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Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111103194907/http://fiddlerchick.wordpress.com:80/
Ok, so I’ve been so busy making music and wrangling the new digital content it generates and getting shit done and generally running around like a chicken with my head cut off, I haven’t been able to pay as much attention as I would want to the burgeoning “Occupy Wall Street” movement, or the “American Spring”, as I’ve heard it alternately called.
In what scant “free” time I’ve had available recently, I’ve been relying on my citizen journalist friends/ bloggers to keep me at least somewhat up to speed with this movement, which looks like something I would actually get involved in (EXTREMELY unusual for me!), but haven’t due to the forementioned reason and one more: we’ve already lived through the nightmare of Chi’s A number (that’s what you get as a green card holding resident alien here) being flagged due to a legal SNAFU (a felony/reduced to misdemeanor domestic violence incident he got himself into within a few months of his arrival in California from Tokyo), resulting in him being detained and interrogated (in English, which he does not speak or understand) at immigration inspection at LAX every time he has tried to get back into this country after going somewhere, usually back to Tokyo to deal with the sort of business stuff that tends to pile up when you live overseas.
This went on for years, and I had to spend a lot of time and effort in a very frustrating process to make it go away. Sometimes it seems as if I spend all my time and energy dealing with the insane amount of bullshit Chi seems to generate just by existing, but I digress….Digressing further, my take on Chi being detained repeatedly at the airport, which in my opinion was due as much to his slovenly appearance as the DV criminal record, is “Dude, the immigration authorities are under a mandate to keep people like you out of this country – they’re just doing their job!” And unusually well, I would add. Anyway, after three years of endless bullshit — phone calls, letters, etc., to Washington DC, and lunch breaks from day job spent at DHS in downtown L.A. — I finally got the red flag removed.
Getting back on topic, when I found this post by one of my favorite music journalists in my RSS feed this morning, I thought we should get out to Occupy L.A. with our instruments (they’re acoustic so can be played without having to drag along cumbersome, unwieldy sound gear), and inspire the occupiers with some of our occasion-appropriate tunes, and maybe even invite listeners to write lyrics for them. As soon as I thought that, I realized that Chi would never go for it. He has expressed dismay and suspicion of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement ever since its inception, and decried the judgment of the occupiers, especially those getting arrested, for the grief they will face every time they try to go anywhere. They’ll have a red flag alert attached to their passport number due to the arrest, and that will louse up every trip they take for years to come. Oh well…. maybe I can participate online, as I cannot afford yet another protracted administrative ordeal.
Back to the post referenced above, when I read it, I felt positively blessed to be among the approximately 50% of American households that have a full-time professional job and owe taxes (and are not receiving some sort of government aid), even though I don’t know where I’m going to find the money to pay the taxes I owe since the income from the full time professional job does not quite completely cover our month-to-month household overhead, the Panache Orchestra is just barely operating at or near break-even, and Chi apparently has no plans to contribute to overhead. I just asked him nicely if he could pay for the cat food last week since I was tapped out from paying for our tax prep, and he threw a fit….
Listen while you read to “Overture”, a piece that dates back to the earliest days in Tokyo, and candidate for the upcoming “Victory Speech” album.
Early July 2011
When a room still looks this God-awful even when it’s (relatively) clean and organized, it means that you have a major design problem. When it reeks to the rafters of cat piss, then it means that you have a major litter box management problem too.
Living room, pre demolition
After dropping Chi off at the airport bright and early for a three-week musical research trip to Cuba on Monday, July 4th (a public holiday in America), I pre-emptively took Tuesday, July 5th off from the day job so that I could make sure to get a running start on this massive household demolition operation and hopefully avoid having all my motivation dissipate throughout the week due to post-day job fatigue.
Since there were several phases of this demolition/renovation project that I wanted to execute while Chi was gone, I decided to take advantage of the relatively reasonable temperature in the early part of the day and commence the garden demolition operation.
Totally out-of-control front garden
3.5 hot, sweaty, back-breaking hours later, I had recovered about 15% of the overall area from massive weeds (the asparagus plot and one more small adjacent area) , and although that amounted to barely making a dent in this sub-project, I decided to pack it and move on to the indoor work.
Asparagus plot recovered from weeds
TPO HQ, pre demolition
At the very top of my list of target areas for this demolition project were the office room (TPO Headquarters – a perpetual disaster area) and the living room, which was doubling as the Panache Cats’ toilet, so after executing a desperately overdue solid waste management operation and dispatching the worst of the surface mess, i.e., ridding the fridge of rotten food, taking out the severely ant-infested trash, and deep-cleaning all the litter boxes, all in suffocating heat, I sat down to have a think about how to eat this elephant.
Another incredible delay was caused while I pondered the order of the demolition/restoration phase(s) of this series of renovation projects that was starting to take on a life of its own. I had to very carefully think everything through from preparation to completion, as well as sequencing in order to avoid boxing myself into an intractable situation, or worse still, causing a calamitous chemical reaction, setting myself on fire, or asphyxiating myself with toxic fumes. One cardinal rule is to “make the mess first” (i.e., primer/paint walls/ceiling, etc.) before stripping the floors. That meant that I needed to do the living room walls before even getting started on the floor. That would involve moving a lot of stuff around, a particular set of tools and chemicals, and a fair bit of drying/re-coating time. I wondered what I would be able to accomplish during the drying time, and realized that there would be precious little space left to work on anything else due to all the displaced furniture and stuff from the living room, plus whatever other space I decided to work on while the living room was drying.
Since de-stenching/sealing the walls and de-stenching/restoring/sealing the floor in the living room required the most extensive treatments and accordingly the most drying time (specifically related to the de-stenching/future piss-proofing aspect), it made the most sense to start there. That decision lead to 90 exasperating minutes of having to first clear Chi’s bullshit out of the living room and pile it into his bedroom so I could then get the furniture out of the way.
trillions of DCs and videotapes Chi dumps on the piano
More of Chi's mess he encrapicates every available surface with
So now with the living room voided of surface clutter, it was a matter of moving the big pieces away from the walls toward the center of the room. I wasn’t sure I would be able to single- handedly move the grand piano, but thankfully it is on casters, which greatly helped. I had similar misgivings about the ginormous TV in the humongous armoire that Chi had bought, but through an intense effort of will and whatever brute strength I still have left, given my present sorry-ass, out-of-shape state of un-fitness, I was able to muscle that whole assembly across the floor a few inches at a time. I moved the smaller big stuff into the kitchen, like the cat tree, the bass amp stack, side table, and a couple other things. Now I could at long last get started with the actual work!
Massive armoire & TV
living room stuff moved into the kitchen
I also unloaded the truck of all the stuff I had bought for this operation the day before and arranged it neatly in the center of the living room.
demolition stuff from massive shopping expedition
However, by that point I was starving and took a break to feed the Panache Cats and make/eat a quick dinner, awkwardly navigating around the stuff from the living room that I had moved into the kitchen. Before getting back to the living room wall operation, I had another look at the diversity of stuff I would be working with and given the number of decades since I had last taken a chemistry class, decided to do a little more research since I didn’t want to inadvertently set off some crazy reaction and find myself in the middle of an out-of-control experiment. It turned out to be a good thing I did, because I found this (this is about floor treatment rather than walls, but to illustrate my point):
Zounds!!! If I hadn’t randomly run across that particular article complete with that amount of detail, this might easily have turned into an epic-scale train wreck of multiple catastrophes, a.k.a. a grand-slam cluster-fuck! While imagining myself trying to explain (in Japanese) to Chi how I managed to totally destroy our brand-new outlandishly expensive HEPA-filtered Miele vacuum cleaner by setting off a nuclear reaction in the dust bag that partially burned the house down, I saw the profound intuitive wisdom of his parting admonishment to me at the airport to not get too carried away with this and end up in trouble. How in the hell could he have foreseen that?!!!
This ended up consuming the rest of the evening, so I didn’t get the walls done. At all. Another thing I didn’t get done that evening that I had planned on doing was deep-cleaning the absolutely pestilential refrigerator.
At any rate, I decided to ghetto-down the floor project based on this most recent research. That’s kinda like dumbing something down, only smarter. Rationale: even if Chi were going to be gone for three months instead of the three weeks which will fly by in the blink of an eye, in reality, this is a little ghetto duplex that we do not own, so it makes precious little sense to spend an enormous amount of money I do not have and infinitely more costly time I have even less of still (money is a renewable resource and time is not), to do this properly, i.e., spend several days sanding down the original wood floors to get them perfectly smooth and even (including possibly having to hire someone to help me lift the rental floor sander out of our truck and up the stairs into the house, and then back down again when it’s done so I don’t injure myself and damage the sander trying to), and several more days to let the varnish harden so I can scuff-sand it between coats (minimum of three for the bloody expensive water-based oil-modified polyurethane that I am using).
Given that Chi will be coming back home and how hard he is on floors (and everything else), it makes no sense whatsoever to try to achieve a beautiful, new-like end result that he will no doubt completely trash within a countable number of hours of his arrival. I also learned that it is possible to hot coat the varnish, which will eliminate the potential fire hazard from the polyurethane sanding dust spontaneously combusting. This will also greatly reduce the latency time with having to completely dry multiple coats of varnish prior to sanding.
I also realized that I would have to put up some sort of barrier to keep the cats out of the living room to stop them from continuing with their own counter-demolition operation and establish a “no fly zone”, so I took a length of 2’ plastic fencing we had bought for the garden and placed it across the entryway between the kitchen and living room, and closed the door between Chi’s room and the living room. I had a feeling the cats would make short work of that admittedly notional barrier, and sure enough, there was evidence that Pink had breached the blockade and violated the no fly zone sometime during the night when I got up the next morning.
no-fly zone
Back to the walls. I had to work the next day, and annoyingly enough, had to attend a meeting on Friday, and another one the following Monday, so wouldn’t be able to stretch out the coming weekend to accommodate this project as I had hoped, but here’s how it went after work the next day:
Wipe down all the surfaces to be treated with Krud Kutter. I had bought a gallon of Krud Kutter, and decided that I should use it full-strength given the crud on the walls under the piano (cat piss and residue from the burnt oil-laden smoke from the adjacent kitchen since we do a lot of Asian-style high-heat sauteing). I donned a respirator and put on the new chemical-handling rubber gloves I had just bought, opened a roll of shop towels, and started pouring Krud Kutter onto the towels to swab down the walls. I eventually worked my way around the room and then left them to dry, which didn’t take long given the temperature in the house.
Next, I carefully thought through the primer/paint procedure and assembled the array of tools and stuff I would need: paint pan, rollers, brushes, shop towels, same respirator & gloves, plus knee pads. I got one coat of Kilz brand stain/ odor-sealing primer on the walls and then had to leave to go pick up some video clips Chi and I had shot at a friend’s studio the previous week, and then put on a second coat after I got home. That paint roller sure got heavy during lap 2!
Two coats of stain/stink-sealing primer on the walls
After putting on the primer I made a horrendous mess of the utility sink when I tried to clean the paint pan and roller with mineral spirits. For some dumb reason I didn’t buy an extra paint pan (I have no idea why – they’re dirt-cheap, and I’d bought extra rollers and brushes!), which would have obviated this whole absurdity by making it possible for me to just chuck out the oil-based primer-covered pan and roller and start over with a fresh set to put on the water-based paint. It took upwards of an hour to get that sorted out, and the pan and roller (and sink) were still far from clean! I also learned from a friend of mine who has more experience with this sort of work that it doesn’t even matter anyway since the two types of stuff won’t mix once the first one has dried! I also have a feeling that none of the stuff I was disposing of down the utility sink is even sewerable! I hope I haven’t just created some god-awful ticking time bomb of a plumbing debacle. Live and learn…..
utility sink mess
After dispatching the utility sink mess, by which point the primer had dried sufficiently to start painting, I rolled a coat of paint over the primer, beginning (and ending) with the corner of the room that used to be occupied by the grand piano that the Panache Cats had turned into a giant toilet. Thankfully the landlord had left a container of touch-up paint in the basement, so I didn’t have to try and figure out a close match for the wall color and buy it! By this point it was some ridiculous time in the middle of the night, but I was absolutely determined to get this project to the point where I could begin the serious floor demolition by Saturday morning. That meant that I had to pull up the tiles in the cat piss zone so I could soak the underlying wood with bleach to disinfect it and kill the stench that had permeated the floor.
Given the amount of cat piss that had inundated Stink Corner over the past year or so, the linoleum tiles were already starting to lift, so that would make removing them fairly easy. I picked up the long-handled floor scraper I had bought (a “floor bully”), and began prying them loose before the fresh paint on the walls had even dried to the touch. As expected, the tiles came up without undue resistance. It only took a few minutes to clear both layers of linoleum from the piss zone, and lo and behold, what to my wondering eyes did appear? Drum roll……. EXTENSIVE CAT PISS DAMAGE!! And one totally rotten floor board. Well, at least the rotten board wasn’t our fault.
oak flooring with major cat piss damage
one rotten, termite-eaten oak floorboard
I next put the chemical fume-ready gas mask back on, and a pair of nitrile gloves (which I later learned are the wrong type for alkali substances), and liberally doused the newly-exposed wood with about half a gallon of super- hardcore industrial-strength germicidal bleach I had bought for that purpose to disinfect it from the cat piss. That would have to sit for quite a few hours, and ideally according to my research, a few days in order to dry completely, which it would quite quickly given the temperature – probably around 110 degrees inside the house during the daytime, before using any other chemical on the floor. Just to be sure, I had researched the combination of bleach + paint stripper, which creates a lead oxide – not good!
So the next problem was figuring out how to completely block access to the living room in order to stop the Panache Cats from going in and getting poisoned by the bleach, or worse, peeing on the floor/walls again and ruining the progress so far. Since Pink had infiltrated the “no-fly zone” I had cordoned off earlier, I pondered this dilemma and realized that there was no practical alternative but to lock them down for the night (i.e., restrict their access to only the back bedroom and interior hallway, and Chi’s room, where they were already contained as I was doing the painting tonight) and hope enough of the bleach will have dried by the time I had to leave for work the next day to let them out since they would have no access to the litter box while in lock-down mode.
By the time I finished drenching Stink Corner with bleach, removing my chemical handling gear and getting ready for bed, it was going on 03:00 a.m., but fortunately the next day was Friday, so I could at least survive whatever I had to at the day job, and FINALLY, at long last, I could begin serious demolition of the floors!
- To Be Continued -
chemical-ready personal protection equipment (PPE)
Listen while you read to “Kyojo Renka” (loose translation: “Love Song of a Crazy Girl”) from “10 Strings” by the Panache Orchestra
Thursday, Sept. 23, 2011
It was near the end of an especially grueling and stressful week in which I’d been in the throes of bringing a new drummer on board for our band (I say “I”, instead of “we” because although Chi calls all the shots, I have to jump through all the hoops to make it all work, and this process involves having to learn a few new circus tricks on the fly, while greatly increasing my capacity and efficiency with old ones. Blog about this coming soon), so sleep has been hard to come by lately; day job activity level is increasing, and after a post-day-job rehearsal from 7-10 Wednesday night followed by being up until 0200h dealing with the film we shot of the rehearsal (i.e., feeding it to the computer, playing it back, dumping it into my audio editing program to cut it up and send the individual audio clips to the drummer to review before the show this Sunday, and then burn a DVD for Chi and me to review, etc.), I was rather knackered by the time I got home from work yesterday (Thursday), which was so busy that I didn’t even have a chance to eat.
Anyhoo, I took a quick nap, and then Chi and I sat down to have appetizers before doing our daily Panache rehearsal. It started out amicably enough, and then he abruptly started up at me with some hysterical thing about a huge satellite that was supposed to come crashing to Earth sometime the next day (Friday), telling me that I should take the day off in case it lands in L.A. I tried to gently parry this one and keep eating, as I was absolutely starving, but he persisted, switching to another hysterical trauma-drama about an impending catastrophic devaluation of the US dollar, leading to cataclysmic hyper-inflation, and carrying on about how he wanted to convert our remaining cash into what he thought might be less vulnerable foreign currency, then demanded that I research manufacturers of air cleaners and vacuum cleaners that were publicly traded so we could invest in them. I know, that’s a total non-sequitur. This might be a Japanese thing, but I’d have to observe a larger sample size over a similar period of time in order to make anything like a definitive judgment about it.
By this point I was thoroughly annoyed and asked him as mildly and offhandedly as I could if he thought, just perhaps, that I didn’t have enough things to do already, and could he possibly get one of his Japanese friends to help him with that instead. That sent him flying off his hinges screaming and yelling, verbally abusing me, etc., so I just executed what has become my SOP whenever this situation occurs and got up from the table and withdrew to my (home) office and went to work.
He came in a few minutes later, bringing me my unfinished glass of wine, and said something like “So we’re not going to practice tonight, right?”, to which I calmly asked, “Is that your way of asking if I am ready to rehearse now?” (I’m trying to train him in a more effective way of communicating with me. Again, this might be a Japanese thing, but the jury’s still out.) He went back into histrionic tantrum mode, picking up my music stand and throwing it on the floor, and stormed out of the room. “Good fucking riddance, Douchebag!”, I thought.
However, I was intrigued about the satellite thing (been too busy to read the news lately), and did a quick search. Nothing much came up, but from what I did find, it appeared that something was headed on a collision course with Earth, although not expected to hit North America, and by the time it finished disintegrating upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the remaining intact chunks of it should not exceed 300 pounds or so. Irked that I had to spend time researching this non-disaster in order to debunk it, I went back to work wrangling rehearsal video footage, which ended up taking until 0200 a.m. again. The US dollar implosion fiasco is something I cannot do one single thing to mitigate in any way, even if it’s true, so I didn’t even bother looking into that. What-the-fuck-ever!
As the hours went on, I realized that there could be a potential major silver lining to this satellite ordeal. I wondered how the roof on our decrepit ghetto duplex would hold up to the impact of a 300-pound chunk of metal falling at whatever velocity things like that fall at (some complicated mathematical problem, I suppose), and thought that if one of those things hit our house in the right place, the resulting roof damage (and potential hole) would provide the perfect justification to install the skylight above the kitchen/bathroom/interior hallway that I have wanted ever since we moved into this place! And if the satellite chunk went all the way through and damaged the kitchen floor, then hey! Time (and easy justification) to re-do the kitchen floor too – woohoo! I see nothing but good coming of this!
From a relative’s comment to a FaceBook post I made about the satellite panic, I had one of those “whoa – that’s deep!” moments and realized what the problem is: I have a karmic issue with letting people torment me with their infatuations with lunacy, and I need to learn to see it for what it is and just let it go without getting worked up about their insistence on dragging me into their ridiculousness. That has to be why this scenario keeps playing out over and over and over – I keep failing the test! Now, to figure out how to not get worked up about it next time…..
Listen while you read to “Give Me Another Kiss” from “10 Strings” by the Panache Orchestra
Friday, Sept. 16, 2011
Chi and I had a fun date on Friday! I got tickets to a world premiere production of the play “Poor Behavior” by the Center Theatre Group, so when I got home from the day job, we had a nice spread of appetizers (it’s not fun to be totally starving halfway through the show!), and then set off for the Mark Taper Forum. I got a little irked with Chi for making us late by doing his routine of filling various containers with various types of alcohol to bring into the theatre, and was non plussed at him telling me as we were hurrying from the parking garage to the theatre that he ended up not bringing the alcohol along after all since he realized that it would make a bad impression. Since when has he ever been concerned about making a bad impression?! Anyway, we ended up getting there in time to be seated, so it all turned out ok.
Plays are especially challenging for Chi since, at least in this country, they are normally performed in English, and it’s all dialogue. However in this case, the story line was so readily apparent and so acutely relevant that he really enjoyed it! In fact, we both found it highly cathartic. It left me wondering that if art imitates life, so it follows that the drama portrayed by the play is supposedly pretty normal, then perhaps Chi and my marriage may not be quite so fucked up as I’d previously believed? All the insane shit that went on in the play was perfectly plausible under our roof just amongst ourselves, even without adding in the extra aggravating factor of the other couple and alleged affair.
It also underscored the point that even people/couples/friends who speak the same language and are more or less culturally in the same book, if not on the same page, still have issues like this, then how much more likely would it be for people from extremely different cultures with a barely-functioning common language, particularly when the situation is routinely aggravated by substance abuse and mental illness?
I was further vindicated to read in the program notes that the play had been inspired by an actual incident the playwright, Theresa Rebeck, experienced and described as a really nasty weekend in the country with old friends…one of whom was in the process of cracking up, and that the title “Poor Behavior” had its origin in an acquaintance of the playwright’s labeling of someone having “treated her poorly”, who had in fact been an absolute nightmare to her, and the way that label came to represent civility and incivility mashed up against each other.
A comment to the review in the L.A. Times of the play summed it up most strikingly as follows: “Feel like having your soul drained? Then go watch four very unlikeable characters hurt each other rather comically for two hours.” In our case, watching actors psychically decimate each other both deliberately and unintentionally for those two hours gave us a deep sense of satisfaction and relief that we only had to be spectators rather than the actual combatants this time. I wonder if this means that we are “very unlikeable characters” to others? I would be inclined to believe not based on the number of perfectly decent people who regularly seek our company, but I’m sure it would become true if other people had to watch what goes on in our home on a nearly day-in, day-out basis. In fact, that reminds me of another play we saw at the Taper last year, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo that in an earlier review had been described as especially disturbing and unsettling. When we saw it, I found it oddly mild and comical vis-a-vis the review I had read, and was nonplussed to realize that it was because the dialogue was so on par with the totally insane shit that regularly takes place under our own roof that I was desensitized to it!
Listen while you read to “Prelude”, the opening track on “Neo”, the EP Chi and I cut when we first began our musical collaboration in Tokyo, Japan in 1998.
July 2011
So it took a nuclear catastrophe to get Chi to take indoor air quality seriously….
TEPCO apologizing
Ever since the catastrophic events that took place in Japan on March 11, 2011 and the ongoing disaster with the Dai Ichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Chi has been on high terror alert regarding contamination from radioactive material, and has been driving me completely f*cking batshit with his constant hysteria and Cassandraizing about it all, trawling the internet constantly for updates, which he proceeds to harangue me about. I have no idea how he thinks it could possibly produce any useful result to continuously suck my energy into this futile black hole by dousing me with his constant, radioactively toxic negativity over something that is obviously completely beyond my reasonable control.
However, one bright spot in this dismal nuclear winter emerged. He got the idea, probably from his incessant internet trawling, that we must procure super-hardcore, nuclear-grade, HEPA-filtered air cleaners and a similarly die-hard HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaner, and then described a very elaborate procedure and schedule for changing the filters without releasing any of the radioactive material he thought they would trap back into our house. I was cautiously elated about this sudden interest in the air quality inside our home, which ever since we’ve been living with each other and several cats, has been so putrid that I am almost constantly miserable with allergies. It would cost a small fortune to procure these items, but the benefit of having better air quality and thence a better quality of life, made it worthwhile in my estimation. I was at the same time apprehensive, given his propensity to spend a lot of money on something and then when he realizes that his bank balance has reduced according to the amount of money he just spent, he starts abusing and shitting all over me about it, demanding that “I” stop spending money. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
New HEPA-filtered Oransi air cleaner
The air cleaners arrived about a week before he was to leave on a 3-week musical research trip to Cuba, and we set them up and put them to work. It already made a noticeable difference the first morning I woke up after having one running in the main bedroom all night. I wasn’t coughing and sneezing all day, and I could breathe easily.
New Miele HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaner
The vacuum arrived a few days later, and when I put it together and tried it out, I was amazed at how much easier it was to use than the ones we already had, one of which is decent quality but very cumbersome and heavy, and the other one is more maneuverable, but too weak to clean properly. My amazement increased when I tried it on the carpet, and the vacuumed part was a totally different colour than the un-vacuumed part as big gobs of ground-in cat hair and dust were being sucked out. Wow!
Soooooo…since I have always hated the shitty carpet and nasty-ass linoleum in the house, I planned on demolishing the floors while Chi was gone, all the way down to the subfloor, if that was the only place where wood could be found, and sanding out the cat piss smell that had permeated the surfaces in the pee zones, and then restoring / refinishing / sealing it.
There were other projects that I hoped to be able to do too, such as getting the Panache Garden under control, which had got completely out of hand since I’d last had a go at it in mid-spring, and trying to clear out and organize the crawl space under the house, which has become so chaotic and full that we can’t even fit any more stuff in it, let alone get to the stuff that’s already there. In other words, another feng shui disaster area. I also was hoping to put in some quality face time with my instrument and do some recording, and get to spend some time with my friends too.
After dropping Chi off bright and early at LAX on Monday, July 4,
the first stop was the Marina del Rey garden center to pick up a couple odds and ends I wanted to integrate during the garden clean-out, but after a couple more stops to pick up some more odds and ends with my blood sugar plummeting as fast as the temperature was rising, my enthusiasm for doing a lot of dirty, frustrating detail work outside in the now-blazing sun waned.
Nevertheless, after having something to eat and feeding the Panache Cats and Farishta, I decided to soldier on and start by fixing the tire on my wheelbarrow that had blown out awhile ago since I had no desire to have to lug around tonnages of compost and dirt and stuff by hand. After an hour of sweating and swearing and suffering over that exercise in high noon sun, I gave up when I’d got the new inner tube about halfway stuffed in. I just didn’t want to force the issue and risk a hand injury or damage the tube or rim since I didn’t have quite the right tool, and excessive use of leverage to compensate for lack of hand strength didn’t seem like the way to go with this.
Given how hot it was, I decided to defer any further outdoor projects (like the front garden) until it cooled off later in the afternoon, so made lunch and then set out for the big shopping expedition to Home Depot to get the stuff I would need with the list in hand that I had made during my extensive research (I had spent several days trawling the net and querying home repair-savvy friends of mine for information on how to go about this).
At Home Depot
That ended up taking quite a bit longer and costing a lot more than I had expected it to. There was admittedly a little mission creep, but not enough to make that much of a difference. The oil-modified polyurethane cost a whopping $50/gallon (!), and all the million smaller/less expensive things really added up. I swallowed hard as I handed over my debit card to pay the $250 tab, knowing that this would not be the end of it, and I still had to pay our rent come month end.
When I got back, not only was I starving again, but I found myself faced with a typical chicken-or-egg conundrum: there was a truly overwhelming amount of work I wanted to get done during the three weeks that Chi would be gone, and an almost equally overwhelming amount of crap that had to be bulldozed out of the way in order to open up enough space to get the work done, ranging from outright garbage that belonged in the compost bin to large pieces of furniture destined for other places and big pieces of equipment that didn’t get used often enough to justify taking up precious real estate inside the house.
Panache Headquarters
Organizing the home office (a.k.a. “Panache Headquarters”) was at the very tip-top of the list of mission-critical tasks, but there was an awful lot of bullshit that had to be gone through and/or winnowed out first, which would take quite a bit of time (as well as brain power) and could be done with artificial light (but not a heavy fatigue load), while the garden/basement/floors cannot, so do I start with clearing out/ de-junking/ organizing the crawl space under the house first in order to have a properly planned storage area to put stuff, albeit a seriously nasty, dirty, vermin-infested one? Or do I just start de-stenching, restoring and sealing walls and floors in the living room (including Stink Corner under the grand piano) and Cat Shit Corridor?
Basement/crawl space under Panache House
From my extensive research, I also realized that the floors/walls will require a lot of drying time between applications of various treatments, which meant that I was out of time this weekend. I could at least de-stench and seal the walls in the pee zones and get that process started, which will require moving a lot of big, heavy furniture out of the way in the living room. I could even start pulling up a few of the nasty linoleum tiles I planned on getting rid of, and at least get a look at what I’m up against.
Back to the office: should I just pile all the shit in the bedroom(s)/ kitchen/ wherever it will fit, and then bring it back in after the floor has dried and sort it then? Hmmm… there’s an awful lot of stuff in here, and that will create a major problem with doing other rooms concurrently if they’re going to be full of displaced office stuff. Or should I just start with the “easy” part(s) of the house where there isn’t so much crap to have to move out of the way and sort through and figure out, like the inner hallway and main bedroom???
home office, a.k.a. Panache Headquarters
It’s kind of depressing too, because everything is such a horrible mess, dealing with it takes up a vast amount of time (and there are loads of other things I would much rather spend this blissfully FREE time doing!), and more depressing still, Chi will just have it all filthed up again within a matter of hours of when he returns home, so it all seems rather pointless from that perspective.
That’s the worst part! I’ll end up spending the whole time doing all this miserable drudge labour of getting the house into a decent condition, but won’t have any time left for me to enjoy using the nicely clean, refreshed, reorganized space for what I want to do… aaarrrrrrgggghhhhhh…………..
Oh well, I’ll just have to find a way to get him to go off on another trip during August! How about Peru? He’ll need to keep up his Spanish, right?
Listen while you read to an early live recording of “Resistance” – a strong candidate for our upcoming album “Victory Speech”.
If I recall correctly, Jaco didn’t start “marking” until we moved to L.A., and I think this may be due to the place where we lived in San Diego when he first joined our family being a newly constructed loft with concrete floors, i.e., no prior history of other odors to have to overwrite with his own. There were also no other cats around except Gureyo, so that didn’t trigger any particular need on his part to defend his territory.
When we moved to L.A. into a decrepit old duplex in the Mother of All Ghettos, he started peeing outside the litter box, which we kept next to the front door. Incidentally, that probably explains at least one reason why our marriage seemed to have irrevocably turned to shit at that point (and our life at that time was particularly shitty), given the horrible feng shui of keeping a stinking pile of cat feces right in the main entry to our home!
First apartment in south central L.A.
We eventually moved to a larger unit downstairs in the same building that had a nice, big bathroom with sufficient space to keep the litter box, but for reasons best known to himself, Jaco preferred to pee in the bathtub. Well, at least that’s the easiest thing in the house to clean, especially since it had a European-style shower, i.e., the type that’s on a hose, which makes cleaning the tub vastly easier. I can only assume that given the age of the building and pet-friendly policy, there were probably plenty of intriguing smells that eluded detection by humans of ordinary olfactory senses. Also, the unit on the ground floor provided a face-to-face view (and presumably scent) of the numerous feral cats inhabiting the neighborhood, and the mayhem that ensued during “cat season” (spring – summer), which I’m sure didn’t help our situation any. (Even though all the Panache Cats are spayed/neutered, the presence of intact animals typically causes a breakdown of law and order in most cases.)
Second apartment in south central L.A.
The cat piss situation got totally out of control after Laxmi (the feral kitten) joined us and we moved to Chinatown a year later (where the landlord let slip that the previous tenant’s dog had peed all over the place), and then escalated still further when we acquired Pink. By that point it was incontrovertibly clear that we had a major problem. The areas where Jaco seemed most inclined to mark were near the cat toilets, but when you’re starting with a room that looks like this,
Living room before the demolition operation
the cats have a lot of options for stinking it up undetected, at least until the stench sets in and transcends the background smells.
Chi found a self-flushing (yes, for real!), self-cleaning cat toilet in the Japanese classifieds, so we brought home a practically brand-new Cat Genie, set it up, and took the old school “chamber pot equivalent” downstairs to use as a port-a-potty when traveling with the kitties.
The new "Cat Genie" kitty flush toilet
Everyone checking out the new potty
Gureyo discussing the new potty with Pink and Jaco
The Panache Cats approached the new toilet with great suspicion, which, at least for Gureyo, who has always liked water, turned to great fascination when we ran it through the flush/wash/dry cycle.
Cat Genie flushing itself
Gureyo ended up being fine with it, and so did Pink, and so would Laxmi, had Gureyo let her use it. That’s when I figured out what was probably the root cause of the problem. I saw Gureyo harassing Laxmi while she was trying to use the toilet, effectively forcing her to have to go on the floor in an out-of-sight corner. Jaco showed no inclination to accept the new facilities.
Gureyo cautiously approaching the new toilet
The WRONG way to introduce a thing like this to a cat!!
Pink coming to investigate
Is he going to try it??
Good boy! (and no, those are EMPTY wine bottles destined for the recycle bin)
Even little Laxmi got real brave and came in to check it out
We thought we might be ok once Jaco accepted the new contraption, but there were other issues. The only place that made any sense to put the new cat toilet was the part of the house now known as “Cat Shit Corridor”, i.e., a long-ish, narrow corridor running from the kitchen to the back room I use as my home office, a.k.a. Panache Headquarters, and the back door leading to the parking area outside.
Cat Shit Corridor with old litter box being decommissioned
We originally routed the outfall pipe into the utility sink in that part of the house (yes, it was really, really G-R-O-S-S!!!), and then eventually I realized it would be perfectly possible to run the pipe through the bathroom window to empty into the toilet directly on the other side of the wall, which made much more sense, and yes, I poured A LOT of raw bleach and Dran-O down that sink after re-routing the cat toilet pipe! That notwithstanding, the long tube had to be at a vertical elevation that made it more prone to clogging and also caused backflow of wastewater into the basin of the unit, which caused a horrific stench that would permeate the whole house while the toilet was running the “dry” stage of its cycle.
Cat Genie installed
Outfall pipe routed to utility sink (Disgusting! NB: this was the test run. The water's not always that clean)
It all turned into shit (LITERALLY!!!) when it clogged up so badly one night that I had to take the whole kit and kaboodle into the bathtub, disassemble it and totally clean it out around 0200h. (We got to bed around 03:30 and I’d called in late to the day job that morning, and the perplexed look on my boss’ face when I answered his question about what happened was truly priceless!)
At any rate, this of course was an intolerable situation to which there were few practical solutions due to the configuration of the house, so we had to make sure to run the toilet only when we were going to be outside for some period of time and hope it wouldn’t clog and cause a crisis while we were gone. Chi eventually conceded that we were still in a losing battle, and suggested that we try adding the other toilet back, commenting that as long as we were going to be scooping again, we might as well scoop the flush toilet as well, which would eliminate the frequent clogging and stenchful horror. Jaco flatly refused to use the new toilet, and my patience was wearing thin with being late to work due to having to clean cat shit off the floor practically every morning.
We ended up even adding a THIRD toilet/litter box under the piano (the only place I could figure out that we had room to put another one), which significantly improved matters. At least Jaco stopped shitting on the floor, but he apparently still felt compelled to have to mark his territory both under the piano and in Cat Shit Corridor.
P.U.!
That brought the Cat Piss War to a new level. I was fed up with the house reeking to the rafters of cat urine, and the miserable hassle of having to regularly hose down both the area under the piano and Cat Shit Corridor with a gallon or so of white vinegar spiked with bleach to disinfect the surfaces and kill the smell.
Ready for chemical warfare
EEEEWWWWW!!!! AGAIN????!!!!
MAN, THIS SUCKS!!!!!
Weary sigh.....
chemical weapons
A tiresome, time consuming ordeal
that caused a lot of extra laundry
consuming gallons of bleach
This time I bought a great big package of 100 Wee-Wee Pads for training puppies, and masked off the whole area under the piano with them. That at least had a prophylactic effect of stopping the cat piss from making contact with the floor and walls, but only if the pads were duct-taped securely in place. Jaco seemed to make a point of soiling practically all of them (about 13 in total), and in fact, Chi even suspected that the other cats were joining in, creating a very time consuming and laborious chore of having to replace them every couple days, and if I didn’t tape each of them individually down securely (which made for a COLOSSAL pain in the ass to change them), they would move around and the floor/walls would get peed on, bringing us back to square one.
dog wee-wee pads
Ok, how's this?
3rd potty under the piano and prime culprit (Jaco)
Since the stench is now entrenched, it appears that there is no reasonable alternative but to do a major demolition operation and then seal, i.e., piss-proof the floor and walls in the battle zones. Enter Stage 5.
Listen while you read to “Halley’s Comet” because this came from so far out of left field it might as well have been outer space.ca. late June 2011A friend of ours performed on an album that got nominated for the L.A. Music Awards this year, and since things didn’t work out with the person he had planned on bringing with him, he invited Chi and me to go along. We were happy to support the artist being nominated, and curious about the L.A. Music Awards, so off we went. There was a cock-up with getting an extra ticket for Chi (our friend only had two that had been purchased in advance), so Chi threw a tantrum and went home AFTER the money had been spent and the additional ticket procured for him.For some reason the promoter thought it necessary to subject the award nominees and the people they had brought with them to an entry-level “industry panel”, i.e., a group of music biz types giving generic advice on how to “take it to the next level” as indie artists. Boy, am I getting tired of that trite and meaningless phrase! Whoa, I get it! The only reason people would fall for this bullshit is if they are entry level. But wait a minute! The artist we came to see is quite well established and has one hell of a group of backing musicians working for her.
Anyway, when the panel finally wrapped and the awards announcer came onstage, my first clue that this was not what it was cracked up to be was the big pitch he gave to potential “sponsors” about how they can get their logo on the plaque each nominee is photographed with, and that the nominated artists’ band mates almost always want to buy memento plaques, increasing the sponsor’s “exposure”. Gee, where have I heard that meaningless term before? (for those not in indie bands, “exposure” is typically brokered as if it were bankable currency, but that’s a subject for a separate rant–oops–I mean, post)
After much ado about nothing, the first act to take the stage was a kid who sang and played keyboards karaoke-style with a sequenced band in the background, followed by a generic young rock guitarist/singer from Phoenix who began his set with a series of bad jokes about Arizona and that state’s notorious xenophobia. I thought, “Phoenix? What does that have to do with the L.A. Music Awards?”
Next up was an utterly unremarkable band of mid-teenagers from San Antonio, Texas that was nominated not only for “artist of the year”, but “guitarist”, “bassist”, and “drummer” of the year as well, and ranged stylistically from totally generic heavy metal to totally generic kiddie punk-pop. The singer should have stuck with Sprechscreamme because when he tried to actually sing, his pitch was all over the map. Oh well, at least he wasn’t using Auto-Tune, and to give them credit, their choreography and synchronized head banging appeared well rehearsed. They had a cute girl bassist too.
By this point I was thinking, “Wow! When did L.A. become such a cultural wasteland that they have to import quintessentially mediocre school kid bands of from hither and yon to nominate for music awards?” Wait a minute – I get it!! This has little, if anything, to do with music, and much to do with some promoter making a killing off the uninitiated.
At this point, the big stars our artist works with began trickling in with their inappropriately young girlfriends in tow, and it became clear why there was no schedule or order to the nomination confirmations and for the rule that “you must be present to win”. EVERYONE had to suffer through the entirety of this jackassery to ensure a captive, if unenthusiastic audience for the nominees who were from out of town, and a fair share of “Wow! There’s (insert name of big star)!” Hollywood moments.
It went from silly-sad to pathetically bizarre, and as the evening wore on, it descended deeper and deeper into incomprehensible wackiness.
My incredulity increased as the next nominee was announced: a 10-year-old kid who was ballyhooed as having been nominated not once, but TWICE for rock guitarist of the year (yes, in L.A., where one might reasonably expect that he would have to be absolutely, incredibly, gob-smackingly, fucking righteously awe-inspiring!), and then the MC noted that he was nominated based on recordings, and hadn’t been evaluated playing live. (Uh-oh, what does this mean?? A little Photoshopping at the mixing board, perhaps??)
The visual was rather striking: the guitar was almost as big as the kid, and the adults twice his size accompanying him further emphasized the diminution effect. He began a totally generic instrumental piece by strumming and chunking on some open D chords, punctuating with some random noodling and alternating rhythmic patterns (a recitation of heavy metal fundamentals, I guess). When he did a few bars of rudimentary hammer-on-tapping technique, I whispered to my friend (ok, I didn’t really whisper, as the volume was so loud that my companion had offered aural prophylactics to everyone at our table after the first act), “Hey! I learned to do that when I started learning to play electric guitar too when I was 16!” He replied half-jokingly, “but he’s only 10!” I decided against rebutting with the entirely truthful statement, “Ok, and I was playing Beethoven symphonies in youth orchestra when I was 10”, having started violin very late, i.e., at age 9.
I felt guilty as I thought with increasing annoyance, “This is worthy of an award nomination??? Oh Lord! In the remote corner of the music world I hail from, child prodigies perform in world renowned concert halls and play at least as well as adult stars.“ Ok, I get it! The adult singing and playing the guitar must be the kid’s father, a struggling indie artist, who’s using his kid as his talking dog publicity stunt. That reminded me of an ageing (and struggling) indie artist we encountered in Japan expressing similar designs to exploit his cute, popular “tween” model daughter.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not so bitter and jaded that I’ll rip on little kids playing in school talent shows. I don’t have any problem like that. I did it. They should do it. It’s good experience for them. What I have a problem with is shit like this, i.e., hyping this thing up like it’s some sort of legitimate merit-based awards thing and charging admission for it, and then having it turn out to be some glorified pay-to-play open mic or kids’ talent show. I believe that’s known as “deceptive marketing” or something like that, right?
I’m not even mad about getting swindled into it. I came at the invitation of my friend who paid for our tickets, and was looking forward to possibly seeing his friend perform, who has put forth a good album based on solid musicianship that has garnered some well-deserved positive reviews. I never would have gone to anything like this on my own recognizance because I just couldn’t care less about this sort of thing. I don’t even watch or give a rat’s ass about the Grammys. I just feel sorry for all the people (i.e., parents, friends, colleagues (of the award nominees who are old enough to work legally!), band mates, session players, etc., who pay hard-earned money and take time out of their busy schedules for the “privilege” of getting taken hostage by this exercise in absurdity and shameless profiteering off the backs of aspiring artists and the people who financially support them.
My patience was wearing thin as more photo opps with the plaque followed, and then my friend reported that our artist would be in the next batch of plaque photos, and it should be just a mere 20 minutes or so before our set of hostages would be freed. Hallelujah!
As promised, all of our artist’s entourage got ready to exit en masse once the last photo was snapped, and then for some reason the boys took out their earplugs a little too early (I kept mine firmly in place) while some cutie-pie aspiring pop tart was performing at a particularly deafening volume while we tried to escape. That brought back not-fond memories of trying to find the exit from a casino in Vegas when I’d quickly hit my tolerance for the frigid air conditioning, cigarette smoke and clamourous din.
For some reason there seems to be no Wikipedia entry for the L.A. Music Awards. Maybe I should start one with this post? At any rate, now I know what it means when I see the words “L.A. Music Awards Nominee” or “Winner of the ‘prestigious’ L.A. Music Award for (insert category)” on some artist’s profile. It means that they waded through that steaming, seething cauldron of elephant shit, especially if they have a photo of themselves posing with that telltale plaque to prove it!
Epilogue: I remember an occasion not long after Chi and I first moved to L.A., and Chi found some ad in the “Musicians Wanted” section on Craigslist (a.k.a. “the L.A. Slave Exchange”). I made an inquiry and then some kid called me offering me an “opportunity” to pay several hundred dollars to get nominated for awards sort of like this one. More perplexing is that the artist we went along to support, who is principally domiciled in another state almost on the other side of the continent, and has absolutely no clue how she got nominated, and even odder still that her new record wasn’t even released until two weeks after the close of entries for this year’s awards.
Listen while you read to a (admittedly less-than-great) live recording of “A Shitty Day” taken from a recent performance.
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Early July 2011
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AHA!! I am vindicated by none less than Bill Gross of Pimco, who has just confirmed my theory that college, at least in this day and age, is a ruinously expensive waste of money, effort and time!
When I returned to the US a few years ago after about seven years of perfectly respectable employment in international economic development consulting in Tokyo and couldn’t find anything any better in my hometown of San Diego than THE most excremental, abusive non-entity of a job I’d even had in my life, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d be doing considerably better if I had just dropped out of high school and got a job driving a garbage truck, and never bothered with spending an inordinate amount of time and effort obtaining three university degrees that I am still to this day struggling to pay off the student loans for. That job was so extraordinarily shitty that on my way in, I would gaze enviously at the (probably undocumented) Latino day laborers toiling away in the searing summer heat shovelling manure into the beautifully manicured grounds around the big, fancy houses interspersed amongst the businesses in the mixed-use-zoned La Jolla neighborhood where I was effectively taken hostage for a suicidally miserable nine months, believing that I would actually be less unhappy doing that instead.
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If I thought I was capable of learning to back up a garbage truck and accurately stick the forks into the holes on the sides of dumpsters instead of taking out the building behind the dumpster, I’d check in with Waste Management and see if they were hiring trainee drivers. That didn’t, however, seem like a viable strategy given the number of people out of work or ridiculously underemployed, and my total lack of experience and skill in that form of employment.
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So there I was with my three university degrees and international consulting career profile, trapped in a debt treadmill I despaired of ever getting out of with no viable prospects in sight, and stuck in the most wretched job of all time. Perhaps if I had chosen a vocation-specific career path when I was 16 or 17, I’d probably own a house by now and be debt-free unless I drank the American credit card debt-addiction Kool-Aid and elected to be financially insolvent in spite of myself.
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And here I am now, just as, if not even more, underwater than I was then, trying to make a viable go of it in the obviously (financially) inviable field of music!
Listen while you read to “The Dream is Over” recorded live during a performance in Beverly Hills last year.
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ca. mid-June 2011
Well, I’ve been feeling like I’ve had about enough. Of what? Let’s see….
1. Life in general, at least in the form it’s been for me over the past couple years.
2. My husband and his abusive, drug-addled, mentally disturbed behavior.
3. Struggling to be sustainable as a musician.
All these things aggravate and amplify each other. Let’s break it down:
Why does my life suck? Because I have to spend practically all of my time doing things I view with varying degrees of distaste, ranging from simple boredom and disinterest to intense loathing, and on top of that, endure constant domestic strife. I write this knowing that I have a choice about every single bit of it.
So what exactly do I spend all my time doing?
1. Eight hours a day Monday – Friday is spent slogging through a menial job that even if I didn’t have a family to support, would still only pay enough to provide a barely acceptable standard of living. At least it’s not virulently toxic and is with an organization I am happy to be a part of, which is much to be grateful for.
2. Practically all the rest of the hours I’m awake are spent forcing myself to wade through an endless array of tedious administrative chores, time-consuming, crazymaking work wrangling digital media, and marketing/promotion work that I absolutely detest. I intensely hate the way that having to be the marketing machine for my band reframes my relationships with other people, and for that matter, I generally dislike having to deal with other people in the first place! As long as we’re on that subject, a quote I came across on Twitter sometime last year really hit a nerve with me: “If you’re enjoying the process, it’s your dream. If you’re enduring the process, desperate for the result, it’s someone else’s dream.”
3. That’s before we even get to the part about the abusive, drug-addicted mental case I’m married to, stuck with having to financially support, and play in the band with (i.e., that I can’t ever get away from!). At least if we didn’t live together and only played in a band together, I’d be free to come back to my own home, that ideally would be an environment I feel safe, comfortable and at peace in (depending on the background noise and crime level of the neighborhood).
Conspicuously absent on that list (or of such a negligible percent of how I spend my time) are things that at least theoretically, ought to be enjoyable and constitute a significant percentage of my personal timeline, but don’t: personal practice, ensemble rehearsals, creating new material, and, well, for what it’s worth… “me”-time. Why aren’t these there? Well, not to overstate the bleeding obvious, but there just isn’t any time or energy left after I slog through all the shit I have to do just to survive my life. We do ensemble rehearsals on a daily basis except under unusual conditions, but these would be far more productive and useful if we had a game plan for each one and I had the time and energy to do my own personal preparation beforehand.
While we’re on that subject, I guess I’ll vent my frustration with Chi and his apparent inability to work according to any kind of game plan on anything. He has some bizarre idée-fixe that we must have an insane amount of repertoire under our fingers and ready to perform at any moment, so he insists on spending rehearsals running through our long list of over 70 pieces, and flatly refuses to plan and prepare a “generic” set of specific repertoire. This is ostensibly due to his adamant insistence that shows must be programmed spontaneously depending on the vibe in the room and how the audience is responding, and to his credit, he has consistently demonstrated a strong aptitude for that. Nevertheless, it causes unnecessary awkwardness, which needless to say, is distracting and prevents me from being able to focus all of my attention on playing. Oh, and this is the same person who flatly refused to get a job “because he might get called for an audition!” Go figure…..
So why does my time get consumed like this? Well, for starters, someone has to keep a roof over our heads, and since Chi doesn’t see fit to take on that responsibility, or actually may not even be mentally capable of doing so anymore, it lands squarely and singularly on me. We won’t even bother addressing another unpleasant aspect of that, such as seeing to the upkeep and administration of said roof. Since we both want to make a living as musicians, we can be the best players with the most repertoire in the world, but it’s not going to amount to a single, damned thing if someone doesn’t do the endless amount of work to promote us, book shows and cultivate a loyal, dedicated fan base to purchase tickets to the shows and buy the recordings we create, and again, since Chi won’t lift a finger to that end, guess who gets stuck with it?
Back to my distaste for having to deal with people, let’s be clear: naturally I enjoy interacting with people I like, but under specific conditions, i.e., when I am able to focus on interacting directly with them in a relaxed social context. It has recently become crystal clear to me that I find chaotic communication distressing, so much so that it ruins situations for me that I might otherwise enjoy. For example, when I’m struggling to get set up for a performance (especially when we’re having to scramble to get started on time in the event that something went wrong), and I’ve got one person telling me something, another person asking me for information, someone else handing me something I’m not in a position to deal with, and Chi yelling at me to hurry up and get ready to play all at the same time; or the same thing happening while I’m trying to pack up my instrument(s), the PA, the merch kit, etc., and take a mental inventory that all our stuff is accounted for and work out the logistics for getting it all back to the car, that totally stresses me out. I would infinitely prefer leaving the setup and tear-down to roadies and stage techs, the face work to a PR agent, and being able to hide out in a secured green room and then walk on stage thoroughly warmed up with my instrument carefully tuned, clearly focused on giving the best performance that I can.
Ok, that’s another thing I strongly dislike about performing in this sort of configuration, i.e., a all-original duo that has much more in common performance-wise with popular music than the orchestral and chamber music I was raised on. I have absolutely no training whatsoever in extemporaneous “stage chat” and audience interaction, and feel infinitely more comfortable as part of a string section, or safely out of view in an orchestra pit, leaving the audience interaction to other people. Now that I write that, it strikes me as odd given that I am an inveterate non-team-player. Perhaps that contributes to my equally inveterate distaste for having to deal with people? In this particular ensemble, it is aggravated by other issues, such as Chi undermining my confidence by stressing me out so much prior to and during performances that it critically interferes with my ability to play my best, and makes it next to impossible for me to connect with the audience.
I find online communication similarly challenging. I am acutely sensitive to contact overload and data slam, so when I’m having to cope with several email inboxes flooded with a morass of exchanges to set up future performance/tour dates, requests for various information and promotional stuff for existing bookings, administrative wrap-up from just-completed shows, random booking requests, (practically all of this requires careful, detailed thought and having to create new stuff and reconfigure existing stuff according to specific requests on a short turnaround, and keep it all up to date as our resume expands and evolves) notifications and updates from this, that and the other web community we have a presence on, a hodge-podge of conversations with various friends, family and colleagues, plus an endless barrage of newsletters, announcements and stuff that I actually did subscribe to in addition to the unsolicited bullshit that eludes my spam filter; that totally overwhelms me and consumes an enormous amount of time and energy I would far prefer to have available for other things. And on top of all that, I also have to do all the communication, logistics, wardrobe contortions, etc., for Chi’s acting work that he does now and then.
Should I just declare emotional bankruptcy and fold, or should I soldier on? At what point do you just accept reality and surrender? One thing I do know for sure is that I am desperately sick of constantly feeling exhausted, totally stressed out and overwhelmed, and just plain miserable, and very dissatisfied with the quality of my life (or lack thereof) and how I spend my time. I am remembering that quote attributed to FDR: “When you think you’ve reached the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on!”
Listen while you read to a live recording of “I’m on the Run“ taken from a recent performance. For the benefit of new readers, I’ll be repetitive: As much as I would have loved to soundtrack this post with “Under the Knife” from Kansas’ Freaks of Nature album, I will stick with Panache tracks rather than use material whose copyright is owned by others, for which permission to use may be complicated and/or costly to obtain….
Sorry that I keep repeating this prologue, but I think the narrative might be helpful for first-time visitors.
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Monday 23 May 2011
This is so surreal it just has to be documented.
Whilst bumbling through the motions of making a pot of decaf at the day job this morning (regular coffee blows my circuits, and the decaf we have here is already too strong for me), I was wondering why everything was so shitty, and that could mean only one thing: it was Monday, and no one had made it go away as I had pleaded on FaceBook ca. 0130h last night when I finally finished my transcription of David Ragsdale’s virtuoso violin lines for “Song for America” by Kansas that I have to perform in a couple weeks.
What made this particular Monday shittier than normal ones was Chi informing me yesterday that his plans for importing his “ex-family” (i.e., the one that had forcefully kicked him out of their lives a few years before he and I met, obviously because he is such an abusive alcoholic mental case) are nearing critical mass. This was a bit much, given that I am so desperately fatigued and sleep-deprived due to the insane shit I’ve been buried in recently that I’m having to re-criticalize just to keep functioning.
Ever since the catastrophic events in Japan on 11 March 2011, in addition to driving me completely fucking batshit with his constant harping and Cassandraizing about an impending nuclear apocalypse resulting in the imminent end of the world (his perception of the Japanese coverage of the unfolding events, compounded by that douche-blowpipe’s May 21 Rapture end-gaming and internet panic-mongering), he has by his own admission been badgering his ex wife and two adult children in Tokyo via email on a daily basis to quit their jobs and come move in with us (yes, into our little two-bedroom ghetto apartment in Chinatown, L.A.). From what he had heretofore been reporting to me, they were resisting this gambit into utter ridiculousness. Now it sounds like due to the duress of the ongoing crisis with the Fukushima nuclear power plant (exploding re-criticalizing spent fuel and continuing large releases of radiation, core meltdown(s)/melt-through, etc.), frequent aftershocks from the massive earthquake, disruption to the power grid and economy, etc., they are starting to cave in to his daily pressuring and harassment. That means that I have to figure out a way to nip this in the bud. Now. Before he succeeds in severely disrupting all of our lives and creating a legendarily expensive calamity.
A part of me wanted to feel betrayed and hurt and angry about this since he now seems to have all this will to work and be productive in order to rescue his ex-family from nuclear contamination and economic meltdown, while the whole time he’s been here with me, all he’s seen fit to do is roll over and play dead and refuse to lift a finger to make anything work for himself. However, after stewing over it for the better part of the day, my cool-headed, rational side won out when I finally realized that this has nothing to do with him suddenly acquiring a sense of responsibility and the will to work and become viable, and everything to do with his mental illness, specifically his narcissism, and wanting to come off looking like a hero and saving the day, charging in on his big white horse to sweep his family out of harm’s way.
I also thought that he is not legally competent to sponsor other intending immigrants since he is not even here on his own recognizance – I sponsored his visa – and he has remained gainfully unemployed the whole time he has been here, so I would have to agree to sponsor them and provide proof to the CIS that I am in a position to support the whole lot of them, which obviously I will never agree to. However according to the CIS site, a legal permanent resident (green card holder) can sponsor other people, but they have to prove their ability to support them by filing a form i-864, or Affidavit of Support. Upon re-reading the form (I had to fill that out when I originally imported Chi), I was non-plussed to learn that my meager income is indeed considered sufficient to support EIGHT (yes, E-I-G-H-T (8)) PEOPLE! Obviously not at any standard of living I would find acceptable. Whatever, at this point I am going on faith that the business counselor he told me he is going to go see today in Little Tokyo will talk some sense into him and head him off of this infatuation with lunacy since he sure as hell won’t listen to me, so I haven’t even tried!
Don’t get me wrong. I care about his family too and want to help them. Nevertheless, I am already stretched over the rack just having to support Mr. Special Needs and do everything for him since he won’t even so much as try to improve his (very minimal) English or attain any level of self-sufficiency here, so I’m in absolutely no position to take on several more people who would be just as inviable as he is. Enough is enough. If he wanted to save them, then he should have prepared better. I.e., if he had only got a fucking job several years ago when we first moved here and it became clear that music was no longer an economically viable occupation (he has had plenty of opportunities to get employed, but he has quit or outrightly refused everything he has been offered!) instead of just consuming me out of house and home, and we’d had several years of two incomes and hopefully some savings, we would be in a position to trim down and divert the surplus to securing housing for them and providing for them until someone got their bearings and figured out how to bring in some income and attain criticality, but no…..
And of course this looming debacle would neatly coincide with one well-compensated booking for TPO in a new market segment for us that I cannot get out of and still maintain any credibility (or employability), so I may well be held hostage to that gig that is still a couple months out, and a lot of shit can occur during that time. For background, this has been one of his favorite methods of manipulating and extorting me into doing his bidding: whenever I refuse to comply with some jack-asinine demand of his, he throws a hysterical temper tantrum and demands that I cancel all the shows I have knocked myself out to book, delete the web presence I have worked like a dog to create, etc., etc. After I caught on to that control drama tactic and consciously realized that my world would do nothing but improve if he got the hell out of it by making good on his frequent threats to move back to Japan (like he’s really going to do that now – smirk!), I just ignore him and leave the room and wait for him to get a grip on himself. That said, I’m not looking forward to the fight that this will probably ignite, and am working out a contingency plan to salvage the July date in case he tries to scupper that to coerce me into agreeing to sponsor visas for his (former) family.
Well, thankfully it turned out that the business counselor he met with told him that his ex wife is not eligible for family-based visa/green card sponsorship (she’s no longer considered a part of his family any more than she considers him a part of hers), and that his two adult children are over 21 years of age, and so aren’t eligible either (which isn’t quite the case according to the USCIS site, but had the desired effect of detonating this asinine plot). His two young grandchildren (one infant, one in kindergarten) are not considered “immediate family”, so are not eligible either.
And as I take a break from writing this to pass around the mail at my day job (with my three college degrees and former expat career in international project management), I feel like a failed experiment in humanity, wondering, “How in the hell did I get here?” My thoughts drifted to what I would do with all the relationships I have forged with musicians over the years, and what I am self-sufficient with, what I would need help with, equipment I’d have to re-purchase, etc., once I finally do discharge Chi and his never ending trauma-drama Cluster B bullshit from my life, should I keep doing music and start a solo project, or should I even wish to continue this at all. I just don’t know. To quote Lou Reed, “I really don’t care and I just don’t know”. Probably from “Black Angel’s Death Song” or the heroin song, or one of those.
the first stop was the Marina del Rey garden center to pick up a couple odds and ends I wanted to integrate during the garden clean-out, but after a couple more stops to pick up some more odds and ends with my blood sugar plummeting as fast as the temperature was rising, my enthusiasm for doing a lot of dirty, frustrating detail work outside in the now-blazing sun waned.
