Rebellious
Making things harder
Strengthen the weaker muscles
Needless obstacles
06
Feb
2020
1:56
Author: Heath
01
Feb
2020
20:53
My Abandoned Corner
I feel like when Twitter and Facebook took over the internet, it mostly killed blogs. People don’t want to leave their walled gardens for content. My blog never had a lot of traffic but these days, I figure there’s next to none. And of course, that isn’t helped by the fact that I never post here because I’m always posting on Facebook. But I also post more there because that’s where the people are so it’s a bit a snake eating its tail, chicken or the egg kind of scenario.
Sometimes though, I find this a bit comforting. Like there was a thought I had and kind of wanted to express but didn’t necessarily want a lot of attention on it, and I thought this blog seemed like a perfect place. It scratches that itch of expressing the thought and yet probably no one (or very few people) will see it. A strange middle ground I know. I’m not even sure why it feels good to express stuff like this if you aren’t looking for reactions, sympathy, or comfort or something, but it does.
I’m not sure why I hesitate expressing personal, vulnerable things sometimes. My best guess is that it’s because part of me thinks “Why? What’s the point in posting that? I don’t want sympathy or comfort and people probably don’t want to hear it any way,” or maybe it’s some fear in me about being judged or exposing myself like that (though I tend to be a pretty open book), or some combination of these and other factors. My mind does love analyzing these things though. I knew from a young age that if music and acting weren’t my calling, then psychologist or psychiatrist would have been a career path for me.
Any way, the thought that inspired all these other thoughts was simply this: it has now been just over a year since my last electronic communication with her (about 2 years since our last non-electronic communication). I never in all eternity thought we would end up here. Completely disconnected as if we didn’t know each other and had never met. Not even polite holiday greetings. I thought at the very least, we would always be friends and in each other’s lives. Then again, I thought we would always be together, so what did I know. I was wrong about a whole plethora of things.
01
Feb
2020
20:31
12
Jan
2020
3:22
Life’s Strange And Beautiful Road
In 1999, I lived in Dallas for a year. My roommate Esteban and I went to see the Arcangels at a club in Fort Worth. The opening band was a band called Cadillac Voodoo Choir and we were both blown away by them. We were also both particularly blown away by the keyboard player, a guy named Danny Smith. He was a great musician, singer and just had a great stage presence. I got their CD. Later on, just for fun, I learned all the guitar parts on their CD, and thought, “Hey if they ever need a guitarist, I know it all now!.
Fast forward several years (I can’t remember the exact time). I have no recollection of exactly how this meeting came to be, but I was living back in College Station again (my home town), and I drove to Austin to meet the drummer of Cadillac Voodoo Choir (which I think may have been defunct at this point) to talk about a new project he was getting together. We met at Star Seeds, had a conversation and I gave him a demo CD with some of my originals. Nothing ever came of it.
Then tonight, I had a gig with Scottish Thunder. Through a series of random coincidences and chains of events, Danny Smith ended up sitting in with us tonight on keys, guitar and vocals. Super talented, and more than that just a phenomenally nice guy. The more we talked the more we seemed to have in common and I felt that “kindred spirit” vibe. The “brother from another mother” thing.
And as coincidence icing on the coincidence cake, I happened to mentioned one of my all time favorite artists and influences, Butch Walker, and while most people have no idea who he is, it turned out that Danny is friends with him. Now in my world this is kind of like if someone was like “Paul McCartney? Oh yeah, we’re buds!”
Anyway it was a phenomenally fun gig with 4 other super talented friends and I felt like we were pretty solid, put on a good show and at the very least had a blast doing it with good people. Life is strange and beautiful.
12
Jan
2020
3:21
04
Dec
2019
1:44
04
Dec
2019
1:37
“Pride And Joy” Bass Tablature
I love that you can find many original isolated tracks on youtube which are great for really hearing details when learning songs. I found the isolated bass track to “Pride and Joy” by SRV so I could really work on the nuances. If anyone else would like to benefit from my painstaking work, here’s a PDF of the tablature. This should be almost note perfect. The only exceptions are that there are times when he is sort of muting the upbeats and such, as opposed to playing a really audible open string on the upbeat (which is a lot of the song) but all the important and audible notes should be there.
01
Oct
2019
18:49
Dream Theatre 52
In this dream I was snuggled up on a couch with Jane Wiedlin, guitarist for The Go-Gos. We were both lying down on the couch (a tight fit for two people, but possible). I was reading and she was watching something on TV, I think. Something on the TV kind of bummed her out and she turned to me a little distraught with the state of the world, so I put the book down, put both arms around her and hugged her tight. In that moment, the world was a little better.
01
Oct
2019
18:46
13
Sep
2019
16:31
Dream Theatre 51
A trio of strange dreams last night. The first two seem to share a theme of fear of lending stuff to people. At least on the surface.
In part 1, I was working (not sure in what capacity) in a big space in a strip mall. My friend Kyle (who I once worked with at a video game company) had borrowed my car, which in the dream was the red Mazda 323 that was my mom’s car and the first car I learned to drive and shared with her in the subsequent years. He had supposedly returned from his errand and parked it back at the strip mall (where he worked with me, I believe). It was a late night of work and as I was leaving to go home around 7pm or so, I saw some people walking out in a group. There was something strange about their look and demeanor, and I think I overheard something indicating that there was about to a news story about them, and how they had been caught up in some scandal.
I walked out to parking lot to go home, but I couldn’t find my car. I looked all around the parking lot but it was nowhere. I looked several more times, thinking surely I had just missed it, but it was not there. I called Kyle to confirm that he had returned it and to ask if he had maybe parked it somewhere else. I was starting to freak out a little as I was sure it had been stolen.
Now the next part, in true dream non-logic style, I’m not sure if it actually “happened” in the dream or if it was just one of the branches my mind was contemplating as a possible explanation, but when I got Kyle on the phone, he was very apologetic and realized that he had just absent-mindedly drove it home when he left.
In part 2 of this dream trio, I was in a particular neighborhood of my home town near where my friend Esteban used to live. A woman (in the dream, I knew her, but I don’t remember her having a specific real world identity), asked if she could borrow my phone, so I handed it to her thinking that she just needed to look something up or make a quick call. She pulled up the navigation software and started walking away, and kept walking. Far too late, I realized that she was going to use my phone to navigate all the way to her destination, and I had no idea where that was or when I would get my phone back. At some point, I either got a hold of her or saw her again (I can’t remember which) and she said my phone was still at the destination and that I could come get it if I wanted to, which was highly inconvenient for me.
And in the last dream, I was being put up in a (purely fictional) apartment as part of a movie shoot. This apartment was right next to the (also purely fictional) apartment that my ex had lived in. The shoot had ended and I was now leaving the apartment when my phone rang and it was, coincidentally, my ex calling me for the first time in years. I remember the tone of the conversation being happy, sweet, close and immediately there was an intimate connection again. I told her how crazy it was that she happened to be calling at this moment as I was leaving the place I’d been staying which was right next to her old place. It was really nice.
Then I woke up.