Caution: Discouragement below

Today I met one of those people who makes me feel like the most unaccomplished, wasted, insignificant and lowly person walking this globe. I saw a Behringer headphone amp on craigslist, emailed the seller, and ended up driving out to Greentree to pick it up at his office this afternoon. Garry had long enough hair to be a tried and true music guy, but short and neat enough to be very professional. He had mentioned his studio on the phone, so I asked him about it as we stood in the stark lunchroom (straight out of The Office!) and he hooked up the unit so I could test it. Turns out he ran a studio all the way from a four track tape rig in the 80's to a full-blown 32-channel board with all kinds of gear and people working there... while playing in bands himself and working as a software engineer. He's finally knocking the studio down to a home rig since the crazy amount of work and time and lack of sleep was getting to be too much. I use Cakewalk Sonar 2.0 as my recording software. Turns out he was on the beta testing team for Cakewalk for years, and he wrote some of the code that they use in Sonar. He spoke about mics and boards and gear and bands and musicians with the ease of immense familiarity.

I drove away from the gleaming office building despising my pitiful, introverted, connection-less, lackadaisical, unfocused, unmotivated, unproductive little suburban life. Hearing about Ken's accomplishments in Africa hasn't helped either. Leading tours, hanging out with a multimillionaire client, setting records in Ethiopia, working on writing a field guide, posting 100% professional-looking pictures of vistas that make me almost wet my pants, planning and working to break the North American record for the most bird species seen in 1 day (which he's got sponsors to pay for, by the way)...

While here I sit in my colossally tiny world of church friends (Whom I love, don't get me wrong! You guys are.. far better than most of the world even knows can be), a few work friends (with whom I have no connection outside of work), and... what is it 1? maybe 2 friends from college? I roll through this life safe in my car, paying for everything I do and everywhere I go, talking pleasantly with strangers behind counters whom I'll never see again, and holding unrelentingly onto my time and activities. I find myself waiting to end conversations with people! Just because.. it's less effort to not talk! The thought of making my life, my evenings, my hours, my meals, my time, my effort, part of something other than church, work and the occasional trip to Akron or elsewhere is inconceivable.

That is the functional reality I am faced with in those moments when I crave being accomplished in real-life, professional-level fields. I am so far from real music people, people running studios, the actual livings and breathings of professional musicians and studios that it makes me snort a despising laugh at myself. And the thing that kills is that I can't kid myself that I'll start making those kind of connections. My life isn't going to change that drastically! If it was, it would have by now! I have never done my recording at the level of fierce seriousness that gets you moving up and into professional (or even just freakin' serious hobby) circles. And though I hurt inside for the lack of accomplishment, I know that that is not the same as a motivation that will begin to generate that kind of productivity.

So I sit in our kitchen with a knot in my stomach, hatred for myself, and thick chains of laziness, personality and years past and gone locking me down. There is no one to blame but myself.

You may protest - oh! You go to Akron! You travel around! You're a better guitar player than me! You have a studio in your basement and you've made two albums and like 70 songs!
All that is is a pitifully small pond in which I might look like a big fish. Any kind of respectable, real-world pond leaves me a bacteria floating in the water, worth nothing to anyone.

When (please Lord) God saves and changes me, I think I will look back on this post as the wretched misery of a person trying to live for himself and being resisted in his pride. I can't just snap my finger and make that change, though. And right now, I'm in the valley of despair--at least in the moments like today when I look at my life and compare it to lives of actual accomplishment in the world.

Here again is a poem I wrote awhile ago and posted. It gives a bit of emotion to the content of the paragraphs above:

Your wings have feathers and here you sit
Watching them folded at your side
You didn't know which way to fly
And so you never tried
You write the songs but never make a sound
You'll spend the rest of your life on the ground

A couple things I'm happy with:
- Basketball. I'm exercising myself, hitting shots, and getting outside.
- Jamming with Steve Gole. So much fun, and some pretty cool music!
- This post. At least I was non-lazy enough to exercise the creative energy necessary to type this up and work it over.
- My music collection. It's huge, I know almost all of it, and it's recently been expanded by another 7 CD's.

I don't know what that's worth. Documenting this period, I suppose. Pretty dinky stuff I guess, but at least it's not depressing, and I enjoy those things. I don't want to be ungrateful or unreasonable.

--JPB