This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Well, it's over for me and Sara. I guess it was more or less inevitable.

There were to many points of division. She settles in and I chafe against routine. She requires lots of time, I require lots of space. She's thinking of the future and I don't want to know what happens tomorrow. She'll be in Oklahoma at least five more years and I'll be out of here in less than half that, at longest. She never said she wanted to get married, but she didn't need to. She's the definition of "uxorial". Sadly, she's the only person who ever treated me the way a person who would love me ought to. Sadly, I couldn't return the favor the way she wanted it.

There are less personality-based factors at work. I'm a scene person and she's a homebody. I try to grow my social network, she hardly ever spends time with her friends. She has lots of musical aptitude and does nothing with it; I have just as much academic aptitude, but do much the same. She fries pork in grease and fries potatoes to go with it and I'm a person who is insecure about gaining weight. Plus she's a 23-year-old homeowner in Midwest City, a place "where dreams go to die". I increasingly became terrified my dreams were going to be among them. I'll not even get into matters of music and movie taste, but that's a rich vein too.

Finally all the darkness in me became too much for her good nature to endure, and my need for privacy and space and a place to decompress got smothered by her. This is all I have to say: it's sad that the timing was so wrong, but it's right to be honest.

"And the human heart is like a clock / And time goes on"

Is this why Elliott Smith did it?

Playing all the instruments on your stuff, pros and cons:

Pro - Absolute unfettered creative control over arrangements.

Con - It's a lot of work.

Pro - Record and rewrite at your leisure.

Con - Wanna play live? Not unless you're a laptop whiz.

Pro - Not having to find a way to express your esoteric ideas in concrete terms with other musicians, which is harder that many people realize.

Con - Denying important other voices in your music. Wynton Marsalis: "Necessarily, at some point, someone is going to play something you would not play." This tension and the ability to let go its anxious qualities is what produces rewarding partnerships in music and some of its best fruits.

Pro - You never have to rely on people whose enthusiasm for music [yours, and in general] is less than your own, and you never have to try to corral new people once those invariably become distracted and leave.

Which puts me at my crossroads: Since fall of last year, I have struggled to keep any semblance of a continuous organization together in music. I have burned through three prospective bassists - currently on the fourth ; two keyboard players- currently looking to recruit a new one ; three drummers- currently on the fourth ; and one lead guitar player not counting Brian Barbee's friend Daniel who played unsuited blues licks over three of my songs at one supposed "rehearsal" last November. Currently on the second.

I realize that no person can ever want to prioritize my music more than I. That is just asking too much of a human being with distinct goals and individuality, and then there's the point where I must openly wonder if I'm even any good. I have had positive feedback from most informed musicians on the topic of my songs, but they might just be being polite. All evidence I has points either to this, or the fact that anyone who has been impressed was simply too busy to spend enough time working with me to improve it. I call this the "John Calvin Corollary to the Norman Musician Problem."

That problem, succinctly, is that in this town - and, increasingly, its surrounding burghs - there are two types of musicians. Type one loves music but is ungodly flaky or otherwise distracted; type two has the ability to play music and the time to do it and does so out of obligated habit, not actual desire. There's either the interested or the available. Not unlike the pursuit of a good partner when one is single.

My current organization SEEMS to be on shaky footing right now as my current drummer (Daniel Deason) works 9-to-5 and I work 10-3 and 6-10 weekdays, so all practices are not on his schedule - to say nothing of his living in South OKC. Grant, who I know and respect, is admittedly in a flighty place right now. Tim is, as always, hard to nail down sometimes. And he too lives in a different town. With my girlfriend living in Midwest City, I too understand that a commute for pleasure is no pleasure at all sometimes. I'm fighting to keep things together, but my efforts have been undermined by unpredictable hours at Coach's and an obligation to keep driving to MWC to spend time with my (also 9-5 working) lady. Not to make my priorities compete, you see...

I just hope that something comes from all of this before the new year.

"If patience started a band, I'd be her biggest fan" -E.S.