Spring Break 2022!

Hello, good readers of the ofigueroamusicblog. It's been a pretty long time since I've updated, so here I am, ready to share more information on what it's like working at the job still under covid conditions and more. 

First, the working conditions have improved since I've last posted. There was going to be a possible strike but the company ended up giving in to most but not all of the demands from the union. We've also since added more staff to the front end. And inspiringly, I got promoted to cashier position after many years of toiling in the vineyards. 

However, this doesn't mean that the working conditions are optimal. We're still working under covid conditions, there are still a few covid cases every now and then, and most of the customers aren't wearing masks while they get extremely close to our bodies and faces. Covid has been extremely brutal for workers in the retail industry. In addition, now that the weather has become a lot hotter, the masks have become really hot again, but again, I can't take it off, unless I want to risk the wrath of possible covid exposures. 

I've mostly been chilling by myself and occasionally with a few friends. It's funny because, two years later, still under covid, I find myself only really going out to dinners with family and friends. It's my favorite social occasion. I've since left a lot of my many much more casual friends/acquaintances, to focus more on doing my own thing, which involves a lot of reading, guitar, and studying languages, mostly Spanish. 

I started the morning by reading Machiavelli's Mandrake, a comedy play about a young man who tricks an old scholar fool into letting him fuck his beautiful young wife. Talk about uncomfortable reading. In a way you could say c'est la vie but if it was your wife or your girlfriend what would you do? What if you never find out like our old scholar dude? It's certainly a funny story. Maybe the ends do justify the means, because in the end the wife wants to do it again with the young man, and even befriends him and gives him a room at her and her husband's estate. Talk about the ends justifying the means. 

I also found time to read Seneca's Agamemnon tragedy and start reading The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, a deep thinker for ya, anthropology and sociology.

Lastly, I even found time to jam with my friend Jason who plays the alto saxophone. You can find our most recent live recording here.

Although work has been the norm throughout and around all this activity, I'll be able to rest easy knowing that I'll be getting the better contract raises, and although I'll get less hours as a result of getting paid more, in that process I'll actually get the same and/or more money for less hours of work. Not too shabby! I found 100 rupees! 

Although I haven't gone anywhere in a few years and things have stayed relatively the same I feel like I'm on a grand spring break adventure for the moment. 

If you're looking for a reading adventure look no further than the beginning of my covid plague journal where I write about the beginning of the pandemic and the working conditions at the gig. There are many posts in the plague journal now after these two covid years. Read all about it here.

Let there be peace and love in the universe as well as within your life. 

Gestalt

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about art, music, history, ideas, philosophy, zen, and the like. Almost a year ago I came upon the sudden realization that my focus was attenuated by my own distractions, resulting in poor work service and social skills among my friends and peers. Thankfully, I've been working on all that and things have been going swimmingly. You could even say people love me, even people who aren't my family or apart of my immediate friendship circle. I'm ready for the Orlando Fanclub LOL. 

In all seriousness, what I am truly talking about here is thinking processes on a metaphysical level. Gestalt actually. This is a German word for shape or form, and its the idea that systems and their properties should be viewed as a whole, not as loose collections of parts.

What really got me going with this was reading Heidegger's Being and Time, a book so immensely prolix that I'm not quite sure anybody who's read it quite understands it, or definitely doesn't understand all of it, but perhaps portions, or segments of it. Being and Time got me thinking about life metaphysically. What is life, what is being, what is time, what does it mean to be apart of the worldhood of the world? Etc. 

I've thought about these things as part of Heidegger's thought processes but that is too complicated to go into here [blog in the future incoming on that book], so rather I'll focus on what I think about these ideas. 

Life is the optimal persona [don't ask, its a California thing] of the soul, of a person, place, or thing. Being is the consciousness, so to speak, the thing that makes it a life plus everything else. This includes personality, physical, and mental traits of the person, and the way they make their thoughts process. Time is the standard measurement of life. To be apart of the worldhood of the world means to be a willing participant in the game of life, to want to be apart of social conventions. This includes work, friendship, family obligations, girlfriend, wife, kids, etc. Plato has different variations on these ideas, as does Heidegger.

My own thoughts on these ideas are simple, they're still valid still fair game. My thoughts on Being, or as Heidegger calls it, Dasein, has brought me to a new idea, a new way of thinking, thought processes. Basically, you don't have to think about your thoughts as being apart from each other. Rather, you can look at it as one entity. All your ideas could be thought of as one spontaneous act. Cycles of reality if you will. Your whole entire day could be thought of as one smooth motion rather than many different acts within 24 hours. That sort of thing. Frank Zappa had a word for this that I've since forgotten. But basically, he thought of all his recorded body of work, music, as one entity, rather than as individual albums or single inspirational moments. I'm thinking about daily ideas, activity, and thought processes in a similar way. 

This could also correlate to activities. You could do many things throughout the day with many different people, see a lot of places, do many things, and at the end of the day, you can look at it all as one activity, one single act of motion. 

I think about all this as cycles of reality, an idea I got ironically from a jazz song, from a modern jazz muso from New York, a drummer whose name I've forgotten. For me its a way of thinking in a more meta way, thoughts are more cohesive rather than random and disorganized. This isn't to say that all your ideas are related, rather when you think in this vast linear fashion, the worldhood of the world changes a bit, not it in itself, but rather the way you fit inside of it. It can come in handy sometimes when boredom is so ready at hand in the humdrum of everyday life. It connects everything together, you're more alert, so you don't look up and go, either in your mind or speaking to another person, "what?" 

What can I say? These Germans have me thinking metaphysically.