June 2nd, 2019.

Monday night’s open mic was a good gathering. A number of people that I hadn’t seen in a while – Morell (who suddenly has a first name!!! Arschell!) has retired and threatened  to come out to the open mics more frequently – and I’m down with that! Dave Benham’s son Thilman came out and shared monstrous cello riffs with us, and then everyone’s batteries failed! Fortunately, no more than one failed battery per act, so I didn’t have to break out more instrument mics…

Tuesday’s open mic at Busboys and Poets was a small exercise in territorialism, with a new-to-me manager walking in as I was setting up and asking “I was wondering who was using my events room” and my taking that as the opportunity to say that if Busboys was advertising their open mic as heavily as they ought to then she’d KNOW who was using her event room… and that I’ve been doing this once a month since last fall.

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 I handed her a bunch of posters, requested some more support from the venue and got on with my day. Unfortunately, I think that lack of support is really beginning to take its toll – we had our lightest turnout YET – though I can’t even really just blame the venue on that one… my feature didn’t even show. Sickness struck, but I didn’t know about it till a half hour before we ended the night.

Definitely some issues to work on.

Sigh.

In my downtime I tried putting together a “webcast” version of Monday night’s open mic at Teavolve – basically stitching all the videos together, doing a LITTLE bit of multi-camming and dubbing in the main board mix – adding the Teavolve and Focus logos and then creating a youtube “premiere” event rather than just slapping it online. It’ll go Live tonight and we’ll see if anyone cares – I’m NOT optimistic – but think it COULD gain momentum. Unfortunately the amount of effort involved probably means this method would be impractical.

The idea would be that maybe I can funnel and focus a bit of an “EVENT” out of it, regain some of the energy that we used to get from the Livecasts – but – it means that on top of the 5+ hours spent actually at the event, the 1+ hours spent offloading and cataloging everything, I spent another 2+ hours editing everything, rendered for 7.5 hours, spent another hour uploading and creating the event and tonight will spend another 3 hours hosting the event… so the model adds another 5-6 hours or work + almost 8 hours of downtime for my computer… I do a LOT of impractical shit but that may simply be over the line.

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HOWEVER – we’ll try it out! We go Live at 7pm tonight here : https://youtu.be/mjNnN9ExzbM

 (you should be able to access this link later too, at which point it should be like any other youtube video)

….May 29^th, 2019…

Feeling stressed OUT. No real good reason for it. I got up, thought I was going to have a completely work-from-home kind of day precisely because I’d forgotten about a meeting, got reminded of the meeting, raced and got to said meeting and got there late but still had a great meeting. Came home and beat the thunderstorms, back to work-from-home day sans much angst, and though there’s still things to do on my to-do list, I don’t think I’m going to do them at the moment because enough of my to-do list is done, that the rest to be done to-do items can get done tomorrow.

Stupidly, I think I’m still stressed over blowback to my Sofar post – just seeing people who I think of as individuals that SHOULD respect my opinion tossing it into “well, I’ll take that into consideration” when weighed against an article by someone they don’t know at all. I’m not social-scientist enough to say for sure, but I think a lot of that just comes from negative bias. We’d rather get our hackles up over something that someone says is unjust than discover that… sometimes things just aren’t quite the way you wish they were. We Live in a capitalist society – I’d be worried if a for-profit company WASN’T trying to cut corners and make a buck because then I’d have to be suspicious.

On that front – the meeting I had today was a good one, gathering two people that I perceive to be if not necessarily idealistic, then at least well-intentioned – and probably idealistic to boot, except my jaded self feels that there might be connotations of naïveté attached to that word. One of them is younger than me with big ideas, the other is older than me with big ideas and I felt sort of bad cause I worried that us two olds were ganging up on the youth cause we had so many negative stories… but we had very specific negative stories… worried that our young friend was being circled by vultures, carrion birds eager to take advantage of his positive exuberance.

Though I Love playing music and believe that’s my purpose in Life, sometimes I can be made very, very happy simply by bringing people together.

YOU should know YOU! Enjoy.

*leaves the room quietly*