: lower black pain.

I called my Mom to say hello, and she asked if I’d heard a certain story “on the news”. I said I hadn’t. So she told me the story. It was “the news”, so the story wasn’t really a happy one. I don’t expect news to be happy; the words “have you heard this”  or “I’ve got to tell you something” rarely lead, in my limited experience, to a happy story.

“You’re listening to BBC World News. Today, kittens…”

Growing up, news wasn’t happy either, but it was at least assumed to be “true”. Now if someone tells me a news story I ask them who they heard it from, as if it was a rumor heard during first period in high school. “True” isn’t “happy”, but it does allows us that shrug-shoulder-look-up-to-Heaven-what-ya-gonna do thing we’ve all gotten so good at.

It’s better to “know things” than “not to know things”, but still, I’m trying to steer my mother’s attention away from the news. She gets her news from reputable sources, it’s all journalism, but at some point every news source runs out of news and begins offering “information” instead, which is less grim, but still excites her keen sense of danger and mayhem. We would all probably appreciate a little less  “what we should be looking out for” and more “what we might be able to forward to”.

The weather report rides that line; no matter how jovial the chosen meteorologist, I am really only concerned about bad weather.  The sky looks cloudy, so I check the forecast to see what’s gonna happen, or how long until whatever’s happening is gonna happen, so I can dress appropriately. But when the sky is blue, and it’s going to be great weather, in the back of my mind I’m kind of wondering how long I’ve got before it’s bad weather again.

I appreciate the news my mother tells me. A cautionary tale is still a tale, and I love stories, though it’s confusing to hear the news in the same voice that told you about The Three Little Pigs. 

I do believe that wolf is still serving hard time.

You’ve read a year of things like that. Bless you. I began this on a bit of a dare, then wanted to collect enough stories to make a little book, then maybe a bigger book, and now it’s a seed that’s taken root and grown wild. And here we are. This is nice.

It’s the end of Season Three, due to some really weird numbering on my part (I started at “00”, which Zoë says nobody does, but now it’s a tradition). If for any reason this is your first time visiting :lowerblackpain, welcome, and if you’ve been here a while, or even (gasp) since the beginning, Thank You.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m exhausted. Not due to this column, but the post-lockdown pace of the world surrounding it. Leaving the house. Yipe. Talking to people. Eek. But I’m lucky to be sharing this coordinate in space-time with you, people who are doing things, making things and making things happen.

As I close out a year of doing this, I’m going to take this specific moment to share a few updates…

The lollipop lady likes me now.[S03E03 https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/the-lollipop-lady#details ]

You remember that crossing guard who was very, well, cross with me?

She likes me now. This is a huge comfort.

I walk to work everyday and offer her a strong “Good Morning!” and a heartfelt “Have a good day!” and she reciprocates, with a smile, even. I am part of a community of people passing her, and for each of us it’s a bit of a blessing.

Heck, it’s New York, it might be the nicest thing anybody says to us ’til we get back home. She couldn’t be more comforting if she was a nun.

My name is (also) Jd Michaels.[S01E14 https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/six-names-of-four-things#details ]

You know the history of my name, but strangely, even after all the twists and turns, it isn’t entirely unique.

There are two other Jd Michaels.

* Owns a landscaping company (and the url of my name with .com after it). He lives in Guilderland, New York, which sounds like it’s between The Shire and Camelot, but is just 30 minutes west from our state capital. He does beautiful work, and must be incredibly annoyed by my constant online shenanigans. It’s an arm wrestle between us; one of us is going to have to say “No, I’m not THAT Jd Michaels” someday. Though, to be honest, given the demographic makeup of Guilderland I don’t think anyone assumes that he’s the author of this column. Just…y’know.

* Is a professional wrestler. He is the reason that the WWE video game has my last name programmed in it. With a bit of finagling I actually created an animated entrance sequence where the announcer says “and now, coming to the ring, weighing 150 pounds, from Kansas City, The “Professor”, JD MICHAELS!” And then there is pyro and smoke and I jump out from behind the screen and the lights hit my sparkly shorts and I rage down to the ring. It’s cathartic.

* Last weekend I heard, for the first time, an album called “Donuts” by arguably the most famous Jay Dee, a man whose full name was James Dewitt Yancey, but was known best as J Dilla. He was a hip hop sample artist who created some amazing work and stands as a primary influence to modern music. And where did I listen to this incredibly important chronicle of genius? Home Depot. (The sink was broken.) As a fellow African-American “j-d” I wanted to bond with him, in a way, which happened in a big way over by the rubber faucet washers. He sampled not only Frank Zappa, but also Raymond Scott, two of my top five musical heroes. I was actually tearing up by the time I got to the checkout. I am proud to lose the name arm wrestle to that guy.

The first lap.S02E14 https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/gifts-of-thwipmas-past#details

I never did find the photo of me and Spider-Man. I looked in all the photo boxes, it just wasn’t there.

I found one with a cardboard cut-out of the magician David Copperfield levitating me (the Polaroid camera and his cutout were both mounted sideways to create this illusion). I found one with my grandfather at Thanksgiving; I’m probably 17 and I’m wearing what I must have considered a “nice outfit”.

I did discover one I don’t remember seeing before, of my mother and I, as a tiny baby, maybe a few weeks old. The photo was taken from a weird distance away, not really a portrait but more of a journalistic piece. I’m doing nothing at all useful, I’m a potato, but my mother looks confident, sitting in a housecoat, calm, focused, even though she was surrounded the late 1960’s and riots and war and unrest.

But soon, she will tell me of The Three Little Pigs. Shortly after that, she will call me at my home in Brooklyn and make sure I don’t eat the recalled spinach, or give my social security number to the wrong person, or get caught up in an international deepfake conspiracy, because she heard it on the news and it might be important information I need in order to stay safe. And I will appreciate this information, and check the dates on my food items and not answer unknown numbers and avoid professional spy networks.

And we will talk about the weather, even though we know it’s changing, and tell each other stories. And then I’ll tell a year of them to you.

Thank you for your time. And yes, I will see you next week. I mean, next year! Wow.

- Jd Michaels.

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I just read an article that said getting six hours of sleep a night was as bad as not sleeping for two days straight. There was research, in a laboratory, with subjects and pencils and numbers.

I’m proud when I get six hours of sleep. I’m not saying that I “get six hours sleep”, like, every night or anything. I don’t know where you even heard that, that’s incredible, what an imagination you have. No, I’ve always felt that I physically REQUIRE six hours of sleep a night to achieve what I’m going to call “Basic Human Functionality”.

But this research revealed that only those who slept eight hours a night were “properly rested” or whatever (the smarmy jerks), while my noble Sixers faltered on the 10th day, breaking down in tests doing things like…cognitive stuff. Vocabulary things. Maybe memory stuff too; I don’t really recall.

So much modern talk mentions a “work / life balance”, and we live in a world of such stunning convenience that surely it is nearing Utopia: bon bons on chaise-longues in self-driving cars while wearing VR helmets. In this world of absolute wonder, I can definitely get two more hours sleep every night, right?

Going to sleep isn’t staying asleep. And if I roll the wrong way, I snore loud enough to be heard on the street. In Brooklyn. With our windows shut. And at 3:30 AM I’m up for no apparent reason (they say it might be stress but who are they and why should I listen to them whoever they are and what do they know?), and no matter what I do the cats always wake me at exactly 5:30 AM to be fed. No, I tried that. Yep, I tried that too.

The article vexed me because I really thought I had cracked the life/work balance code with the six hour thing. I was proud - I had my Apple Watch all set for my bedtime and wake-up time. More than I used to get… I used to be exhausted ALL THE TIME. I got home from work at 8:30 and to bed by 11:30 and then up again at 5:30. Oh. Wait. That’s six hours too.

Anywise, 8 hours of sleep a night seems to scientifically be the answer to everything, which isn’t surprising. We’ve heard that our whole lives.

Somewhere around 1817, a Welsh gentleman named Robert Owen promoted a revolutionary idea he called “the workday: 8 hours labour, 8 hours recreation, and 8 hours rest”. He owned a factory, so he tested this hypothesis on his employees as one of his first efforts to create a “utopian society”.

He never really hit that mark, but he did became an originator of the trade union movement, which later adopted this theory: “8 hours work. 8 hours rest. 8 hours for what you will”.

You’re doing the math in your head, aren’t you? 8 and 8 and 8 is 24? Really? I could really sleep for 8 hours and then go to work and have 8 hours left? Every day?

Of course not. Clocks were more… theoretical in 1817. And the sun was younger, and more forgiving.

When’s the last time you had 8 hours of sleep, then had a super productive 8 hours at work, then partied for 8 hours? Never, is the answer, because it doesn’t work that way. 8 - 8 - 8 is a beautiful numerical fairy tale that has inspired civilization, but QUITE LITERALLY doesn’t add up.

You know what hadn’t been invented in 1817? Commuting. That’s an extra hour on either side of work. Then they must not have had any errands to do, that’s an hour, and two more for morning and evening ablutions and eating meals. At least an hour for some kind of home maintenance or reading the mail or the news or anything else that’s necessary instead of a fun choice…that’s 16 hours of work a day.

Sounds more like it, right? We’re getting there. Because now it’s 16 hours of work, with 8 left over to try and get some sleep and watch a couple of YouTube videos.

The “weekend” was an idea that occurred to several people at the beginning of the 20th century: a mill in New England offered Saturdays off to its Jewish employees along with Sunday, then Henry Ford tried it, but in England it was a gift from John Boot, whose pharmaceutical factory in Nottingham was experiencing a significant surplus, so to slow production, but keep staff employed, he gave them two days off without reducing their pay.

The 40 hour workweek, along with the weekend, was formally adopted the USA in 1937, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, under the New Deal, and it wasn’t so people could get more sleep, it was all a numbers thing of keeping people employed and factories open and numbers up or down or whatever.

And the weirdest fact about all this is that humans used to sleep in two four hour chunks, back before we had artificial light.  They’d wake up in the middle of the night for an hour or two, get some stuff done then go back to bed until morning. But candles and street lamps changed all that; then of course electricity, and Johnny Carson.

Even if I have a couple of hours for “what I will” I usually spend it decompressing. Decompression is the time it takes to get over the time directly before it. If I don’t employ some discipline, I end up using all that time to scroll through one thing or another on my phone, which is never productive.

“What” I should “will” is to read a book. Or write music. That’s a good thing to will. Or maybe a little pilates, I should be willing that. But if I only have 8 hours that I’m not working, should I spend all of that time sleeping? Really? I mean, what do I know, I’m a just a six-er, you eight hour sleep people have all the answers, you tell me –

– oh, sorry, I didn’t see you were… I apologize. Just give me a call when you wake up.

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Hey.

If you’ve been here for a while (thank you very very very much) you probably know that my hometown is Kansas City. Long before it was cool to wear a Chiefs or Royals cap, I rode the Yankee / Mets gauntlet of the subway proudly sporting my ancestral brands. Ok, I was a 49ers fan for a while back in the day, but everybody was, it was like science fiction - Montana and Rice? and I don’t even follow football… and then Montana went to Kansas City, so it all seemed like kismet.

You don’t get to choose your hometown, it’s yours forever, and I’m proud of mine, but there’s been some stuff about it in the news that I don’t want to talk about.

Ok, I want to talk about it a tiny bit because this is a column called :lowerblackpain, where, as you know, the lower is a verb. So I feel its title - if not its formal charter - if not to address pain, is in some way to counterbalance it.

The pain I wish to counterbalance is not a new one. Nor is it eradicable, like smallpox, because it’s a human condition that will exist forever: in the words of a pure dear friend: some people are garbage. They may not start out that way, but as there’s only two paths in human development; confidence and fear, they chose poorly, and drank from the shiny golden goblet of ego and anger instead of the dusty brass cup of compassion. #lastcrusade.

I am not an optimist. I am a proud pragmatist. It’s served me well in a world that didn’t have an infinite amount of automatic options for me. Instead I found bits of wisdom and information that I could put together like a kit to make a way to move forward. My Grandpa gave me Count Basie, my Grandma gave me Tchaikovsky, the early seventies gave me The Partridge Family: boom! I’m writing music filled with the funk, rococo pastiche and warm G-rated harmonies only that combination could deliver.

But the most important kits were the ones I put together to survive.  You’ve got to survive: that’s the basic goal.

This is true for all of us. What memory floods your head when I say the words “close call”? Hmmm? We’ve all had at least two. And they don’t have to be the ones where you’re on vacation and the zip line looks dodgy or the last oyster tastes a little funny. They are most likely (because I know you guys, and you’re all super cool) choices you’ve made where you look back and realize the road not taken needed desperately not to be tooken. Took. Whatever.

Let me come at this the long way. I appreciate your patience.

So a newly famous actor, a black man, recently had a public altercation that is probably going to stall if not entirely maroon his career. I didn’t know if it was his fault or not, but this week I ended up following a thread on the internet and accidentally researched it.

He went to the same college I did. That was in every article. It shouldn’t have been, but it defined him a bit differently. Below the article was a collection of comments from other black guys who’d attended the same college.

They were all really mad. All of them. One said he had graduated with various degrees from several prestigious higher learning places and had never been treated as poorly as he had at my alma mater. The others followed suit.

I did that thing with my lips where you go “Really?”. Pursing, yes. Then I read: “Every black graduate I know has had an anonymous white person turn him in for a made-up charge of something that he had to defend, like going to the principal’s office.” And I said, “Well, that never happened to me!”, but it did. 

There was this prince of somewhere who behaved very badly his sophomore year, buying up a lot of stuff and basically partying all the time, and then the next year he was definitively gone but all the stuff he bought was there, including this “big screen” console TV, a giant wooden cabinet of a thing, and the next people in that room were me and my two roommates, so we didn’t move it out, we just kept it there, and everybody knew it, and the next year the people in the room didn’t want it and they said we had to move it out so we took it to our next room where, again, everybody saw it all year, even the Dean knew about it (but had no clue as to who to call about it), then the next year we put it back in the place we originally found it and somebody apparently took it.

So I was called before a huge long table of very angry people who told me that I had stolen it. “I don’t have it,” I said. “We can go to my tiny off campus apartment right now and it won’t be there.” I told them the entire story. “How could I steal something which everyone knows the location of, all that time?” They had no answer for that. “What is my exact responsibility towards abandoned furniture?” They had no answer for that either. Though they threatened my educational future quite seriously, by the end of this interview with me they seemed as exhausted as Elmer Fudd dealing with Bugs Bunny. I’m sure you can imagine.

And nobody told me who quote-unquote “turned me in”; I was just told by my Dean to “trust no one”, which is cool to hear in a movie but, y’know, not so much when you’re still on a dating circuit.  I always thought it was a one off, a fluke of weirdness borne of royal misbehavior, but reading a series of similar incidents from similar looking people made me sad. A few of them were way more famous than the newly famous actor was.

But I digress. Kind of on purpose. I’m stalling, actually.

My worst Kansas City story, told as briefly as humanly possible, was driving home on a summer evening from my job performing at a local amusement park. It was the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I had the sunroof open on this beater car I was driving and was singing 80’s hits on the highway, when I pulled off and stopped at a light and the guy in the huge truck next to me started spitting into my sunroof. He wasn’t a great shot, but the principle of the thing made me a bit rebellious.

I said hello. He said hello back, and added a word.

I set off to the next light, but pulled a trick I had seen in a movie somewhere; I waited until the light was yellow then SHOT through the intersection at the last minute, leaving him stranded on the other side of a six lane road. I may or may not have waved at him through the sunroof. I may or may not have used all of my digits to do so.

I sped down the street and turned down my mother’s block and quickly got to the garage door and hurriedly opened it and a lawn mower was blocking the space. I jumped out and was pushing it as the guy’s truck pulled up and he took his rifle from his back window. My mother was at one of the three evening events she’s been to in her entire life, so I ran through the back door and jumped over the fence to the neighbors yard, who was a formidable ex-marine, though I realized I was now between a rock and a hard place, so I kept shouting whose son I was and they opened the screen door and listened to my abbreviated tale and he went to the kitchen to the drawer where you probably keep the Handi-Wrap and pulled out a loaded Magnum and walked out the front door in his stocking feet and fired two times in the air. There may have been words.

When the cops showed up, two of whom were black, they told me the man in the truck was friends with the sheriff (who was away fishing this weekend) and he was only upset because his daughter had gone to the prom last week with a black guy. He’d showed up there all liquored up with a baseball bat, not realizing his daughter’s date was the captain of the football team. Which hadn’t ended well for him, and he held what I’m gonna call a general grudge concerning the situation, and I just kind of drove into that.

My worst Kansas City story is not getting shot there. I think it is a very fortunate story. But then, I’m a pragmatist.

A friendly neighbor. A faithful educator. The elements that have combined to get me from there to here have ranged from the extraordinary to the unimaginable, and I have nothing to complain about. But it would be ungrateful to go through the world without trying to make something better.

I don’t believe there’s a sequence of temporal events after which all people de-garbage-fy. I don’t believe there is any object in the world that can protect us from everything. I don’t believe there are answers to problems when the problems aren’t questions. But I do believe that there are tons of non-garbage people everywhere, never more than two or three folks away from one another.

We should have a secret word so we can recognize each other, a call-back to epic courage and savage conflict, yet a shared statement of compassion, illustrating how absolutely and entirely nonsensical everything’s become.

Perhaps, “Jabberwocky”.

Thanks for your time. And your patience.

Next week, so lighthearted, I super promise.

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I used to say that I wasn’t a math guy, but I’ve learned that what I’m not is an arithmetic person. It turns out that actually enjoy mathematics. Reaching beyond arithmetic’s addition, subtraction, division and multiplication, mathematics serves as a dynamic modeling science of measurement and pattern.

I didn’t actually know the two were different until I looked them up.

I’m thinking about numbers a lot because my reunions are coming up. College and high school. I’ve never been to a college reunion, and because I went to a 5 year high school (where 8th grade was included) these events are always right next to one other, rather than in the “every other year” pattern that most people have.

So college 10 was the year before high school 15, 20 was right before 25 and now it’s college 35 and then high school 40. Wow. That’s the number of years where, if we were trees, we would be considered officially fully grown, ready to be cut down for IKEA furniture. I think I’d better go to this one.

It’s assumed that the reunion years up to 15 are where everybody’s getting started, building a base, becoming established, pushing forward…so many good phrases for that. Around 25, you begin riding it out, staying the course, keeping stride…a lot of what seem to be horse racing metaphors. At some point you pack it in, or just take it easy.

I’ve been listening to a load of autobiographies by octo- and nonagenarians.  Betty White, Dick Van Dyke, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks. I’ve learned so far that:you should be born or live in the midwest or Brooklyn (so I’m pretty much covered there), always take your vitamins, keep moving, keep learning, and keep making stuff… all good advice. But they never spoke of packing it in or taking it easy.  And all of them said that they don’t really “feel” old. I guess I don’t either. I have no desire to be young again, but hanging around people you knew in the past, in a place you lived in (in the past), talking about things you barely remember in the past seems the surest path from dirty martini to Geritol Spritzer.

I’m only going for one day. My chief reason not to go before was social media - if there was anyone I wanted to talk to, I thought I could just chat them up online. But that isn’t really true - because something special happens when people gather together in the same place. Relentless judging.

While I’m enjoying who I am now, I haven’t really been graded on it yet. 

Reunions seem designed to determine just where we stand between potential and decay. I am neither a mighty seed, nor a hollow log atop the forest floor. Am I more highly anticipated food order or post-meal empty plate? More New Year’s resolution or stationary bike used as a clothes horse?

Like a talking hat at Hogwarts, reunions sort us like a social pachinko machine. Clickety clickety clickety boom SUCCESS. Clackety click clackety click click DISAPPOINTMENT. Clackety clickety click clickety click -

– and here my metaphorical metal ball falls out of the board because I’m just not done yet. I’m taking my vitamins, I’m moving, I’m learning. I’m not done building yet. I don’t know if this means I haven’t applied myself, or that I didn’t catch a break, or maybe I was busy paying off my student loans for 22 years. Oop- yeah, it’s that one, I recognize it now.

In any case, I’ve got no regrets to complain about and no incredible achievements to crow about.  I am neither hobo, nor movie star.  Clickety clackety clickety clack.

It would be easier if we were all movie stars. That would be like the Met Gala. We would all assume each other’s achievement, even we didn’t recognize each other.

There’s still be judgement, I guess. Let’s see, there’d be:

The Tabloids: I mean, you knew they were always headed that way. But wow.

The Methods: still forging the paths they were on years ago with keen determination.

And the Legendaries: propelled by the winds of some epic achievement that defined them, leaving them nothing more to prove, or in some cases, even do.

Again, I am none of those.

A friend suggested two more movie star categories: the Workhorses, and the Show Ponies.

Show Ponies have very expensive watches and haven’t scooped a litter box in a long, long while. They have staff. They have mastered the discipline of delegation, allowing them to control resources far beyond their natural reach. They don’t DO the thing; but they’ve put themselves central to THE THING GETTING DONE. They’re probably not actors… they’re more like Executive Producers.

But the Workhorses are the actors you remember from dozens of movies and shows; the police chief, the sommelier that ended up being that spy, the Vice President who fought the werewolf. You’ve seen them around. That one is probably me: never stop working, ends up being the Great-Grandpa in some Disney+ show.

Of course, it’s good company. Samuel L. Jackson is a Workhorse. And Dame Judi Dench. And, saints preserve us all, Harrison Ford. Now there’s a man who’s cleaned a cat box. He’s probably mucked a stable. Recently.

I think the whole reunion experience may be best enjoyed by those who have been to all of them. It’s like a show they get to watch twice a decade. From the “What have you been up to?” brunches, to the “Well, why didn’t we?” late-night parties, there is intrigue and gossip and schadenfreude.

But I realize that, ironically, my life is more arithmetic than theoretical equation. It’s all added up. So while it might be more fun to have an agenda, I just kind of want to talk to a few other workhorses. People who are doing rather than people who are done. I guess I’m more interested in what people make than who people are.

Hey look! Who is that over there? Is that Jd Michaels? Wow, he is covered in cat hair! What a scooper!

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I was washing the dishes last week when my daughter danced by. She’s growing, quickly, and every night her bones begin to stretch around suppertime. Her answer to this pain is to defiantly strut through our apartment like it’s a fashion runway, listening to music in her headphones, dancing out the lyrics to the songs, applying the healing miracle of being entirely fabulous. It’s kind of like watching Mick Jagger.

I usually watch a tv show while I’m doing the dishes, but the iPad was out of power, so every time she passed the kitchen I could hear the sound leaking out from the speakers strapped to the kid’s head.

They’re really nice headphones.

I used to wear them myself. She’s just borrowing them.

It’s been about two years now.

I’m not getting them back.

We actually call them “her headphones” now. But they’re part of a plan; I wanted her to have music as a universal coping mechanism, since we live in this age of miracles where we can hear any song at any time now.

And it’s working, her relationship with music is great. But computers aren’t DJs. They can offer us playlists calculated by analysis of song tempo, music key, keyword categorization, personal listening pattern – it’s the ultimate jukebox, right in your pocket, but it is only that, a jukebox.

It isn’t a DJ.

On a dance floor, a DJ can blend disparate musical sources to create amazing moments where they seem to know exactly what a crowd is feeling. In my mind’s eye, do I see this kid in those same headphones flying to Ibiza for work once a week in her private plane? Yes, yes I do. My mind’s eye is quite imaginative, particularly in regards to my eventual retirement plans.

But that’s not the kind of DJ I’m talking about.

I’m lost sometimes in these infinite music programs: I open them up and am suddenly transported to this giant warehouse where I can’t think of anything I want to listen to. I used to buy music I liked, and very often discovered that music by hearing it for the first time on a radio show.

A great radio DJ – and I’m not talking about on-air personalities talking in between pre-programmed lists of top hits, I mean those noble few who serve as curators of audio greatness – they dig through crates of old vinyl or check out the newest bands at the smallest venues in town.

You need a curator in this world. There’s just too much everything. First Thanksgiving at the in-laws, you need the honest person who tells you not to look great-grandma in the eye or she’ll think you want to fight, and not to go into the bathroom after Uncle Louis, and never to try the white gravy. You need somebody whose job it is to go where you can’t and find what you never imagined existed. THAT’S a DJ, a trusted sonic sommelier.

You can still find this kind of thing on college radio. Even the call letters KCRW or WFMU relax me.  A great DJ can play math rock next to easy listening and follow it up with a bluegrass song, and it all just works. They’re becoming increasingly rare, but to listen to a DJ is not listening to a list of music that you’re supposed to like, you’re listening to the music that THEY like. You’re listening to a person, not an algorithm.

I was stuck on the subway underground yesterday for what seemed like forever; I looked on my phone to see what I had downloaded and found shows from BBC Radio 1 I had recorded over fifteen years ago. I chose one from Rob De Bank - the first song was “Anarchy in the UKulele” which was exactly what it says on the tin, punk rock ukulele music. He had found the song on MySpace. It is not available on iTunes.

I have tons of shows from Annie Mac, a woman who provided the soundtrack of our lives for over a decade, and a few from the legendary John Peel, who brought more musical artists from obscurity to national fame than any other single person. Growing up it was Dr. Demento every week, or Casey Kasem, whose “American Top 40” was probably the ultimate in corporate radio, but his stories, shout-outs, and long distance dedications made it all feel personal.

Siri is a lot of things, but she isn’t Wolfman Jack. At least not yet. Though that’s an amazing idea, can you imagine that voice? “The temperature outside is 41 degrees, baby! Wooooo!”

As a parent they say you have one job, and it can’t just be to protect (you can’t be everywhere) so it has to be to prepare. I’m not gonna tell my daughter what to listen to, but I have ever-so not-subtly added in things to the mix.

I picked her up one day from fourth grade and she seemed pensive, which looks weird on a nine year old’s face. I didn’t ask her any of the usual “what did you learn in school today?” questions. Instead I just took the slightly longer way home, and I played her “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin.

She didn’t say a word. She looked out the window and her head ever so incredibly slightly bobbed to the beat, her spirit visibly transforming from exhaustion to absolutely defiance. Then we parked the car and didn’t mention it. But now she has that, and can refer to it whenever she wants.

Anyway, I was doing dishes, and my daughter was marching around listening to music, and I could hear it as she passed by, and it was a song from the My Little Pony movie – not the last one with the new ponies (though that one’s just fine) but the big one with the original ponies and Kristin Chenoweth for some reason. I finished up and went to find her – she was in the bathroom cleaning the tub, singing along with the next song…

“Fight the Power. You’ve got to fight the powers that be.”

And I was very proud that I’d done my one job well. I am the DJ.

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So. Have you ever not been able to find something, a tool maybe, a stapler let’s say, and so you just finally end up getting another one, and then you end up finding the first one? 

Please say yes.

Great, whew, well, then this’ll be a fun story.

In an effort to live bold, wild and free, I erased 9000 computer files this week. All of them were copies of copies of backups of other copies of files relating to the music I’ve been talking about for the last eleven weeks. In total, it looks like there were about 250 core files created, scores and sequences and notes and mp3s and even QuarkXPress digital mechanicals, which is kind of an inside joke for people who do that sort of thing. It’s like finding an Betamax tape or a rotary phone.

In any case, I made one copy of every file, and then backed it up JUST ONCE, to one other drive.

I felt better. Responsible. So much hard drive space… maybe I could put a plant there now, or a little bookshelf.

But I found a file called “ballet plot lines”. It’s a pretty well thought out and kind of expansive set of liner notes for this work. I mean, it’s extensive, it explains each movement in terms of an overarching theme and an inspirational mythical figure and a key element. I wrote it for a friend who was interested in choreographing the piece, she worked in the San Francisco office and I was shuttling between there and the New York one.  I remember emailing it to her, so I wondered what happened, or why exactly this didn’t happen?

The last “date modified” on that file is September 10, 2001. 2:56 PM.

Right.

This file didn’t get lost on a hard drive, it got lost in time.  In 24 hours it would be forgotten, completely, as the world became this other place. My next project file, in chronological order, is dated January 2004.

—

So this week I wanted to create something that would allow you to see my ballet in your head as you listened to the music, but of course I’m not quite ready to have you listen to it. It’ll be a few weeks. I wish it could have been today, that would have been so delightfully unlike me, we all would have been so surprised, victorian hand fans would’ve unfurled to cover shocked and whispering faces. But it’ll be a few weeks. Thank you for your patience; I’m honored that you’ve taken this experimental journey with me, and if you’ve been here for all of Season Three, thank you so much, I hope you haven’t found it an entirely aimless ramble.

In any case, the liner notes I found on that old file are so much more detailed than what I was trying to write, but they’re not what I wanted to write. I didn’t want to send you off with words about a dance, I wanted to make the words dance, kind of.

The beginning of that original piece reads, “The World And Me will tell the story of a woman’s life, from wonder to knowledge to wisdom.”

It is now 1:30 in the morning. I normally write these a bit ahead, but life has been pretty persistent if not entirely daunting, so I may not be making the best decisions right now, but I offer you this poem, which is kind of like words dancing, if you stretch that premise super thin.

It’s not fancy, but neither am I; it’s an emotional outline of six movements of music you haven’t had the chance to hear yet, but you’ve supported its creation through your presence here, so I thank you for that kickstart…pun kind of intended.

Oh, and what’s next? I don’t know.If I keep this up for 8 more weeks, it’ll be a year. That sounds fun.As always, thank you so very much for your time.

At first, she wonders what they’re for

since they never touch a floor, but dangle

or are trailed behind

two feet she sees but bears no mind.

The world is safe. That’s what she’s feeling (mostly)

as she faces ceiling,

sky and happy faces, smiling

down at her. No moment wasted,

every breath her new tomorrow.

She begins to see, and although

there’s no mirror

she perceives a sense of who she just may be -

but someday is so far away;

for now there’s now.

——

She stands one day,

and that’s a new surprise, she’s taller.

After she learns not to fall, she

runs and jumps, her feet her own.

She plays with joy.

—

She’s not alone. Her feet atop a grownup’s shoes,

softly counting ones and twos as

they dance on the kitchen floor.

A moment she’ll remember for as long as she will be.

—

Frustration. Formal shoes and schools.

—

Elation at the thought of being free:

but now there’s work to do, so she

must stand in lines, and walk in time.

Conform for every single dime…

—

until she stops.

And stands.

Defiant? Maybe not, but uncompliant in a sense of

who she’s made and what that means.

The girl who played, and danced, and ran

sees herself, and makes new plans in tempo with her own heart’s beat

Standing on her own.

Two feet.

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Let’s see, I’ve covered what I’m writing, how I’m writing it… when? – well, I guess that’s now. Which? (maybe that doesn’t really work here).

Who? (that’s me? Obviously. Yeah.)

So, why am I writing a ballet?

That is an excellent question.

I don’t remember.

I was originally inspired by the story of a girl I met who, in the spirit of the film “Footloose” went against her family’s wishes to pursue a professional dance career, studying full time and driving hours back and forth from training to jobs in shows. Upon the very day of her college graduation, right after her home-cooked graduation dinner, her father asked what she was thinking of doing, and she told him she’d like to get a job in a show, and he said, “Well, no, where are you gonna stay?” and she told him, “Well, I was looking at rooming with some friends up in LA for a while.” and he said, “No, I mean, where are you staying tonight?”

“Tonight?”

“I told you I would support you until you were 18, or if you chose to go to college until you graduated. Today you graduated.”

“I have to sleep somewhere else tonight?”

“You’re on your own. Leave your keys.”

So she left her childhood home and headed out into the world to make her own way, and she wasn’t really even mad at her folks about it, it was some strictly enforced tradition regarding self-sufficiency that I felt, as an outsider, hadn’t been adequately explained. So she couch surfed and kept at it and eventually ended up at the same job interview I was at, trying to be a tour guide at Universal Studios in the later ’80’s. We both got the job. There was a lot to memorize, so she came over to where I was staying to study and ended up telling me this story, which was very interesting.

Here was somebody who had grown up in a tv-sitcom household, complete with cul-de-sac, and she had it rougher than I did. I mean, I didn’t live at home after college, but I wasn’t banned from the property like a blacklisted drunk at a bar. I still had socks there, and comic books with full visitation rights. And this evening wasn’t supposed to turn all confessional, all I said was, “So, tell me about yourself!”

I did not have that interesting a story to reply with. I had driven across the country in a car whose carburetor I’d repaired with the pull tab from a can of ginger ale and found the open audition call in a newspaper my father was throwing away. I’d never really spoken to my father for more than 20 minutes before this visit, but he had offered a spare corner of his apartment for me to sleep in if I wanted to come to LA. My Mom thought it was important that I meet him for some reason, going so far as to call it a “good idea” to spend part of the summer there, so me and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang made the trip across the country. That was my story. It’s a lot more interesting, telling it now.

Anyway, we shared, ate some food, I played her some music I’d written and asked if I could write a ballet about her story. She said sure. I think she thought I was trying to go out with her, which I wasn’t, but then I did, but way before this piece was fully written. It don’t think even two of the movements were finished by the time we stopped dating. So all of this was the inspiration for the piece, but not the reason I’m writing it.

It’s hard to really remember back that far. Everyday every other day gets further away.  And now my brain if full of things I don’t even want to know, like what a “dab” is and the name “Grogu”.

Somewhere between long term memory and short term memory are all the things I actually remember. Here’s a little memory game: what’s your cell phone number? Do you know it? Really? That’s pretty good. Second round: what’s the cell phone number of that person you call every single day…your spouse, sibling, best friend, parent. G’head…Aha. Well then, it’s not just me. But watch this: what was your phone number when you were a kid - the one for your whole house? Just say it, without thinking, right now.

Weird, right?  I too used to be a little Filofax; now my memory’s just a folded up Post-it™, written on both sides in pencil so everything’s just a bit smudgy.

I don’t remember phone numbers anymore - like you (I’m assuming) I carry a magical little light box with me everywhere, and when I want to talk to people I lightly touch their name, or when my fingers are really tired from a hearty doomscroll I can just say their name into the air…

and suddenly, we’re connected.

So I don’t exercise my memory much, which is only a problem when I forget something, or rather when I later remember that I’ve forgotten something.

I’ve forgotten something.

Something extremely relevant to this series of columns.

If you’ve just joined us, welcome, this season has been about finishing a musical work I started over 30 years ago. It’s a ballet.

It’s, a ballet.

“So there’s dancing?”

Yes, excellent question: YES, there IS dancing, and here I am working so hard to render all the music so that you can hear it, but I forgot about the dancing.

I am NOT a choreographer, but I do have a vision of the work being performed, and there’s sadly no software in my computer that can show you that. As this dance has never happened, it’s not a proper memory, but I can remember the feeling of writing music for a dancer, for someone who would interpret it through motion: I wanted to see that, I wanted to see the music, that’s the ballet part, except when I did get a chance to give a cassette tape of an early version to the dancer I mentioned earlier her only comment was that it was “…kind of interesting”.

I’ll take that. Interest is better than scorn. But she wasn’t gonna choreograph it. So I did, and I have a full performance in my (capital I) Imagination.

The problem is that my head is over here and your head is way over there. Honestly, when I’m listening to the piece, this whole little movie is going on in my brain, and I can’t get it into yours.

But I can do this.

I can’t show you the dance, but I can tell you the story. It is nowhere near as fundamentally grim as its source material, but there is a general sense to things; learning and disappointment, courage and triumph.  So next week, I will tell you this story, the same one I see in my head, in the hopes that when the music plays, it will flow into the air…

and suddenly, we’ll connect.

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My third favorite piece of kitchen equipment is the springform pan, a metal band with a cinching latch and a perfectly round disc. It’s a puzzle that you make cakes in; alone, the pieces are somewhat philosophical metal circles, but together they hold hot batter.

It’s my favorite cake pan for sure, because the shape of that cake is the shape of the puzzle, not the pieces. It somehow does not seem as empty a “shadow-of-cakes-yet-to-come” as our other pans. “You are an empty delicious ring, and you, a negative space tasty circle, and you a vacant scrumptious square.” The springform pan is a just a hoop and a platter and some physics: it’s a concept that can create confections.

Cake always takes the shape of the pan you bake it in, which illogically makes a big difference, even though the batter is the same. I could eat three cupcakes, say, chaperoning some grade school event - one before it starts, then one that dropped on the ground but wrapper side down and only for a second (yet I don’t feel it’s appropriate to serve it to children anymore), and one during clean up, you know, for energy. Because they’re cupcakes, they’re snacks based on their size…

…yet their volume is probably about the same as a slice of cake, and I would never eat three slices of cake at party…I’d be that guy that ate three slices of cake at a party. How rude. Yeeesh.

* I have a cupcake pan with the faces of MARVEL’s Avengers, but we never use it because I get a bad feeling when I bite into Captain America’s head. 

* We always seem to finish round cakes, but our journey with square ones often end with a lonely Tetris shape that seems to appeal to no one.

* We got the pancake mix and the cake mix mixed up a week ago and so we had pancake shaped cakes for breakfast. They did not sit well.

As much as I am a proponent of the idea that books can’t be read by their covers, the shape of a cake does give it context.

I feel cake-ish about four times a year. Not like I want cake, but that I AM a cake. Ok, I should probably just explain this really quickly.

I’m from a place, geographically, where the seasons progress exactly as indicated by the paper decorations above classroom blackboards. There atop the reassuring upper and lower letters of the alphabet (with those pink and blue lines going through them) the cycle of nature was depicted by cardboard icons of a snowflake, a flower, and an orangy-browny leaf, representing winter, spring, and autumn. There usually wasn’t one for summer because we weren’t there in summer, though I think once I saw a beach ball.

The weather followed perfect suit. Summer was blistering, Fall was blustery as a Winnie the Pooh day, and Winters were ice and snow. And Spring? Well, flowers.

So every season, different clothes.

Picture day was always in the Fall.  Then, I was pleasantly cozy, smiling with the optimism of a child wearing thick white cotton socks with colorful stripes at the top, brought home in a fresh new plastic bag along with the rest of the school supplies. But by Spring, repeated washings had rendered those socks, once so snug and confident, into crispy (for some reason) and yet still floppily ill-fitting footwear, no more comfortable than a saltine cracker. But they were still my socks for the year, so I had to dance-with-who-brung-me until the next fall sale at K-Mart.

Spring was a problem. I was never warm in spring. Fall and winter clothes get layered as it gets colder until they all end up under a coat. But winter coats are not raincoats, and raincoats are cold, you know when they touch your neck? (yeeegh); they don’t have any fuzzy nice stuff in them at all.

Every season, wardrobe-wise, I still pour myself into a different shapes, like cake batter. Summer me is sassy and has a lot of cool vintage t-shirts, Autumn me is the best, ‘cause there’s LAYERS (I’m a walking matryoshka), then Winter comes and I disappear into my coat and scarves and I’m a mysterious adventurer. But Spring is my springform pan; it has no shape of its own, it’s all potential.

There’s a couple of wet patches of ground that I look at every day on the way to work with heightening glee because I know those are gonna be flowers; the trees are still practically bare but I’m watching those tiny buds because they’re gonna be leaves; and we all dress like it’s gonna be warm enough to wear what we’ve got on but it’s not yet.

What clothes are warm and cool and waterproof and light and breathable? It’s too much responsibility to lay on the simple textile. Perhaps a new, space age material could fulfill those requirements, something one would wear when travelin’ through the ‘verse on Serenity, but I don’t have it in my closet yet.

So I sit here with the rain slash sleet slash sometimes-snow-for-a-minute falling outside, trying not to let the weather get into the music I’m working on, because right now I’m choosing the virtual space that the music will be performed in. I have two dozen sonic clones of famous halls around the world. Sydney Opera House? The 20th Century Fox scoring stage? Each place is a cake pan, where music is provided context, and it’s important, it does change how it sounds.

I’m searching, I suppose, for someplace cozy that warms the ear, marshmallows afloat in hot cocoa. But this piece is really born from Spring, it is a dirt patch of potential that I’ve been staring at for decades, waiting for something to grow.

Wherever I choose should sound like that first Spring day we leave the house expecting that morning chill but it’s not there; instead there’s a wind that’s a little bit warm, and the sun suddenly hits our face and we automatically gasp a bit, and kind of relax, because all those plots of wintry dirt are now officially gonna be gardens. Really, really soon.

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We’ve all made the speech.

80 percent of the time it’s made either in the shower or while we’re washing dishes.

The speech itself isn’t the hard part. The true challenge is that fake surprised look; eyebrows slowly raised, eyes slowly darting left and right:

What? Was…was that my name? Did they just call my name?

Tom Hanks at the next table nodding, mouthing “Yeah ! Go on! Get up there. Go !”

Your crew’s all laughing and crying at the same time. You gotta put down your program and hug a few people and head on up to the stage [except that in my case the orchestra is playing MY MUSIC, which is super fetch]. Then whoever’s up there either shakes your hand or air-kisses as they give you the thing. You turn to the crowd in the arena, and they give you this extra big cheer because, you know, you were kind of a total underdog.

You say something about a parent, and a spouse, and your kids if you have ‘em, remind the folks at home that they should just keep on believing in themselves, then head off the stage the wrong way at first until an unknown lady in a pretty long dress gently points you in the opposite direction.

By this time I’m usually out of hot water. Or the dishes are done.

I realize I’d probably have to insure the thing and then put it somewhere, and since I’m not moving either the Buddha statue or the LEGO model of The Mandalorian’s spaceship (the original one…The Razor Quest), it’s probably better off not having it.

But I would like to be a nominee. I think that would be best stage of the entire thing, getting interviewed by people for a month or so? I’d probably like that. They would ask,

“did your affection for orchestral music stem from a childhood where, bedecked in silken pantaloons you’d challenge Mumsy to a rousing game of backgammon whilst surrounded by the gentle lilt of a harpsichord being played from the sitting room over yonder?”

and I would respond,

“Well, good question, surprisingly, no. We did have a Columbia House record with the title of “The Most Beautiful Music In The World” which we ordered from a 1-800 number…”

Which is true, but it wasn’t that either.

As a kid in the early 70’s, my daily source of orchestral music came from television, and I’m not talking about Lawrence Welk here, but the glory and 60 second majesty found in the best of the television theme tunes.

Mannix. I did not make up that word, it was a detective show with the most killer title music, written by Lalo Schifrin, who also created Mission Impossible’s theme. There was Barnaby Jones, The Magician, Ironside (so cool that Beastie Boys sampled it); even mellow themes like Room 222 exposed me to cool new examples of instrumentation. And just in case it crossed your mind that these tiny masterpieces couldn’t have been created by folks with any hope of professional notoriety, I offer The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O, both by the legendary Henry Mancini, and both versions of the Lost In Space theme by a young and very promising Mr. John Williams, a couple of folks who eventually did get the chance to give their shower speeches.

I’ve written dozens of brief works that seem like musical short stories, and now, once again examining my childhood, I understand why. Earlier this week I realized that the theme tune is probably my truest musical medium. It was the theme tune that kept orchestras in my head.

Aw, look at that little kid in the back yard with that nappy hair and the snaggle-toothed grin, humming thrilling horn parts when he's leaping around and mysterious string motifs as he sneaks behind the tree… isn’t he just adorable? You’re worried about him? I see your point. He’ll probably be ok.

The humming to myself was crucial. Tunes would get away from you if you didn’t hum, then you’d have to wait a whole week for the show to come on again.

(a brief side note for younger readers:)Things used to happen, and then didn’t happen until they happened again. In between there was just…time, when things weren’t happening. Nothing happened “anytime you wanted”; 24 hour entertainment was called books.

The modern ability to focus on anything in this current sandstorm of entertainment is incredible, but I had to pay attention to what I heard and saw or it would be gone forever. Ok, I had no idea the internet was coming, or even DVDs, so my only strategy to keep what inspired me was to commit it to memory. Thus the little kid humming in the backyard. And at the grocery store. And everywhere else. We were, back then, each one of us, a hard drive. And if you could get your hands on a ball point pen and a spiral notebook you had, like, 10 terabytes more room.

I look back a lot. I realize that. I’m trying to build some sort of map, maybe move forward with kind of a plan based on what I’ve learned and experienced. Navigating a world without cords and wires is much harder than we all thought it was gonna be, and my lifespan, set so firmly between the inventions of the transistor radio and the flying car, is getting a little bit confusing. I’ve had copies of the exact same music on vinyl, cassette tape, CD, and now digital download.

But no matter the format, music still resonates. And there’s still great theme music being composed; check out the genius that is Yako Kanno and her Cowboy Bebop suite… it is magical. We sing it a lot in the car.

Movie soundtracks were hard to memorize because you only saw a movie once back then, until it was shown on TV somewhere.

And then there was Star Wars, which I saw repeatedly, enough to memorize the score (and the dialogue, and the sound effects).

John Williams won best original score for Star Wars. (That year, one of the competitors in his category was HIMSELF, for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) I remember watching and cheering, not because the idea of an industry award brought sparkles to my middle school eyes, but because I really loved that music, and the award seemed to validate this deep emotional connection, which I celebrated by jumping up and down and shouting “Yay!”, thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, far after bedtime on a Sunday night.

I don’t expect any of the music I create to win an award. But if I can get one kid in one backyard to hum it while they’re saving the universe –

– that.

That will be my shining hour.

Which way do I walk? This way? Thanks…it’s so confusing.

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What’s your time signature? If you’re not familiar with the term you’ve probably seen a time signature; it’s those two numbers stacked on top of one another at the beginning of a piece of sheet music. The top number is the number of beats in a measure and the bottom is which length of note is counted as a full beat.

1234

The most common time signature is 4 / 4. That’s four beats and the highly recognizable quarter note as the unit of common measure. The quarter note’s the one that looks like a golf club. Or a ladle. Four beats – four quarter notes.

Of course, you can fit more notes in the same span of time, you just play them faster. In the same space as a single beat you can have two beats (pun-pum) or three beats (tri-pl-let) or four beats (one-e-and-a). Or if you’re a superstar dj in Ibiza with the moon high above you and a undulating sea of hot bodies in front of you you can do that thing where the beat gets cut up faster and faster and faster until it’s just this buzz and then stops altogether and is silent for a second until a super deep voice says something like “get busy one time” then the beat drops and everybody just goes crazy. And there’s fog cannons.

Anyway, a time signature lets you know what’s happening and then when it’s happening, like a work calendar with those little half hour slots to plan out your day.

Which have never worked for me because my problem is that half hour slots aren’t small enough.  I can have four or five things happen in half an hour and there’s no room in that little rectangle to write all that; even when I use the calendar on my phone it keeps reminding me “you already have something scheduled at this time” as if I didn’t know that already and then it’s sort of reticent (even for a computer) when I insist that yes that is happening but this is happening also. (When artificial intelligence thinks my schedule is nuts it’s probably time to use some real intelligence to kinda fix that.)

I’m a little worked up because I’ve watched some composers online. They all seem to have sun rooms, rooms with just, lots of sun, and they have these wide desks made of red stained wood and cups of what I imagine is single estate coffee. And you’d think I’d really want that situation, that those circumstances would be desirable to me, but none of that matters nearly as much as the fact that they all say things like:

“Well you know in the morning when I wake up… I never get really started until late after lunch, then I work through until maybe 8 and when we have supper, then maybe come back around 11PM to try some things until 1 AM or 2… some days you know I just walk from room to room trying to FEEL the music…”

Walk? They walk? I am constantly running, jumping up from the table to get another fork or catching a train or trying to get the kitchen garbage bag down four flights of stairs before the molecular cohesion of the plastic it’s made of gives up the ghost and coats the stairs with what probably should’ve been composted anyway. My days accelerando to presto and stay there. When I wave I lose the time I save because my fuzzy whiskers took me too much time to shave.

I’m writing from 11 at night until 2 in the morning, but then I wake up to start my actual day, long before Hans Zimmer is enjoying his fresh melon and rainfall shower. I’m always trying to “fit stuff in”. And I live in the age of absolute miracles. Phone calls: used to have to wait for the dial to turn all the way back before you dialed the next number… where’s all that saved time? That should be, like, two days extra every year. I don’t have to look things up anymore with Siri around, still have to do dishes but now we’re lucky enough to have a dishwasher, my commute’s only 35 minutes and I’m too tired to meet up, club-hop, hang out, or party. I should have time in a bottle. Several bottles. I should have a wine cave filled with time bottles.

There is more to watch, but less time to watch it. I used to binge HBO shows back in the day, rocking the DVD sets; now we have to dutifully schedule YouTube shows that are only 12 minutes long. I’m at an endless buffet but I’m standing on one of those moving sidewalks from the airport. Lucky to grab a cherry tomato at that pace.

Ok, I’m unravelling, I can feel that, I’m not denying it. I just can’t see the bridge from here to there; from this wonderful tiny room I’m in in Brooklyn to our sprawling beachfront heavily windowed yet feels-so-secluded space that I’m constantly WALKING through and not running. Ok, only 12 people in the world have that reality, I know, and they’re all on YouTube, ‘cause I’ve spent 12 minutes watching each of them so I could have saved THAT 144 minutes and used it for something I guess.

The thing about quote unquote classical music is that it really does take time to write. Pop music talks about time a lot, but at its essence each song is around under 5 minutes.

Time Is On My Side

Time In A Bottle

Times Like These

Wonderful songs about time that don’t take up that much of it. Except my favorite tune about time, “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers. It is a sprawling melon of a song, a nearly 12 minute long psychedelic masterpiece of rock and roll with a callback to “The Little Drummer Boy” and more cowbell than Blue Oyster Cult could ever imagine.

I guess I don’t care if I have one of those crazy time signatures like 7/4 or 19/16 as long as my rhythm’s steady. That’s what I find most important, because no matter the pace it’s always the rhythm moving us forward. I may not live a life that one can amble through loconically, but it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.

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