I’ve been extraordinarily busy. I have been busying myself with being busy. It’s a terrible way to live. I’ve gotten into a wonderful habit of imagining a problem and then obsessing about the solution. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, if you hate yourself passionately. Never do that. I’ve been overwhelmed by the things I alone have decided that I must do. Sometimes there is so much to be done that the completion of one single activity could never represent any measureable progress, so it’s hard to get started. Absolutely pathological. I must break the habit.

In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that I took my own advice for once and delegated. I’ve written previously about how web site design is a great way to procrastinate. It’s always a great way for me not to do what I’m more ideally suited to. However, I was growing tired of the previous look of my site and I wanted to change it. It started out very well. I had a few ideas. I had some breakthroughs in understanding and those ideas became achievable. In realizing those, I got a few more. It was very promising for a few days. Then, the days turned into weeks. Suddenly, I was working on a web site and not music, again. I needed to get out of it, but I’d invested so much time that the only way out was forward, not back. So I made a list of what I still needed done and headed to Elance.com. I posted a job and had four bids in about 20 minutes. I hired someone qualified and this headache was off my plate. Now I can just write, which is what I wanted to be doing in the first place. What a great thing! I highly recommend delegating. Could I have finished the site myself? Maybe. Should I have? Definitely not. I must learn to live this way all the time.

The sad irony of designing a great blog theme is that if your readers subscribe to your feed to get regular updates, chances are they’ll never see your theme. Wild.

This month I began obsessing about how I might stage the musical extravaganza that is my next album. After all, I have to gig on this stuff or there’s no point. I thought I had it figured out, but then I lost a key musician, already. I’m regrouping and trying to solve that problem. At least I’ve lined up a drummer on whom I can depend. He also sings backup, which makes him a damn unicorn where I come from.

In his book about excuses, Wayne Dyer had an answer to an excuse I could very easily warm my hands over. I can’t achieve my goal because I don’t have anyone to help me. To re-center, I often meditate on his affirmation. “The people you need to help you are already here, and are on their way.” That feels so much better to me than complaining about the pool of New York area musicians. Wayne’s right on, I think.

Being an independent musician means coping with countless unknowns, innumerable situations in which the outcome cannot be guaranteed. It’s a challenge for musicians like me, who are in control of most everything about their music, from conception to recording to management and so on. As soon as others are factored into the plan, things always get unpredictable. The key is to re-center constantly and resist the urge to control when control is impossible.

So, today I have a single task to accomplish. Love the music.

It’s tax season! I’ve done my returns already and this year I did pretty well. I gave various governments interest-free loans last year and now they have come due. So I’m in for a bit of a windfall. The windfall won’t be used for much of anything except for paying bills, but the prospect of “found money” excites even me.

American consumer culture hopes that you actually enjoy the act of making purchases. If I recall correctly, our crackpot president in 2001 suggested that best thing to do after 9/11 was to go shopping. Huh? Yes, this is my country.

Despite my aspirations toward an enlightened existence, I am American and sadly was raised in a culture of decadent consumerism. Whether I like it or not, even I am a consumer, albeit a selective one. I thought this morning about things that I actually enjoy buying. The purchase actually provides an enjoyment that is separate from the item. Weird, right? But then, I suppose I am as well. Here goes…

Six things I enjoy buying

1. Guitar Straps

Unlike some musicians I know, I’m not a guitar collector. I know some guys for whom buying guitars is a sickness. I can’t believe the collections they have. I call them guitar whores. How can you ever become one with an instrument with which you haven’t even a suggestion of exclusivity? To say nothing of the fact that guitars are expensive. But guitar straps? A wonderful alternative. They are the coolest. Like some people dig shoes, I love guitar straps. The smell of the leather. Finding just the right texture. Vintage or modern? Oh, the colors. The way they can be so personal and breathe new life into your old guitar.

2. Blank books

I’ve written frequently here about how I fluctuate between writing by hand and writing using a word processor of some sort. While I get a lot of efficiency out of typing and editing electronically, sometimes there’s nothing like the feeling of a pencil or pen scraping across just the right kind of paper. When the urge re-visits me, I never write on loose leaf, cocktail napkins or note pads. It’s difficult to be self-aggrandizing if my writing is not in some way enshrined from the start. That’s why I enjoy writing in blank books. They can have the most interesting covers and bindings and any kind of paper you can imagine. Scratchy, recycled, acid-free, whatever you fancy. If a writer’s ultimate output is a book, starting with a blank one means that you’re already halfway to your finished product! Shopping for just the right blank book makes me feel like I’m on a mission. What medium will satisfy me? How will this hold up for the ages on my shelf? Is this one suitable to be revisted again and again to examine my progress through creative and philosophical trials? The empty pages are a tangible form of the infinite potentials of my mind. Where some writers fear a blank page, I look at a blank book as something I can fill with the priceless artifacts of my existence. Picking the right one is a task of great significance, and a great way to procrastinate.

3. Blank tape/CDs

Related to blank books are blank tapes and CDs. (DVDs don’t give me much of a charge because I use them for backing up files. They eventually outlive their usefulness or dependability and are tossed on the fire.) I don’t buy blank tape anymore, since I’ve retired from analog recording, but back in the old days, there was nothing like buying a couple of new reels of 456, tightly wound, just aching for the imprinting of my test tones and precious, life-changing mixes. They had exponentially more infinite potentials than even blank books. They were bulky and heavy and came in large boxes you could label. Once I finished recording mixes and editing for an album and put those big master tapes back in their boxes, I could swear that they felt different in my hands than when I bought them. It all started with the purchase of blank reels of tape. A magical first step. To some degree blank CDs give the same thrill. They’re only little pieces of plastic but will hold music that never existed before I put it there. They can hold 80 minutes of it. 80 minutes of new music you can hold in your hand is never anything but exciting.

4. MP3s

At the very beginning of the wave, I had a thing against MP3s. I claimed up and down that MP3 was an inferior format for listening. To a degree, I suppose it is, but I had a revelation one day when it occurred to me that the bulk of my musical self-indoctrination had been through audio cassettes, the most flawed format available after 8-track and wax cylinders. Were those musical experiences any less valid because I came of age in the 80s, the era of the pre-recorded cassette? Absolutely not. I’ve since embraced their modern technological equivalent and never fail to delight in how I can purchase music at home, and be enjoying new additions to my music collection whenever I choose.  I enjoy buying them too, not stealing them. Much like I enjoyed buying cassettes instead of dubbing them from my friends. The music felt like it was truly mine to enjoy if I’d bought it myself. Whenever I buy a new recording on MP3 and my files are downloading, I think of Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre. He describes how the simplest things move him. He says something like “Sometimes I watch traffic lights changing and think, ‘How wonderful!’”

5. Bicycle and guitar tools 

Few things bother me more than paying “professionals” to do something simple that I could easily do myself. I hired a plumber once who spent about 7 minutes fixing a leaky pipe and charged me $600. The thing he had that I didn’t have was this new-fangled pipe-crimping tool that enabled you to make a permanent and reliable seal between two pieces of copper pipe without a blow torch. It made these flares and ridges and after bending the metal, the two pieces fit together like a puzzle and were completely water tight. The tool, he told me, costs thousands of dollars. Whether or not he was lying, his claim did appeal to my conviction that “the right tool for the right job” is an axiom for good living. Though I have no desire to plumb (is that what a plumber does?) I do want to keep my bicycle and musical instruments in good working order. Nothing sucks more than going to a mechanic to tighten a brake cable or a luthier for a seasonal neck adjustment. Last year, I bought a cable puller and have had good brakes for free ever since. Thanks to my discovery of Stewart-McDonald, I now own weird wrenches with bends in them that enable me to access the truss rods on my guitars without stripping them using a tool that doesn’t seat properly in the bolt heads. This is easy stuff. You just have to have the right tools. For the cost of a single service call to both “experts,” I can stick it to them every time the seasons change. :~) I love buying the right tools. Their purchase is an investment and as such, a guilt-free expenditure.

6. Coffee

OK, maybe coffee doesn’t technically fall under the category of consumer goods, but I do like buying it. I love choosing the right cup, establishing the perfect blend of coffee and milk, securing it with a convenient and pristine sipping lid. All of these things amount to a ritual of preparation for something completely unrelated, but in my adult life, I’ve learned that almost any activity or event you can imagine can be gilded by first purchasing a cup of coffee. The best part is that in most settings, it’s completely acceptable. Picking up coffee on the way to work, a meeting or a rehearsal is as commonplace as showing up wearing pants. Unlike wearing pants, it makes little sense, since the coffee is an arbitrary accessory that doesn’t really last and leaves an unsightly cup laying around until the first break, but who cares? The break might be a good time for coffee too, but for some reason coming back to a meeting after a break with coffee doesn’t feel as good to me. Somehow coffee at the start seems to say, “I’m ready to begin and regardless of whether I’m truly motivated by what I’m about to do, I shall eek some enjoyment out of it.” I’m confident that I’d have even loved the kindergarten if I could have stopped off for coffee before showing up. Nobody told me about it then, so I ended up pretty upset every time the bus came. Despite those scars that never heal, I’m thankful for the wisdom I now possess.

I had a birthday this week. (Aquarius) I enjoy birthdays and believe that we all have a right to make the most of our own personal holiday once a year. I’ve always felt that way. I was surprised that no one picked up on this fact when I was in high school and was absent on the same day every year. In fact, staying home on my birthday was probably the only luxury that being an honors student ever afforded me. It was the only time that I assumed some sense of entitlement with my mother, who never objected to my refusal to waste a birthday at school.

I spent this year’s holiday quietly with my family. I used the time to be my usual introspective self. After some consideration, I’ve determined that still, in a rotating sense of perspective, I want out, I want in, I must stop and I must begin. I won’t detail the specifics of each item here, but I was pleased to discover this time that I also have a number of things, as I scream headlong into a lifetime spanning two score years, that I have absolutely no desire to change. This is a departure from the customary list of resolutions that often stares back at me post-birthday and it pleases me a great deal. It shows that I’m living with purpose and enjoying the rewards of my conviction.

Having tacked on another year, it occurs to me today that to live a memorable and remarkable life requires not greatness but engagement. To be involved. The greatness that I long believed was the goal is merely the result. Engagement is the goal. Action. The goal must be pursued daily, even hourly. It is folly to aspire to engagement over a long period of time, such as a year. It makes greatness elusive, something for which there will always be time. In truth, a lifetime of countless moments of engagement is in and of itself one of achievement, value and greatness. These moments must be countless. Their numbers are our only defense against time that cannot be frozen and hours than can never be relived.

I thought of this while watching a video of Todd Rundgren performing one of my favorite songs. I believe the clip to be a sublime piece. For a moment, I allowed myself to become melancholy about it, since no performance by Todd at which I’ve ever been present has come close to what this clip seems to capture. I’m too young to have been there in 1978 and a great number of things have changed since then. However, I don’t believe that the moment in this video could have been planned. It only exists because of engagement, the pursuit of significant moments that, however unexamined at the time of their occurrence, as a gestalt may amount to something that can be called great.

My birthday gift to myself then, is greatness that defines itself. In realizing that I have things that I would not change, I’m already in motion. I have only to pursue the small piece of ground illuminated by my headlights, the precious few feet that in time will surely add up to a remarkable life’s journey if I do not gaze beyond, and miss them.

Rush hour music, indeed.