Thoughts on Songs for Birds

Painted Lady

Painted Lady

(All the photographs in this post were taken at Lurie Garden, Millennium Park, Chicago on a couple afternoons last week…and have nothing to do with the content.)

It was a somewhat quiet weekend, with plenty of time to sleep and reflect. I had only one mission, and that was to drive into the city on Saturday morning to take my guitars in to Chicago Fretworks for repair. I have been thinking about doing this for years, only to somehow talk myself out of it with that inner voice that asked, “When are you going to find the time to play?” and knowing full well that after not having played for more years than I care to admit, it would be worse than riding a bicycle after a long absence, for the frustration of trying to build up calluses on my left fingertips alone.

Clouded Sulphur Lurie 8-5-15-8464

Clouded Sulphur

But a number of forces have converged to light the fire under me to start playing my guitars again. Perhaps the most significant force is a need to respond to all the insanity. It has been and will always be wonderful to play piano, but I miss the guitar for the intimacy of cradling an instrument on my lap, with the vibrations of the strings going right through me. This is how I will write songs again. Only this time, they will be songs for birds.

Common Green Darner

Common Green Darner

I trust the indoor crowd will bear with me while I regain enough facility to sound not too bad. I have fewer expectations of any prowess than I did when I went back to playing piano, so it shouldn’t be too humiliating. Then there lurks in the back of my mind the thought that eventually, weather permitting, I could play music for wild birds again. Even if it means coming downtown on a weekend, I would love to play music for my crows. And by that time have something else to sing for them besides “There is Nothing Like a Crow” to the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune for “There is Nothing Like a Dame.”

Twelve-Spotted Skimmer

Twelve-Spotted Skimmer

The forces that have converged? I am giving credit at this point only to the positive ones. Falling in love with David Wax Museum. Not wishing I was young and on the road again, just finding so much in their music to explore and connect with. The music is infectious, and David Wax’s lyrics are often priceless. Personal Anthems.

Hearing Mavis Staples interviewed twice on NPR: she talked about singing protest songs for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The sense that music had a purpose beyond music. I don’t necessarily aim to inspire anyone, but I feel the need to protest the insanity. To make noise. And this is the only true way I know how.

American Lady

American Lady

If there can be any silver lining in the disappointing fact that Operation Rubythroat’s excursion to Guatemala in November–which I was looking forward to–has been canceled due to lack of participation, I will have more time to play the guitars and the cost of rebuilding my Guild 12-string will be less painful!

Monarch on Swamp Milkweed

Monarch on Swamp Milkweed

Making music is good for an old body, too. All the pains and inconvenient stiffnesses that were making my life miserable, no doubt in a negative response to the insanity, seem to be floating outward, released, wafting in the air, or in the case of swimming, lost to the water in the pool… I can almost fly. If nothing else, my heart will soar. With the birds.

P.S. The pictures in this post are not related to the topic but I suspect they’re not totally unrelated either?

Wasps in the Rattlesnake Master

Wasps in the Rattlesnake Master

Offering Sacrifices to the Software Gods

Journals 3-1-14 6200.jpg-6200

This blog post is totally off-topic, I think — well, given the Endless Winter, maybe not totally off-topic — but I feel the need to vent my frustration and so I am giving space to it.

For years I used to carry around little spiral-bound notebooks, journalling on the train, on a plane, up in my mother’s room when I went to visit my dad and brother after she died, wherever…until communing with a laptop became more expedient. Not to mention that I once left a notebook in the ladies room of the Chicago Theatre the first time I went to see Steely Dan and I never recovered it. I imagine it was simply thrown in the trash, but for quite a while I got slightly paranoid and thought somehow someone had stolen the notebook or would find it and manage to trace it to me, even though my name wasn’t on it. A lot of the early bird-and-music observations are buried somewhere in much earlier notebooks such as the ones pictured above, and someday I have to go through and decipher them, my handwriting not always being legible even to me, since I have always thought faster than I can write, and it still happens to me even as I type at the speed of 120 wpm.

But now that everything is supposedly secure with my new laptop, it’s only fitting that I find a new cause for paranoia. Somewhere in the last day or two, I think it might have been yesterday morning, I saved and closed everything and let Apple install the latest security update, which I had read about, I think, in the New York Times the day before, and it didn’t seem like an issue I had time to deal with, as far as backing up All My Data before, since I have never, ever lost a text document…

Drivel is sometimes my only verification of existence, especially when the Crows aren’t around. I don’t take it personally with the Crows, they’ll be back as soon as the weather improves.

Crow IMG_0150_1

Well, suffice it to say that I am glad I didn’t lose any of my work I was doing with the photographs, although I do have the original photos backed up externally – but I lost the entire month of drivel for February 2014, whatever it was, basically stuff that I wrote on the weekends, sometimes a comment here and there during the week, nothing terribly important, I don’t think – except that now I will never know.

I guess I’ve been lucky. Just dumb luck. Read about this happening to people all the time, right? The stupid file was saved! I didn’t lose December or January. What happened to February? I lost a month of my life. Not the first time it’s happened (having had an entire laptop stolen) and likely not the last either.

Where the paranoia sets in? Maybe I’m being spied on by the NSA and it’s incorporated into the Mac update. Wouldn’t surprise me. Not that I’m doing anything any more subversive than anybody else. I may have signed a few extra petitions and letters urging people to drop the Keystone XL… but that’s another off-topic blog post let’s hope not in the making.

I am still fried over this lost file, but I will never ever recover it – I’ve been everywhere on the Mac and it does not exist, and yes, I downloaded some free software to look for it which doesn’t help either – it simply got swept up during the installation or restart or whatever it was that went on yesterday or the day before or the night before or whenever it was that I allowed this to happen. Maybe it was last night when I was just too tired to do anything? No, I was falling asleep reading something. It wasn’t last night. Just as well I didn’t notice it last night, it would have pissed me off even more and I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. I am simply going to start saving these damned things on a flash drive. It’s easier and I can always overwrite with the latest version. Period.

Thanks for listening to my rant. I’ll be back soon with an update on the baby birds.

P.S. Arggh!! As I am now restoring the last version of this post…

Well I’d be really annoyed if any of my picture work disappeared along with it so I guess I can live with this small sacrifice. Offering up journals to the software gods. Really.