The Night Owl Problem

I was first going to write this post back when I was working, but I suppose the fact that I'm starting it at one in the morning on a Thursday should pack the same amount of gravitas.

Here's the thing: I am not a morning person. I never really have been. Given the choice (as I have at the moment) I prefer to turn in somewhere between three and four in the morning and wake up around noon. It's a weird way of going about life, I understand that, but it's just what suits me best. However, whenever I am employed, that whole lifestyle is turned on its ear: I have to be awake and functioning far earlier than I'd ever choose to be, however no matter how hard I seem to try, I can't naturally acclimate to waking up at 7:00 or 7:30. Try as I may to break the pattern, my body seems to resist it. Even if I try to "get to bed early" (read: midnight or so) I still find myself laying wide awake in bed for hours on end until my body is finally ready to rest. Then when the weekend hits, I'm back to my old habits.

This is why, as I fairly broadly advertise, I am a bit cantankerous in the mornings. I have warned people for almost as long as I have known them: if you happen across me before about ten a.m., coffee or not, chances are, you will be met with some manner of scowl like you just insulted my mother. I honestly don't really want to be that way, but it seems like my body is much like a porcupine with its spikes: it just wants to send a clear "do not touch" message to anyone who can see me. I have famously either glared at or nearly flipped off a number of friends and acquaintances who give a gentle honk to get my attention while I'm on my way to work. Perhaps the most notable of these times was about six months back when my friend's brother-in-law saw me as I was crossing the street in front of his car at a stop sign. He gave a quick honk to say "good morning" and I stopped dead in my tracks in front of his car, thinking he was honking that I wasn't getting through the intersection quickly enough. As I wildly gesticulated and yelled "STOP SIGN" at him, he rolled down his window and said hi. Apparently I seemed so irate that he felt he had to text my friend to have him apologize for the "unnecessary spike in blood pressure" he had caused me.

What amazes me more is the fact that, when working, I tend to end up being awake for so long any given day. It could be the reason that no matter how much coffee, Red Bull, or 5 Hour Energy drinks I have, I am still tired until about 10 or 11 in the morning - I think my body just tells itself that it is either still asleep or about ready to go back to bed. More interesting is in the evenings: I can be dead on my feet at 8pm, and almost ready to go to sleep, but suddenly, once the clock gets close to about 11pm, I wake up like an eight year old who just drank a two liter Mountain Dew. It's like I miss my window to fall asleep, and as a punishment, I am stuck awake for at least three more hours. It's uncanny. What's worse is that during that time is hands-down when I am most productive. I'd say most of my college papers and probably at least a third of my master's thesis were written between eleven at night and four in the morning. It's just how I work, so as a result, I feel guilty since I know I'm not as productive at work as I can be.

One other snag in this situation is that what should be the obvious solution of finding a job where I can work nights is that, in all honesty, I don't want to because, again, I get so much done during this time of the day/night/morning that I wouldn't want to use all this focus and energy for work only to be asleep or unproductive during my other waking hours.

In short, I'm kind of a mess and this post has dragged on far too long already. I'll be back in the next couple of days with something that is hopefully a tad more entertaining than this, but as I said, I've had the idea for this post for some time now.

The Closest Thing You'll Get To a New Year's Post

Yeah. It's New Year's Day. (Note: it was in fact New Year's Day when this sentence was written) You know what? It's just a Sunday. I am not a big fan of New Year's Eve or the festivities that accompany, so usually I tend to bow out of most invitations for that day.

I was thinking about maybe doing some kind of music review "best of" kind of post, but the simple fact of the matter is that 90% of the stuff I've been listening to this year didn't even come out this year. (Though I will say that both the new Thrice and the new Manchester Orchestra albums are both worth buying and listening to about a hundred times each)

I was going to try to write some kind of "ten best shows I've been to this year" list, but I realized that would be absolutely impossible. The reason is, I have gone to a stupid amount of live shows this year. So, in the spirit of lists, here is Bill's "I went to that show" list for the year 2011. Seeing it all down on paper kind of makes me wonder if I have a problem.

"I Went to That Show In 2011"

1/22 - Old 97's at The Fillmore
1/27 - This Charming Band and Dead Souls at The Rickshaw Stop
2/8 - Sebadoh at The Great American Music Hall
2/17 - Cake at The Fillmore
2/20 - Godspeed You! Black Emperor at The Great American Music Hall
2/21 - Man or Astro-Man? at The Independent
4/14 - Two Door Cinema Club at The FIllmore
5/1 - Explosions in the Sky at The Fox Theater
5/9 - Mogwai at The Regency Ballroom
5/10 - The Raveonettes at Bimbo's
5/18 - The One AM Radio at Bottom of the Hill
6/18 - Matt and Kim & The Thermals at The Fox Theater
7/21 - Soundgarden at The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
7/22 - The Ogres and The La Teen-Os at The Knockout
7/23 - Audiodub at The Independent
8/13 - Beta State at The Rockit Room
8/13 - Outside Lands Music Festival
8/24 - Motion City Soundtrack at The Fillmore
9/4 - Daikaiju at Serra Bowl
9/27 - Jimmy Eat World at The Fillmore
10/5 - Blink 182, My Chemical Romance, and Matt & Kim at Shoreline Ampitheater
10/9 - Yellowcard at Slim's
10/16 - Treasure Island Music Fesitval
10/18 - The Airborne Toxic Event at The Fillmore
10/30- Cake at The Fox Theater
11/4 - Minus the Bear at Slim's
11/5 - Thrice at The Regency Ballroom
11/11 - Benvenue at Sub-Mission Gallery
11/30 - Rhett Miller at the Swedish American Hall
12/9 - Death Cab for Cutie and The Airborne Toxic Event at The Masonic Auditorium
12/17 - Lagwagon at Slim's
12/30 - Kalifornia Redemption at The Phoenix Theater

I am sure there are others, and I didn't include shows that I personally performed at, which would add another 15 or 20 to that list.

Hopefully in 2012 I will be able to make enough money to afford to go to that many shows again.

Getting Comfy

As the winter is wearing on, everything is all about comfort these days. People are putting on their comfortable winter coats and scarves (yes, even in San Francisco. I am aware that we are all wimps), they are eating comfort food, and doing "comfort things" I suppose. What those are, I can only guess. I just picture sitting by a fire, maybe cuddling, maybe drinking hot toddies.

Ladies, I would just like to say that at this moment, my schedule is almost entirely clear and open if any of you wish to pursue any of these activities with a certain charming and verbally awkward blogger. But my chimney is broken, so you have to supply the fireplace.

I find that throughout the year, I have a whole different comfort tradition: I am a comfort reader. It sounds silly perhaps, but from time to time I just feel the need to go back and read books that I know and love. Sometimes it's because I want to re-capture a feeling that a book stirs up in me, sometimes it's because I want to re-immerse myself in a world that the book creates, and sometimes it's just that I love the story so much that I want to take it all in again. I don't know if this is a unique feature to myself or not. As far as I know, a number of people are not re-readers. I'm not always, but there are a number of books that I can pick up and read pretty much any time and I know I'll be happy about it.

This came up in conversation the other day: I was discussing holiday traditions with some friends, and I mentioned that for probably about six years straight from the time I was a young teenager, I used to read Stephen King's The Shining every Christmas break. It started because it was the first chance I had to do pleasure reading after my Fall semester had ended, really. I had purchased a copy at a garage sale, and found myself so taken with it that I couldn't put the book down. It's the 100% honest truth that reading that book is when I realized I needed glasses: I'd find that reading for more than 2-3 hours at a time would give me one hell of a headache, so I'd have to stop reading, little did I know it was due to eye strain from my farsightedness. But I digress. I read that book in a few days, and decided then and there to make it an annual tradition, and I think that, especially given my recent lack of employment, this is the perfect chance to re-kindle that tradition.

There are other titles of course, the Scott Pilgrim series being a prime example, where I just feel like it is totally worth my time to go back and read it all again. Specifically in that case, they are quick reads, so I can usually knock it all out in a day or two. On the Road is obviously an "A-number-one" example (between pleasure reading and thesis prep, I have got to be nearing my twentieth read of that one).

But I'm not here to catalog books I read all the time, (you can check out my GoodReads account for that). Rather, I am curious about why certain books are so re-readable, and if I'm a freak for having reading habits like this. Is it a book nerd thing? (I hesitate to say "scholar" because if you know me, you know that's not a term I'd usually apply to myself) Is it something else? Is it something that authors actually strive for? I know this seems disjointed, but I guess I just have to keep hearkening back to the base question: am I alone in my comfort reading repetition? I know a lot of people who re-read books, but are there people like me out there who re-re-re-re-read stuff? If any of you out there have an opinion, please chime in, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Dream Big

I had a dream the other night. It was about a girl. A real girl. A girl I "kind of have a thing for" I suppose you could say. We don't have a relationship or anything like that - we know each other by name, we interact from time to time, and we are friends on Facebook, but that's the extent of it. She has a boyfriend, and myself being an upstanding young man, I would never stand in the way of that. Honestly, I don't believe, even in my most delusional mind, that she thinks of me the way I think of her. Yet still, she popped up in a dream I had the other day. I never tend to remember a whole lot of my dreams, so the details are hazy, but I remember the gist of it, and that is what this whole blog is about today.

See, usually when someone talks about a dream involving the opposite sex, especially a member of the opposite sex that they are attracted to, it is some kind of sexy dream, or a dream where that person is just so overwhelmingly in to you that you wake up feeling like a million bucks. It's something that bolsters your confidence and creates a reality in your dream world that you can never accomplish in waking life. But here's the thing about my dream from the other day: it was wildly awkward, probably just as awkward as I would be in real life. Instead of dreaming of fun sexytimes and what I could do with this girl given the lack of restrictions, relationships, and hangups, what did I do? I awkwardly talked with her for like half and hour, at the end of which I was just as oblivious about her feelings towards me as I am in real life.

So what the hell is wrong with me? Has my subconscious become just as awkward and stammery around women in my dreams as I am in real life? For all my ways with words in written English, for my master's degree in literature, I am absolutely fucking terrible at talking to women. But why should this carry over into my dreams? Shouldn't I be the great Lothario that I always wanted to be in real life? Shouldn't I be witty and charming and suave? Apparently not. Apparently my dreams are pretty much useless in fulfilling any of those desires, even in a dream world of my own creation. Apparently my dreams are trying to tell me that no matter how I try or how far I may go, I will never be that charmer that I would like to be.

Maybe it's for the best. Maybe I'm not meant to be the silver-tongued ladies man. Maybe I will in fact find a girl who doesn't mind the fact that i trip over my words like a verbal Inspector Clouseau. Hopefully, some day my long, mildly awkward pauses wil come into vogue and I'll be every girl's dream come true. But until that day comes, I will continue to be kind of quiet, always short on things to talk about, and a huge fan of telling women I'm interested in that "yeah... you know... I think you're, well.... pretty awesome. And maybe.... some time that works for both of us maybe.... we could, ah, you know, like, get coffee? Or a drink? Or dinner? My treat? I think? Because, yeah, your'e pretty awesome and you're pretty much... you're... definitely almost exactly the kind of person that I want to get a drink or some food with. But if not that's cool." and then quietly slurk away while they are trying to suss out exactly what I'm yammering about.

Revival?

I'm not going to go making a bunch of crazy promises or anything, but seeing as how I will now have free time again, and feel like I need to make a more concentrated effort to write regularly regardless of my employment status, I hope to bring this blog, like a phoenix, back from the ashes.

But seeing as how I'm at work at the moment, all I'm going to do is insert this video, because it is just everything that is right with the world right now for me.



But check back soon, I will be writing here again. At least for a little bit, ya know?

Rockstar

A friend recently posed an interesting question to me: as a musician, would I prefer to have a handful of okay hit songs, or to have one major super-hit.

I answered as truthfully as possible, that I'd totally take any string of mid-quality songs, so long as I could keep on playing music as long as possible. While I earnestly believe that this answer is as true as possible, there are some interesting considerations to make.

First off, the case for being a one-hit wonder:

• Superstardom - This is hard to overlook; I believe that most everyone who plays music somewhere deep in their consciousness dreams of the spotlight, of being on the cover of magazines, and of hearing your songs played everywhere you go
  
  
• Royalties - let's face it, when you have a mega-hit, people want to use it for everything. It will probably be in some movies or at least used on a TV show. Radio stations will play it day and night. Soon you'll be hearing your smash hit being used to sell everything from cars to candy to hair restoration treatments. And each time those few notes hit the airwaves, you'll be making a few cents. And that's just sweet.
  
  
• Giant Shows & Diva Perks - When you have that one song that everyone wants to hear, your label/manager/promoters/etc. are going to make sure that as many people as possible can hear it. This means opening for acts who are way bigger and playing venues that most bands can only dream of. When this happens, you don't have to lift a finger. There is simply no chance in hell if you're playing something like the Oakland Coliseum or Bill Graham Civic Auditorium that you're going to have set up your own drum kit or really even tune your own guitar. You just have to show up, not be strung out, and play that one song that everyone wants to hear.

Now, the downside of mega-hits

• Burnout - Think about this logistically for a moment or two. You know how you get all tired and bored with songs when they get played out? You know how quickly you reach for the mute button when you hear that song in that commercial? You know how much you gripe when that super hit keeps showing up on your Genius playlist? Now imagine having that happen PLUS having to go out and perform that song three to four times a day for shows, radio live performances, mall openings, or whatever. Do you think you'd EVER want to hear that song again? Yeah, me neither.
  
  
• Pressure for a follow-up - There is an almost mind-boggling misnomer about the idea of a "sophomore slump". Bands that blow up on an initial release are really cursed. From the time that big hit or super debut album drops, the pressure is on to be equally impressive on the second record. But you're mired in a huge catch-22: if your follow up sounds too much like your original release, then you're considered uncreative or stale. If you stray too far from your original sound, you're persecuted for changing too much. It's a total no-win situation.
  
  
• The Brightest Star Burns Fastest - Yes, this is also connected to the "burnout" factor, but this has to do much more with public perception. The term one-hit wonder exists for a reason. Do you think the Toadies wish they could write another "Possum Kingdom"? So do I. But let's be honest; writing a really great popular song is a very difficult art, and doing it consistently is an incredibly rare feat. Unfortunately, the much more common occurrence is that you write one great song (or group of songs) and that helps you crack the big time, and you spend most of your career trying to live up to that.

Now, a couple of considerations on the benefit of being a band that just consistently puts out quality music, but no super hits:

• Sustainability - The gold standard that most all musicians I know hold is: can you pay your bills by doing nothing beyond being a musician? If so, you have officially made it. I just spoke to a friend of a friend last night who makes his living as a musician, and despite being successful enough to warrant his own wikipedia article as a musician, he said that he spent his first two years touring in bands being essentially homeless, because he couldn't afford to be on the road and still pay for rent for an apartment back home. Still, he can do it now and he doesn't exist solely on ramen and canned soup. But still, for any serious musician, the ability to do nothing else but write, play, and record music is an absolute dream.
  
  
• Experiences - I believe that you haven't really experienced places until you've played there in a touring band. By doing so you not only get to see what the night life is like, you have some free time in the day to wander around and experience a place, and if you're touring on the cheap, you usually meet fantastic people and have some of the greatest stories you're ever going to be able to tell as a result. You have some nights where you're totally blown away or caught off guard by some smaller towns or venues, and you have some nights where you can only take comfort in the fact that it's finally over. Still, it's what every musician I know wants to do for as long as humanly possible.
  
  
• Artistic fulfillment - This is what we also call the "cover band conundrum" - if you make a living as a musician playing original material, you get to enjoy having your music heard night in and night out by groups of people who, for the most part, just want to go out, enjoy themselves, and hear some music. They won't be calling to hear your hit single, but they are also more likely to pay attention to your whole set, rather than waiting for that one song. Plus, you get to play your songs to your heart's content, moving new and old songs in and out at your discretion only.

But, there is always a down side...

• Money - yes, you're making a living doing what you love, but the vast majority of musicians who play and tour for a living don't really put a whole hell of a lot of money in the bank for a rainy day. You don't have a 401k, you don't have benefits, you just have whatever is in your bank or in your pocket. What you're really working towards is being able to have enough money to make it to the next tour, next album, or anything like that. Hopefully you can stockpile a little cash here and there, but it's not an easy route.
  
  
• Wear and tear of the road - If you're just a working musician, the only way to really make money is to play shows and hit the road. Yes, you make some money selling merch and music online, but it's probably not enough to sustain much of anything. So you hit the road for months at a time. One story I hear in common from almost all the bands I've heard interviewed that gain enough success to be interviewed is that in the early years they always played shows. I believe it was Motion City Soundtrack who said that their first year after being signed to Epitaph, they played something like 325 shows. On a smaller scale, Crown Point, who are friends of mine, estimated themselves as playing 285 shows or something like that in the past calendar year. I don't care who you are, but that schedule takes the piss out of you at some point. There comes a point when all you want is a home-cooked meal and to sleep in your own bed.
  
  
• Motivation - Let's face it, there is going to come a point where you're going to look up and say "what am I doing all this for?" There are sort of built in "levels" that musicians hold themselves to; whether it's the ability to book a certain size venue, to tour, to make a living playing music, to get signed - it all depends on what the person's aim is. Still, I honestly believe that there comes a point where you realize you've plateaued, and the trick is recognizing that point when you get there. Not every band is destined to have a chart-topping hit, hell not every band is going to be able to play some of the biggest venues in your city. You just have to be happy with what you can do at a given point, or do your best to improve that situation. Do I want to be playing local clubs and venues when I'm in my late 40s? Probably not. But I can tell you right now, all I want to do is play as many shows as humanly possible and tour as much as I can afford to.

That's a somewhat more in-depth look at what into my decision. Again, it's a matter of time frame and motivation, and I feel that has to change with your age and personality as much as anything.

So.... anyone want to sign my band so I can live the dream?

Transience

Jeez, I tell you what - you start working a contract job that takes the usual 9-5 timetable, and suddenly all my late-night blogging goes straight out the window. Fortunately for you and I (but definitely not my wallet), I am back to my standard unemployed self. And as I wrap up another contract, I can't help but think about how much of my life has been marked by a certain degree of employment transience. It's interesting, for someone who clings to such deep roots, that much of what I do for a living is connected to the "here today, gone tomorrow" idea of impermanence.

First, the roots: I have lived in San Francisco for what most would argue has been my entire life. Yes, there was a short-lived freshman year of college where I lived in the East Bay, but not only was that maybe a 45 minute drive from home, I spent on average four nights in the city regardless, so I was really just sleeping in the East Bay for the vast majority of that time. I still remain close with friends from as far back as pre-school, and I take a great deal of joy in going to any establishment where I am a long-time regular. I mean, come on, don't you like it when then owner of your favorite restaurant comes up to you and greets you by your first name? I know I sure as hell do.

So, taking all this into consideration, I find it peculiar that I have spent so much of my working life not connected to much of anything. Yes, there was my time as a Community Manager, and there was the year I spent teaching full-time, but by and large, I have spent the majority of time since graduating college as a worker who has no official long-term connection to a business. In the nearly five years I spent teaching, as I said, one year of that was full time (a stat that implies impermanence in itself), but the rest of a time, I was a substitute. This means that every day I worked, I was generally greeted by an entire classroom full of strangers in a room I'd never been in. People didn't know my name or anything about me beyond what was written on the white board at the front of the classroom. Still, in that time I feel like I made a number of significant connections with students, teachers, and office staff. I don't know if it's the nature of the job to breeze in and do that, or if I simply have that tendency as an individual, but I feel like it was almost a coping mechanism in dealing with the stresses of the job: if you could walk out of the school at the end of the day and feel like you almost belong, or that you learned something about somebody in those few short hours, it put a whole new spin on the rest of the day.

Freelance work, at least in my experience with it, has been rather different. While I occasionally had moments in my recent job where I felt like I was really part of the team, on the whole, I had a much greater "outsider looking in" perspective on the whole process. I think it's mostly due to the fact that I am only brought in house when it's really crunch time, so everything that is happening around me is a bit of a whirlwind, and I can simply put my head down, turn up the music in my headphones, and tune it all out while I do my drone work for the day. Naturally, there were exceptions to that scenario on a semi-regular basis, but still, on the whole, when I left the office for the day, it wasn't very often that I would find myself thinking about my officemates the way I did kids.

But all that aside, I find the nature of this work rather singular: why is it that I am drawn to jobs that I can take and leave at the drop of a hat? Do I really value freedom that much? Do I just like being able to work around my own schedule and whims that much? I wonder how much of it is that I do indeed have such a wide social base around me that I don't feel like I need the camaraderie of co-workers. Think about it: I have two awesome roommates, great bandmates, a bunch of Rumdums, high school friends, a cop, and a wonderful monkey who are all people that I look forward to spending time with pretty much on a weekly basis, so I don't really need to add to that, so maybe that's why I can come home from work, no matter how isolated, and still have all the social interaction I may have missed out on during working hours.

Who knows. It's just something that's been kicking around in the ol' brain for a little bit, especially as I once again start staring down the rabbit hole of full-time employment again...

(sorry there's no image with this blog post, but searching "transience" on google proved a hell of a lot of really ugly art, and for some strange reason, a lot of pictures of urinals. Check it out for yourself if you're interested)