Diary: 16th-24th November 2000

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Thursday 16th November

    Nothing good to say, really.   Am still frustrated at my attempts to record vocals.   Further blackness of mood engendered by theft of gear from the place I work at (I do recording etc. with a variety of musicians and bands).   

    As a rule, you see, my opinion of people as a whole is a balance between the pulls of two opposing extremes: on the one hand, I have a deep faith in human nature, I believe everyone is inherently good, and only being exposed to negative or misleading learning experiences pushes us off course, and causes our perception to be muddied, our values distorted, and inaccurate and unhelpful beliefs to prevail.

   On the other hand, often I look around me at the world we live in, and can draw no other conclusion except that, as the late great Bill Hicks once put it, we are no more than "a virus with shoes", and when we're not treating each other like shit, we're exploiting and abusing everything else that exists on this globe we inhabit.   Wow, the most highly evolved animal on the planet, see how much we achieve with our incredible intellects.   See how well we use the incredible power we have.

   Sometimes I think, hmmm, if the CIA or whoever did accidentally release one of those bugs they're working on that would wipe out the entire human race but leave everything else intact, and if we all did suddenly die, would that be such a bad thing?   I mean, you know, obviously I'm not into people suffering unnecessarily, but if there was nobody left to be sad about everyone being dead, er, no-one would be upset and, er, the planet would have a chance to recover from the years of short-sighted abuse we've subjected it to, and, maybe once the balance of nature had been restored, maybe then there'd be a chance for evolution to give it another go, back to the drawing board as it were, and, you know, maybe after a few million years, there'd be a new kind of creature whose intellect didn't turn it into some ravaging demon, and maybe then those beings could look around themselves and say, hey, we're doing okay, we live in harmony with the other creatures on the planet, we treat each other with compassion and respect, our existence here is generally valuable, all beings are obviously part of one universal consciousness (despite the illusion of separateness), and peace and love would be the order of the day.

    Maybe.

    But as far as the human race goes, at the moment I'm kinda leaning towards the virus-with-shoes end of the continuum.   (About 98% of the way).

    I dunno, maybe there is hope for the human race, maybe our evolution is poised on the brink of a massive elevation of awareness and consciousness (as Timothy Leary, among others, has suggested), maybe it's not entirely inevitable that the human race will destroy itself and everything else with it.   I remain to be convinced, but in the meantime there's always hope.   And when there's no hope, there's always alcohol.

Monday 20th November

    Well, things have been kind of up and down since my last entry (that's going out to all you lovers of innuendo), some fine moments and some awful ones, but seem to have settled down of late.   (Good job, I was starting to get a bit seasick.)

    Good things include last night at the Old Mo music night, the improved atmosphere was a winner, both performers and audience seemed to really enjoy themselves.   It's not often I leave a gig feeling inspired and uplifted, but that was one such occasion.   Long may it continue!

    Other than that, I've come to the realisation that the main reason I'm having so much trouble recording a vocal that I'm satisfied with is that I genuinely don't like the way my voice sounds, at all.   This is a problem, because to fundamentally change that is impossible without major surgery; to change it at all requires hard work and dedication, and actually practising, and I'm impatient and lazy.   I guess as an interim measure I'll have to work on my attitude & perception, as I reckon that's more easily malleable.   So hopefully out of the vocals I've already recorded, I'll be able to patch together something that I can post on the website without thinking "Nooooooo!!!" every time I hear it.

    There should be a new track up within the week!   Watch this space, etc.

Friday 24th November

    Hey hey!   The new track is up, "When You Smile", I could have carried on redoing bits of it forever, but you have to get to a point where you go, right, that'll have to do for now, leave it, and move on.   I suppose if you demand that every piece of work you do should come up to your ultimate ideal, you'd never get anything done, and you'd spend your whole life on one unfinished thing, going "Hmm, not quite right ..." !

    So there you go!   Enjoy!   The only other news to report is that I've totally broken my computer yet again

    So I may not be posting much on the website for a while, I may be sulking instead.   But hey, it's a different thing to get frustrated with!

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