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.

Gloucester Street Spring Break Journals (Day Eight, Part Two)

I'm at Andrea's watching the red carpet coverage of the Academy Awards. This E! newscaster is really annoying, losing her mind over Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. They're just fucking actors. And who cares what these people are wearing? All of that artifice is ridiculous. Actors are nominated for roles that on some level convey a universal and true sense of humanity, yet we're supposed to care about how superhuman they can look. Don't get it. Never will.

One of the things on my list of things to do before I turn 30 is write the introduction to my memoirs. I wanted to get a start on it this week. I've been thinking a bit about it. Memoirs are written to convey a life lived. I wonder who would read a collection of my writings after I pass on. I've wondered that for a while.

I finished off The Medium is the Massage tonight. McLuhan makes the point that people have lost interest in self-expression and individual ideas, preferring instead the expressions of a collective. One person with their own ideas is hard to take seriously.

I think I'm coming to an understanding about the way I see the world. All these bits and pieces are connected. McLuhan makes a great deal of sense to me. I wish I'd paid him more attention in school. I think I'm going to send an email off to Brian Johnson. He was my undergraduate honours thesis supervisor and he had a predilection for McLuhan. Maybe he can help me make greater sense of these ideas. I haven't talked to him in quite some time, so it would give me an excuse.

I've been thinking a little bit over this past week about going back to school one day. Mostly I'm hoping that I can keep that door open. I think there's something very important I have yet to write. I'm not through learning. I'm not through arguing. I'm not through figuring things out.

Picks: Mickey Rourke, Kate Winslet, Heath Ledger, Viola Davis, Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire.

Gloucester Street Spring Break Journals (Day Eight)

Much as I hate to admit it, I'm really impressed by Lily Allen's new song, "The Fear." She slagged on Radiohead, proving that she's a dimwit, yet the song is incisive and intelligent, and her producers produced the HELL out of it. It's really the best song about popular culture I've heard in probably the last five years.

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
When do you think it will all become clear?
Because I'm being taken over by the fear

That's the condition of the 21st century captured in a pop song chorus. And it's catchy as hell.

Andrea called me at 5:30 this morning (2:30 California time). I haven't been able to get back to sleep. Today is my last day off.

Gloucester Street Spring Break Journals (Day Seven)

I like the sound of traffic at 2 AM. There isn't much of it downtown. Downtown Ottawa shuts down around midnight, after most of the buses have stopped running. Lately I've been falling asleep to the sound of snow plows, but that won't last forever.

When I go for periods without working or going to school, I tend to gravitate towards keeping late night hours. I had no daytime obligations for a few months last fall and would often stay up past 3 o'clock in the morning. If I was at Andrea's, I would watch TV, or go on the Internet.

I'm on the Internet a lot, for hours at a time each day. It's been that way for years now. And it strikes me that I spend an inordinate amount of time online checking to see if I'm being noticed. Recognition of me, as a living, breathing person, more often comes in the page view as it clicks up, or the view counter as it moves forward, or the notification of a comment, or an email in the inbox. It is beyond being noticed - it is being seen. I know I am alive when I am seen by other people, and my computer tells me when I am seen. Without it, I would be invisible.

It is an isolating experience. I often feel alone. And I'm okay with that, I think. It only gets to me when I fool myself into thinking that no one cares about me. 95% of the time, I believe I am cared for. And I think that's all anyone can hope for. Luckily, fascination is high on my list of character traits, if it could be called that. I am fascinated by the idea that I can be whoever I want to be on it. It's a new world. A new environment. I can change a person's perception of me with the click of a mouse or the clatter of a few keys in succession. And all along, I seem to carry with me the belief that I'm the only one who thinks about the Internet that way, that everyone else is simply using it as a tool to replace the post office and diaries and telephones and television. They stay who they are. I become someone else.

I can pretend to be here. I can pretend to disappear. I can make my life sound full or empty. I can proclaim to be in love or that I feel lost. I have over 300 people on my Facebook friends list. More than two-thirds of those people will never know the difference between my online identity and my real life identity. They will know that I make music and watch movies and read books and that's it. They will know the same 25 things about me that everyone else I tagged knows. It's how we get to know a person these days, perhaps because there are more people now than there's ever been (a fact that seems shocking to me at 2 AM on a deserted downtown Ottawa street).

What I really want out of life is to be thought of while I'm alive and to be remembered when I'm no longer living. That's my ego talking. What I really want out of life is to fall in love and eventually raise a family. That's my society talking. What I really want out of life is a great job and enough money to take care of me in old age. That's my government talking. What I really want out of life is to create art. That's my heart. Art in everything and everyone, in every thought and emotion and belief. Quiet moments of grace. A trembling of the hand. The way the sun hits the faces of people during sunsets. The look of Andrea's teeth between her lips. Note changes. C to B to A to A flat. When I woke up, there seemed such promise. It seemed like nothing I did would change this. I put my hand through a running faucet and flinched to feel it: a final notice. I put my shoes on and hit the pavement. I passed a stranger and looked right at her. If I could capture this pregnant moment, I'd give birth to it and never feel alone again.

Something like that. The waiting for a loved one to return. Thinking of her. Being thought of. Remembering the sound of traffic at 2 AM.