sounds familiar

As an engineer steeped in the culture of my Fortune 100 sawmill, I am data-driven.  In fact, I horde data.  Collect it in raw form because I know that, through the power of pivot tables and frequency analyses and causation/correlation studies, it can be an endless pool to draw conclusions upon.  Interpreted the right way, data can justify spending, get people hired, get people fired, win arguments and lend credence to points.

In fact, at the sawmill we place so much emphasis on data-backed execution that it’s become part of my life.  I can’t stop seeing data, craving data, generating and storing data.  I do it for things like my finances, my diet and exercise, my personal time.  I try to make decisions based on data, and work to capture and store useful data for that very use at a later time.

I guess most folks, analytical folks, do this sort of thing anyway.  It’s pretty much a subconscious human behavior.  Going to a new restaraunt, ordering the fish while your wife goes with the lamb.  Realizing, after the inevitable sharing-of-bites from each other’s plates, that the lamb is fantastic and that the fish is, even without comparison, nothing to write home about.  Realize it or not, you’ve just created a file on this in your brain.  You have a piece of data which says that, based on prior experience, it’s better to go with lamb than fish at the Overton House.  Maybe later along you have an opportunity to talk to someone, whose opinion you value, about their dining experience at the Overton House and they, unlike you, thought the fish was fine.  In your brain you may file a “minority report,” or some “note of doubt” against your personal fish-at-Overton-House experience.  It’s all data; we all do it; I just think I see it for what it is because it’s what I breathe all day at work.

I spent those paragraphs setting up my data-driven nature so I could talk about Keaton turning five.  It happens before the month’s out, and the milestone has been on my mind more and more as the day approaches. Five years old.  Wow; I find that… simply amazing.  I was writing a mail to my mom the other day and had the occasion to muse, “When I was fifteen or so I can remember thinking it seemed like forever until, as a kid, you turn eighteen and get to go out on your own to college.  Now I find myself thinking eighteen years is a pittance to spend with my kids, and get downright sad when I realize my little girl is already almost 30% to that point.” It’s that bit about 30% that got me a-thinking on the data-driven nature of my thoughts (great sentence, that one).  At the time, I hadn’t actually done the math – but my mental wizardry told me that five was at least a third of fifteen, so it must be something close to 30% of eighteen.

Turns out five is actually about 28% of eighteen (check my math, I’m not so good at it).  And, for that matter, 28% is pretty close to 30% (uh-oh, I’m heading down that slippery slope of strategic-estimation to make things appear better or worse; my brother used to be able to convince himself that his birthday was “tomorrow” by deciding that the day before, the current day, maybe tomorrow, and other chosen days simply “didn’t count”).  So, I wasn’t that far off.  My little girl is some 30% through to that arbitrary age where we think of “kids” as”adults.”  Without having their first solo lion hunt and kill; without getting the tenth ring around their neck or walking across the hot coals; without being proven in battle or bedding the village wise-woman. Coming of age tied to naught but the right to vote and serve in the military (poor gits can’t even drink in most states).

I’m not really sad about it; I know we still have a lot of great time together to be had… I’m just intrigued by the statistic of it.  With any luck, I’ll live into my nineties and therefore still have the better-side of 50% to spend with this family we’ve created.  God knows I’m pretty much 200% in love with them all.

Goodnight.

This intensely gorgeous Sunday afternoon finds me typing on my laptop in the garage.

I’ve set the music to shuffle “all songs” for the Dead, and Jerry is dreamily noodling behind me, “Playing in the Band.”  I’m drinking a Downtown Brown and smoking my pipe; I broke into a old tin of Dunhill’s London Mixture for the occasion – to this American it’s a lavish tobacco and it works perfectly against the brown ale.  My feet are bare and I’m wearing shorts and a t-shirt.  The baby is sleeping inside and Sharaun’s about to leave for the gym.  Keaton is playing in the front yard with her next-door neighbor friend.  I brought my book out here with me so I can read when I get tired of writing, or “wake up” to the fact that everything’s going on around me whilst I stare at a damned screen like I do every day at the office.

I’ll bet you didn’t know, friends, just like Keaton and the neighbor girl didn’t, that there’s a secret underground kingdom beneath our front yard.

Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe – but it’s there; I have proof.  You see, we found a door.  It’s been there all along, right in the corner of our yard!  And to make it more obvious, the name of the subterranean lands which lie hidden beneath its hinges is stenciled right on front: SMUD.  The secret underground kingdom of SMUD, hiding in plain sight all these years and we’ve never thought to think about it.  But no more!  Today the scales fell off and we got interested.  Keaton, the neighbor, and dad went into full-on explorer mode.  By jove if there’s a door to a secret kingdom right in our own front yard we are duty-bound to make contact with the inhabitants and establish neighborly relations (even if these neighbors are underneath rather than to the left or right).

At first we tried knocking, but no one answered.  Silly explorers, we forgot that our daytime is the darkest dead of midnight in the kingdom of SMUD – everyone must be sound asleep!  But we couldn’t wait until nightfall, there had to be another way.  Keaton had an epiphany and ran inside, double-timing it back a minute later with an array of keys we could try in the door.  Nothing worked.  Perhaps, dad pondered, there might be a secret password!  Like in the story of the forty thieves or when Gandalf gets the crew into Moria.  We try several guesses: “abracadabra,” “SMUD,” etc.  Dad offers up “open sesame,” and we even speak the most magic of all magic words: “please.”  All to no avail.

Presently, I’ve left the girls to the chore of waking or breaching – and they’re a dedicated duo!  I, on the other hand, am taking a break.  Every so often they run over to test a new thought, “Maybe we need tools!?”  “Good idea,” I encourage, “Here take this wrench and look for some kind of bolts or something!  Let me know how it goes, explorers!”  And they run off again into the sun.

And this, friends, is how to spend a Sunday.

Goodnight.

Hi Thursday.  Work today might suck, so I wrote this in preparation.

I like writing about music, so I thought I’d write today about songs that “move” me.  A lot of songs move me in positive ways, making me happy or pumped-up or reminiscent, but the sad songs seem to get the short shrift.  So today I want to focus on just a few songs which make me feel… sadness.  Some, in fact, move me to the point of tears; not because of some associated memory or anything, but just because the songcraft or words or whole package is done juuuust right.  Here then, are some songs that make me sad.

Save the Life of My Child – Simon & Garfunkel (from the album Bookends, 1967) [listen]

How can a song about teen suicide not be sad?

Poor kid.  Who knows what’s driven him to this.  To climb out onto the ledge of a building and contemplate ending it all.  Paul Simon narrates from a 3rd-party perspective, showing us the crowd and the cops and the poor child’s mom, begging someone to rescue her child, to not let him die.

Where does it wrench the gut?  Oh, people, if you’ve heard it all the way through and you don’t know… they you ain’t got blood in your veins.  After all that time up there, all alone with his thoughts, the crowd that’s gathered below is growing hungry with bloodlust.  As night falls and the the police train their spotlight on our protagonist, Simon almost laments, “He flew away.”  The song changes drastically, and is a cue for us to recognize that we’ve now entered the mind of our young jumper.  We hear his thoughts as he falls, “Oh my grace, I’ve got no hiding place.”  Over and over again.  The lack of resolution makes the resolution clear.

As soon as I hear that, “He flew away” bit… I get chills and can almost feel the weight of that fictional kid’s choice.  What an awesome song.

The Ballad of Humankindness – The Dears (from the album, Gang of Losers, 2006) [listen]

Who said sad songs can’t be powerful?  Because, let me tell you, if a dude did say it that dude was dead wrong.

By now you’ve maybe queued up the song from the Grooveshark link and it’s starting.  You might be wondering, “Dave… this sounds cheesey.”  Stick with me!  Please, I beg.  Just make it through the trumpet solo (and don’t let the fact that there’s a trumpet solo turn you off).  Right around the end of that solo, you’ll hear a stray tambourine… it’s your warning bell, your omen, your hint of the amazing denouement to come.  Musically, this track is like a lovely jack-in-the-box, winding and winding and winding and finally exploding into an orgasm of arpeggio guitars, steady tambourine, sing-song chorus, and that final strum-hold/strum-hold/strum-through rhythm.  Musically, it’s bright and powerful and… maybe you’d say… happy-sounding.

But lyrically… lyrically I want to re-cast it for you.  Listen to Lightburn’s words.  Listen.  Bemoaning the plight of the homeless, Lightburn asks himself what he’s been doing about it.  Indicts himself for simply “living with” such a terrible situation.  The part that cuts me to the bone is the impassioned, “I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change!” verse.  It’s a song about being disgusted with yourself for not heeding your WWJD bracelet.  Maybe the words are a bit over-the-top, but I love the sentiment.  The guilt, the shame, all of it comes across really well for me – and qualifies as a song that makes me sad.

Little Dancing Girl – Harry Connick Jr. (from the album Lofty’s Roach Souffle, 1990) [listen]

There are no words to this song.  In fact there are no words on this entire album.

But people, this is one sad song.  I don’t pretend to know what it’s about, other than maybe a little dancing girl, but I like to imagine a story in my head of a father who, for whatever reason, has lost his daughter.  Years ago, maybe it was an accident, or a divorce, or even just bad blood and a broken relationship.  This song is him remembering when things were better.  When she was maybe five and he was her idol and her rock and everything she looked up to in the world.  He can think back to that day, maybe she was just dancing around silly in the house, maybe it was her ballet recital, but it’s a perfect memory and he holds onto it.

The song really gets bad, sad-wise, when everything else drops away and all you get is the upright bass, somewhere around the 3:40 mark you get that little bass solo.  So deep and round are the notes on that big bass that you have to turn the stereo waaay up to hear it.  But this bass breakdown represents, to me, my fictional dad’s breakdown.  He knows his memory isn’t reality and this is the part where it all falls apart.  Dang.  Tearjerker (in my own mind).

She Sends Kisses – The Wrens (from the album The Meadowlands, 2003) [listen]

I wrote about this song already, back in 2004.  I loved it then and I love it now.  The lyrics are so perfect, 100% unrequited love.  The girl is gone.  She’s been gone.  He spent a lot of time missing her, still misses her, maybe not rawly or every day anymore, but he still loves her.  He’s got all these memories of the time they spent together, how much he worked for her, how badly he wanted her.  “Hopes pinned to poses honed in men’s room mirrors,” and “I put your face on her all year,” are simply amazing bits of lyric.

And then, around the crescendo things go dim.  My eyes go damp, my chest goes tight.  This poor, sad, pining sucker.  This dude is head over heels and this specter from the past just sent him a note signed with Xs and Os.  Those are stupid-letter-code for kisses!  Kisses?! That bitch!  After all this time she’s going to do this to me?!  He reads the note and sees those Xs and Os, knows what they mean and all of the sudden, “Back doors blow open.”  Every memory cued at half speed, it all comes flooding back.  Xs and Os.

Oh you poor man.  Down the rabbit hole again.

Thorn Tree In the Garden – Derek & the Dominos (from the album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, 1971) [listen]

A gorgeous song by Dominos member Bobby Whitlock.  An unbelievable stereo mix, the guitar and sparse knocking percussion clear and present and balanced.  The harmonics repeated in the background almost like bells.  I imagine I can hear Whitlock’s held-back tears.  At the end, when he goes falsetto to wonder, “And maybe some day soon, some way…” you want to just put your arms around they guy and tell him it’s going to be OK, it’s all going to be alright.

I wonder how many people have listened to this song whilst bawling over their very own lost love.  I wonder what they’d think if they learned Whitlock was actually singing about a dog.  Yeah.  A dog.  A roommate of his took his dog and killed it. Bobby hated him for it and wrote this song to “out” him to the world as the guy who did such and awful thing to the pet he loved.  Don’t worry though, those of you who may have misappropriated the track, Whitlock himself clarifies, “It’s all about love anyway. There is no love of this and not that. There’s no measure of it. Whether it’s a dog, your mother, dad, brother, sister, your companion, your horse or your neighbor, it is that one thing. It doesn’t have a distinction. There’s no barrier, it’s just one thing that encompasses everything if you stop and think about it.”

OK, that’s enough for sad songs.  Here, have a tissue.

How about you?  Got any songs that start the waterworks every time?  What did I forget?  “Tears in Heaven?”  Cash’s “Hurt” cover?  Yeah, saaaad.

Goodnight.

Saturday in California the weather went downright Springy.

70° and a few high wisps of cloud.  Sharaun had all-day (and most-of-the-night) plans with girlfriends so I was playing daycare (it’s actually kind of dumb to say that, like it’s not half my job anyway… but I find men do make jokes about it so I guess I’m part of the herd).  Around 2:30pm I decided it was too night to say inside, even if to listen to some fine music and read The Hobbit with Keaton.  Since the trees, both ornamental and fruit, needed pruning I decided it would be a good hour of sunshine and fresh air.

Put the new Dead Road Trips (’88 April Fools Day show) on the outdoor speakers and pulled out the ladder and went to work. I chopped and trimmed and shaped and formed, not really knowing if I’m doing ill or good, not really caring (OK, kinda caring if I’m forever ruining the fruit trees, but I did do some internet research – three minutes looking at “good pruning” vs. “bad pruning” pictures – beforehand) if I was doing it totally right or not.  In the end I think I did OK, although standing back and looking at the Japanese maple I think I could’ve been even more heavy-handed, guess we’ll see when the canopy begins coming in for true-Spring.  Afterward I gathered up my cut branches and put them into a pile (the green waste thing is full of winter clippings).

Know what though?  I didn’t want to write about pruning or the weather or how great it was being outside doing something.  Nope.

I wanted to write about the small blister on my right ringfinger.

It was maybe an hour.  Maybe.

How soft have I become?  Apparently that soft.  So soft that an hour, if even that, of what would be classed somewhere below “light” work leads to a blister.  Egad!  The humanity!  This life of computers and cubicles and elevators instead of stairs and supermarkets and horseless carriages and insoles has torn me down.

On YouTube this weekend I saw a video of a native dude in some dense jungle scaling a tree that must’ve been a hundred feet tall with nothing but a vine and rough-made axe.  Once at the top he walked bravely out on a spindly limb, high above the ground, not tethered to anything, and proceeded to chop a hole in the limb to reveal a massive hive of jungle-bees.  He then blew smoke from a smoldering bundle of leaves – which he’d hauled behind him tied to his waist – into the hole, getting stung the entire time.  As the angry bees swarmed, he reached bare-handed (and bare-feeted, for that matter) into the hive to break off and steal honeycomb. After hepping that honeycomb down to the jungle floor he and his family feasted on the raw comb, hungrily plunging comb and bees and all into their grateful mouths.

This is from whence we all came.

The guy who got a blister from pruning his Japanese maple… blood and mettle so thinned by time and trade.

I run from a bee.  A bee.

Goodnight.