Damn it. Misplaced my breakfast again. Third time this morning. I definitely need more sleep. If anybody trips over some cold toast and a half-empty mug of tea, drop me a line.
We keep odd hours here in the cohort of collectivists known as Big Green. Matt, the naturalist in the group, is up at all hours chasing after critters, feeding them, changing their diapers, keeping them safe from the elements. That’s a slight exaggeration, but only slight – the guy is attempting to single-handedly make up for all of the injustices meted out by god and man. Kind of time-consuming. Me? I am the unnaturalist in the group. When I am outside, I think to myself … “This is too strange for us, Hanar. We are creatures of outer space. We long for the comforting closeness of walls.”
Okay, if I’m paraphrasing classic Star Trek, I must be a little groggy. (Too much grog, perhaps.) I’m up late at night in the lab, sometimes. Did I say lab? I meant studio. Cranking up the keyboard, jamming along with drum loops, listening to old recordings and occasionally committing something to disc. Then I’ll climb the stairs to my bedroom and get halfway through a decent night’s sleep before Mitch Macaphee detonates some weakly controlled “experiment” in his lab (yes, lab), shaking the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill to their very foundations. We’re not so different, Mitch and me. Profoundly sleep-deprived. Trying to make loud noises using sophisticated instruments. Nearly bringing the house down on our heads.
One of my obsessions of late has been rebuilding our YouTube site. That’s my hobby, if you will, until Matt returns from Peregrine Falcon watch. (To catch up with him, see his Falcon Watch blog.) We don’t have a lot of video to post as of late, but we do have archival material that may be of interest to those who have limped along after Big Green for lo these many years. I will drop a note to all and sundry when I launch the new YouTube channel. There will be a few takes from an old video demo in there, most likely, along with our usual compliment of strange videos.
Okay, down goes the toast. Turn the keys up to eleven. And Mitch is back in the lab, so … boom goes the dynamite.
My process is much more gradual. It usually starts in the shower with me humming some random bit of nothing. I do it and do it, and sometimes something bobs up that works with the various thoughts running through my head. I scribble it down on a cheap-ass notepad and maybe, just maybe, sing melody fragments into my phone. Then I take a swing at it every time I’m near the notepad. Matt’s more like Thoreau, communing with nature and all the rest of it. I’m like some tin pan alley hack, trying to turn nothing into something and usually failing. Hard to believe we were ever any more disciplined than this sorry spectacle.
In all honesty, I’m considering moving back to a lean-to type housing arrangement, like what we had back at the beginning of this current chapter in the history of the Big Green musical collective. That’s probably more appropriate accommodation for the collective as it currently stands, which is to say … big enough for me, Marvin, and anti-Lincoln. A little tight for my taste, perhaps. And then there’s the question of plugging Marvin in for the night. (We need at least one outlet for his AC power supply and a second for my electric piano. Oh, right … and one for my amp. Shit … my Mr. Coffee! Make that four.)