through. I dunno. There is no chorus. Other comments about some of the silly things that we’ve done… but everything smooshes together somehow – sometimes by accident – in purpose. It’s weird.

I don’t know that I’ll ever write a story of a song about any of our tunes. I might about ‘Triangle’ just because it is so interesting and I was so sad and it helped so, so much. I know I will probably revamp ‘St. Andrews.’ I may work really hard one day to pull out a perfect performance of ‘End of the World.’ I am already doing these types of things for ‘Invisible Girl’ and I’m trying to learn a live version of ‘Duality Cupcake.’

That is all I have to say.

things that cost money

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
1. really good shoes.
2. nice VSTs
3. good microphones.
4. cables.
5. iPads.
6. hotels in Paris.
7. lots and lots and lots of my time

sound barriers

i can assure you
it went by unnoticed
as these things do
for it sneaks up on you
though it isn’t ok
the inevitable decay of our senses

first one, then another
the frequencies falling away
they whine, there’s a protest of air
like a crustacean hitting a tank
we think “WICKED!” “That concert
was bitchin’!”
…but I’m not really talking about that;
the eventual loss of the highest
D-flat
which is seven times higher than
Soprano Mosquitos can hear
… once again I believe that my meaning’s unclear..

I’m talking of the package of stimuli.
Which no one had voted upon
The constant assault on our retina
the not knowing where thought was coming from
A head full of answerless questions
not knowing what to release
what to keep
what to throw into the deep

and then finally the POP!
at a final reaction
when the goddess decided
to void the transaction
the card machine cracked
Send the merchandise back
(how many magazines, really, do we lack?)

Let’s go home….
… or whatever that means
to wherever we are still allowed
and if we are welcomed then try to find there in the world
The last small scraps of sound

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

the secrets of moving about socially

1. my partner who can see stuff intimated that there was kind of a secret handshake. he didn’t really explain. i wasn’t really WHINING about it exactly, but i sort of was, because repeated rejection hurts and I wanted to know, like I once wanted to know in Austin (with people who, frankly have REALLY cool hair; where, I have to say, fewer people I have encountered in the “internet circles in which I Move seem to”). But it is all about acceptance. Whether it be with pocket protectors for fashion or actual necessity, or skinny jeans (leaving out the should/shouldn’t debate on that for the moment).
2. I suck at fraternity. This is because I often spill punch. I stay in the kitchen. No, that’s a lie. I usually actually stay in my room. That’s even worse. I thought the internet would be PERFECT for this.
3. I learned a LOT in a chat session yesterday. It pretty much told me that I was a weirdo and there was nothing I could, or should do about this. I have given myself the deadline of a week to stop whining about it.
4. I think it’s more that the last time I did this, my migration into myself was a lonely one.

I am going back to where I was before. Because right now, I am WAY outside my comfort zone. I put myself out there and it didn’t really go as planned. All that really happened was I wasted some time. And I am an introvert. And we must accept this. And at this point in time, I am actually going to go on that limb an use the royal “we.”

What really bothered me this week was that I was talking to my aunt last week, and I knew more about the goings on of people who are really not all that concerned with me than I knew about things I should be conversing with her freely about. Things I learned at university. Things we have in common. Because I am a pianist.

The insidiousness of a thing only becomes a danger if you let it. Right now, I have let coffee become a problem. Does that make it evil?

If I drink six cups a day, yes.

Den, you’re grounded.

Poem: Mr. Whatsit

This is a poem I found. I wrote it on September 7th, during a week of Much NervousNess.

This is a song / that should not be a song
for a purposeless habit that shouldn’t exist;
so set down your number two pencils, your pens..
and lay your papers face down on your desk.

No, there’s no way you can make up this test!
There’s got to be some way to separate
wheat from the chaff
After all you can’t seriously believe
you’re the only sob story
that struggles so arduously
up the path

the one rare soul with problems! -yeah janes got a doctor’s note too,
-twice more problems than you do
(and she’s not there whining!)
She’s there with a laugh and her homework on time
so you’d THiNK that YOU TOO could go that extra mile…

And smile
Over your weaknesses… like any good worker bee would
Just do what you should
to get by
yes smile…
Just tell Mr.Whatsit
what’s wrong with your eyes
as you do it.

People don’t get me. This is why I will ultimately fail.

I was one of those kids. You know that LOOK. The ones the cool kids gave the nerds (those are you, by the way.. bothering to read my blog). it was this scrunchy up thing with a sideways eye peer. Maybe the phrase “OH MY GOD, BECKY! Look at HER BUTT! It’S SO BIG…”*

[*disclaimer: I listen to LOTS and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of NPR. and I voted. For whoever you think I should have voted for that makes me not an idiot. Please love me. And when I have t-shirts, please buy them. or make them. or give a care. maybe. no.. no. wait, I'm kidding... NOT THE LOOK... *gurgle*]

Anyway. Now the nerds are in control. The geek has inherited the earth. And *I’M STILL GETTING THE LOOK!* I should have known. Because I was a Dork!

Yes. A dork. My reply to the cute boy who I wanted to take a walk around the neighborhood with me in highschool; when I asked “wanna go for a walk?” and his chilling response was “I’m ONLINE…….” like I didn’t have two brain cells to rub together was later.

“So? How’s your modem?”

DURRRRRr……

Smooth, Den. Smooth. Least I had awesome… um… attributes. Yes. It’s true. They won out in the end. Or in the front, or whatever. My poetry wasn’t really good enough though, yet, to maintain his interest. And when it all faded away I had my Rachmaninov.

Because I’m special. Yeah. One of those genius types. No one really understands the tortured twistyness of my sad soul.

Which is why I am so often bemused when you humans don’t get my Xondorian humor. I’m trying to get *IN..* I want to hang out at the TOP TABLE! The one at the comic con! That’s why I came in a CAPE!

Oh. You’re not wearing capes. You’re wearing T’shirts with funny symbols and weird lyrics to songs I don’t know because I am still listening to secret music I don’t talk about. The same song. Sometimes several times a day.

Yeah. That band you’re talking about. I probably haven’t heard of it. Yeah, I’d probably like it if I knew. I live in a pod. I’m pretty sheltered.

It’s cuz none of the cool kids will play with me.
Maybe I should stop telling the other dogs at the dog party about my bad case of mange.

Talk about faux paws.
#killmenow

Love
Den. The Xondorian. No. You don’t get her.

ps. Bless her if you have tried. And if you have actually listened to enough of my songs to have noticed that YES, there are codes and a pattern and some secret messages… BLESS YOU.

pps. It’s nice to get attention. Shut up. You know it’s true. That’s why I like to pay attention to you.

ppps. Dear superbowling halftimers. The use of autotune-capabilities as an effect is a privilege. Not a right.

pppps. Everybody sells out eventually. This is my worst fear, about how, when, and where to do it – and with how much class. Perhaps I should do it early, when nobody gives a rat’s.

Crayons

1. chin up
2. you have a bluebird
3. go back to sleep
4. you can find out when you wake up what variety of blue you are, and how many surround you.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone