Oh yeah, I once had an internet journal
It can be difficult to believe that within memory was a time I spent all day (psychically) chained to a terminal, every day, endlessly reflecting in high loquacion of my low moods. Then I guess I concluded: maybe I would feel a bit better about my life if I got up and did something beyond ceaseless contemplation of the endless imperfections of my own navel? (Ask me about its mole sometime...) So I quickly filled every available moment with preposterous obligations of dubious merit, and it's true: without the spare time to indulgently dwell on my misery, I did feel a bit better.

That was going to preface a recap of my summer from some private correspondence, but looking back, I've already shared (or at least alluded to) most of the high points in my miserly handful of recent LJ-posts. And really, since it is actually the case that my prime motivator for making this post now is to tell you that my open stage night is on again tomorrow night, perhaps it's for the best that I just get that right out of the way. (We also hit the retro '80s at 8 cover night Wednesday night at the Cottage Bistro, and the Planks play a Bike Porn movie night at the WISE Hall early Saturday night -- hosted by Portland's own RevPhil!) (These are what I earlier allude to as preposterousness. My weekly Friday night 9:30 pm all-accordion radio show / podcast is, by contrast, a staid work of academic musicological scholarship, surely worthy of grant funding from some august academic institution.)

I don't feel that my progress has been anything other than glacially incremental (kind of like I'll almost have achieved what I'd hoped life to be like at 19), but I can't ignore the fact that on all three of the past three days people pressed hot business cards into my hand, one praising the merry demented musicality as suitable for the festival circuit, another lighting a fire to crank up the silly to 11 and take it to the elementary schools in participatory workshop form. (The third^* just wanted Newfie tunes for his PoCo pub. He looked really skeptical when I told him that I got further playing Britney Spears than maritime music.) The interest represents wonderful opportunity, but hidden behind it is of course the ominous spectre of: weightier responsibility of getting further organized and building the necessary infrastructure for long-term plans^**, including keeping closer tabs on submission deadlines and hammering out things like travel itineraries. I've enjoyed a taste of this world with the Outlaw Band, but generally its work has already been done on my behalf: all I have to do is clear two weeks from my schedule, hop in the back of a cramped van for two weeks, try not to eat anything too foolish, and incinerate my unwashed travel duds at the end.

It seems a strange focus; playing music is not hard (I like to say a cat can do it by walking across a piano keyboard) but all the support work required to make anything happen with it is very counter to what is often (in this East Van stoner context at least -- Nathaniel's military music path certainly explodes some preconceptions) viewed as a very loose, organic, spontaneous, creative process. I suppose that's what agents and managers are for. All the same, over the past several years, since I've primarily identified as a producer/promoter/coordinator (yeah, I just performed publicly to draw attention to the events I was involved in -- kind of like (put on your time travel caps) Cthulu's attempts to draw attention to Mistigris by producing guest lit collaborations in higher-profile artscene packs... and with similar end results) that kind of nitty-gritty work ought to be right up my alley! Perhaps I would enjoy greater confidence if my productions enjoyed greater popular success. (After all, if I can't get local friends to hear me for free, how can I expect to get foreign strangers to pay money to do so?)

Really perhaps I'm mostly concerned that it's just going to eat up whatever spare time I have left (I can't get a job, I'm too busy with my projects! Where will I find time to kiss ladies on their wrists and necks? That is not a job that should be multitasked); if my blogging and e-mail correspondence even halved, I fear my diminishment would slip me into the online margin of error, indistinguishable from background noise. (Of course, who is to say that this would be a bad thing? Perhaps the internet will still find a way to carry on if deprived of a regular injection of my long-winded rumination on such topics as text adventure games longer since defunct than I am!)

And maybe the reluctance (hm, where have we heard that word before?) is just plain old fear of commitment. (Let me, uh, get back to you on that.) If you told me five years ago that the wagon I was going to hitch all my horses to was the accordion wagon, I would certainly have raised an eyebrow, Spock-like. Still, if I'm going to do it at all, I suppose there's no reason not to go in whole-hog.

^*Classic circumstances, however; leaving the VAG (thanks for the free ride, Travis!) with friends, we pass some hipsters on the street corner working a viola, glockenspiel, fiddle and banjo. "These are my kind of buskers!" I exclaim (they also had a guitar; less my speed, but there's no need to be a bigot)... walking by, the mini-squeezebox (thanks, Adri!) on my back awaiting live radio application an hour and a half later, a small voice calls out, "Join us!" Certainly I figured I could do more good there than at the Indian restaurant destination with a belly already full of curry. Some short time later we are shut down by the cops (somewhat rudely in the eyes of the buskers; I say have some sympathy, it must wound their pride tremendously to be reduced to enforcing such bullshit bylaws); research for an abortive busking session with Andrea the previous Labour Day (at which I shocked Anna's mother; my daughter's high-school chum has become a street person!) suggested that there were unregulated areas where busking without a permit was allowed -- and that the VAG was among them. It's tricky, though, since any information Google pulls up from the City's website dates to 1998-1999. I suppose the Civil City Sam wants may differ from that of Philip Owen (if memory serves correct, once a busker himself!)

^** Long-term plans make for some localized short-term strangeness... was at a studio yesterday discussing the weirdness of having to get into a Christmas mood in July in order to have the album (a charity compilation to benefit the BC SPCA, including the Planks' first original song, "Never Give A Puppy For Christmas" -- more of that splendid doggerel in rhyming couplets I haven't exercised since those Cthulu days) ready for Nov 1st.

Where was I going with all this? Oh yes: Rowan needs to get laid. No, wait! Rowan wants locals to know that his open stage is on, and generally should look at becoming more efficient to permit the mounting of grander (and more lucrative -- though there's nothing strictly /wrong/ with backyards and living rooms) undertakings. (Certainly there must have been a more efficient way of phrasing that previous sentence.)