Scarcity and Demand

It is nice to know that had I not had all my tapes stolen I would have had a lot more than $200-worth of tapes in that case, since Queen tapes are so pricey on the used music market now. I do miss all the pictures in the album cover that are not in the CD jackets. And Europe! I can't imagine paying more than $10 for a used rock CD, but the cheapest I could find on Amazon for Wings of Tomorrow was over $30. Same for Europe, their first album under their bandname. This of course sucks since their first album was my favorite.
Somehow or another, albums from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra are either rare and expensive, or quite cheap. This is another where a new album might run $70, but other albums I actually ordered at around $5. Does this money return to the artists? We must hope some of it does.
I am liking the personalization on Amazon. I no longer have to do anything special to find albums by Roger Taylor, Brian May, or Queen, as they pop up on their own. Very handy since I am now on to solo albums, except for those 4 remaining Queen albums. I am still hoping for a cheaper copy of Sheer Heart Attack, especially since I got a cheaper copy of Hot Space finally.

Physics 2 returns with a vengence

I was hoping I could avoid this part but it looks like I will have to read a lot of e&m physics to really make a guitar from scratch. I know I could possibly just buy one, but I really don't want to put much money into this yet, and I don't know that I could find a guitar I could physically play. So I may be writing a bit less often for a bit while I finish learning the physics I never quite mastered a decade ago. I don't want to buy pickups, cause they are expensive and I would like to understand them better. Plus, I don't know yet if in making my mandolin electric and tuning it with each string different, so 8 strings instead of four, if a standard pickup would even work best. I am enough of a nerd that making my first set of pickups would be satisfying, even if I wind up buying some later when I can actually play well enough to need them. I will have to figure out a neck design too, that allows me access to the strings while maintaining their tension and allowing multiple pickups. And I still don't quite get the part about how the sound gets out of the guitar. Stupid, I know, but perhaps understandable since I have no electric guitar to play with. If they are hooked up to an amp, is there a cord? Where is the amp? How big is it? When Brian is playing with three amps, is there a cord running from his guitar to the amps? Then how could he walk around onstage playing his guitar? I hope in a day or two this confusion will seem silly and I will understand completely.

Things that make depression seem like heaven.

Leave it to Brian May to once again be behind such life-changing sentiments as make the choice to live necessary and obvious, even to the most apathetic depression imaginable. Here I have been still allowing that I might choose to die in about a year from now, not for any real pain, but simply out of a sort of fundamental frustration with life and the universe. I just finished reading the stuff on Brian's page about Vicki, a girl who died a few years ago of terminal cancer. I can't say I was shamed into retracting my pact, because it is not a matter of shame. Rather, I am certain now that it is not life itself I need to decide on, but my way of living. If I had, as this girl, only months left to live, I would no doubt truly live every day of the rest of my life. Since I have no such certainty of death, I am allowing my life to slip away, mired in work at a department store I couldn't care less about, selling lots of crap to lots of people who need little or none of what I have to sell, wasting not only time, but material resources, energy and everything else, to bring me money with which I pay bills and buy a few needless trinkets. If I knew I was going to die in a year and a few weeks, I would have to do differently.

I have not made time or any decent effort lately at seeing my many friends, who I hope still remain my friends even after months and in some cases years of neglect on my part. This has been largely an effect of my depression, and yet I know well enough that if I was around my friends more I would have less severe depression, and it would not feel so awkward to see people. I am becoming a recluse, unnecessarily. I live in an annoying apartment, which I know most of my friends who have visited disliked being in. It has lousy ventilation, and even without cats would smell stale, and it is cold in the winter. My ex was still telling me almost the last time I talked to him that I overheat my apartment, cause in Washington I did like to keep my room at about 72 degrees occasionally. This apartment is lucky to hit 65, ever, except in the dead heat of late July. And I use these things as an easy excuse to not invite anyone over anymore. And since I live in Longmont, and can't drive, and most of my friends live elsewhere, it is easy to have no contact with anyone away from my place, too. If they lived here, I might meet up with them at Old Chicago's for dinner some night, or meet someone in Boulder for a concert at CU, and many of them would really not mind and could even drive me back to Longmont after. It simply takes some effort and motivation, which I was not possessed of.

Well, as being on facebook just a brief while has shown easily enough, I do still have friends, lots of them, and lots of incredibly good people who I am glad I have known. And as they mean more to me than my store, and are more rewarding than new shoes, I have to change something to make my friends my top priority after taking care of myself.

And hobbies- I own a piano, and a mandolin, and a pair of drumsticks, and I have enough of a science background to understand books on making electric mandolins, setting up sound studios, and anything else music related. I may not have a great volume to my voice, but I have a great range, and I know it. Heck, I have performed in choir concerts the Hallelujah Chorus in every part but bass. When properly warmed up I can sing all of every song Freddie has recorded, and I am quite capable of writing my own songs. Making music is a much bigger hobby than anything I have played at so far, but everything I do so far is something that requires little effort, and no committment, and it is all easy to drop or ignore. My life feels like it is made up of tons of tiny bits that take up all my life and all my energy, yet add up to practically nothing. I may miss some of the tiny bits if I concentrate on just one thing, but really. By my age, my favorite musicians (Queen) had made quite a few albums, toured all over playing music for thousands of fans at a time, and had been treated to countless priceless moments that are well worth losing some random time-wasting experiences.

I let depression and my handicap decide a lot for me. There is a lot that is not my handicap behind my not driving, for instance, and I will most likely be driving in the next few years, when I can afford to. I don't play my piano or mandolin because of my handicap, too, yet these instruments make sounds for me just as they do for others. I can type at almost 40wpm, faster than many of my friends, without thumbs, and on a 'normal' keyboard. Surely if I actually try to work with my instruments I can learn to play them, even if I can't ever play someone else's music. And I have a very strong will, which most days makes up for whatever mania or depression I am experiencing. Some days I have to admit the mood disorder and deal with it, but most days, till I get worn down or careless anyway, I can act as if I am just fine. Most people only know I have a mood disorder because I have told them. And as Brian and the author May Sarton demonstrate by example, in a creative life mood disorders can be used for what they are worth, adding a certain depth to music and writing that most 'normal' people never could reach.



Really if I concentrate on restoration ecology and music, and my friends, my life will be full enough, and maybe I could actually feel interesting enough as a person to be happy meeting Brian May.

New shoes and daydreaming

My card is working again, after a week blocked due to a miscommunication at my bank after my computer purchase. So I celebrated by buying a new pair of designer shoes. Actually I spent about $20, and I knew my card was working again cause the purchases I made of, yes more, Queen CD's went through finally.

Wow, what an experience. To sing one's song live with Luciano Pavarotti. Sounds horrible, but still quite an experience. I think playing guitar for Robert Plant is perhaps a higher achievement if a bit less high-class. He really should not have tried to comb out his hair like that though. It looks all frizzy and fluffy, not at all attractive, whereas his nice mop of curls looks great if he just lets his curls stay intact. He would have been a dull-looking man with short hair, but his curls make him distinctive, and, yes, attractive, though much too old for me.

I can feel the high of my hypomania beginning to really seep away now. I am fighting it, and Queen still helps, but I am losing energy. Yes, the Show Must Go On, and it will, but it may be mostly will for a while. I got pretty decent at managing my moods like this for a bit, before depo, and was only very rarely suicidal. Obviously this might still be unhealthy if I am suicidal at the end of March next year, but my pact still holds for now, and I can't consider death an option at all till then. So I might as well continue to ride the wave of this rock-star path. I have no idea what I am capable of in this, as I have never sang into a microphone, nor have I made music in ublic except in choir. Yet, I am not afraid of public speaking, and am rather flamboyant when in public, some days anyway. Most importantly I need to figure out how to reinvent myself, cause where I am now seems too much of a dead end. So maybe there are other aspects of me that can help. If I live past my 31st birthday I have to have something to live for, and otherwise I might as well jump figuratively instead of literally, and choose a new life instead of just giving up entirely. Who knows but maybe I will become good friends with Brian May and John and Roger, and live a life of my dreams if I give myself half a chance. All that is certainly more possible if I am still alive, even if it is still silly and highly unlikely. Maybe my dream guy, Jonathan, exists too, and I'll fall madly in love with him and live happily ever after, too.

I wonder that I never thought to google the names of the guys from those dreams. There is the skeptics' approach to such dreams. I know the first and last names of three of the four and the middle name as well for one of them, and if the Internet was not so infernally slow at night I might find out something interesting, though not finding them does not proove anything, any more than John Deacon's absence from the web makes him dead or imaginary. Not that a name like Brian Masters is distinctive or anything. No, I doubt I will ever meet those guys. Nice daydreams, but they are not real and can't be. I am much more likely to become best friends with Brian May. :)

The Battle Rejoins

I have been wondering about this ever since I returned to Queen. Listening to Brian talking about writing "Too Much Love..." I suddenly am quite sure and aware that I am in fact cycling again. It is a weird phase now. I sleep very little and have some of the outward giddiness of hypomania, but it is as if I am fighting to hold on to that energy and craziness tooth and nail as I am inexorably slipping back the other direction into depression. It is maybe no big surprise then that I am back to Queen. The music has always been such a comfort, a friend that is always there, at least now that I have CD's and my computer to bring these voices back to me. The YouTube videos of songs I have never heard or heard of, and live performances that actually do sound at least as good as the studio versions, all this gives me little boosts that keep me less depressed, and listening to songs and interviews that bring back all that about Freddie and his death seems to be allowing me to attach my depression feelings to something external, something almost unbearably sad but at the same time not personal. It is truly painful for me right now to watch the last few music videos, especially "These are the Days of Our Lives" with that image of Freddie weak and nearing death, though I have seen it often enough the last time I was really 'into' Queen.

Maybe I ought to take to heart what I have been picking up through Brian May and May Sarton about how one can use one's mood disorder to the good. I will not resort to drug therapy, so I have to figure out other ways to deal with this. I have really latched on to this idea of making my mandolin electric, and maybe doing the electric double bass from my dreams too, and perhaps music is a channel I could benefit from. It seems rediculous that I at 30 could possibly have a career ahead as a musician, but so long as I can afford it, I would really enoy making and mixing my own tracks and putting together my own solo album. In my dreams Brian May is always involved in all this too, but that scene in Wayne's World with Alice Cooper comes to mind (We're not worthy! We're not worthy!)

It's a great dream, though. Brian May turns up at Dillards and is talking to Hayley at the fragrance counter, not that she is likely to know who he is, and that is I guess the point, cause she introduces me to him as a guy who might know what I am doing wrong with my pick-ups on my poor little mandolin, as he has built his own guitar. Why she is telling him all that about my project I don't know, but I guess I am having problems with getting the second and third pick-ups working and the music store people think I am crazy for wanting multiple pick-ups anyway. I chat with Brian briefly, trying not to be too self conscious and embarrassed, since maybe it is not Brian May, but simply someone else who looks and sounds like him and knows about building guitars, and then remember that I was getting change and really ave to go finish counting down my drawer so I can clock out on time. I pass him and Hayley again on the way back from turning in my bag, and Hayley, true to form for my usual experiences of walking home when there is weather of any kind, makes a big deal of my walking. Brian has been waiting for Anita, who is shopping with Mrs. Deacon, and she turns up as I am asserting that I will be just fine walking home in rain, that I won't melt, etc. She and Brian agree that I shouldnt have to walk home, and he insists on driving me home, ignoring my turning beet red at the thought of having to accept a ride from one of my rock heroes. He wants to see my mandolin, too. I am not sure how normal my idea is, really, but he thinks he might like to see it. So he gives me a ride home, and I show him my mandolin, and bring out my finished electric double bass, also with three sets of pick-ups, to show him that the arrangement itself has worked for me, if not on the much smaller mandolin, and he starts playing with my bass. We work on the mandolin a bit and he tells me he thinks he has something back at his hotel that might help.

The nex day, a day off for me, he shows up with the parts, and with John Deacon, who was bored and lured in by the idea of the electric double bass. Brian, John and I fiddle with the mandolin a bit more, both of them amused at my tuning it as an 8-string guitar, and then notice that I have been recording music, using my bass and the mandolin, and an electronic drum pad, with my voice. All the bits are charted out in a format remeniscent of a form I have seen on video of Queen's studio work, and while I am in my room for something, Brian starts listening to the trackon my computer. When I come back out he is talking with John about how it could be improved, mostly with adding backing vocals, which he has taken the liberty of singing and is in the process of layering in. I blush beet red again, of course. Brian May on my song! John is tweaking the bass line, and when they are done it sounds great and really rofessional, but not quite done. So Brian calls up Roger, who is also here, and he comes over, bringing along a few drums (bass, snare) and a few cymbals. An hour or so later we have a finished track, something I would enjoy listening to, though I still am uneasy about my voice being on a Queen track, especially the first ever Queen track since Made in Heaven to feature all the surviving members of Queen. The dream continues on, as Roger sends is producer friend an email with one minute of it attached, and gets a reply back by phone asking him if it is real, and when it would be ready for release as a sngle. Brian tells him that they think it is ready, but that it is my song, written and performed largely by me, and with the three of them only doing backing vocals, second percussion lines and a running bass line, at which point the producer guy realizes the significance of John's presence in the room. We are asked about a second track, a B'side, and John meanwhile has discovered another track on my computer for which I had written out a bass line that was too fast and comlicated for me to play, and has been playing it and tweaking it. By the end of the night we have, the four of us, recorded and mixed another track, from that bass line and my mandolin, extra percussion and voice, Brian and Roger's voices, and drum and guitar lines and solos from Brian and Roger. I think this is where I wake up, but there is a general impression that the story continues, and that the single is released and is ugely successful, to my extreme distress, as I still feel that it is rediculous that I could be the catalyst to bring John back into Queen, as the press insists, and that I could belong in the same studio or on the same stage as them. If I could shut up these common sensical voices and just enjoy the fantasy it would be a great dream, but I think a part of me wishes too strongly that this dream would translate to reality. Dumd and silly, I know, but there it is.

oh happy day. . . .

I am so thoroughly enjoying my Queen II CD. This is and always has been my favorite Queen CD, though certain songs on other albums rate higher. I do love them all, and will re-buy all of them this year, but I have most of my top picks now. I do need Jazz, and A Night at the Opera though. And as I put in my order on Amazon for those and 4 other Queen discs, I ought to get them this week. Yay! Four more albums and I will have them all.

I also got my plant systematics project data sent off, at least enough to run the next semester's plantings easier. There is a lot more I could do with it, and I may do some side projects to try to get some of the harder or less successful ones to work. I think some of the seed is maybe too old, but there are too many factors to be sure yet why any one of these plantings failed. I almost wish I could stay in Boulder and finish this project properly, with a second run and a properly controlled program, but I can't figure out how to make it into a proper graduate thesis project, and it seems silly to stay on for it otherwise. We don't have a horticulture program at CU, and there is very little in the project that could be a decent thesis question without a lot of tweaking. Getting mecanopsis to grow reliably and figuring out what has been preventing our seeds from germinating or starting properly might lead to a thesis, but there are not any professors here who could adequately support me on this project. The fact that I got my lovely schizanthus to grow is great for my ego, and meant that I did in fact have a better understanding of this plant than Tom, but also is not thesis-worthy. HMPFH! Maybe I can find a professor at CSU whose work can piggyback off of this stuff though. After all, I was working with 86 different species, so I ought to be able to find a decent project connected to at least one of them.

Tomorrow, though, is day 2 of Pinguicula Day, and as long as I make it into Boulder I get to thin and clean pinguicula all day, or for as much of it as the task requires. After that if I have more time the sundews may need attention again too. :)

Innuendo and odd dreams

Innuendo arrived today. I can't help thinking about that interview with Brian talking about recording the Innuendo tracks and about how sick Freddie was by then- he had bronchial pneumonia, and Brian was apologizing for the high notes in The Show Must Go On, and Freddie stopped him and did the song, very beautifully, a sound that is quite miraculous for Freddie as he was then. Brian tells the story much better than I can, of course. But this idea now lingers within my perceptions of that song.

I told Andrew about my wanting to build a guitar and fix up my mandolin, and he seemed to like this idea for me, and thought I ought to go for broke, and get a drum kit and a recording studio. A one-man-show starring me. It would be fun if I could do it. I don't have much faith in my ability to generate enough good material even if I can play the necessary instruments, but if I can afford it I will try. It's better than accepting all the excuses for not.