We all have our hang-ups. One of mine is insecurity, about a number of things. I remember being 20 and greatly concerned about the size of my ego, because I suddenly became aware of how much time I was spending feeling self-involved and introspective. Of course, ten years later I've come to realize that that's the way MOST people are. Most people are too worried about their own hang-ups to notice anyone else's.

One's own insecurity can result in a tendency to trash others to make themselves feel better. I've been guilty of it in the past, but I haven't spoken ill of anyone in a long time. It's a rotten byproduct of insecurity and I believe that one's actions and words go a long way in structuring their world. I loathe negativity and separate myself from it consciously. Sometimes it's felt like a technique of survival.

It's not very poetic for me to sit here and type about the moments during each day when I feel as though the world looks at me with disdain or contempt, but I feel as though I'm so rarely honest with myself in print these days. There's a quadrant in my brain that's obsessed with the idea that somewhere out there, people I have only a perfunctory relationship with think I'm worthless. That I shouldn't be taken seriously. That I'm an infantile person with insincere opinions, desires and goals. It burns away in that part of me and leaves a black spot.

I've always felt a need to make an impression on people. Sometimes I think that I should have gone into acting at a younger age, or thrown myself headlong into some sort of career as a performance artist. But I've never been able to match up the aesthetics of people who perform with my own tastes and perceptions. And maybe that's a GOOD thing, because it theoretically leaves me with an original take. But it also ostracizes me, on a certain level, and it makes me afraid to try.

I have, in the past, Googled the phrase "proving people wrong". That part of me that thinks that people view me with contempt also thinks that I have an uphill battle in actively changing their opinions. I try to reconcile that thought process with the tendency that everyone has to marry themselves to their opinions as they get older. When does proving people wrong stop becoming important? One of the greatest sources of elation in the world is finding out that the idea I had of someone in my head was completely false. When I find out that I was wrong, so wrong about somebody. That they're so much better than I was willing to give them credit for.

What do you do when no one thinks you can do something? Do you find new people who are willing to give you a shot? I think I suffer from the delusion that the world is much, much smaller than it actually is. I feel like I'm living in a bubble all the time and that one day it's finally going to pop and I'll wonder why it took so long. I'm afraid. I'm afraid to try certain things. Yet there is so much I want to try, and so much I'm trying to try. I'm doing the best I can with my time and money and drive.

I'm going to Europe in a month, for a couple of weeks or so. Maybe that will jostle my sense of geography a bit.

I've sat down a few times over the last couple of weeks to attempt to write an entry, since I've had a lot on my mind about work, music, writing, love, faith, film and life in general. The thoughts won't fall into place and trickle down to my fingers. I just got off work a little over 30 minutes ago and I have to be back in less than eight hours. I type thousands of words a day. No wonder I want to cool it on the computer when I get home.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with these songs. I want people to hear them. I'll put them online. I'd like to get some hard copies printed up to send to radio stations, labels and magazine, and I've been considering going through a company called Indie Pool. They also have a service that would allow me to copyright the songs for about 60 bucks. For about 600 bucks plus tax, I could get the songs on iTunes and the like, plus make them available for order through HMV and Chapters.

I should chip away at that sort of thing gradually, I think. I still haven't played a show yet. I've been thinking of spending hundreds of dollars on a speaker setup so that I can practice a live show in my apartment. This music venture is costing me more money than a band normally would because it's just me, for the most part. I have to cover all the expenses. I don't know how I'd do it if I didn't have a grown-up job, and even now I'm pushing it.

It's been kind of nice, the way the job has afforded me the opportunity to grow as an artist. Sometimes I think I'm turning into one of those people who, when you ask them what they do for a living, they say "I'm an artist," but what they REALLY mean is, "I'm a bus driver who plays guitar for an open mic at this shit bar downtown once a month." Such a cliche. Is that an okay way to be? Is there an alternative?

I've been working on these songs, listening to them pretty closely lately, and lately I've found myself kind of proud of them instead of embarrassed. When I heard my voice singing on a track for the first time in about 10 years, I almost couldn't stand it. I buried it under reverb and put it way back in the mix. But I've been turning down the reverb lately and adding layers for clarity. I'm starting to not mind the way my voice sounds because it's more a part of the songs now. If it doesn't work, I can change it. I can be in the song rather than always apart from it, which is really what this whole process has been about on some level, I think.

Does anybody really care about this besides me? I've been thinking back to the things that I felt when I started really hearing music for the first time. As much as it manipulated me through the forms it took, I didn't question it or apply bullshit theories to it. I felt it through and through when I joined my first band at 14. I would show up at Darryl and Jeff's house with my bass and we'd play, just to see if we could get the songs to sound right. And sometimes they would sound exactly, perfectly right, and I'd be so happy. I'd grin my face off, and I don't know if they ever felt the same way completely. That feeling has always been something I've convinced myself into thinking is mine alone.

What are these songs I've written about? A lot of the time they're about words that I think sound good together. As a teenager I always liked the way the word "away" sounded in a rock song. A word that kept coming to me while writing songs this time around is "another", like I was joining these efforts at creation in progress somehow, as if they'd always been going on. Just more words in a long line of word-speakers, but I'm happy to take part.

A lot of the time, the songs are about the state of the world. They're about technology and worrying about getting old and marveling at how it feels to be alone in an environment that has been pulled so close together. They're about finding happiness in simplicity and finding a role to play and the enormity of the universe. And love, of course, because all songs are about that.

Playing these songs live and pulling them off is going to impress even me, if I can make them sound and look appealing. That will be the next part of this process, after I've done all I can to the songs in that little basement bedroom of mine.

Some of this is going to end up in liner notes. No doubt about it.

My top five most likely religious identifications, according to a survey on http://www.beliefnet.com:

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (89%)
3. Neo-Pagan (89%)
4. Secular Humanism (82%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (74%)

Just a few notes from the Red Pill, aka my living room, before I hit the sack...

I've had an Acer Aspire 3620 laptop for almost exactly three years. The main reason I purchased it was so that I could use it to record and play music. I have used it to mess around with Reason a bit in the past, but it gradually replaced my whole desktop computer once it went belly up. The Acer was the computer I used while I lived in Toronto. For almost the entire time I've had the thing, I've typically had to point an external fan at the processor to keep it from overheating. The internal fan is probably caked with dirt. I've never squirted the vents with compressed air or popped it open for a closer look. I don't have a small screwdriver or the willingness to buy one, especially since I bought the huge Mac desktop last summer.

I've wiped the hard drive clean several times to try and restore its functionality. Now, I'm finally getting around to seriously wanting to use it for music purposes. I've taken most of the non-essential program off the hard drive and installed Reason, plus an ASIO driver to cut down on signal delay from my MIDI keyboard to the computer. I'm now downloading FL Studio for installation, which should complete the software end of what I need it for. A next step is picking up a powered speaker that I can run from my mixer and the laptop. If I can get the software to work well in conjunction, I'll be pretty well set.

This doesn't change the fact that the laptop isn't the greatest, but maybe I can get a show out of it. I've got it raised on a stack of coasters right now to allow ventilation and it seems to be helping it tremendously. I really should have taken better care of this thing.

I think about what I'm going to do with the music a lot. Right now the plan is to put it online and play a show. Small steps. I've been thinking about hard copies to send out to places and how hardcore I want to go on designing/printing them. Over the next few weekends I'm planning to finalize the tacks, design a website and finish a music video, with everything coming together for a launch on Tuesday, May 19th. Once my equipment comes together, I'm going to practice my ass off and schedule a show. And then, well, I guess that's when I'll see how serious I am about this.

I spent the week in Peterborough with a lot of ideas floating around in my head. I came back with some poems written and ideas for poems and a short story brewing. It felt like the vacation kind of threw off the rhythm I had going of working, songwriting and review writing, but at least I have a lot to aim for. If only work weren't getting in the way.

I'm still listening to a lot of Wilco. I've got four of their albums. Some of these songs will be with me forever, I think. As long as I get to listen to a song like "Poor Places" as often as I want, the world can't be all bad.

Tomorrow night I'm going to check out a set by Adam Saikely at the Avant Garde Bar. I want to spy on his audio setup. It feels like my ego has kept me out of a lot of venues in Ottawa over the last few years. I'm trying to get past it because it's bullshit and I'm too old to be concerned with things like that. Andrea helps me out on that front. The world is hers to hold while the rest of us are just trying to stay standing.

I've been listening to a lot of Wilco lately. Pretty well exclusively, even. I got a hold of three of their albums. Tonight I went out for a walk around Centretown in the snow, listening, listening...

I think part of my new fascination with Wilco is stripping away each layer of their production, trying to listen to their records on separate levels. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a record that places noise and ambient soundscapes upon fairly straight-ahead acoustic and pop rock numbers. The newer Sky Blue Sky record is one that lead singer Jeff Tweedy called an album of songs, pure and simple - a lot of guitar progressions and jamming. The other day I picked up A.M. and it's different than I thought it would be. I had heard so much about the influence of country music on Wilco's earlier stuff, but it's different from country music. Sure, they use slide guitar, but it's taken out of the context of the country music style and put into one that sound more like 90's alternative rock.

I've been trying to wrap my head around Jeff Tweedy. He's a huge punk rock fan, yet he fronts what a lot of people have called an alt. country band. He collaborates with a guy like Jim O'Rourke and has a predilection for noise and art rock, yet from what I've heard of the Wilco albums, they only scratch the surface of how different that style can get. I think part of the reason for that is Tweedy's love for writing lyrics. I think he regards himself as a poet who happens to be a songwriter.

I've always been a little bewildered by noise, but experimenting with Reason has turned me on to some of its possibilities. I'm still a much bigger fan of structure and melody, but I love the challenge of crafting something out of both. I'd really like to try something drastic with noise while still keeping an identifiable rhythm and lyrics as elements. I'm really interested in songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and "Radio Cure", songs that shift in structure yet still hold together as beautiful pieces of music that start at A and end at Z.

The problem with the way I currently write songs in Reason is that I'm still married to writing overly segmented arrangements. I need to mix them up. I need to take a hammer to them and shatter them somehow, yet avoid the problem of them turning out too "weird". A lot of folks are into music that I find "weird". The music I make has to make sense to me. I don't want to write a song and feel like I didn't try hard to shape it appropriately afterward. I also need to spend more time on writing lyrics. Right now I'm writing words off the top of my head to gel with the songs. I'd like to try working on stuff that's more imagistically rich.

I started working on a new song today. These days listening to music feels more like a process of deconstruction to me. It's impressing me on a whole new level.

I've never thought much about meditation or finding some sort of spiritual peace through another culture's beliefs or religious tenets. My spiritual side seems to be permanently entangled with what I regard as my common sense. That's not to say that I find meditation or what have you nonsensical or ridiculous. I just feel as though my thoughts and emotions already come out of my spiritual side. Meditating would be like walking around outside with an oxygen mask strapped to my face. I can breathe just fine without it.

At the same time, I do wonder how spiritual a person I actually am. I suppose "spiritual" is a word I've used to describe myself since I was able to admit that I wasn't particularly religious. I find it difficult to believe in the finer points of anyone's God and rely more on impressions that I've gathered from being alive. In that, I'm spiritual. When I think about meditation, I think of it in the context of something that's needed when our wiring starts to overheat. I believe it allows a person an opportunity to relax and think themselves past a problem that's interfering with their happiness. It helps a person gain perspective, if not an "insight" into God's plan, even if that plan takes the form of a general universal harmony without a figurehead.

I'm a curious person. I wouldn't mind knowing how this whole life business got started in the first place and for what reason, if there is a reason, I'm conscious in this mind and body at this moment in the history of the world. It seems convenient that this vast expanse of a universe was created and none of it would have ever been so much as perceived if life hadn't sprung up. What would the point of the sun, moon and planets have been if we hadn't been around to figure out how they work? Maybe they would have been acting elements in a play we can't yet comprehend, put on by intelligences far greater than our own for their amusement, though one would tire of the repetitiveness of orbits and asteroids after milennia, wouldn't they?

Maybe time is perceived differently by greater intelligences, if they do exist. Species of Arctica islandica (mollusks) have been discovered to live for over 400 years. What would a year be to a man who lived that long? As human beings, we're aware of the average age at which we're bound to keel over. We have a common perception of time expressed in a completely physical term. I guess meditation helps some folks think of it in terms of the soul. It helps lift some of the weight of mortality.

I'm quite confident that I have a soul. Whether I'm bound for a destination of paradise or damnation is another story. Must it be one or the other? Why would the afterlife be so much more definite, so much more black and white than the physical world? Would the seemingly infinite facets of human intelligence be forced into line, the mind shackled in the ethereal state after years of being shackled to the physical body? But I'm confusing the soul with the mind. Maybe the soul is the part of us in between emotion and thought, the carrier that cradles the two and experiences hurt when they go into two directions.

All these years of human life and now all this information at our fingertips and we still haven't seemed to trip over the one piece of information that answers it all. We probably won't. The grand answer will be kept grand, I think, because why deny life the opportunity to recognize itself as such? You're alive. Have an ice cream cone and give a chuckle. Yes, we feel pain. Life gets downright unbearable. When it comes down to it, the only alternative is to not have it. It seems natural to me. I have the opportunity. My mind and heart recognize it, and so I live.

I browse the CBC news websites quite frequently at work. Today I came across this article, which details the near-miss of a 10-story-sized asteroid that flew by the earth at a distance of 72,000 km on Monday. The article says that astronomers didn't know about it until Saturday.

The article compares the asteroid with one of a similar size that exploded over Siberia in 1908, devastating the landscapes with the force of 1,000 atomic bombs. That was called the Tunguska event (More on that here).

There is a lot of talk in the astronomy community lately about finding another Earth in the extrasolar regions of the Milky Way. This Friday, NASA is launching the Kepler telescope to take a closer look at the orbital patterns of Earth-like planets.