Music is starving

I cut all my nails off my right hand tonight and effectively removed my ability to play guitar. It's like trying to play a drumset with pencils. I played for a few minutes out front after I worked on my charts but decided to come in when a truck slowed down next to me specifically honk and leave. I don't understand it. I take that back. I don't understand people who choose not to use words. It's a beautiful night and the moon is hunting. I didn't need a car horn 4 feet from my head on an otherwise silent night. He did, however, have the good graces to leave me in a cloud of diesel exhaust.

It's been damn near comfortable outside. We've had winter skies for the past few days. If you were to just look outside, the colors could pass for about 40 degrees cooler. I'd rather it not get cold again when it comes right down to it.

I'm listening to radioactiv, a student-run radio station out of Mannheim, Germany, filled with all sorts of fun stuff. The day I can stream European radio on my mobile device is the day I don't ever need another mobile device. I told myself I wouldn't buy a cell phone until I could wear it on my wrist. And I've technically adhered to that since my phone/mp3 player/hockey puck was provided to me while I was working on the festival last year. LG actually has a watch phone out but the technology isn't where it needs to be. It has to be waterproof with a thin build, a Windows mobile platform, large storage, audio out and great reception. Mmm and an AM/FM tuner, too. Come to think of it, every popular cell phone should have come with a radio tuner rather than a low-quality camera. I guess I have to wait for the Mac tablet. I won't be able to afford it so I should just fix my HP tablet and keep working on my time machine. It's almost done anyway.

I'm going to go get upside down and think about the weekend... think about being on a beach in a place time forgot.

Still looking up.

After sitting at a desk all week, there's not too much I like doing more than loading some new music and riding my bike aimlessly around the city for a few hours. The weather was kind on Friday after the storm and I don't think it got over about 100. I rode down to the springs but the water level was still pretty low. I ran over to the Green Belt to check the water level but it was pretty dry there, too. There were some puddles in the crevasses but nothing substantial. Since I was the only person out there, I ended up doing handstands on the rocks and inspecting various things on the ground.

When I was a kid, I used to sit on my driveway on hot afternoons and fix my eyes on one position in the concrete. Aside from being generally absent minded, I did this to see how many different worlds were alive on a different scale. It usually took a little less than a second to find 3 or 4 miniature storylines unfolding on the alien landscape. I'd put my face right on the surface to get a terrestrial view of the landscape before becoming an obnoxiously omnicient cameraman with some particularly bad commentary. As I remember it, I'd spend about 30 minutes on a Saturday afternoon with my miniature buddies before being distracted by something else. If using 75 years for the average human life expectancy and 90 days for the average life span of the common Texas ant, I spent about 6.34 ant days with those bugs in a small part of my Saturday afternoon. I must have considered this to some degree as a kid because I was always more than able to provide life-changing, truly awesome situations for those poor ants. They were troupers, a great cast.

After playing on the rocks for a bit, I took my usual route to the recreational fountain next to the Long Center and watched the kids perform a ballet with the water. As many years as I was tortured for being the smallest kid, I miss being able to look up at the world. The fountain was a veritable oceanic circus to these kids. I must have made a subconscious note of this because I ended up peddling downtown to watch some skyscrapers go up.

I parked around 3rd and Colorado in some fancypants new residential area and watched the housewives do what they could to keep the local economy afloat. I watched the construction crew across the street haul load after load up and down the 40 story scraper with their monster crane perched precariously on the roof. It was nice. I was a comfortable ant again.

I burned across the bridge and headed over to Freebirds for a monster burrito. I made a quick stop at a custom guitar shop and wondered how anything less than 10,000 years old could possibly cost so much. I still don't understand it, really. Why not donate the money or teach yourself how to make guitars if you want to spend that much? A piano is one thing... but a guitar? Really?

I got my burrito and decided to take Riverside to Alameda or Alta Vista through Travis Heights. Those are my favorite streets in Austin, side by side. They're hellacious on a bike, but they remind me of the houses up in New Hampshire where I used to spend my summers. It's quiet and clean and... just generally fantastic. On the way down Riverside, however, I performed some impromptu acrobatics for the birds. I wanted to go from the road to the sidewalk before turning the next corner because it was more of a switchback... more than a 90 degree turn. There was a spot in the road with a tapered curb that I incrorrectly assumed was all asphalt. It seems the road crew who recently made the curb only made half of it out of asphalt. The other, taller half connecting the asphalt to the sidewalk, was dirt. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but it was like quicksand after the hard rain the day before. My front tire went about 8" into the mud and it ran into the face of the sidewalk underground. I flew over the handlebars and thankfully saved the burrito in my backpack. I landed on my hands (gloves!) and my shoulder took most of the impact. I have no idea what happened to my bike but the seat looks to have taken the worst of it. It must have gotten airborne, too. I ended up with a kind of scary looking shoulder and a sore palm. Thankfully there was no audience for the performance, but it certainly would have been a good show.

Johnny's dog helped me eat my monster burrito after I rinsed all the mud off when I got home. I was back on the bike and riding again yesterday. I blame the music. I blame Ariel Ramirez.

My week started today. Johnny got back from New York this morning and I no longer have the house to myself. I'm gonna update my COT sheets and do some work before the rest of the world starts moving in a few hours.

It rained hard for the first time in several months this afternoon. I made it home just in time to change and run out to get drenched by one more Texas summer.

As the storm passed, there was a moment that reminded me of the aftermath of a truly awesome event, one of those instances in life when you're caught off guard so thoroughly that the following few moments seem to float entirely suspended in time. I'm under the impression the only reason a person ever comes back to reality in these situations is because there's another person present with a far weaker imagination. Interestingly enough, I was alone.

The rain continued heavily well after the sun broke and I was for a moment perfectly in between two fantastic things. Looking down my street, the lightning kept charging westward. The thunder must have beaten it out of the city because it wasn't any more than an afterthought. To the other direction was the afternoon sun already busy stealing the water before it hit the ground.

The rain fell steadily for several minutes with nothing less than a beautiful sky looking South off the porch. There were kindly no cars on the street so I just stood in the river in the road and listened to the rain applaud its own show against the oak leaves across the street.

Like any other Texas storm, it's turned into a thick evening. The sounds of the engines rattling away from the restaurant across the street move through the air just as heavily as the train's horn a mile away. There isn't a breeze that could move a feather but I know that's what the mosquitoes were counting on.

Growing up in Houston, there were two kinds of storms. Winter storms started around December and ran through March. They'd roll in at about 9am and turn the sky pitch black for a few hours before the skies finally opened up. All the creeks and bayous filled quickly around the neighborhoods and it would keep raining steadily for between 6 and 48 hours. It would always be overcast for the entire week and they made for some particularly awesome muddy afternoons. The other kind of storms were the ritualistic afternoon summer storms that showed up at about 5pm every day through August and September. That's what we got today. The storms would crash and bang and shake the world for about ten long minutes. Those who waited it out were wise. Everyone else just got wet.

So I met my weekend with a shower, a scared cat and a disgruntled peacock from across the street who apparently had no reason to find shelter through the deluge. The ragged looking dinosaur was perfectly content shaking me down for cat food when the rain stopped. I obliged as I so often do.

Just as it used to be

Since I'll probably be the only one to have the interest to go back and read this surprisingly intimidating first post for any sort of nostalgic purpose, I'll cut to the chase.

Long sentences, short attention spans and colorful music will make for nothing but the breeziest of exchanges with these, my many blank pages.

This collection of writing is codenamed "Operation Breezy" for many different reasons. But it's mostly because I'm listening to a turbo jazzy, urban-retrofitted version of the Mission Impossible theme in 3/4 by Cinematic Orchestra. The words wham and bam come to mind.

I was inspired to start this by an old friend who might or might not know who she is. She prolly does. I also chose this name for the blog because "Crabapples" and "Frogpond" were already taken. They don't even know.

With the exception of about 300 pages somewhere in the last decade, journaling has been foreign to me. I like writing and people say I need to do it more often. We'll see what sort of consistency I can muster.

I'll use this to sort my aspirations and plot my emotional benchmarks. I'll wager a little privacy and I'll hopefully get some recreation out of the internet for a change. Some other folks might even benefit from reading. If you have the time to be reading this, life must not be all that bad. So take care and make sure others do the same.


The breeze is here. Grab some paper and make your best airplane. We're throwing in 5.