Monthly Archives: November 2019

When we all finally come face to face with our own grimly inevitable existential threat – color, race, gender; rich, poor, crazy, sane, idiot or genius – none of it matters.

In the final moments of our brief visit to wherever we exist at that particular moment in time, we’re all the same person.

Everybody bleeds the same.

You know – when you look at the world around you?

Kindness or hatred?

Hope or despair?

Meaning or nihilism?

Beauty or ugliness?

Comedy or tragedy? (actually, these two go together)

Let’s be clear: nothing in life is black and white, i.e. by definition there are no absolutes. This implies that each of these extremes exists on a continuum. But with that being said – which way do you tilt? And do you think you have a role in how you think and interpret the world around you, or you simply at the mercy of forces greater than you?

All things considered, it’s certainly multi-factorial – but I think we can agree that we some control over this process.

In other words – we choose to see what we want to see.

Ok, in 10 years I don’t think I’ve ever seen the census quite this high – 82 patients in 25 beds, and it’s not even flu season yet. Hey, I was in triage and let me go on the record and say I tried my best not to miss anything – focusing my attention entirely on each patient as they tried to express to me while they were here. After what seemed like a hundred patients in 12 hours, trust me – it wasn’t easy.

But it’s one of the things I love about my job – I can just totally be in the moment and get lost in the work. To everyone else it must seem like total chaos, but to me I’m in my element.

Welcome to the ER! We’re open for business 24/7 and we never turn anyone away. Please bear with us – I promise you, we’re doing our best.

Maybe instead of trying to find your way home, you should just push ahead in the darkness and see what’s out there.

What’s important to get done before the show’s over?

Being in the moment – this seems so easy to grasp, yet so hard to pull off. It’s certainly a constant struggle for me. Instead I’m always thinking about the future – grand plans that, if only I can pull them off, will somehow make life better, somehow make me feel fulfilled and valuable. What bullshit.

The reality, of course, is that this moment is all we really have – and once it’s over we’ll never get it back. It’s one less moment of life we have in the bank, or, as Chuck Palahniuk so succinctly puts it “This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time.”

I think this is one of the things I instinctively love about being an ER nurse – because of the intensity and constant overload of the job, it forces me to simply be in the moment. No time to think about the past, or the future for that matter – you just focus on whatever emergency is right in front of you. And because you are providing a meaningful service to other humans (or at least trying), you of course feel valuable.

But take that away and I can start to feel a bit lost, because whatever creative shit I am doing doesn’t really seem like it makes a difference to anyone but me. Sometimes that’s enough and sometimes it isn’t.

I wonder: Is it recognition I am looking for or just the knowledge that whatever I’ve made was somehow meaningful to someone else besides me. Hmm…

It wasn’t dark yet.

The wind was whipping off the canals hard enough to make Nils tighten the scarf around his neck, then pull down the wool cap on his head, stretching it in an attempt to cover as much skin as possible. It was early winter – things would get a lot colder in the coming months. But today – at this moment – it was clear, cold, gray, and very, very windy.

He wasn’t in a rush, but he had to be somewhere at a particular time, and so walked briskly. His partner, Demi, knew he had something specific to do, but no more than that. Nils liked it that way – the bottom line was this: anyone who asked too many questions wasn’t going to be around very long. But Demi gave him plenty of space, and they had fun together, so Nils was comfortable just enjoying the their time together and seeing how things played out.

The streets were crowded with people walking in a disordered fashion; the problem was that what was street and what was sidewalk wasn’t clearly delineated. He was always fascinated by how, if you kind of put your head down a little bit, and didn’t look anyone in the face (it was important not to meet anyone’s eyes), even in the most chaotic crowds you could just kind of go on autopilot and people would naturally create a space for you to walk in. The effect, however, is ruined if you actually look at anyone.

If you walk in this manner, you could be a billionaire or a pauper, a priest or an assassin, a captain of industry or homeless, a genius or a dimwit – no one walking by you would ever know or even give it a thought, because to them you’d become invisible. It’s some weird quirk of human nature, and he could confirm that it was the same all over the world.

Nils liked paying attention to the world around him – especially people. If you really watch, they’ll tell you things without ever even knowing it. This effect works best when you’re watching individuals in a group of people – in these situations you can closely observe behavior, body language, and facial expression in real time while they are interacting with their group – all the while they are completely unaware of you watching them. You’ve really got to look closely and watch for “tells” – little mannerisms that give away their true thoughts and intentions. With enough data, you can get this down to a science.

Glancing at his watch, it looked like he was going to have some time to kill, so he decided to stop at a cafe in the square and do some some people watching. You never know what might present itself, he thought. If you watch for it, life will often tell you what to do next.

Vincent van Gogh was wildly unsuccessful in his lifetime. Having decided to become an artist at age 27, he lived the next 10 years on a monthly allowance from his brother Theo prior to committing suicide. A couple of years before he died, Theo married a woman named Jo, and she joined Theo in his quest to make a name for his brother. Theo, you see, was an art dealer.

So far so good, except Vincent becomes more and more debilitated by his mental illness as he grows older – he spent a year in an asylum after checking himself in at the age of 35-36. The brothers were quite close, after Vincent killed himself at 37, Theo died 6 months later from Syphilis.

Now the story could have ended there, but of course it didn’t. What happened? Johanna Gezina van Gogh-Bonger, that’s what. Theo’s wife began publishing a book of Vincent’s letters to her her husband – she had worked as an editor, and after failing to interest anyone in the art world in his paintings, she tried this tactic. It worked.

After apparently not following advice to throw out Vincent’s paintings when Theo died, the success of her books sparked enough attention to allow her and Theo’s son to carry on promoting the collection. They had, of course, named their son Vincent.

But the whole point of this post is not really Van Gogh, but rather how perilously close his work came to being thrown out in the trash. Except for this one woman, it most assuredly would have been.

So how many great artists have forever been relegated to the dustbin of eternity because no one took up their cause after they died?

The answer is more than you can imagine.

This idea is really not so unusual – classical forms of composition had strict rules within which the composer would create – but in contemporary pop music I’m not sure how common this thinking is.

I was looking at 17th century architecture today in Amsterdam when this idea struck me – if one is stuck composing using one paradigm, it pays to think in different terms to generate new ideas. I like this one, because it implies thinking about structure before motifs or themes are explored.

You could even reverse engineer another piece of music in this way. I’m thinking beyond the obvious intro-verse-chorus type structure, actually incorporating macro-dynamics into the picture, e.g. Where does this composition build in intensity? What is the overall arch of the thing? Does it change dynamically, and if so, how and where?

I almost always composed from musical ideas first, most often chord changes, but sometimes from melody or rhythm. Once I had these themes in place, then I would begin to construct the music around them. This, of course, illustrates how my mind naturally works – for me, the music had to be interesting first, then everything else came from that.

But every style works differently – with rap/hip-hop, I’m guessing either the beat or the vocal comes first. With metal, it’s going to be the guitar riffs, with jazz, it’s chord changes/melody/structure.

It might be fun trying to compose something this way…

I slowly lowered the gun until his head was centered in the sight. I had no real idea who this person was, nor did I care. See, I was a different person then – I’m not like that anymore. I realize that doesn’t erase the fact of what I did – but make no mistake, I took no pleasure in it. I just needed the money to survive – or at least that’s what I told myself. How did I get here? Well, let’s back up a bit…

When I was fifteen, my older sister was dating a vet that everyone called Spider, who, years before, had been deployed as a sniper. He enlisted voluntarily at the age of eighteen, and as a result of his personality type and physical traits, eventually ended up in the United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper School. Spider was about fifteen years older than I was, and took a liking to me immediately. At first, the feeling wasn’t mutual – mainly because I had learned not to trust anyone. I wouldn’t aggressively push people away, instead it would quickly become clear that there was very definitely a wall beyond which you weren’t going to pass. At the same time I was sending out this message, I could be smiling and deceptively friendly – but that was as far as I’d go.

I guess he admired my fierce independence, so he gave me plenty of space whenever I would see him – because of this, I eventually let my guard down and we became friends. He wasn’t exactly a father figure, or a big brother, but because of his age and experience he seemed to fall somewhere in between. Eventually we became close, or at least as close as I’d ever been with an adult. He didn’t seem to be working at the time, and had a drinking problem coupled with an impressive taste for weed. It seemed as though there was always either a cigarette or a joint in his mouth, but no matter how much he drank or smoked, his demeanor was always pretty much the same – unflappable. Nothing, I mean nothing, ever seemed to get him excited, he just always had this Zen-like sense of cool, looking at the world through what appeared to be coal black, emotionless eyes. It got to the point where I would feel proud if I could make him laugh, if only because it seemed so hard for him.

Spider only had one skill, and at first glance it appeared to be pretty useless in the civilian world. He was a sniper, and although he didn’t talk about his military experience, it was obvious he had been good at it. So it seemed natural for this older man to want to pass on the skillset he knew to a boy on the cusp of manhood. Especially since there was this dynamic of father/son, or big brother/little brother underlying our relationship.

The summer I met him, we would go out into the mountainous woods of western Virginia and shoot a few times a week. In the south, everyone had a gun, so the idea of an older man teaching a boy how to hunt was the most natural thing in the world. Occasionally we’d run into other hunters, and they would always look approvingly at both of us, smiling through their beards stained with tobacco juice. They’d usually have a bottle of bourbon, and would share a swig with Spider before grinning and saying A’ight, we’ll let you boys have yer fun, see y’all later and ambling off.

The thing was, we weren’t really hunting – at least not yet. Spider had his Steyr SSG 69 rifle outfitted with a high-powered scope, it was one of the rifle’s he had been trained to use in the military. He said under the right conditions it was accurate up to a half-mile. No, he wasn’t teaching me to hunt per se, it was more like he was teaching me how to shoot. More precisely, he was teaching me how to shoot like a sniper, and it turned out that I was a natural, or at least that’s what he said. It was the first time I had ever been good at anything. I grew to love our time together, and because he encouraged me, I wanted to be the best for him, to make him proud of me. Spider was the first close relationship I ever had with an adult, and he was the first one to ever tell me I had something special. If you’ve made it to fifteen and no one has ever told you that, you’re starving for it, even if you don’t know it. His lessons and attention were like water to a man dying of thirst, only I wasn’t even aware how parched I was before I met him.

For better or worse, the skills he taught me changed my life. Change, however, is neither good nor bad. It just is.