Welp, here we are again. I'm not sure what to really say except, damn, attitudes and habits live in your body much longer than the time it takes to extract them out of your blood stream with a pocket knife and an eye dropper.
Still, I think it's worth examining if the real or perceived threat to myself is legitimate enough to continue being a sociopathic serial killer of hopes and dreams. I really don't know.
I have relapsed once a few times too many which leads me to believe that this may be the pattern I will just have to learn to make a part of myself. What really matters, anyway? Who gets to measure my integrity?
I know the sinking feeling is near and will avoid it to all costs, any and all costs, right now. I don't know. I see the promised land approaching and from my point of view, it's just a mirage.
Maybe this is the part of the story where I disappear for a few years and come back to society as a polished enigma of whatever the fuck it was I was trying to be 3 years ago. Every day I make decisions that only clarify the unclarifiable.
When my dopamine levels even out I'll let ya know if it was all worth it. The way I've been living my life right now it doesn't even seem to matter in the slightest. Sigh.
It's May 2020. We've been in quarantine for over two months now. I somehow got through my second semester of my second year of grad school. It was without miracles and amphetamines, just pure human wills and won'ts. Racism is as rampant as ever. Police still killin unarmed black people. Donald Trump calls COVID-19 a China flu. White supremacy is still the rule of the land. We fight back with education and enlightenment, awareness and alcohol, riots and riots and riots. The heart can only take so much. I'm coping with lists and schedules, select interactions, calling in and calling out when necessary, blocking and unfriending, weed and love. I've been on medication for a solid two years now. It's part of my chemistry now and probably the reason why I'm still fighting. My birthday this year was a close call of falling back into death traps. I did not want to be alive and, well, I somehow got through that too. The weight of the world is still on my shoulders, but I've learned to manage its heaviness and I know it's okay to put it down for as long as I need to before picking it back up again.
Music is the only constant, but sometimes, it isn't. When the music doesn't give me what I need, the question then becomes, what does it give me? It doesn't have to be absolutely transformative every time. How exhausting. Music has become, I guess, just another tool in my toolbox, but it's my favorite one. It's the one with the worn down edges that make it fit juuuuuust right. When it's not my refuge, it's my dragging anchor. When it's not my power source, it's my Vick's vapor rub. I have learned how to balance my relationship with music and my life so that it's healthy, not... needy and relentless. The music never lies, but sometimes it does.
The best thing about my life is the love and self-respect that I have for myself. I did that without the music carrying me, like I'm a parasite grasping on for dear life. I did that shit by myself and I have no regrets. That's why I don't write in this thing as often as I used to- I simply don't need to anymore.
It's been a pretty good run, I'd say. I've been level-headed and exceeding expectations. I've got a bright future that I'm grateful to have and hone. I haven't been too stressed out because, well, there's a level of cockiness that hasn't faded, that I'm riding 'til the end. I'm doing alright. The energy is positive.
Still, my heart does tricks on my brain, or the other way around sometimes. The patterns are all the same, but the reactions are different, which I guess could be a sign for growth. I lose my focus and I trip and fall- sometimes try to save myself- but the truth is, I was the one who set myself up for perpetual downfall, because feeling this good just feels so damn GOOD.
Perhaps it's just another form of addiction. Do all people feel this good when they feel good? Why is it so addicting? And do I even want it? For real? Or is it just a nice thing to have something sweet when you wanna indulge once in a while? Will anything really ever compare to real love?
Post-tonal theory has always interested me. It's fascinating that composers were so bored with music sounding good that they found functional serialism and atonality at the beginning of the 20th century to turn music into numbers, creating atonal systems called pitch class sets, cells, and tone rows instead of melodies, harmonies, and what the classically-trained ear would consider "beautiful."
"Birds Singing Atonal Music" by Charles Moulton
Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951) is to blame for this brilliant atrocity of musical innovation. He created a 12-tone system that was born directly from late-German Romanticism, eliminating the hierarchy of chords and demolishing the need for a tonal center by using all 12 notes in some sort of order that could change at any given moment in musical time. Apparently, writing music in a key was overrated; Schoenberg called the lack of a tonal center the "emancipation of dissonance," using chromatic melodies and chromatic harmonies in a way that these clusters of notes did not need to resolve. Never had emancipation sounded so painful. Nonetheless, he wrote many pieces, including piano and orchestral opuses. Perhaps his best known work was Pierrot lunaire, an atonal German 21-song cycle for soprano voice and a five piece chamber orchestra. As a pioneer in Expressionism, Schoenberg dealt with emotions of a modern human being in pre- and post- war: fear, confusion, rage, unsettling anxiety, a poor grip on stability, tension, and all the elemental and irrational drives of the subconscious. Not surprisingly, his buddy was Freud.
Schoenberg's music was an angry rebellion against the status quo, and he loved it. So did a bunch of other German white guys, including Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Berg (1885 - 1935) somehow made a 12-tone row sound... good, tonal, familiar, with his musical choices using tone rows that might suggest chords and melodies found in traditional Western harmony. This is made evident in his atonal opera, Wozzeck, about a poor soldier who was so messed up in life that he eventually murdered all of his friends before committing suicide. The opera contains leitmotifs, pitch class sets that are identified with the main characters, and movements with orchestral music in sonata, rondo, and even fugue forms. Webern (1883 - 1945), on the other hand, stuck to Schoenberg's tradition of constructing cringy, cannibalistic-like earworms, using serial technique in thorough-composed pieces with vast instrumentation; he also created actual pointillism in the music as tiny, wispy points of sound. His pieces were not very long because of that- once he used all of the pitch class sets he wanted, he ended the piece.
The Second Viennese School sounded like a hot mess. However, Schoenberg and his cronies did something that revolutionized how we listen to music: they made us actually LISTEN. Because there isn't a steady beat to tap our foot to or a catchy, sing-songy melody that'll get stuck in our heads, what else is there to realize? Well, what's left is a focus on all the other stuff: dynamics. Instrumentation. Articulation. Timbre. Register. The actual environment of performance. The performer himself (women still didn't have free access, even to the New Viennese School #metoo). Ironically, these are all of the elements that music therapists have to pay attention to while using music in their practices. Without Schoenberg, there would not have been the landmark styles of Messaien, Penderecki, Reich, John Cage, Oliveros, Skrillex. If Schoenberg were alive in 2018, I think he'd probably be a gender-fluid, colorblind quantum physics teacher creating tone rows out of cohorts of didgeridoos used as the music to lure small atonal-singing children to ice cream trucks.
Can you believe it's been 9 years of The September Project? A friendly reminder that I have been emo for almost a decade?
What started as an escape has become my life's work, at least in this edition of the story. The lessons learned, the music made, the love had and lost, all wove together to create a platform on which I stand in this very moment. I've accomplished my goal of getting into grad school- a goal 10 years in the making- and now I understand that it had to take that long for me to be in the position that my heart, soul, and ear can navigate through what promises to be a tough, but enlightening three years ahead.
Getting fired from amplifi, though it may not have been the most graceful exit, was a blessing in disguise. The knots in my heart knowing that this company's best interests laid first and foremost in profit without providing the right tools or resources for their instructors, has now dissipated. I still think about and care for all the students of mine who have come and gone, and hope to keep ties with the ones who want me to be a bigger part of their artistic journey. In a way, we are going through this together, and if I've learned anything, it is that I am not alone, nor do I intend for them to ever feel that way, if I can help it. Nonetheless, a bright future lies ahead and I feel more open to the possibilities of it than ever before in my 32 years of life.
It didn't happen without sacrifice. I've had to learn how to create boundaries with people, addictions, habits, and my own Self- my former Self- a Self that I had to mourn and make room for a new, improved, better, stronger, more productive Self. I've lost friends on the way, but have more room for ones that actually serve me, in turn, serve the world; I've lost familiarity with substances that numbed pain from inner and outer sources; I've had to push myself out of bad habits and force my brain to not fall into the traps of easy ways out, for what is growth if the foundations crumble in chaos? If conflict is inevitable, then my suit of armour has to be made of gold.
Still, music remains my constant, traveling through time, before, after, through me in a way over which I finally realize I have little control. To quote my very first post in TSP:
Love is not an energy that just comes and goes.. it's a chameleon; that energy transforms itself into other forms and there must be some organization to its growth when manifested into art. The repression of that passion, whether formulated by circumstance or happenstance, is what pulls the spirit down into a place not easy to crawl out of, and can only be rescued by the willpower to hone the thing that flows so naturally from the tips of your fingers. Mine is music.
I'd like to take that quote further: The repression of passion can only be rescued by the willpower to hone the thing that flows so naturally from the tips of your fingers... and for me, also has an intentional value to implicate change for the betterment of humanity. That is music.
Happy September 1st, my friends.
Here is a little improvisational ditty of two other classmates and me exploring the Dorian mode in a practice room on a piano, a 10-note xylophone, and a hand drum. It's a Side A Track 1 of what's to come.
or does it thrive on the system on which it was born?
The music business hate me 'cause the industry ain't make me
Hustlers and boosters embrace me and the music I be making
I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars
They criticize me for it yet they all yell "Holla"
If skills sold truth be told
I'd probably be lyrically Talib Kweli
Truthfully I want to rhyme like Common Sense (But I did five Mil)
I ain't been rhyming like Common since
When your sense got that much in common
And you been hustling since, your inception, fuck perception
Go with what makes sense
Since I know what I'm up against
We as rappers must decide what's most important
And I can't help the poor if I'm one of them
So I got rich and gave back to me that's the win, win
The next time you see the homie and his rims spin
Just know my mind is working just like them (The rims that is)
is this responsibility I feel a debt to the society I'm inherently bitch-faced to?
is it quite selfish or simply humanitarian to strive for the idea of what is the betterment of our society
which entails relationships we build with each other
which entails also a necessary destruction of what is already there?
i mean bro
the real question is this
who the fuck are you, someone who is not oppressed,
to even have a valid opinion about the progression of art in this genre
of the oppressed?
personally, i want to hear what you have to say
but in no absolute
NO way
NO shape
NO form
does that validate it at all.
and it doesn't mean that you got away with ruining all the colours
Nowadays my only desires involve being by myself.
I force myself into social situations to balance out my worlds:
The real reality, the one I almost lost because of trying to be someone I'm not.
I love my therapist; she's the only one who gets me, I think.
Before I fall in love with someone, like really press the play button, I tend to tell them I think I'm fucking crazy. Usually their response will determine how long we're together.
The longest relationship I've been in was with someone who was a raging alcoholic.
Just like my birth father. Haha, first I wrote bitch father.
He's dying, maybe. He's hooked up to an oxygen tank and a dialysis machine.
I keep thinking maybe I should say something to him, like I forgive him or I hope he's okay.
Those statements are only half true.
I don't give a lot of myself to anyone but the kids.
I call out people who can't get their shit straight, or I treat them like kids.
They should not be getting paid the same rate as me. Call it Aldrin justice.
I'm sick of sitting back and letting things happen that are unfair or unjust and really, I can usually get what I want by calling white people out on their shit.
That's probably the only good thing about living in Boston.
The only good thing.
I am the face of diversity, the only one who will play their games and play it well.
In the end, the kids are the ones who matter the most anyway.
There are so many of them who won't ever get a chance to tell someone they might love that they're fucking crazy.
When I graduate, I'm getting outta here. I'm gonna be international. I don't care how hard it is or how long it takes.
I used to have this image of the future.
It's gone now.
The only thing left is me, in a foreign land, doing work that I like, work that is meaningful, work that will change lives maybe. The most important part of that is work that I like.
It is all about me now.
And it's about damn time.
It is so natural for me to alienate myself from the world that when I actually have a friendly connection with a human being, it consumes me to the point of paranoia about all the ways that they will hurt, disappoint, and leave me. It's a blacked-out cave with prehistoric hieroglyphics deciphering the self-hatred it took to get me here in the fist place. Add on the molotov cocktails of procrastination, anxiety, amphetamines, and this secret life of inevitable failure and voila! All the love is once again sucked outta my veins, but this time I'm just too damn old to feel sad about it. I haven't had a suicidal thought in a long time, a long, long, time. I can taste the prejaculation of glory with these thoughts of dying, my own blood on my hands. I wonder if anyone would even miss me. In a way, I hope they never find out.
