Alexandersmap

    Category: Music

    • RIP Kris Kristofferson

      I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
      But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
      And if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed.
      ‘Cos I don’t believe that no-one wants to know.
      — Kris Kristofferson, To Beat The Devil

      I saw that Kris Kristofferson passed away, but instead of writing a blog post about it and listing a bunch of songs he’d written topped by Me And Bobby McGee, I’ll leave this lyric to stand on it’s own. Any creative type knows the wrestling match we play with ourselves over the work that we put out into the world (or don’t put out into the world, holding out for that moment that never comes). I’m of a certain age where Kristofferson seemed to be everywhere in my youth. I mostly leaned into a different kind of music than he was singing, but I would always listen to what he had to say. It may feel sometimes that no one wants to know, but they’re quietly listening just the same. Put the work out there and let it find its audience. And in so doing, beat the devil within.

    • Ship of Fools

      Save me, save me from tomorrow
      I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools, no, no, no
      Save me, save me from tomorrow
      I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools
      Where’s it comin’ from?
      Oh, where’s it goin’ to?
      It’s just a, it’s just a ship of fools
      — World Party, Ship of Fools

      We’re all collectively setting sail for tomorrow. Who do we want steering the ship? Why exactly are we on this ship anyway? Why not sail to a better place on a ship surrounded by a better crew? We’re acting foolish ourselves when we don’t use our agency to set our course for the destination we wish to go to.

      We’ve been here before. It’s easy to recognize fools when you’ve seen their act in other chapters. We can’t blame the fools, for they only know the fool’s game, but we ought to find another game for ourselves when we see the way the game is going. For this game is played by the clock.

      It’s hard to change. That’s why the ship is so full of people looking around at each other wondering if they’re being foolish but not lowering the lifeboats and rowing like mad for shore. But sometimes we’ve got to risk all that comes with change to find a better ship.

      We may yet be the change we wish to see in this world.

    • Thou Hast Thy Music Too

      “Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music.” — John Keats

      Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
      Think not of them, thou hast thy music too
      — John Keats, To Autumn

      Keats only lived to 25, but his life was memorable because he had productive energy and talent and used it to churn out enough poetry to capture the world’s attention. Had he lived another few decades, I wonder where his voice might have taken him. Perhaps less flowery and more pointed? Our voices change with time, having lived beyond the illusions of our youth to a place more… earthbound.

      I’ve long ago abandoned any idea that writing a blog post every day would net a million followers. That’s Seth Godin territory. Blogging is a daily practice in writing, and thinking more deeply about consequential things. The idea of advertisements and diligently churning other platforms for clicks is not my game. Frankly, it’s not a game at all anymore, it’s simply the practice of writing every day. A steady climb to a better place.

      If life is short, but hopefully not as short as Keats’ life was, then to live it with joie de vivre seems vital. Ah, the poet has joie de vivre—but does the blogger? I think so, friend, but taking oneself less seriously and learning to enjoy the discoveries one makes about the universe along the way would surely carry us to a more joyful place than overanalyzing one’s key performance indicators (KPI’s) ever would. We don’t always have to know where we’re going or even why, but we ought to feel something stir deep within us when we move through our days. For ’tis true, thou hast thy music too.

    • September Song

      Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
      But the days grow short
      When you reach September
      When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
      One hasn’t got time for the waiting game
      — Frank Sinatra, September Song

      Labor Day Weekend in the United States is the unofficial end of summer. That in itself isn’t particularly remarkable, but I feel compelled to remark on the fact that it’s now September. In general I love September for the crisp air and epic sunsets that seem to come with it, but that’s tinged with the reality of shorter days and a realization that we never really do everything we wanted to do with summer before it’s gone. Alas, we can’t do it all. We must simply be deliberate about doing the things we most want to do with the time we have.

      There’s a Latin phrase that is often found on sundials, “Serius est quam cogitas”, which means, “It’s later than you think.” We must remember this and live with purpose each day, that we may look back on the season recently passed and feel we didn’t miss the boat. We can’t change seasons already passed, but we can feel the urgency to do something with today. We’re all familiar with that other Latin call to the moment, carpe diem, and ought to embrace it more for the desperate call to pay attention it was meant as. Indeed, we must seize the day before it fades away in our memory with all that is lost.

      Yesterdays carry us to today, either as a stepping stone or a slide into oblivion. I’d rather be climbing, wouldn’t you? Writing saves more of my days than reminding myself to get to it already. Writing anchors me to the moment, forcing me to pay attention to something tangible in the time I have available and do with it what I can. Last week was a series of late, often frenetic posts inserted into spare moments in airports and hotel rooms. Finding something that anchors us to the day makes the day less likely to float away like all the rest. A blog post, a moment shared with people of consequence, a bold act of self-determination and a nod to the time passing by are things we can hold on to.

    • Forever and Always Now

      Reflecting on the moment

      You said time makes the wheels spin
      And the years roll out and thе doubt rolls in
      In the truck stops, in the parking lots
      And the chеap motels
      When will we become ourselves?
      — Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Hashtag

      The other day I was talking with a coworker at a hotel bar in Washington, DC. He’s a few years closer to retirement than I am, doesn’t travel all that much anymore in his current role and isn’t the picture of health (probably related to too much time in hotel bars). He mentioned that he’d never visited the Lincoln or Washington Memorials before, let alone the war memorials on the National Mall. He wasn’t sure if he would have the time on this particular trip either. I looked at him, said “why are we sitting here now?!” and summoned an Uber. For the next couple of hours we visited memorials to those who exemplified greatness in the United States. I took a few pictures of and with him and shared them with him afterwards. Memories must be built, not stumbled upon.

      I’ve reached a point in my life where, when I compare the former me to the current version, I usually forgive that former guy for not being better at the art of living than he was. We must figure things out along the way, or be lucky enough to have a guide to show us the ropes. We become ourselves through deliberate acts more than stumbling along through life. When we do stumble, we figure out a way to get back on track again. Being human is full of opportunities to learn and grow.

      The thing is, we must keep challenging ourselves to step out of the box we’ve grown into. It may be bigger than the one we were in before, but it’s still a damned box. The answer to “when will we become ourselves?” must forever and always be, now.

    • Illusions of Someday

      First thing we’d climb a tree
      And maybe then we’d talk
      Or sit silently
      And listen to our thoughts
      With illusions of someday
      Cast in a golden light
      No dress rehearsal
      This is our life
      — The Tragically Hip, Ahead by a Century

      It’s no secret that we ought to stop deferring the living of our lives for the illusion of someday. We see the changes in each other and it makes us both feel strange, as Bonnie Raitt put it so beautifully. And seeing the changes around and within us, the urgency to make the most of now burns hotly in our souls.

      I write this in an airport, awaiting my flight, after sending off my daughter on her own flight an hour before mine. That we’re both flying out of the same airport with an hour of each other is serendipitous, that we’re flying to different destinations unfortunate. Such is life: I bought her a sandwich for the flight and hugged an until next time.

      We may look at life flying along and try our best to hold on for dear life. Alternatively, we might simply enjoy the blessing of each moment together and position ourselves well for another day, someday, when we may pick up where we left off. Today will slide into the past just as surely as all the rest. What will we remember of it?

    • Learning to Fly

      “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
      — Kurt Vonnegut

      A soul in tension that’s learning to fly
      Condition grounded but determined to try
      Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies
      Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
      — Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly

      Any self-respecting rock n’ roll fan knows that there are a few songs with the title Learning to Fly, and I love them all. We can argue about which gets your heart rate racing more, or any such thing like that, but for my money Pink Floyd’s song is the best of the bunch lyrically. Foo Fighters fans and Tom Petty aficionados might quibble, and the shear number of covers of Petty’s song indicate popular opinion on the matter, but there: I’ve said it. And yes, I digress.

      To master anything in this life we must at some point leap into the unknown and find out how we fare. Mostly we fall on our face in those early days. We either quit and play another game or we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get to it again. Even writing that I felt the overpowering cliche of familiar metaphor wash over me (sorry). But if the metaphor fits, use it.

      The whole point of this game is discovery. Try everything, learn which things work well for us and lean into them with gusto. With enough leaps we become adept at adaptation. Sure, some people have more talent than us, but persistence matters too. Skills may be learned. The rest is just breaking through the mind games of categorization and imposter syndrome. The fact is, some people will always put us in a certain bucket (people like that don’t do things like this), but mostly we do it to ourselves first. Just go do it and be ready for the stumble (see metaphor above).

      I write this knowing that there’s some new cliff I’ll need to jump off sooner or later, that I may learn to fly yet again. Life is a succession of such cliffs, and we may grow a pair or live with being ground-based creatures. We all feel like earth-bound misfits in the beginning of anything new. There’s only one way to soar though, and so we must toe up to the edge and lean into the next. It’s the only way we’ll ever fly.

    • Screens and Stars

      I scrolled through Facebook this morning. Not a proud moment in productivity but there it is. It occurred to me that the platform is now a lot like living in an empty nest. Where once you could easily get caught up with all your friends and family in one place in pictures and comments, now it’s nothing but endless videos and advertisements cultivated for your perceived tastes, mostly because you happened to click on one and now they dump them all on you. Like an empty nest, there’s nothing there to hold on to but memories of what once was. A great reminder to fly away more often and live our lives instead of lingering in the nest.

      The easiest way to fly is to walk right out the door and keep on walking. I walk the dog every night just to get away from the collection of screens that would otherwise call to me, and really, because the dog insists on it. I’ve trained her too well at this point. She serves as my catalyst for action: get up and move! Get outside and let’s see what’s new in the neighborhood! Good pup.

      The days are getting shorter again, and the air feels autumn-like after the thick tropical air we just had finally cleared out. The pup and I have an unsaid agreement where she covers the ground level quite well, and I tilt my head up and assess the evening sky (This works until she bolts for bunnies, but I’ve learned to sense those sudden energy bursts before they erupt). The waxing crescent moon clears out just as it’s getting dark, and the stars emerge to remind me that there’s so much more to life than lingering in front of screens.

      Look at the stars
      Look how they shine for you
      And everything you do
      — Coldplay, Yellow

      We are what we repeatedly do. We can dwell on the empty nest or immerse ourselves in the cultivated media feed that serves as a time-killer (quite literally), or we can step into something more with our minutes. Social media platforms and streaming services are no substitute for interaction with people equally invested in the interaction. The right people in our lives are like stars, shining for us as we shine for them. Together lighting up the eternal void. We may fill that which is empty with something that brings us to life. Fly amongst the stars.

    • Raising Our Voice of Reason

      Our little lives get complicated
      It’s a simple thing
      Simple as a flower
      And that’s a complicated thing
      — Love and Rockets, No New Tale to Tell

      Wrestling with what comes next with the generation ahead of mine is complicated. Offering guidance to the young adults we raised when they have good heads on their own shoulders is also complicated. We ought to let people find their own way as much as we can, while remembering that we’re in their life for a reason. Sometimes we have something to offer in such moments.

      The world is very complicated right now. Sometimes it seems like our only purpose is to be a voice of reason in a maddeningly confused time. It seems some people are outraged by the opening ceremonies at the Olympics. I’m more outraged by children dying on a soccer pitch in the Golan Heights for no reason but that they were born in a place and time that made them expendable to someone with the means and inclination to wipe their lives away. I’m more outraged that we’re pissing away time focusing on petty instead of looking at the bigger issues this planet is facing right now. And yes, I’m more outraged that people are outraged by things they’re told to be outraged about instead of following their own moral compass.

      “Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
      Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
      ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

      I don’t particularly want to make this blog political, and choose to focus on finding common ground instead. I feel the world needs more people pointing out the things that link us together instead of people pulling us apart, and so I use my keyboard accordingly. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out when we go astray. The human race is staggeringly complicated and stupefyingly simple all at once. Art is finding the beauty in the madness and helping others see what was right in front of them all along.

      Our job, should we choose to embrace it, is to raise our voice and bring reason to the conversation. The world doesn’t need another person screaming, and it doesn’t need another person who chooses to stay silent, it needs thoughtful consideration about what comes next and a measured response. It needs people who rise up and do what’s right when it feels like rising up will get you knocked down. This is our time, after all. So what will we do with reason when it asks for a voice?

    • Before the Noise

      Well, those drifters days are past me now
      I’ve got so much more to think about
      Deadlines and commitments
      What to leave in
      What to leave out
      — Bob Seger, Against the Wind

      Count me in as a proponent of productive mornings. I get far more done in the first three hours of the day than I do the rest of the day. We all have our time of peak energy and focus, and for me it’s between the moment I wake up and the moment the world throws its first curveball my way. Every day offers new twists and turns, and all we can truly count on is that short amount of time that is ours before the noise.

      Before is the trick, I think. Before everyone else’s agenda becomes ours. Before the distraction machine between our ears has robbed us of our focus and mental energy to do anything of consequence this day. Before is everything for the early bird.

      This post is out late because I prioritized a long mileage workout over writing. Normally I do it the other way around, but alas, the workouts don’t always survive intact after the noise. With deadlines and commitments, we’re always weighing what to leave in and what to leave out in our lives. A song like Against the Wind is more meaningful with a few miles on the soul than it was as a kid.

      Priorities change as we do. And we aren’t drifting at this point in our lives, are we? No, we’re living with purpose and trying to fit as much in as a day will give us. The lesson always seems to come back to starting early and not beating ourselves up for leaving a few things out.