Keith Handy 1.999

Leap of faith, get away from the noise

I need to write a little closer to daily, but I think what I’ve written so far has already helped me stay on track. It’s a sort of “leap of faith” that I’m setting out to systematically make this short animated film and break me out of my rut (of just being a musican that can’t manage to hold people’s attention over all the noise, more on that below) — faith in the sense that I have to put in a good stretch of unacknowledged work, stay on a single project (don’t jump around), and basically be in isolation, i.e. no feedback until I’m much much further along and have something impressive to show off. I’m kind of seeing it as going into a long tunnel. But I feel good about it.

I went to House of Guitars today for new bass strings just for Slab. Yeah, I decided to go all out on this remix, cough up the $20 and not just boil my old strings in water a fourth or fifth time. It’s kind of funny, at HoG there is a large cinderblock wall covered end-to-end and top-to-bottom with autographs. A sign in front of it says:

WALL OF ROCK STAR AUTOGRAPHS
DO NOT WRITE ON THIS WALL

I know enough about Aristotelean logic to know that translates into “YOU ARE NOT A ROCK STAR”. And I kind of feel like screaming at everybody there, of course you’re not a rock star, you’re in a sea of noise where no one can hear you. Look at all this noise … you’re putting your flyers up on walls covered with flyers for other bands, putting your CDs in stores where there are thousands of other CDs, submitting them to record companies that get thousands of demos a day, putting your band’s website on an internet with millions of other bands … that’s called noise, don’t you get it? If you want to make a dent in the world, you have to get away from the noise.

When mishearings compete with actual dialogue

Christy: “Why, oh why, did I wake up with the ‘Duck and Cover’ song in my head?”

Keith: “Hmm? A Dokken cover song??”

:|

Actual message scrolling across the bottom of my television screen:

… TEACH AN ADULT TO READ OR SPEAK ENGLISH. BECOME A LITERCY VOLUNTEER. (phone number) …

…

…and all I can do is ask myself, okay, suppose God is there. What is he really like? Forget all the shit you’ve heard, Keith. What do you really think?

And I guess, when I drop the handful of unpleasant associations and try to answer that one from my own mind, I would say … he’s like a character in a movie, a lead, but doesn’t come on the screen often enough. A very important character, central to everything but virtually absent, appearing in such a small quantity of footage that you flat-out forget him until things come to a breaking point. And then when he finally does make an unexpected cameo, he bangs on the jukebox with his elbow and says “AYYYYYYYY” and everything that seemed out of place suddenly makes sense … for a little while …

Why 99.999% of the members of my own species will never relate to me…

… because I look at something like this …

Staying between the lines….

There are certain times when I should not be permitted near a medium where I can post my thoughts in public. This is one of those times. However, like the drunk at the wheel, I will make every effort to stay between the lines and stop at all the red lights … and unlike the drunk at the wheel, I can always go back and delete this.

I am delusional. I think that, underneath everything, things are as I would like them to be, and all I have to do is wait out the rough patches. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a cushy life, or I’ve lucked out too many times or gotten away with too much.

The closest thing I have to a religion is the belief that things are basically right on a metalevel, and that everything bad is transitional.

(Gah! This keyboard has the Home/End/Delete/PageUp/PageDown/Insert keys arranged all weird! That’s disorienting. Anyway.)

Anyway, based on that belief, perhaps what I need to adjust is my scope. Things that I’m assessing as meta … which I won’t get too specific about, because remember, I’m driving drunk here, must not run over any puppies or kitties … are possibly more minor and “detaily” than I’ve evaluated them to be.

And I’ll leave you with that. Look ma, no fatalities!