Cueing Up The Music

I should write more. I’ve been telling myself that for years. Instead of writing, I do other things.

Too often it’s as detached and passive as watching television. I think I’m one of the original bingers. At least, I was doing it years before I was aware it had a name.  24 was one of the first. Hey, the show took place over twenty-four hours. Why not try to watch it in twenty-four?

I’ve binged on the catchy, thrilling stuff like 24 and Lost, and on the Shakespearean Breaking Bad and The Wire. And I’ve sometimes supplemented those with regular, weekly doses of Biggest Loser and So You Think You Can Dance.

I don’t think of it all as brainless, but it’s not active either.

But I’m also spending a lot of time with Jazz Gumbo, my internet radio show and podcast. Once a week, I carry some vinyl into the basement studio of a Regent Park youth program and spin tracks for a couple of hours. I used to haul in a crate of thirty or forty albums each week, but now that I’m commuting, it’s fifteen to twenty. I’ve had to think more in advance of what I might play, of the soundscape of artists and styles, tempos and instrumentation, melodies and moods I want to create.

Putting the set together is like a stimulating and rewarding game. Most weeks, I start with the handful of albums I have from last week’s show that I didn’t get to. This week, that’s Terumasa Hino’s “Speak to Loneliness”, Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way”, Jay Hoggard’s “Overview” and Duke’s “Ellington at Newport”.

Most of them, I’ll carry in again, and I’ll eventually find a good place for them. If I haven’t played something in three or four weeks, back on the shelf it goes. There are almost always three or four numbers I’ve already decided to play (chances are, one of them won’t make it). Then, I’ll spend some time picking out other tunes to complement them or balance them. That’s a lot of fun. That’s the heart of the programming, for me.

Often, I’ll hear something on Jazz FM during the week, or something will come up on my iPod random play. Those will account for a quarter of what gets played. On the morning that I go in, I’ll often grab a couple of last inspirations as I’m walking out the door, and by that night I’ll have thought of another one or two I wish I’d grabbed. But, I do carry my iPod with me and anywhere from once to three times during a show, I’ll scroll through it, or go looking for something that just came to mind, to stick in on the spot. In the mix there are almost always at least a couple of tunes I’m not really familiar with. And increasingly, I have a recommendation from a friend or a listener, of a favorite tune or artist of theirs.

The actual two hours in the studio – which results in an hour and forty minute podcast, on average, is fun, busy, focused, scattered, stressful, spontaneous, frenzied, exhilarating, out of control and inspired by turns. I love the music and never tire of hearing it. And I experience the power and beauty of it in a concentrated way through the show. I’m trying to share in the brilliance of musicianship, the dazzling artistry that flows as sound through an infinite array of personalities, histories, attitudes, loving and experiencing.

I play enough music to know the potential of the connection between oneself and an instrument – a beautiful tool, built to open channels of expression through practiced skills of coordination and manipulation. Enough to know what magic emerges when skills reach the point when they can be given full reign, and you let yourself connect to rhythm and sound, and find the inexpressible flowing through you.

I love combining the musics of the different genres and cultures of the extended jazz family: the urban soul r&b from Detroit or Memphis, the classically structured jazz of the fifties and the eighties, the raucous, brash explorations of 70’s fusion, the visceral, blood coursing rhythms of Nigeria or Brazil, the folk inspired chord structures of South Africa or Poland, the rigorous, spirit flights of progressive or free jazz.

Yes, I should write more. But I’m pulled to so many other things.

Bernie's Revolution

How I’d love to see Bernie Sanders as the next President of the United States. But I don’t believe that’s going to happen. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. I’ve been wrong about so many other things this political season, not least of which is Bernie’s improbable success in elevating progressive principles and policies in a country which has a history of allergic and phobic reactions to all things that smack of socialism.

I admire and am hugely grateful to Bernie for his career, his values, his honesty and determination. I’ve wrestled with myself for the last several weeks over whether to voice the concern I’m about to express. I recognize from past campaigns how disheartening it is when supporters give up too soon. And I’ve seen in my personal life that many things I might have accomplished were within reach, had I only persevered for a while longer. So I recognize how wrong I might be.

But I also recognize that there are times when perseverance puts what has already been gained at risk, and sets up devastating loss that might have been averted. And it seems to me that this is such a time.

Donald Trump looms ahead. And his rise has foiled my beliefs and predictions about what might happen in America this election season even more than the Sanders phenomenon. Because, while Sanders has made socialism and progressive altruism palatable to the American electorate, Trump has worked a similar miracle for infantile impulsiveness, arrogance, blind vanity and disregard for others. He has turned bluster and careless ignorance into political weaponry, and then seduced far too large a segment of the voting public with the cartoonish ideal of a superman who will simply bully the world into his own egotistical likeness.

Hillary Clinton is a very interesting figure to put up against these other two. She might be viewed as the lukewarm between the hot and cold of Sanders and Trump, which brings to mind a judgement I remember from childhood bible study – something about spewing the lukewarm from one’s mouth, as inferior to either of the two extremes. She is the representative of “things as they are”, against which the supporters of both Sanders and Trump rage. If I had my way, there’s no question that Sanders would prevail. But I don’t believe that he has any possibility of success. Which leave Clinton and Trump. And my choice there is equally clear. While Clinton may, at worst, merely preserve what is deeply flawed, I believe that Trump may well destroy it, in a way similar to how Hitler destroyed Germany and the Taliban destroyed Afghanistan – with hateful ideology and a morally bankrupt sense of superiority. And I don’t know that the United States or the world will survive that.

The fourth figure that informs my internal debate is Barack Obama. I believe that Obama has been a powerfully transformative president. I don’t agree with all that he has done, and I’m frustrated at what he has not done. But I believe that he is the first political force to seriously weaken the conservative tide that began with the advent of Reagan, a tide that sent progressives into hiding and that made ‘liberal’ a dirty label that too many politicians simply shrank from. Obama, in the face of a mindless and persistent opposition, has pushed an agenda and a set of policies that has begun to readjust the capitalist caste system of entitlement, and to rehabilitate concepts of equity, fairness and equality of opportunity. His presidency has made Sanders’ rise possible, just as the fear and loathing of reactionary conservatism has given rise to Trump. And Obama’s eight years as president confirm the reality that change is slow and difficult.

This is a reality that I hope that Bernie Sanders will absorb. Sanders has changed the political dialogue for the better. He has made income inequality – a topic too loaded for discussion in the centers of power eight years ago – a legitimate topic of debate. He has forced “single-payer” health care back onto the agenda. He has forced attention back to the corrupting influence of money on the political system. He has championed the way overdue platform of free education for all. Carrying these issues forward as their champion is still within his power to do. But to continue to fight for, even to insist on, consideration as the Democratic nominee for the presidency, especially when he has clearly been the loser through the primary season, winning millions fewer voters than has Clinton, can only dilute his transformative message. Continuing to fight for the nomination increasingly casts him as just another politician, making any argument he can for personal, political gain. It’s not about you, Bernie. You have a successor in the wings. Elizabeth Warren will carry on your fight, and perhaps become the second consecutive female president eight years from now.

But now I’m counting chickens. There is still November. There is still Trump. There is still the potential for a Clinton presidency with Sanders as a supportive, prodding, enlightened conscience of the Democratic party. If he sacrifices this potential for an “all is fair” campaign of desperation for a nomination he cannot win, he will make a devastating Trump presidency all the more possible.

Please, Bernie Sanders. Turn your attention to the bigger fight, to the winnable fight. Begin to help unify the left. Begin to draw your supporters out of their disappointed threat to step away from the monumental challenge our country faces. Lead the way, for all of us. And give up your quest for the Presidency.

Glimpsing Death...on a Near Horizon

I feel like I’ve showered in pure water. No residue. No need for drying. Or for clothes.
I will be embraced. Wrapped inside the day and the hour, eventually brought home again.

The day is long. The day revolves around the day, and around me and my thoughts that cannot be contained. And why should they be. The world isn’t a closed vessel. It spills endlessly. We are creatures meant to spill out and to spill in.

Maybe this non-death is a reminder to me of how messy life is, is meant to be, not to be contained in mind or the flesh. Won’t stay inside the lines. Won’t stay neat, polite, presentable.

On the other hand, always ready, prepared or not. 

What can my ear hear, what can my eye see if taken off their leashes? Where will my feet take me if taken off of leashes and out of shoes, away from the concept of leash, away from thinking about shoes, and socks and paved pathways, and unpaved ones, even the conceit of walking.

The animal inside us moves, it sees, it eats what its tastes guide it to, unapologetic to life for ingesting life, for loving the taste so much it licks the lips clean. That natural ecology of longing.

The universe just keeps opening up. Maybe that’s what I was learning , though I wasn’t thinking of learning, of getting anything right, except not to leave anyone out, thinking I’d forgotten how good those stolen moments were, how closely we touched on those uncalendared days that we didn’t know were passing from time and even from memory, but leaving a mark always, as messy humans do, as unblaming hearts and unanalysing minds will do.

That’s what life is, that holding onto life forgets, but that death knows and reminds and reminds and retells until we will learn it.

Don’t worry about the shoes, or even the walking. Just being the animal inside.

Freight Train

There are only a few surviving stories in my family about my mother’s preacher father, in his early, drifter days, before he got religion. It’s said that some things about him didn’t change after the conversion; he was always a stern and serious man, full of self-respect and private thoughts. So that, though he died when I was five or six – the first death of my life – in some ways, the Grandad I knew from Sundays in church and play fighting on the living room rug was the same wandering, silent John Hardwrick of family lore.

I can’t remember now just when he was born, or what America it was he grew up in. Some of that information is scribbled somewhere, in notes from my long conversations with my Aunt Audrey. I’ll never know many of the details of his life, but I’ve always known it was a very different life, inside of a very different world.

What I think of most often when I remember Grandad is the train-hopping. It was his preferred way to travel. What must that have been like, in the 1900’s or the 1910’s?

Aunt Audrey said that Grandad liked to ride on the top side of freight cars, that he would ride standing, and looking backward over the country he was travelling through. He was a casual laborer in those days, though intelligent and with some elementary education. He had a travelling companion, a life-long friend who would eventually settle down with him in Detroit. Wade – let’s call him that, as I don’t remember his name - would find himself periodically abandoned. Ever so often, he’d wake on some morning to find that my grandfather was gone. A week or two later, he’d get a telegram from him, saying he’d found work in such and such a place, and he’d set right out to rejoin him. And a few weeks or a couple of months later, the pattern would repeat itself.

It’s said that my Grandad had his spiritual awakening while train hopping. One day, as he rode along in his customary stance, looking backward from a freighter top, he received a clear message to “Sit Down!” I don’t know if it came as a voice or an un-beckoned inspiration, nor what he thought was happening, but he promptly sat, and the next moment he heard and felt the whoosh of a tunnel as the train passed through. Had he taken time to consider that voice, that message, it would have been his last act in life. As it was, he gave it much consideration later, and it transformed his life.

I’ve always thought it would be a thrill to hop a train, but never seriously expected I would do so. The closest I’ve come to sharing my Grandad’s experience is through the hitch-hiking I did in earlier years. That came about as a convenient expedience rather than a choice for adventure. A trucker picked me up near a bus stop on a country road and carried me into Holly Springs, Mississippi. And for several years thereafter it was my own preferred way to travel. When I peer past the romanticism of Grandad’s image, I image that his train-hopping may have come about in a similar way. I like to think that he and I shared the same feeling of freedom as we travelled, that his miles of rails brought him the same sense of overcoming life’s ordinary limitations that I felt on the open highways. Maybe peering off the top of a freight car was something like staring out at the desert night and hearing a single approaching car when it was yet miles away.

When I was approaching fifty, and concerned that I was entering my last days of any kind of adventuring, a colleague and I fantasized about finally hopping a train. He’d grown up with a Grandad and family lore too. He and I were working with street people and quite a few of our clients had hopped a train or two. It had become a thing among drifting youth of a certain disposition, and we were even schooled on some important do’s and do not’s. We’d been nudging our clients into taking on ambitious, outside the box type goals, to broaden their sense of what was out in the world for them, of what was possible. Why not us?

So we planned a week when we’d head west, and go as far as we could for a week before we’d turn back home by more traditional means. It felt like a perfectly stupid thing to do. And like something that would send us not so gently into the certainty of our waning years. I was newly free out of a marriage and reveling at the vast freedom of being single. My buddy was married and, for better or for worse, two weeks before our scheduled departure, his wife put her foot down. No way in Hell was he going away to hop a train. So instead, we went on a canoe trip on Lake Temagami. It was great.

Heartbeats per Page

I once came upon a theory that the human heart has a certain, more-or-less set number of heartbeats it can deliver. This number acts as an upper limit. Once you use up your allotted beats, that’s it! A belief in this theory can be developed into an argument against exercise, or any other form of exertion or excitement that gets the heart palpitating. Running for the bus, scary movies and roller-coaster rides, even orgasms, would take minutes (and cumulatively, days, months, years) off of your life span. On the other hand, regular exercise that improves conditioning has the effect of lowering one’s resting or low-activity pulse rate.

I don’t know if there’s anything to this, but it’s got me speculating about writing from a different angle. I’ve been writing my entire life. Is there a set limit on the words I have allotted to me. Will I reach a point where the words just stop coming?

My experience of how my writing has shifted over the years lends credibility to the notion of a limit on words over a period of time, if not an entire lifetime. As a student, I wrote a lot for school. But then I stopped being a student. And what happened? I began journaling. In fact, I began my first journal the very month that I dropped out of university. And – though with a fluctuating regularity – I kept journaling for decades. And then, I stopped. And the end of journaling coincides pretty closely with the time I started blogging. Actually, all this suggests not only an upper limit, but also a lower limit on words. It’s never really rung true to me, but maybe there’s something to the notion that writers write because they have to.

As one who aspired (and still do) to make a career of writing, I’ve always lamented that I write so little. But this self-assessment is based largely on valuing some writing and devaluing other writing. I’ve only had six pieces of writing make it into print, in a publication available to the public, bearing my name, for which I received compensation. That’s 2 short stories, one short-short, and three reflective essays on social issues. It hasn’t been much of a career.

But there’s been so much other writing. There are the boxes of writing bits and pieces accumulated over the years of trying to develop my skills, voice, themes. There are the many more boxfuls of material I discarded because I saw no value or promise in them. There are the hundreds, maybe thousands of computer files, some on the machine I’m using at this moment, but many abandoned with discarded, older desktops and laptops and, yes, word processors, and likely never to be opened again.

There has been lots of work-related writing, too: case notes, proposals, minutes, agendas, lesson plans, evaluations and the like. Some of this has been very important on a personal level, both to me and to my clientele, and I’m as proud of some of it as of anything else I’ve produced. This includes advocacy letters, case summaries attempting to place the arc of a client’s journey into perspective, documents weighing in on program and community issues, or responding to a court or police action and its effects.

Then, there’s the truly personal writing. The emails and letters – occasionally, a poem – to loved ones. Sometimes, I’ve written a letter that has all of me in it, and those instances are very much like the times I’ve thrown myself into a piece of fiction or a creative essay. Once, when I was trying very hard to push my writing to a higher/deeper level, and was experiencing serious self-doubt, I dreamed an entire story. I lived it as I slept, and I awoke with it fresh and vivid in my mind, and ready to pour out onto the page. Another time, while composing a letter/poem to a woman I was deeply in love with, I spent a night of drifting in and out of sleep, rising to consciousness ever so often with words and sentences and small edits. These were instances when I felt almost consumed by the act of writing, like I was disappearing into it. And yet, feeling complete, and nourished and expanded by the experience, which is perhaps what death – that final consummation – is all about.

Certainly, this side of Life is finite. There comes an end to heartbeats and to words, whether measurable or not, whether foreseeable or not. But I’m finding something beautiful here as I contemplate it. In the context of an expanding universe, can death and other endings be seen as anything other than transitions? I don’t know that it really matters. I’m not angling for a kind of pseudo-immortality here. Maybe what I am angling for is a deep resonance, connective tissue, something other than a tidy, summing up. After all, we don’t measure a lifetime by the number of heartbeats. And we don’t weigh words in isolation.

Learning to Commute

             It’s a most unexpected discovery: commuting as an organizing principle of life.

               I’ve been at it for six weeks now. Two hours each way, four hours per day, getting from home in Hamilton to work in Toronto, and back again. I can still hardly believe that I agreed to this move, knowing that this commute would be a daily requirement, controlling factor and drain on my life. I worried over it, but since everything else about the move appealed to me, I trusted that I could at least tolerate it, if nothing more. And now I find that commuting has brought a level of order to my life that’s been lacking for a long time.

               It’s embarrassing to write, even shameful, but structure is something I’ve needed, but have avoided throughout my adulthood. My nature is to dodge the limitations of set schedules, time lines and due dates. It’s equal parts stubbornness, a warped sense of independence, and a tendency toward indulgence that hold sway. Consequently, I’m always struggling with the management of my life, always feeling there’s not enough time for all the things that are important to me. And unexpectedly, commuting has carved out a partial solution to all of this, and I find myself embracing it.

               I’ve done my share of commuting in the past and it’s always been a burdensome waste of time. Strap-hanging on buses and trains; jostling through crowds of strangers; dirty seats, no seats; not having the right change for the fare, and worst of all, turning a corner to see my bus pulling away - these are all reasons I’ve hated commuting. Even drive commuting is painful, however much it may seem an attractive alternative to strap-hanging. The relative absence of physical discomfort allows for the full impact of the boredom, the restlessness, the mind-numbing inanity of most radio, as one sits in slow-moving traffic as life ebbs slowly away.

               The main worry I had facing my current commute was having to conform to a schedule. I’m a late night person, and a late riser. I’m not very fond of clocks and alarms and, no, I’m not the most punctual person you’ll meet – and I’ve very much enjoyed the freedom of not having to be. A locked-in schedule does not appeal to me.

               However, from where I live in Hamilton, there are two direct, express trains to Toronto every morning, and the latest leaves the station promptly at 6:46. There are other options, but they all involve even longer commutes. 5:30 feels like an un-Godly time to arise in the morning (it’s practically the middle of the night!), but it makes my life work, so I’m making it work.

               But how does one go from a loose waking time, variable according to my next day’s schedule, how late I was up the night before, and how often I choose to hit my alarm’s snooze button – to an early commute schedule that has me dropping into my desk chair at an hour when I was previously lowering my feet to the cold bedroom floor? With surprising ease, it turns out.

I don’t really like admitting this truth, but it all seems to come down to having options taken from me. If I miss a train, it doesn’t cost me just a few minutes, as missing a bus or a traffic light did previously. It costs me at least half an hour, and that time is lost from the relaxing, evening end of my day. There is now an economy of minutes I must take seriously, to keep my life functioning…so I do.

Yet, I can’t get over how easy it’s been. Nor how much good has come out of it. I’m actually becoming more productive at work, as my days are more organized and predictable. I’m loving the feeling of arriving at and leaving the office with the first wave of colleagues instead of the last – makes me feel that I’m leading rather than lagging. And the added quiet, and the quality of light and air in the mornings, it’s all surprisingly refreshing and enlivening. I’m a bit shocked that I haven’t missed a train yet.

               But the greatest bonus has come in an area I had come to feel some despair about: my writing. The morning of my first commute, I whipped out my laptop the moment I was seated, and I wrote for the first forty-five minutes of the seventy-five minute trip. On the way home, I did the same. In no time at all, it became a habit, one I find myself positively looking forward to. In fact, one of the most satisfying moments of my every working day is when I get seated in the near-empty GO train, at the start of its run. The attendant comes over the speaker and announces the one to five minutes remaining before departure. The sky is still dark as I take off my coat, settle myself and turn on the laptop. By the time I tap in the date at the top of my opening page, the train has begun to move, and its slow, rocking motion nudges me along. Where will I begin today? With some idea newly formed in the night? Revising yesterday’s product? Attacking the novel chapter I’ve been revising for submission to my writing group?

               I’m writing with more regularity and consistency than I have in some years. It’s been six weeks now. Strange to say, the only days I haven’t gotten in at least an hour of writing have fallen on the weekends, when, despite all my intentions, a day can so easily fly by, the period of quiet focus that I imagined, never having come. I know this is nonsense, delusion…yet?

               I’m grateful. I’m re-energized. I’m optimistic again, that I can address my writing goals and see myself moving toward them in real time. The discipline of this commute seems to be spreading to other areas. I’m having a somewhat different feeling and approach to time, to the minutes and hours of the day, the weeks and months of the calendar. Never did I imagine that commuting could be so good.

Fade-In to Tomorrow

The workday is over, the day fades, and the long, busy year passes into memory.

And what happens to it there? Does it merely fade? I know that it changes shape as well, as some things fade from importance, and others grow in significance.

I don’t want to even pretend that I know what this past year has been. It feels like it’s been rich and full of contradictions, and being pulled in different directions. This blog has been caught up in the tidal, back and forth pull of priority. For a time, in the Spring, I reconnected to writing here again, and also to producing my jazz Podcast. Then, months ago, this blog fell away again, and I hardly noticed. But the podcast continues. And there was no plan for any of it, except to try and stay engaged.

If something has become clearer in the year it’s the presence of holes. Holes that will not be obscured by ignoring them. Holes in personal relationships, for one. There are relationships I’ve ignored, undervalued and lost. And there are others that have remained and even grown stronger, despite my inattentions, or maybe because not all friends value and need the same thing.

There’s the hole that has emerged in my narrative, in what I write, think about, in what I use to explain myself, to myself as well as to others. This blog has made this gap in particular very vivid. Because, more and more often my writing stops when I come face to face with some aspect of my life that I’m reluctant to share with the friends and with the strangers that may read my blog. I didn’t realize how wide some of these gaps are. They touch on what I think my “purpose” is, on ideas of commitment and loyalty, and they cover huge swaths of what falls under the categories “sex” and “relationship”. Large gaps, some with answers that are within reach, but will require courage to grasp; some for which the answers are faint, others for which they are frightening; and there are those gaps for which there are no answers at all.

Gratitude and gain make themselves known through all this wandering in wondering. And I realize, with some surprise, that I am grateful not only for those simple answers that rise up and are a comfort in my hand or heart. I am also grateful, maybe even more grateful, for realizing that answers are very often incomplete, superficial, and over-valued. One of the beautiful prizes is to find no answer at all. Maybe to discover that some pressing question was not that at all, but more of an ardent affirmation of what had no fixed, accepted place. Because yes, those mis-placed, unrecognized, dismissed urges and knowings and longings do scream, they do. They make themselves known, and we mistakenly think it’s all about our questions, about what we think we need to know, to figure out, to achieve.

But the hero of this brief essay, if there needs to be one beyond you and me, is the Fool. The first card of the Tarot, the innocent in the world, the ultra present one who thinks not a second about anything that isn’t NOW. The Fool is forever stepping over cliffs and into ditches, stumbling open eyed into various manifestations of the unknown. I will walk into 2016 with my arm interlocked with his, an unknowing grin on my face, ready for whatever comes!