What's a brotha to do?

What's up ladies and gentlemen of the interwebz. It's been a minute since I last wrote a post. I've been on a blog/writing hiatus for a while now. The reason? A lot of work at the main retail gig mostly. Lately, I've been getting these long six-day work weeks. Eight hours, six days a week. They're exhausting but hey, I think they call that a job. 

I've been reading a lot. I recently finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Nearly 800 pages! At one point I was averaging about 100 pages a day. I'm currently reading the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Bring on more classics of the western canon! Brothers Karamazov is such a great work with so much gravitas that I think it deserves to be reread in a couple years if not sooner. 

The Canterbury Tales took me a long time to get into. For a while, I contemplated reading it but instead got hooked on video games for a few days. I've been playing a lot of Overwatch within my last two days off, leaving me in a kind of zoned-out, zombified, sort of state. The game is fun but it gets to be a little mind-numbing after a while. I've been in gaming limbo. Most of the time I don't play games at all but every now and then on days off, I play a lot. Missing out on precious reading time on days off.  

Actually, if I don't read pretty often [every day] my mind starts to wander and drift off into this kind of zoned-out mode. What can I say? I have to stay engaged in the literature to feel active in life. I've become such a reader that when I don't read for one-two days, I start to feel not quite like myself. Fiction especially. And philosophy. Literary essays. 

In terms of music, I've been playing weekly jazz duo jams with my friend Jason Thomas. I'll probably post some music from our sessions here at some point soon. The jam sessions have become more improvisational but I would say that we need to increase our repertoire. Especially Coltrane songs. Songs like Afro Blue, My Favorite Things, Naima, etc. 

I had a freaky moment at work during the past week where I met a music student who actually studied with my music mentor, the new music composer Frank Abbinanti. Apparently, Sid studied with Frank for five years [or more] in Chicago before he came out to California to study at Cal Art. This is pretty astounding. I was dumbstruck. This is where I get to say that I believe in God and metaphysics. What are the chances of meeting this guy? Considering that we are both from Chicago and both are mentored by Frank. Apparently, my step-father knows Sid and his father as well from when they used to run a new music orchestra. Wow! How about that? 

Having free time to write a rambling post like this has been great. In fact, I've been so tired from work lately that I haven't had the energy to turn on my laptop and write posts, let alone my usual book reviews. Instead, the last month or so I've been ranting a lot about retail, and my Marxist tendencies, as well as my arrival to class consciousness via retail work. It's a wonderful world. 

Plans for the future? Well, for one thing, I'm going to get back to my usual book review stuff. For another, I plan on going back and working on my first novel, which was written and finished a while ago, but definitely not perfect. I'm actually not satisfied with it and intend on going back to the original version, which didn't have much editing, without messing it up. My problem with my memoir initially was that I finished a rough draft and then wrote a longer, edited version. However, after going over the edited version I realized that it was edited in a wrongheaded way, forcing me to go back to the drawing board. 

Thankfully, I have the original version. Just to explain to you how different the original is from the edited version, the original version is only 50 pages, whereas the edited version is 100 pages. A lot of people have told me that I should submit it to publishers and try to get something done with it. We will see after I rework it again. 

Likewise, I want to write more short stories of a fictional nature. Science fiction and just plain, old, regular fiction. A reader must write if he or she is so inclined. I've been reading a lot of Jack Reacher [the short story collection]  so I'm inspired to write things in that vein. We will see. 

Lastly, it's not that I haven't quite had as much time to write that I haven't written anything. Rather, it's just that I've been damn tired. So tired that I haven't really been playing guitar much. I've stopped attending the bar open mics because I realized their limitations [two songs, ten minutes, buy drinks, too much $] and in fact, when I play and buy drinks there, I'm losing money and free time. In terms of music, I'm more motivated by Frank Abbinanti's musical advice and direction. In terms of writing, I'm very inspired. But sometimes you gotta force yourself to write. Even when you're dead tired. 

The holidays can be a real downer for people. This time of year is hard on workers because most people have to work during the holidays rather than spend time with their families. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. The important thing is to keep doing the things that motivate you and push yourself to get the things you want to be done. If you don't push yourself, nobody else will. 

I've got to keep pushing myself. 

Kickstart my heart

Howdy, everybody. Here I am back at it with another vlog-style post, life update sort of work. 

Work has been pretty intense. 40+ hours every week, sometimes only one day off. The holidays are here already. That's very scary for a retail worker like myself. I tried to request all the major holidays off. Not that I would actually get them off but I just had to try anyways for giggles. The pay is okay but not great. The work has become very boring. My only solace is that some of my coworkers are cool and some customers are cool. 

As a result of all this retail work experience, I've come to class consciousness. I'm not a full-on Marxist yet but you don't even need Marx and Engels to come to class consciousness. For that, all you need is struggle and contradiction [ironically also a part of Marxism sort of]. All this low-level grunt work forces you into action. You start to think about all the workers in their hierarchy. You see where you fit in and you come to realizations. Some good, some bad. Mostly bad. 

I'm this close to reading Adorno at this point. That's become my running joke lately: Retail work is so bad that it's forcing me to class consciousness. I don't really have as much time for my music, reading, or writing [that's why I haven't written book reviews for a while, forcing me to write these rants of the proletariat]. When you see how highly stratified American society is, and how the common man is treated, it forces you to wake up, to jump out of your small inner shell [my outsider musician shell], and look out into the world, and see for what it actually is. "If the doors of perception were completely cleansed, man would see the world for what it actually is." 

What do you do when you see this? Well, I'm not really sure there's anything I can do. That's just the way it is. It's possible that this entire society [America] is doomed, the government is corrupt to the core, and the environment along with wildlife is damned. Even if that was all true [I suspect it is honestly some days] is that all there is? 

"Is that all there is? If that's all there is, then let's go dancing."

Feelin' Alright

Ahoy shipmates, and welcome aboard. Lately, I've been writing vlog-style [lifestyle] posts so let's keep up in that fashion. The last two weeks I've been ranting a lot, a lot about hard work at the retail gig, Marxist theory, the stompin' upon the proletariat...blah blah blah. The truth is that within the last couple of weeks I've been feeling that work was becoming overwhelming. That the proletariat is being used and abused. Or something like that. 

I almost became a Marxist. That's one of my best jokes I've come up with recently. I was so fed up with working that I wanted to become a Marxist. Going so far as to consider spending my time reading more Marx and Engels, and Adorno, my music mentor's hero. I would say that I have a lot of Leftist influences and that my general political ideology is more aligned with that, rather than say, a pure form of straight capitalism, which we have seen now in 2019, no longer works. But that's an op-ed column for another day, wouldn't you say? 

So today rolls on by. I chilled with some friends and we did the same usual stuff. We played Smash Ultimate in three-player free for all, ate lunch, talked, and listened to some music on YouTube. I didn't take a Lyft from my friends' to work. Rather, I took the bus. The bus took about forty minutes because it was a slow bus on a Sunday, the laziest of all bus days. 

During the wait, I stood the entire time. I was mostly surveying the image of the valley canyons. I saw a customer who happened to be taking the bus and I told him how great the weather was, and how beautiful the valleys looked, and that we were lucky to live here. "Yeah, man, we're blessed." Being able to just stand around, enjoy the weather, and take in the scenery really calmed me down. It brought it all to me right there: dasein, time and being, the worldhood of the world. The important stuff I learned from Heidegger's Being and Time. Which one might say has to be experienced first before you even try to explain.

Long story short. Sometimes all it takes is a moment of self-reflection to realize how great life is, and how your impact on your world, community, etc, makes the world a better place if you will it, allow it, and make it so. "When you smile, the whole world smiles with you." It's actually true. The more upbeat and happy I am at work, the more people want to talk to me, and find out more about me. Likewise, the more gloomy I am, the fewer people want to talk to me. This goes back to a post I wrote some six months ago about how I had an epiphany about happiness, changing the way you think to attain this more often, regularly, etc. I'm no guru or anything. Rather, I am just a young grasshopper trying to attain enlightenment. 

One of the most liberating feelings in the world is being happy amongst others: family, friends, coworkers, customers, and managers. The other is being happy with yourself. Find the balance between the two and the universe seems to open up, engulfing you in a sea of happiness [or something like that lol].  "They call me mellow yellow...quite right."

It can be something simple like standing around, contemplating the canyons. Or it could be something more complicated like meditation. Whatever way you find it, when you find it, try not to lose it. However, if you do, remember you can always pick up where you last left off.  Even life has a pause button.

"When you smile, the whole world smiles with you."

A day in November

Keeping up to date with this vlog style posts I thought I'd write another update lifestyle piece. Life has been kind of grueling lately. I haven't had quite as much time for myself, friends, or music. This has left me with a lack of self-expression. What I have been getting in time for is my intellectual pursuits, reading, although my writing has slowed down quite a bit. 

I usually write a lot of book reviews but lately, I haven't had time to do them. So instead I've been doing these vlog pieces. My life isn't very interesting but I find solace in writing about it here. I have been able to find time for a lot of reading. In fact, I've been on a reading spree for the last couple of years, very intensely. 

I just finished reading The Outsider by Colin Wilson, the 1960s view into the outsider in literature, art, music, philosophy, in modern society as well. The book gave me a lot of insight into selfhood, and my own feelings, which are definitely outsider friendly. I feel like an outsider myself in most social situations, a painted bird if you will, but that's a tale for another post. 

Work has sort of been taking over. The more you work the more you can see why the ideas of the outsider are so important. "Escape from the weight of your corporate logo," as Frank Zappa said. The money is good but will it save my soul? Of course not. That's why reading, writing, music, and friendships are so important to me. The more I work ceaselessly, the more I crave to enter into selfhood, into self-reflection, and meditation. To escape into the self.  

This time of year I get these sorts of flashbacks from the Midwest. From my past. Most of it isn't very pleasant but the coldness is something that I enjoy. The cold weather, not the cold feelings that occasionally arise. The cold air in the valley, the brisk, hard winds, remind me of Chicago and Wauwatosa, a simpler time. When I think about the past I don't know what to make of it. I just can't seem to forget it. Perhaps a bit of melancholia? The neverending work doesn't help. It brings it out more.

I plan on spending more time on creative endeavors to get out of this funk. More guitar playing, keyboard playing, reading, writing, music listening. Hell, I might even play video games again or something just to do something different. I finished a novel about my life not too long ago. It took me over a year to write. And I do plan on writing a second novel as well. I plan on actually having an outline and mapping out this second fiction novel, unlike how I wrote the first one, a nonfiction story about my life, a memoir. I haven't done anything with it because I wasn't quite happy with it, and am unsure if it would ever be ready for the real world, let alone my friends or peers.

"There must be some kind of way out of here, said the Joker to the Thief."