blog – Page 5 – The Conscious Pilgrim

aging

I turn 43 this year.
Actually, I turn 43 this weekend.
Tomorrow.
Star Wars day.

Ultimately I’m good with it. I’m not in the shape I was in when I turned 40 and ran a triathlon, but I am on an upward swing in that regard. I’d love to spend more time in the pool and round out my tri-sport fantasies once again, but the advent of a fresh tattoo about 6 weeks ago, followed by another tattoo appointment this coming week keeps me on dry land. Submerging fresh tattoos is a good way to get an infection. But… That’s okay. Running and biking are filling my early mornings in the same way creative endeavours seem to fill my evenings.

I’m in the early stages of making another great record with The Confusionaires, I have a busy summer ahead of me with festival performances, long runs, sweaty bike rides, rock & roll recording sessions, and a couple of quick trips out of town with the family if fortune smiles down on us before the snow flies again. Summers are so fuckin’ short here.

When my daughter was born, and I was 26 years old, I recall doing the math and determining that I’d be 44 when she turns 18. That’s still true. It’s true every time I check, and the math gets easier each time… that’s a year from now, but it might as well be now. She’s grown up well, and smart, and strong. She has ambition that surpasses me at that age. I’ve very proud of her. She’ll be 17 this summer (obviously) and although she’s not done turning into the person she’s going to be, I can tell that person is going to be awesome. We got matching tattoos last month – an honour I share with no one else, and one I don’t take lightly.

I’m 43 tomorrow. Where does the time go? Well, I know where my 20s and early 30s went. Kinda. They’re hazy and were largely fuelled by intoxicants. Not sure how I lucked my way into finding my girlfriend. We’ve been together for 14 years or so. Like I said… hazy. She’s great, and has either joined me or guided me on several journeys that led both of us to places we’d never imagined… like veganism. She’s just begun a sabbatical of sorts, as she’s between vocations and has found herself with a month off before starting a new job. Having her around is pretty great. I think I’ll keep her for another 14 years.

I don’t know where this leads.
Wherever it’s supposed to, I guess.
But wherever that is, I hope they allow dogs.

machines

It’s early in the year, to be certain. Too early to be dragging hotrods out of the barn, if you ask me… tempting such fate results in heartbreak, and I’m not about tempt the gods, thereby inviting a freak snowstorm. If that happens, it won’t be my fault.

The old fairlane needs a bath, and some love, as 63-year-old cars typically do. I leaned on that car pretty hard last year, but having a good modern vehicle certainly prolongs the enjoyment of working on my fairlane. Last year was a bit tense… when I worked on that car, it was with purpose – I needed it to get to work. This year will be different, as each drive will be special and calculated. Each upgrade will be purposeful, and calculated. None of the work I’d intended to do over the winter got done. Not a damn thing. That’s okay… these things are forgiving.

Maybe it’s not too early.
No, it is.
In this part of the world, any hotrod adventures before the May Long Weekend is done on borrowed time, and unfortunately for me, that particular long weekend in May is about when my summer festival season shows start to ramp up a bit.

What it’s not too early for, is my mountain bike.
I punished that thing last year, too.
It spent the winter in a state of functional disrepair. Rideable, but in need of parts. This is the time to sort my bike out, because once the pavement gets hot enough that you can smell it, the fairlane is going to usurp my time in the most beautiful way.

This is what I do when I’m not running or writing or rock & rolling.
Machines.
My bike. My car.

Also the dishwasher.

moral metrics

I’m not super into celebrity gossip, and I have curtailed my algorithm to omit bullshit that only serves to distract and upset – particularly that of foreign government action that I have no control over, even that of a vote that doesn’t count – but I am not impervious to world news.

Fairly big news in my world; and likely that of the recovery world, is that of disgraced-comedian-turned-podcaster-turned-hyper-religious-zealot, Russell Brand.

If you know me personally, or follow this blog, you know it’s out of character for me to discuss celebrities at all. I bring this one up because of the commentary I’ve seen from many of my more left-leaning friends because; and this comes with some speculation, it’s apparent to me that many people are delighting in his misery because of where he’s placed himself on the political spectrum as of late, even going so far as to insinuate that their taste in entertainment is somehow superior on some moral level.

As a fan of the music of Ryan Adams, allow me to assure you that there is no moral compass built into your artistic tastes. As a matter of fact, as both a connoisseur of the arts AND as a creator of the arts, that art is inherently fucked up, and largely created by somewhat fucked up people.

Make no mistake: I’m certainly not issuing an excuse for Russell Brand, who very likely did what he’s been accused of, and likely ducked & covered himself in sanctimonious Christian practices when he saw these accusations coming for him. What I’m saying is – you don’t know until you know… then you have to decide how to feel about it.

How do I feel about it, personally? Bummed.
Sad for the victims, and bummed about the situation.
Again… he very likely did it what he’s been accused of.
And no… I don’t resonate with a lot of what he’s been into lately… but before this, a few years back when his world view was less one-sided, and more worldly, I did.

He’s a great writer, super intelligent, and not so long ago he was ideological, and thoughtful, and his greatest contribution; a book called ‘Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions’ may be one of the finest guides through the 12 steps to recovery ever committed to paper, and for that I will always be grateful. It’s unfortunate that his actions will prevent people from discovering this incredibly helpful piece of literature.

But what I know, and Russell Brand knows, is that it’s time for him to make amends. He needs to not only apologize, but atone for his deeds however the victim(s) and the powers that be see fit, and he needs to be grateful about the opportunity to do so.

My opinion bares nothing on that equation.

charming mistakes

I recently had a conversation with a friend & colleague regarding recording processes. He’s a fellow guitar player and; as odd as it feels for both of us to refer to ourselves in this way, we are composers. Rock & roll composers.

His question for me was; essentially, how good is good enough?

As in, when it comes to recording an instrument, and the ‘take’ in question is ‘flawed’ in some way – as they often are when they are performed by humans – where is the line for an acceptable take vs an unacceptable take. The easy answer is ‘well, if I did what I was trying to do, then it’s worth keeping’ and we are both inline with that. For me, the question is: Is it charming?

There are happy accidents and not-so-happy accidents in this business, but we both feel that if we get too ‘nitpicky’ with every passing note, and cut out every mistake and replace them individually, that we risk engineering the soul out of the song.

That’s a difficult decision to make in the era of quantization and auto-tune, where no mistakes are left to chance in most popular music, but it’s easy for us as artists to forget that there’s a rich heritage of raw and archaic practices. Once upon a time in 1955, when a young Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore gathered around 1 single omnidirectional microphone in a room and performed their best renditions of songs, that the one that had the ‘best feel’ was what was chosen by the producer, regardless of mistakes, botched endings, and off-key flubs.

There’s a spot in The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” where the drummer apparently hit his thumb with a drumstick in the middle of the song and yells “FUCK!” loud enough to be picked up on the tape. Decades of AM and FM airplay later, it’s still there, never having been edited out.

And these recordings became iconic.

Surely, that was then, and this is now – but there’s something to be remembered there – The soul must stay intact.

In the end, it’s important that we’re proud of what we’ve made. We intentionally record on high quality instruments, into state of the art microphones, into an industry standard recording program. We hire fantastic mixing engineers, and fantastic mastering engineers. We hire great artists and have our records pressed by reputable companies. All the elements for a great recording are there, and our efforts in the studio should match those elements.

Unanimously, they do match those elements, but as I am currently partaking in yet another recording project with The Confusionaires, these thoughts and propensities come back into the foreground.

These things can be much easier to say than do.
Wish me luck.

perspective

Alan Watts, a popular American spiritualist who studied & taught eastern philosophy tells a story from time to time, as I’ve heard it repeated a time or two in the recordings of his speaking engagements, about a farmer.

A farmer’s horse got out of the stable and ran off.
His neighbors said “that’s bad.”
He answered “maybe.”
The horse returned a day later with 6 wild horses.
His neighbors said “that’s good.”
He answered “maybe.”
The farmer’s son was training one of the wild horses, and got kicked, and broke his leg.
His neighbors said “that’s bad.”
He answered “maybe.”
Later, a government man came around conscripting young men to go fight in a war, and the farmer’s son was left off the list because of his injury.
His neighbors said “that’s good.”
He answered “maybe.”

The story goes on like this, typically to illustrate the meaning of the yin & yeng, that no good can come without bad, and no object can be observed without the space around it to give it context.

This occurs to me from time to time when I’m in the thick of it, as I frequently am. When I’m busy, I want time to myself, and when I’ve got too much time to myself I start to look for things to occupy me.

The truth is, I need both. I need those crests and troughs because that’s what life is made of, and if you want to get really granular, that’s what everything is made of – our vision is refractions of light that are distinguishable because of the dark spaces between them. Sound waves are the same. Even we are an assemblance of molecules with space between them…

… but to zoom out a bit, most of us wouldn’t know what a good day was if we didn’t have a bad day to compare it to. Sunny, warm days are treasured because we know what rainy, cold days are, as we know summer from winter.

All day, every day, we are comparing what we have with what we had… you’d think gaining another perspective wouldn’t be so hard.

motivation

I’m motivated. And I’m inspired.

… but there’s something to know about inspiration and motivation, and that is that they are temporary. I am currently a little heavier than I want to be, and it’s a strange place to be because I ultimately chose it.

I don’t mean that in the sense that I ‘chose to eat a dozen cupcakes‘ but I did choose to put my endless cardio on the shelf for a bit so that I could focus on developing muscle, and the good news is that it worked. The bad news is, that when you eat more – yes, even healthy food – and lift more, muscle is not the only thing you gain… so it’s time to cut – and cut I shall.

I’ve been doing some HIIT training a couple times a week over the past couple months amid the heavy weightlifting, which has been great, but a few years ago I hit on something that I’m particularly good at (for better or worse) and that is jogging. I can run in Zone 2 (heart rate zone, that is) for swaths of time, to the point that at the end of February, I thought I’d just ‘see what I can do’ since it had been a while since I’d put in a long-ish run.
I ran 8km.
It took about an hour.
First run back after a winter of lifting weights.

I’m sure you can tell by the way I phrased that, but I’m happy with that. That’s essentially the pace I left off at when seasonal allergies took me out of the running game in the fall. I now do it 3 times a week… longer when I can, but really, between weight training 3 times per week and running 3 days per week, I’m pretty full-up.

It’s also as spiritual as it was before.
I’d almost forgotten how connected I feel to myself, and to my environment when I’m doing this – especially outside. To push myself closer to the ever-changing limit of what I am capable of is such a magical place. I’m not heading into the river valley just yet, because to fall on the ice is to endanger my artistic life, but I can’t wait.

I also have some light bike repair to complete before getting back into the mud on my mountain bike, but that’s coming soon, too.

I do everything I can to quell the winter blues, and ultimately I do a much better job of that than ever before, but that doesn’t mean that springtime isn’t massively optimistic time for me.

I’m so ready.

At this point I’m flirting with the idea of entering a race, but in the end what I really want to do is just run. Run for me. Do I need an event to stay on track? Not really. Would it be fun? Probably.

I guess I’ll have to see what my summer gig schedule looks like.

context

Even a portrait with a blank background still has a background. The background is not absent, it’s just blank, and it allows us to project our own background onto it if we wish to do so – but some won’t. Their lack of imagination or inability to align themselves with the artist’s vision may lead them to believe the artist was lazy, or that the work is unfinished.

But it’s just blank.

Sometimes I try to write like that.
Songs, not blog posts.
It doesn’t work for me, or at least I’m never happy with the end result. So I give it context. Then, in the editing phase, I remove some of that context.

I’ve been giving some thought to a series of short videos wherein I get into the subject matter of my songs, where they come from and why they were written. I’ve received encouragement into this because (a) I’ve got a lot to draw from in The Confusionaires songbook alone, let alone my own catalog from before that, and (b) people seem to be able to acknowledge that my songs are about real things, and that those things aren’t always super clear.

Every once in a while, I get asked what a song is about. It’s always flattering and slightly unnerving, because the genre that my band operates in doesn’t really have a Kerouac or Bob Dylan character. Most songs in the genre are about girls and cars, and while I don’t shy away from the usual tropes, I don’t really write about such things (to the point that my girlfriend semi-regularly gives me grief about not writing love songs).

Girls and cars might play a role in a story-song, but there is usually some larger statement at the heart of the songs I write… questions of morality, sense of purpose, nihilism, higher calling, death, internal struggle… you get the picture. But I make it catchy, and squeeze it into 2 minutes and 45 seconds at 250 bpm, and nobody really notices… until they do.

I imagine that there are people out there who have picked up on what I’m saying and not asked, and are taking me out of context. I honestly have no idea.

Beyond myself, though, I think we’ve all been taken out of context… and I would wager that we take someone ELSE out of context almost every single day, even if it’s small. Between phenomenons such as ‘vaguebooking’ and our propensity to only read the headline of an article and somehow feeling informed enough to voice an opinion on something. It’s to the point that most of the articles you see on social media now are just screenshots of stories, and I don’t think most people noticed.

It’s the reason you won’t see me jumping on bandwagons when it comes to people with controversial opinions. The way people are willing to destroy each other over differing opinions and misunderstandings is gross. I’m not talking about gender identity or nazis or any of that stuff – I mean actual differences of opinion, and actual lack of context, because I don’t believe that every right-wing voter is a nazi who hates poor people any more than I believe that all lefties are barefoot vegan hippies who use cloth diapers.

You, much like me, have things you’re conservative about and things you’re liberal about, but we’re forced to cast a couple of votes every half-decade to political parties who are constantly trying to point out our differences. Buzz-word authors and podcast hosts are trying to instill some measure of ‘holier than thou’ / ‘you’re either with us or against us’ rhetoric constantly, and if you’re not maintaining your algorithm diligently by being intentional with what you ‘like’ and what you remove from your feed, then you won’t be able to keep the wolves away.

I’m pretty accustomed to being misunderstood. My parent’s never really understood me. A lot of my friends never understood me. I’ve been misrepresented in newspapers when promoting my music. I’ve been called names I didn’t deserve. I’ve been shunned by communities and friend groups… and really none of this is special – it’s probably all happened to you before, too… yet here we are, doing the exact thing that’s brought us all so much pain over the years, only to realise that the pain from over the years has shaped who we are today…
And that’s not so hard to see…
… once we put it into context.