Songfu Entry Number 2

Here it is:  

‘Anna’s Gerbil & the Singularity‘

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Below is the story of the song.  If you feel there are any gaps or questions, use your imagination!

Happy Hearing

DH

The way I keep things (relatively) short is to do it in list form, so we’ll keep it to that:

‘ANNA’s GERBIL & the SINGULARITY’ …

1. Anna is abruptly awakened! Her gerbil was already awake, spinning-spinning on his cute wheel.
2. She hears something … she is amazed and communes with it. Its beauty distracts her from a hostile takeover of her bedroom.
3. This is their first step.
4. The strange visitors come in two forms … Master and Slave
5. The slaves can fit in a cage … but gerbils don’t think of themselves as slaves like the visitors do
6. The slaves are very tiny, the masters, are not. The masters have lovely voices.
7. The gerbil doesn’t want to share his cage with tiny programmed slaves running robot military drills in between his wheel and the food.
8. Anna feels her gerbil is upset; the gerbil becomes agitated and protests his plight by loudly stomping his foot.
9. The tiny robots suddenly understand they are in a first contact situation and immediately disappear – taking their large ship and masters with them.

Do Anna and her gerbil now share a psychic connection? Did the self-improving scarily advanced “race” of robots’ finally reach a tipping point into self-actualization? Did the robots and the gerbil come together in a kind of psychic and territorial peace treaty? Were the robots ever going to grow in size?

Who knows? Maybe they had eerie weapons and it is better they left. Maybe they went to a certain wormhole to study the reject song ideas. Or simply, to rock.

 

Proactivity …

When I started the blog – it was sort of like when I started my lj. I promised myself here that I would do my morning pages before I did any blogging – in lj I’d promised myself that I’d write in my personal private journal. I feel like I have a split personality now (perhaps I do!), because I still have all four things. I actually have a couple of other things that I do that are “writing-type-things” as well.

I’ve always has trouble deciding – ‘musician’ or ‘writer.’ This is actually a struggle that has taken up a lot of valuable career time that could have been spent working. I’m happy to be blogging about this in this blog – because whenever I talked about this in my lj I feel as though I used to whine a lot about it. This could be because I was still in my church. I felt a lot of pressure to be one thing or the other, to be something else, or to be nothing at all. There were questions over the type of writing I would be allowed to do. I couldn’t write anything that was too frank, that spoke poorly of my religion or made it look bad – or revealed it’s less than savory parts … I couldn’t write anything “rated R” (or really even PG / PG-13). I eventually decided on “sci-fi” because you could make up your own cuss words. That slowed me down as well – because I’m a perfectionist – and not a scientist. I’ve always described the difference between science fiction and fantasy novels as a question of dragons. In sci-fi the dragon has to be aerodynamically plausible. You have to explain both how he flies, how his species came to be in the evolution of things, how his planet came to exist, how he in particular came to be and why he-in-particular is so special, and how he co-exists and communicates with his humans and/or other natural/supernatural creatures (which would also have to be scientifically plausible). It all has to have an explanation.

In fantasy, a fat dragon can fly with tiny wings and cast random spells. The science is superfluous. That’s not the point of the story. Although I think this is changing and there is really much cross-over. A fantasy enthusiast might be really offended at this and feel like it’s a blase toss off. But there I go – apologizing to a non-existent audience (although I’ve gotten:

52 HITS!)

I don’t know what that means though. Maybe it has something to do with spam. I don’t know what constitutes a legitimate reader of one’s blog, so I haven’t gotten too excited. I don’t know when you know. I also haven’t advertised yet. I’ve also viewed my own blog without logging in, I don’t know how many times. I’m sure that counts.

I’m also glad to be doing this at this physical place. I never seem to have this identity crisis here. I’m a musician, I’m a writer. It’s the same thing. I wanted to be a writer when I was young (jr. high … high school) – I just “fell into” being a musician because everyone else in my social group was writing songs (that sounds really pathetic, doesn’t it?). But at this particular cafe, neat things are always happening – like today I walk in and it’s fresh and breezy and the barristas are threatening each other with freindly bodily harm. I can’t even review Garden District (this is their myspace page) now … because it would be biased.

But I walked out onto the porch and I heard ‘Closer to Fine‘ and I was really happy to be out in the sun on the porch. It made me think I could actually pull this off … all these plans that I can’t articulate … all these things … I can do it without anyone’s help …

Of course, I’ll need help, eventually. But sometimes you feel like you are out there all alone. And I’ve got quite a bit to knit together before I’ve got anything cohesive to put up. What have I got. Fifty songs (only half of which I’d record) and 40-50 MB of writings (not all of which are good or finished … much of which is poetry and stuff). Only one of those 25 is on myspace and it’s not the one that comes up … so it’s not a good (or mastered!) recording. But I need relationships with people to record, as I have no soundproofing.

I’m trying to work through these problems logically. I’m trying to work through the part of me that feels like I’m “bitching to the internet.” I’m trying to be a Problem Solver.

So I’m off to Go Solve Problems.