1. My current apartment lease is up in a few months, so I’m working ahead a bit to break down some of my studio and put it on eBay and Craigslist. The idea is to sell the bulkier items off so I wouldn’t have to move them. It’s not so much about the money as it is about not having so much dead weight around when I relocate.
2. I also realized that my Playstation 3 had been collecting dust for several months. So I packed it up and sent it off to my ex-wife in order to use it as a Blu Ray disc player (as well as catch up on some games that she had bought but hadn’t finished before we split). The last time I had used it was to prep for an audition with a group that does music for video games. Now that’s done the unit has gone dark, and any other games I’ve picked up for study I have run on my studio PC.
3. When I move, it will definitely be to a smaller place. I’ve been at the same apartment for nearly three years now, and it’s definitely more than I need now that the occupancy is “1″. Even if the per-square-foot price is higher, I know I’ll be paying less rent.
4. I was hit on my motorcycle last year, and hadn’t bought a replacement vehicle yet. Since I was working freelance out of the studio, I didn’t need a car for a commute – and most of the amenities (grocery, restaurant, shops) are within walking distance of where I live. But now that I’m venturing out a bit again (though my current commute is by Metro rail) I’m looking at buying a car. I had rented several cars during my vehicle-free stint, and the VW Passat has a clear lead in my book. But I’m still looking around and will find something that’s environmentally and economically reasonable and physically comfortable.
5. My birthday is Saturday, and for now the plan is to catch either “Alice in Wonderland” or “Green Zone” in the theater, and the rest of the weekend is to be spent packing up the apartment and catching up on some reading (see my post about John Gardner on this blog). Boring, but true.

The reaction was “if you’re going to have a mid-life crisis you need to spice things up a bit. So far, you’ve gotten it all wrong.” And when I thought about it – giving away toys, going from a motorcycle to a sensible car, selling off half my studio, moving into a cheaper place – it’s all exactly the opposite of what someone should do for a well-executed mid-life meltdown.

It reminds me of the joke about the country song when played backwards – your dog comes back, your truck gets fixed and your girlfriend becomes faithful again.

So while waiting for the morning pot of coffee to brew, I decided to look Gardner up on Wikipedia to see what’s been said about his life and work. The thing that startled me was the comment about the over-arching themes in his most popular novels, “The Sunlight Dialogues”, “Grendel” and “October Light”:

Each book features brutish, isolated figures struggling for integrity and understanding in an unforgiving society.

That kind of hit home. I suppose there’s good reason why I always found so much sympathy for his characters – even as far back as my high school years. And all these years later, things are not so different on that level. My life, summed up in eleven words is, in a word – potent. And of course I’m sure that many people feel the same way – which is a tribute to his notoriety as an author. But still, I feel like I’ve had my bell rung.

So once I’ve done with “Grendel” [again] I suppose I’ll look up his other works and go through them, too. Maybe when I stop by the local library to donate some reference books [I've been carrying around for years and should have given away long ago] I can get a library card and check out “The Sunlight Dialogues” and “October Light” while I’m there.

“Things fade. Alternatives exclude.“

One reason is that my little “leg” of the Metro is clean. It’s a segment of the Read Line [between Universal City and Hollwood/Vine] that’s heavily traveled by tourists, and for that reason alone I think they’re particularly well-kept. Just the other day I saw a pair of Metro employees cleaning the underside of an escalator to a near-mirror finish. Holy crap – the *under*side of an escalator! In my years of riding the Metro in DC, I never saw that – ever. And that might be the reason why I’ve never seen drug paraphernalia dumped on the Metro platform before. Most likely anything of that sort would have been swept up by the time I showed up for daily commute.

But this was a late run home after a long day at work. It was on the edge of the platform like it had been dropped right as someone was stepping on or off a train. I entered the platform area behind a small group of people – and it was pretty obvious who was the local and who was the tourist. The locals walked right by the artifact without a second glance, and the tourists stopped and gawked for a moment – before becoming self-conscious of even being near such a thing – with the the wife pulling the husband and kids away to wait for the next train. For that first moment, their unguarded expressions showed all of the fascination of aliens visiting from another planet. It was pretty obvious that the closest they’d been to anything like that was watching “Traffic” on HBO.

Another thing that made this particularly poignant was the recent arrest of Lief Garrett for drug possession at a Metrolink stop. When I saw that pipe I immediately thought of that arrest – and perhaps the staring tourists had done the same. I’m not one for Schadenfreude, but it goes to the pervasiveness of the drug problem. From the latest pill-popping pop-star on the skids to the most anonymous addict, this stuff is everywhere. I blog about the latest cool, nifty thing I’ve discovered living here in LA LA Land and I thought it only fair to show a bit of its underbelly, too.

So, I took a quick picture of the pipe as an exhibit for this blog, and then went to pick it up and toss it into the garbage. I didn’t want to leave it there for someone to step on and possibly cut their foot – and I also didn’t feel right about just kicking it down into the rail area. I had been fighting off a respiratory infection and had a package of Hall’s cough drops in the laptop bag that goes with me back and forth to work. So I emptied it of the last few cough drops and used the plastic zip-lock bag as a “glove” to pick up the pipe and place it in the garbage. Again, I caught the tourists staring – this time at me as I stepped away from the trash bin and back to the edge of the train platform. I’m sure there’s one thing we were both thinking at that moment – it’s hard to know how to feel about something like this when it’s this up-close-and-personal.

decor at Uni City station

film cans line Hollywood/Vine

The film cans are EVERYWHERE

The thing that I found amazing was the use of old film canisters at the Hollywood/Vine Metro stop. There must be thousands of them mounted on the ceilings throughout the structure. I suppose that there are scads of them stacked up in storage around town, but it was still surreal to see them used in this way. It’s a very unique approach to industrial art – both a very Hollywood-styled bit of self-congratulation while also making an interesting use of space and architecture.

The real treat here was to see the snow-capped mountains (the San Gabriels, I think) behind the Griffith Observatory. Again the phone cam doesn’t do it justice but it looked like you could almost reach out and touch it – a very nice way to start the week.

Speaking of funky, they had some genuinely odd items on the menu, and I decided to go for the strangest thing I could find. Here we have a meatloaf sandwich wrapped with a savory waffle, kicked up a notch with a bit of jalapeno thrown in for good measure.

It is by far the unhealthiest thing I’ve eaten in a long, long time. And I know this because of the “food hangover” I woke up with this morning (and evidenced by the rotten feeling during my workout this morning). But as such I was in it for the experience, and well, I’ve had the experience. And while I wouldn’t say I regret it on the level of some other things I’ve done in my life (like eating the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle), I’m very unlikely to repeat this meal in *this* lifetime.

It’s somewhat difficult to see how the rainbow crosses over the Hollywood sign from this perspective. Between the smoked glass and the raindrops (and dirt) on the outside of the window, the camera phone is simply not able to do justice to the moment. But to the naked eye it was pretty dramatic to see that pop up.

Then lo and behold, I heard a bunch of racket in the hallway this morning. I thought someone was trying to break a hole in the wall – so I stuck my head out the door only to see a guy dragging a huge carpet cleaning apparatus down the hallway. It turns out they’re cleaning carpets in the place next to mine, and I was able to slip them a bill or two to get them to take care of my place at the same time. I’m not a huge proponent of divine intervention when it comes to the mundane things in life. I’m more of a “I should have died in that motorcycle crash, and yet I barely have a scratch on me” kind of believer. But there are times when I feel like someone, somewhere has cut me a break – and this is one of them. Call it a miracle, call it divine intervention, call it kizmet – I don’t care. When the little things break your way – particularly in the context of a very challenging 2009 – it’s hard to ignore.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today…

And in the context of everything that happened to/around me on a professional and personal level, this year’s annual think time was especially welcome. I started my journey of reconciling the past 12 months by equating some of the negative events in 2009 to “objects” floating in a metaphorical toilet bowl – objects that simply wouldn’t flush until the end of the year. And while it was temporarily gratifying to find crude humor in personal catharsis, the more serious part of me kept reaching for context. Today it came together in the dime-store philosophy of perception as a personal choice. It has been stated in countless ways – people can’t always choose the events that occur in their lives, but it’s the subsequent choices they make in responding to those events that shape them as human beings. I realized that through all of the events, issues, challenges as well as the outright successes and failures I encountered over the past year, I have learned and have grown – a lot. (I know, bad grammar, so sue me) Many of my existing personal and professional relationships were profoundly transformed over the year. I realize now in hindsight that in almost every case, those changes were for the better. And likewise, many of the new relationships that developed have been positive and utterly worthwhile.

Along the way, I have also grappled with my own “is-ness”, for the lack of a better term. Well, check that – there is a better term, in fact there are several. The French call it raison d’etre, and Robert Heinlein did an admirable job of putting it in a sci-fi context with grok (which is the term I most often use). In my case it boils down to my relationship to the music I create – and in large part it’s self-resolving, but it has taken me to this point to realize that certain people understand and accept what I’m about as a composer and others simply don’t. It’s not a value judgment by any means – but it goes to where I plan to put my energy in the coming year. Previously I’ve too easily allowed people the luxury of pigeon-holing me as “the sound guy” or “the film score geek” or other monikers that are a small part of who I am. That’s going to change this coming year, or maybe it won’t for their part – but I’m certainly not going to accept that definition without a firm body of work to show that there’s more to me than their myopic assignment. The more important lesson for me out of all of this is that thinking/talking/writing about it is meaningless without action. Composers compose - and, well – I’m a composer. Toward the end of 2009 I added some cues to my demo reel that I’m quite proud of, but I’m definitely thinking and working on a larger scale than film and television projects would most likely allow. So this year will have a pronounced focus on creating music for its own sake, because that’s where I’m at home. Even when I’m suffering through a bout of writer’s block or struggling with a bleeding-edge technical issue, I’m seldom happier than when I’m in the studio. Spending the last week of 2009 away from it has proven that to me all over again. So I will be producing a great deal more music this year, whether or not those works are attached to film, television or new media projects is of marginal consequence from the perspective of my raison d’etre. And of course I have some specific ideas on how that will take shape in the coming year, but I’ll save the formal announcement for when the time is right.

Likewise, my 2010 will focus on finding and cultivating relationships with like-minded creatives, and as a consequence other points of contact will lie fallow for a while. This seems obvious as I type it – and maybe I’m a slow learner in certain areas – but it came to me as a somewhat profound realization that I’ve spent too much time around those that didn’t share enough of my goals and perspective. It’s like trying to shove a Venn diagram together in a way that doesn’t fit. A slim overlap is what it is – and you can’t force the set to converge more than is possible on its own accord. So I will be working on my own music projects while pursuing truly rewarding collaborations and reaching out to the larger composer community to find like-minded souls. That’s why I recently set up Surround Underground, a site that is for and about music production for multi-channel formats. It’s something that’s been an interest of mine since my college days, and with surround formats becoming de rigeur in film and video games and standardization of delivery formats like Blu Ray disc, DTS-HD, Dolby TruHD and FLAC I think it’s an idea whose time is re-emerging (you quad hi-fi fanatics of yesteryear can rejoice now that the world of digital music has finally caught up to you). I don’t have particularly grand ideas for the site, but I plan to take it as far as it will go within the time I can devote to it – to see if a critical mass develops and it gains its own momentum.

That’s a recurring theme as I start the new year. It’s not about abandoning the past and starting a new future – it’s about taking the hard-won lessons and putting them together with the ideas that I’ve always held true, and applying them to new and meaningful context. That’s when I had my aha moment – when I found that the events of the recent past and the prospects of 2010 attained a kind of personal equilibrium. So in a way I’m really grateful for 2009, because without it the coming year wouldn’t have the same potential and purpose. And I suppose that’s what everyone does this time of year – but again – in certain areas I’m a slow learner, and this feels new and refreshing to me.

I’m not about making wild declarations, proclamations or resolutions. But I’ll say now with some confidence that – for my part – there are going to be many new, different and exciting things about 2010. Stay tuned…

I’m spending a few days with family in The City of Oaks – Raleigh, North Carolina. On the way to meet a friend for coffee I happened across this sign at a local fire station, and it made me laugh out loud.

The Deep Fried South - put a lid on grease fires

I suppose there’s a statistic out there that showed them if they could get a folks to deal with a food prep mishap using a bit of quick thinking and an appropriately-sized lid, it would save them a lot of calls (as well as lives and property). But I can’t help but chuckle at the unintentional humor in tacitly admitting that southerners are at greatest risk from their (our) penchant to deep-fry *everything*.