Paralysis

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I’m sitting in my home studio, surrounded by gear that would make many musicians weep with joy, but I can’t seem to get a single thing done. I have several excuses at the moment.

  1. I either cracked or severely bruised the tip of my left pinky a few days ago while tearing up a bassline on a weighted keyboard. It still hurts and is interfering with my mojo.
  2. My studio is a wreck. The mess is bugging me.
  3. Distractions abound. There’s a stack of CDs I picked up in Korea that need ripping. I need to archive some stuff off my hard drive to clear up some space.
  4. Skyrim.
  5. The Internet. How many times can one human being check Facebook, Google+, Twitter, eBay, GearSlutz.com, and YouTube in an hour? I’m apparently trying to find out and Mr. Owl is nowhere to be found.
  6. I have some work (for the day job) that needs attention.

Of course, none of these (except for the last one) are valid excuses. There is one other thing that’s been working its way into my brain, though. I’ve “written” four or five things that I really liked over the last week or so while noodling around with sounds. But they’re improvisations and I’ve never figured out how to capture them effectively. I’m too self conscious to do the same thing if I know the DAW is recording, and by the time I’ve worked out the bugs in what I’m doing, the moment is gone.

I am, however, putting an action plan together to address at least some of these problems.

  1. After a learning experiment with various social media sites (partly to learn, partly to protect my online brand…), I’m about to contract my efforts and limit them almost exclusively to Google+ and this blog. I’ll try to check the others once or twice a month for private messages.
  2.  I sat down yesterday and wrote out a list of my gear and the gear that I want or think I need. I’m going to try and rectify this list with what I perceive to be the significant holes in my studio (e.g., outboard processing) which should help with my Gear Acquisition Syndrome problem.
  3. I sense a “to hell with all this crap” purge session coming on, so I’m trying to get things organized into piles that will help bring about a hasty exit of much of the junk from my life.

I’ve been doing a GTD action dump for the last couple of weeks, but that becomes another action in and of itself.

What do you do to give yourself a kick in the pants when there’s so much to do you can’t seem to pick a starting point?

Well. That was interesting.

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Lately I’ve been feeling a bit of web overload. This has been coupled with some renewed creative energy, noodling in my studio, and increased time pressure from both work and the mystical land of Skyrim. I’ve been toying around with the idea of leaving a forwarding address on most of my web haunts and just pointing people here.

I was getting ready to put all of those dominos in place when I discovered that my WordPress installation had been afflicted with a redirect hack. I’m not even sure when it happened. In any case, it’s far easier for me to reinstall than to try and muck about in WordPress these days. Unfortunately, I got a little sloppy with the bit bucket and got rid of more than I had planned.

Like… everything.

Luckily, I have some manual backups in my Google Docs directory, so I’ll be figuring out which, if any, of my older posts will be resurrected and which will go into that virtual junk drawer in the cloud.

So things will slowly get rebuilt here and if you’re interested in what’s going on in my life, this is going to be the best place to find it.

Love and kisses,

Ray

Hello World.

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Given that this is my first visible post in a couple of years, perhaps some framing would be helpful. Consider this your (re)introduction to me.My name is Ray. I am, as of this writing, over 40. I am classified by my Wii Fit as “overweight,” an improvement from my just-over-the-line obesity two weeks ago. My hair is thinning in what seems to be a fairly typical male pattern, but I keep it short enough that few people notice.I have a wife, two brothers, a father, a mother who is no longer here, one remaining grandmother, one remaining uncle, six sisters-in-law, no children, and twenty-two nieces and nephews.I am generally happy, but frequently stressed out by things that are largely out of my control. I make snarky comments and feel bad about them later. I get too caught up in artificial drama and the histrionics of others. I think music stopped progressing in 1993 and, with few exceptions, has offered practically nothing of value since.

I’ve reached the point in my life where I can admit and accept my shortcomings, and do my best to correct them. I think I’m smarter, wiser, and a better driver than most people, even though I know that’s probably not true. I’m no longer in my “acquisition” phase and more concerned with figuring out what it is that I really want to do with my remaining time on the planet.

After more than twenty years of politically correct indoctrination, I’ve been beaten down to the point where I’m afraid to say anything in public, most especially anything that might be true or offensive to some group that isn’t white males or that might hurt my chances for a job when an HR person needing to cull the candidates googles me. If it might come back to bite me in the ass, the emperor can just stay naked. I’m both over-saturated with and addicted to information. I feel like there’s something perpetually just out of my mental grasp that would make everything click into place.

In short, I am your typical fat, balding, middle-aged, cynical, stressed-out, smart-assed white guy watching the engineers argue over who gets to pull the brake lever while the train roars toward the abyss.

I should say here at the beginning that I don’t expect anyone to actually read any of this. If you’re reading this, it’s most likely that you are either related to me or work in an HR department, but I have decided that it’s time for me to stop worrying about the latter. If what I write here makes me unsuitable for your organization, chances are your organization is unsuitable for me as well. And if you’re related to me, well, you already have your own problems.

If, by some chance, you are not in either of those two groups, however, I encourage you to create an account and leave a comment. I would prefer at least part of this site to be a dialog. To further entice you, I plan on making some entries password protected and the only way you’ll be able to read them is to start an account here.

So there we have it. Yet another new beginning. Until the next one.