very "good job" motivated

good morning ~

(click the overpass leaves / link to listen)

My Big Breakvery "good job" motivated

today’s track is simply me at the piano, singing into my guitar pedals

something extremely cool happens this Saturday in Kingston, the StretchMetal Drone Sleepover. Atmospheric music, intentionally sleepy, from 10pm to 10am, horizontal listening.

I got to perform this event when it took place in Chicago last year and it was one of the more nourishing gigs of my life. A very special, very intentional, and impressively welcoming world of atmospheric music slumbering, I give it my highest recommendation. Plus there will not be tickets sold at the door, so you gotta buy ‘em now if you wanna go.

Here’s the flyer:

Spent the week alone, mostly working. Had a string of freelance sound gigs - for which I am so grateful, don't misinterpret me on that - but found myself with a lot of idle time on my hands. Or not exactly idle, but that sensation of needing to be on call and responsive but not necessarily having a task at hand at every given moment. Like when the actors on stage are still working out their blocking, there might be ten minutes where, behind the sound desk, there is truly nothing needed of me. A great opportunity, perhaps, to zone out entirely or to maybe play a wordle from the archives, but when they do want to run it from the top again, you have to be ready to turn the mics on, hit play, etc. A little like being in stop and start traffic - you go when you can and sit when you must, trying to be patient.

Friday I had a particularly long one because the new theater where I'm working had some middle schoolers coming in to watch a puppet show and their first run was at 9am. It was a kind of space age neo-noir robots versus aliens kinda thing where all the props and sets were charmingly ragtag - their backdrop was made from discarded political lawn signs, spray painted gunmetal gray on one side. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching a puppet show for children twice through from up in the booth. And then there was a pretty decent break between that and the production of Dracula that was coming in that night, so again I had some decidedly idle time on my hands. What I should have done was go for a walk, call a friend, read a book somewhere else, change the scene a bit. But I felt indeterminately yoked to the building and the work and I wanted to make a good impression on my first shift there, so instead I paced out on the front entrance landing and crushed my Duolingo quests for the day. This felt like maybe a B- use of free will, satisfactory but not dazzling. But then it was time to load in Dracula, they had me help with the coffin.

For their actual run through they put me in charge of hitting their sound cues. Normally the kind of industry-standard computer program for doing this just requires you to hit a spacebar and it'll automatically page through each, all you have to worry about is the timing. But this troop was using something I wasn't familiar with, a program that instead maps each sound cue to the computer keyboard. So when the gramophone cranked up, my script indicated that I needed to hit the "c" key at a particular moment. Same for bat sounds, Dracula stabbing death sounds, etc, all mapped to different keys. So there was this added layer of difficulty, because not only did I have to hit a button at the precise moment an actor did something, I also had to locate the semicolon. If I did it well, the stage manager - a delightful grandma-age lady - would give me a solid thumbs up and a "very good" whispered into my comm headphones. It felt very similar to a Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing game, and also not at all dissimilar from my Duolingo session earlier that afternoon. A little haptic feedback, a little pat on the head - oh yes, he's very "good job" motivated.

15 hours later I was home again, very dead to the world. Gracelee called me from Kentucky and I was too tired to even chat, wanted to go straight to bed. But then I noticed the theater's distinctive Glade plugin smell had permeated my clothes and scented my skin, a hazard of working there so long all at once, started dreaming in the shower.

I had two more days of sound work to go, plus I had a time-sensitive writing assignment to turn in. With my sweetie gone and no energy in the tank left for leaving the house, I found myself working on a fourth draft at 9pm on a Saturday, eating a series of grilled cheese sandwiches and eggs-in-the-hole, made with bread and dairy products we would normally never keep in the house. When exhausted and when unsupervised, I will apparently eat a whole jar of banana peppers purchased at the gas station. Having work to do is a convenient way to guide your thinking. And I think I am just very, deeply attached to having something to do. For most of my life, I've had a steady job - I entered the work force my freshman year of high school and kept a day job through my entire 20s. It gives you money, which is helpful, but it also gives shape to your life and takes you out of the driver's seat for a good majority of your consciousness. For the most part, I've spent my life avoiding being "left to my own devices," so much so that when I do have moments of truly free time, I feel like I don't have a solid notion of how best to spend that time. Too much Jesus take the wheel, not enough steering.

Work, obligations, plans, someone else's needs, artistic pursuits that require getting things in on a deadline or playing a particular time slot at a particular venue, all of these remove some of the terror - they are the walls of the cake pan in which you pour the batter of your life (and some shapes are more fun than others). But I want to actually utilize my free will, I want to truly do something because I want to do it, not because I've promised to do it every Thursday. Are we capable of wanting without shape? And acting on that impulse? I considered this yesterday as I hiked to the Hudson at 5pm cradling a disco ball, that's a pretty good use of free will.

But what about you? What are your guard rails, who are you accountable to? What did you get up to when you were last left to your own devices? How do you fill your idle time?