brain okay category

good morning ~

(click the link / indoor outdoor disco ball to listen)

My Big Breakbrain okay category

today’s track is rendered entirely from a 20 second piano improv

I’m competing tonight in a Halloween battle of the cover bands at Tubby’s in Kingston - we’re doing Sparks :)

speaking of covers the band Fascinating Chimera Project just put out this really great EP of covers. You might remember the band from the interview I did with Alex earlier this year (plus you might see me in this music video ;) )

by the way, I’ll probably mention this again, but Tiny Showcase - the email-based art edition project run by the artist Julia Gualtieri - is shutting down by the end of the year and they’re looking to sell off their remaining stock of artists prints and other objects. Tiny Showcase commissioned sandhills music from me in 2022 and they have a small handful of those super beautiful cassette tape scrolls left, only place to get ‘em!

Say you want to do something. In the very first instance, your mind and your brain have to allow you to consider it possible. Easy to stumble there. Then whatever it is you want to do has to be okay with your body, too, within the limits your corporeal form imposes upon you, and that can totally trip you up. You gotta have the energy, you gotta be reasonably free from pain. And then you must consider the resources necessary - a lot of what we might want to do requires the resource of money, for one thing, but there are many other types of currency, many possible limiting factors. And you have to be brave enough to risk trying to do what you want and failing at it, although that might fall into the first brain category. Then very likely whatever you want to do will require the official or unofficial approval of other people, like maybe you need to be allowed into a building at a certain time, or maybe you need someone to sign off on a particular piece of paper. Like if you wanted to get married, say, there are lots of forms and signatures and notary publics and town officers involved - it's not like you can just get the status of being married from a kiosk outside the gas station, no those kiosks will only help you if the thing you want to do is watch a Steven Seagal movie. And then you might also actually need help from other people in which case you will need to coordinate their energy and resources, you'll need to communicate with them clearly enough, you'll need to be certain that they will do what you need them to at the appropriate time and, you know, that they won't grow to resent you eventually for participating in the thing that you wanted to do. You have to be appreciative and verbal towards them, to some extent, probably before, during, and after. And you'll have to be graceful and flexible enough to deal with the very real and understandable possibility of the people you need to do things bailing or changing the amount they're willing to participate, because one of the circumstances that has to conspire in order for you to do your thing you want to do is that everyone else's things they want to do need to allow adequate space for your thing you want to do. And then, like, there's the weather, or what's happening in the news, or just freak happenings. That is to say that we could easily between us probably list off like 800 things that might prevent you from doing what you think you might want to do, not excluding the fact that your wants can change, sometimes when you're right in the middle of doing the thing. You might wake up one day wanting to do one thing but then the very next morning you could never imagine doing such a thing, happens all the time. But perhaps that also belongs in the first brain okay category.
So whenever you finally do get to do something you want to do it is honestly an appreciable, observable miracle. And I think that even small acts should be seen in this way, like honestly it is a remarkable confluence of a million random factors that, you know, just now I could allow myself a second cup of coffee and a luxurious Duolingo session on our living room couch. My brain was cool with it, my body remained in wellness, we have a place to live and a couch to sit on and the coffee beans were grown in the equatorial band then freight shipped to Troy where my buddy roasted them in a converted ambulance garage and then sent them to me in a blue bubble mailer. And the water comes from the well behind our house, we live on a hill covered in natural springs, what a blessing, and the electricity that boiled the water did probably come all the way from Canada but starting, like, next week most of the power in our house will come directly from the sun itself. And so I sat there with my hot beverage and I got my little haptic feedback jolts and my little notification dings and you know what I'll take all the good brain chemicals I can get. And you could very easily ruin this moment, because coffee is such an engine of colonialism, and we probably shouldn't be letting our phones play such a strong hand in delivering serotonin, but I'm number one in my league this week and that's something of a win, I'll take it.
But the hardest part of doing what you want to do is knowing what it is you want to do and I at least often feel like I wish I had less agency - one of the upsides of booking work is the fact that it shapes your day for you for a minute. Lots of other ways to orient your time, though, and given the opportunity to do so I really threw myself as thoroughly as I could into helping pull off the big overnight ambient music production last weekend. You need me to come early, drive over a lamp, bring my folding tables? I am delighted to do so. I will happily welcome and smile at the artists and the other volunteers, I'll set up the merch. And at 5:45am I'll rise from our inflatable mattress we take to raves to go get in the car and pick up the donuts and the coffee. When we approach the gates of heaven in our first moments in the afterlife, will the celestial queue be as brilliantly lit as the Dunkin in Kingston on a very early Sunday morning? I put out the goodies as quietly as possible, plastic bags crinkling, and then we slowly slid back the curtains, letting in the brilliant light of dawn.

But what about you? What do you want to do today? What needs to conspire in order for that to happen? Is it time to make the donuts?