Finger on the Friday Five Button

Slept in late this morning.

It was raining, and I can.

Joann made coffee and turkey pot pies and put a romantic comedy in the blue ray. We listened to the rain and watched Julia Luis Dreyfus fall in love with James Gandolfini.

But then the phone rang, and it really doesn't matter who was calling, neither of us were going to answer it.

Yet, when the land line rings, its not like you can just look down, press a button and be done with it.

Land lines haven't caught up to cell phones in that way.

Land lines keep ringing until the answering machine picks up. And then you have to listen to your own distorted voice from 2006 telling some stranger that we'll call them back which is most assuredly a lie, and then we have to listen to the person leaving the message.

The are fifteen buttons on my home phone.

None of them are a "Shush" button.

My cell phone has a "Shush" button.

In fact, every button on my cell phone is a "Shush" button. You don't even have to try and dig it out from the pocket of your jeans, you just squeeze your pant leg until it stops chirping, or vibrating, or you can just let it vibrate and be happy that something's tickling your squishy parts.

But not the land line.

Whole universes have banged, expanded and collapsed by the time the marketer has finished talking about introductory APR's.

My land line really needs a "Shush" button.

Which lead me to start thinking about other kinds of buttons that other things need.

Here's what came to mind during the awkward romcom moment (You know that moment, where you knew exactly what was going to happen and it starts happening and you kind of have to get up and clear the turkey pot pie bowls from the coffee table):

Five Buttons:

Number One:
The "I Need You to Focus on What I'm Saying" Button.
This button needs to be installed on every child from the age 4 to 18 and every husband ever. Although, as civilization might collapse from over use, the button must cease to work if the conversation turns to either religion or clothes shopping.

Number Two:
The "I Didn't Mean to Hit that Button" Button.
You know when you're trying to check the weather on your smart phone to see if there's going to be rain in Amador county tomorrow and all you want to do is enter the name of the city, but instead you get sent to the internet and Yahoo is insisting that you change your primary browser? And you know you should have hit the Plus button instead of the Yahoo button, but now you have to wait for the internet to load up which takes forever because you forgot to switch the wifi part of your phone back on and it's still trying to run off the 3G network? This will be primarily for all technological gadgets and leaders of countries with nuclear arsenals. It could be voice activated too, like, "Shit . . . Stop . . . Go back!"

Number Three:
The "I Really Need it Not to Rain in Amador County Tomorrow" Button.
I toyed with a general weather button, but there would be too many people fighting over it. Rain, sunny, rain, sunny, there would be no consensus. However, there's a big outdoor winery festival that I'm booked at which will be canceled due to rain. And nobody wants that at all. It's a bit selfish, but it's my list.

Number Four:
The "Would Somebody Just Pick a Place to Eat!?" Button.
Sounds trivial, but you know, and I know, that this would be the most important button ever invented. I could sell a single one of these for 17 million dollars.

Number Five:
The Universal "Pause" Button.
It would kind of be like a Stop Time button, but it works exclusively for video games that are being played anytime up to the moment that dinner is ready or we have to leave right now. Joann and I are the first generation of parents who truly understand the need to find a saving point on the game before it could be turned off. So, of course I feel guilty just shutting off the TV and yelling to go put some shoes on. I too have been in the middle of a very important battle when it came time to go to work or check and make sure the baby hasn't drowned in the pool. Continuity is the problem. Your adrenaline is up and you have this plan mapped out in your head as to how your going to tackle the situation and if you simply hit Pause you lose all your momentum. The Universal Pause button would pause everything else, except you,
and the Fire Demon in the Water Temple.

There could also be an exception that includes the moment when you and your wife are cuddling on the couch listening to the rain, drinking coffee and eating pot pies and sharing a funny moment with Julia Luis Dreyfus. And you can pretend that James Gandolfini is still alive and well and that your gig is still on for tomorrow and nobody has to be picked up.

And the phone never rings.

TBT: Gimme something to write on

1984.

Orwellian dystopia?

Or, the last Van Halen album with David Lee Roth?

The NSA still hasn't gone full Big Brother on us, but I can tell you right now that the dude in this picture certainly wasn't Hot for Teacher.

In fact, he didn't like her at all.

The feeling was mutual, of course, he wasn't the outgoing type and she was still mourning her love beads and Jefferson Airplane, who were too busy building cities out of rock and roll to care much about white rabbits.

She was old and creepy by 1984, so I can only hope to assume she's pretty dead now, but I can say that she had a terrible name for a third grade teacher, which I won't reveal just incase she is still alive and lucid enough to Google herself from time to time.

Calvin's third grade teacher is much cooler.

At first I thought she was a bit nuts, but after being a parent volunteer every other week, I now see why she has to radiate the kind of energy she radiates. We all want to blame the parents, we all kinda want to blame the teachers, but let's face it, third graders are unresponsive freak show animals. All of them.

I used to worry that mine was too nuts, too shy, too weird to socialize with the rest of them, but other than the fact that I can't get him to eat enough food or put his shoes on, he really is as remarkable as I could possibly want him to be.

The other kids, wow, really not so much.

The reason I thought about this picture is because I got to drop off Calvin to school this morning and was trying to remember if my parents dropped me off still at this point or if I walked to school. We lived right around the corner, so it's not like there was much of a journey to talk about, but I don't remember getting in the car even when it was raining.

I'm sure we did, but it's important later in life to lie a little bit about how hard you had it.

And then, as I watched him make that turn from the sidewalk to the play ground, I wondered if the eight year old me would have gotten along with the eight year old him.

I had Star Wars.

He's got YouTube.

I was into guns and swords.

Calvin's into swords and guns.

We're both athletic, but not athletes.

Yeah, we totally would have ruled the neighborhood.

I guess.

I don't know. As the lists start rolling around my head, it stops being an intellectual exercise and more of a liars jump down the rabbit hole.

It's safe to assume that if all eight year olds are unresponsive freak show animals, then most likely, so was the kid in the picture, despite the gleaming smile.

But, I guess in the context of entertainment for the sheer sake of entertainment, it's perfectly okay to bend the truth a bit. To romanticize the intellectual superiority of your eight year old self in order to project the pride you have in your eight year old son.

And hey, if you're gonna tell stories,

might as well JUMP!

First Takes - Lie To You

About six months ago I had this cool idea to shoot a video for the commercial version of "Lie To You" where I would take several different people and have them show note cards with the lyrics.

The concept being that the song could function both as a universal piece and something that is uniquely personal.

My niece was kind enough to be my first guinea pig and then I continued shooting with the little guy and myself. I wanted to get more people, but after the jumbling of the cards that you see in the final cut, I sorta gave up and decided to just keep it to the two kids.

Yet, when cutting it, it looked strangely like a love dispute between a 20 year old and an 8 year old, so I recut it using my niece only.

The final product was pretty cool, but not the super cool I was going for (The transitions were just too sloppy, something I'm gonna have to learn how to do better as I go along, I guess) so I shelved the project till I had the time to go back and re-edit it.

Now, when putting First Takes together, I had originally wanted to do the song on the piano, but as I got nearer and nearer the shoot date, I realized I was going to need a lot more practice, so I shelved that idea and then just shot the footage you now see with me and a guitar. (The guitar didn't make the shot, so I'm going to assume that you trust me enough to know I was playing live.)

So there I was with this decent footage, an okay audio take, and this very white blank spot filling most of the screen.

My intention was to fill that void with lyrics like last week, cause that would've only taken me an hour, whereas repurposing the old footage would take me a lot more than that.

The moral of the story is that nothing ever goes right, and the only way I'm ever going to get anything done is to do it the hard way.

The other moral of the story is that the internet likes cute kids.

Next week: Quiet Amy, featuring kittens and Pokemon footage.

Click the picture to take you directly to YouTube.

And, as always, please leave me some feedback when you have the inclination, and please, feel free to share it.

Thanks.

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Watch This

Joann and I are in a bit of a spring cleaning mode.

I mean we're not messy people, she's a bit of a pack rat, Calvin can't get the food to his face, and I, apparently, can't seem to find the bowl with a single stream of pee, but all in all, our house is sanitary enough for small children and in-laws.

But there comes a time when you just have to start knocking a few things off your laundry list.

For instance, whenever Calvin gets a cold, our enitre kitchen island becomes a pharmacy of cough, cold, flu, and diphtheria remedies, both homeopathic and gentetically modified. All of which finds a home, for some reason, in a shoe box next to the wine rack.

Maybe just as a reminder that alcohol consumption while using some of these medications is awesome.

I got the idea yesterday that it could be just the time to find a place for our medicines in an actual medicine cabinet.

Of which we have two.

Not exactly one of those "Ah Ha!" moments you read about in the self help books, but I thought it was a pretty niftly little piece of actualization.

On the other side of the bed, Joann decidied it was time to get a battery for her watch.

Which made me think that I too have a watch that needs a battery.

A very pretty watch I got way back in 2005 to celebrate five years in the coffee business.

It's a nice silver affair with a teeny tiny company logo and the number five.

Which I absolutely never wore.

Not because I didn't like the thing, but because I'm the kind of person that might move a little to the left and get my watch caught on a tiny little piece of escalator, which in turn, would rip off the rest of my arm.

That, and it needed to be adjusted, and somewhere in 2008, it also needed a battery.

But as I said, it's a very pretty watch and I'm actually kind of proud of it.

I had gone years without even thinking about it and then one night on stage I realized how nice it would be to have a watch so I didn't have to keep looking at the bar tender and asking how much time I had left on my set. Not because I was bored, mind you, but because I am usually the opening act, and I like to make sure I'm off and out of the way in a timely manner.

It's just politeness.

And I like the fact that it has the number five as the only number on the face. I have a friend of a friend of a friend who is a pretty famous rock star and it took her five years of serious pavement pounding before getting off the ground, so not only does the watch remind me of some wonderful times of the past, it also says that I've got a lot of furture ahead before I even dare get discouraged.

Sometimes we need those kinds of things.

Anyway, Joann had to get her watch fixed and I made her take mine too.

And now I'm wearing a watch.

Which, goodness now that I think about it, is something I haven't worn since the spring of 1997. Any babies born during that year could legally drive now. Yet it seems odd to me, that I haven't worn one  because I actually like watches. Off the top of my head I could probably think of a ton of watches I've owned.

I had a bunch of those little plastic digital watches. Cause, you know, The 80's.

I had several Swatch Watches. (Google it)

I had a calculater watch. (Google that too)

I even went through this phase of wearing suit vests and a gold pocket watch.

That's right, I was Hipster before it was cool.

Then for Christmas 1996 I got a Mervin's gift card. (Go ahead and Google Mervin's too) And since it was Christmas and I had all the socks and jeans a twenty something fashion disaster could want, I used the card to buy myself a nice silver watch. Almost exactly like the one I'm wearing now except that I think it had a little button that made the face glow green. Which in the pre-iPhone 90's, was the only way to annoy people sitting next to you in a movie theater.

That watch was stolen out of a cubby hole at the theater I was working at while I was tearing apart some scenery. Again, even at twenty, I knew that me, jewlery, and power tools were not to be in the same room together.

But I was like super poor by then and never bothered to replace it.

Which was fine because for the next four years I was either building a stage or hamming it up on one and couldn't flash it anyway.

Then for the next thirteen years I was stationed behind an espresso machine, which is both the temperature of lava and would've caught a loose piece of jewlery like a great white going after barely legal bikini clad 70's chick.

But I haven't been behind an espresso machine in six months, so now I get to wear a watch.

A rather nifty watch.

And oh, look at that, its time to finish this post and do something else.

Three Day Jean Rule Five

Okay, so I discovered something that without the aid of my self employment, I never ever would have discovered on my own.

Blue jeans feel freaking amazing on the third day of wear!

I know.

Who would have guessed?

Back when I was a responsible adult, blue jeans were worn for maybe half a day, a day and a half tops. I worked hard. I sweat a lot.

But now that my commute is down the hall and my office is kept at near freezing temperatures, I can totally get away with wearing the same pants long past the expiration date.

This does not hold true for t-shirts, socks and or underwear. I'm not an animal.

But blue jeans on the third day, OMG, it's like wrapping your legs in kitten fur and good intentions.

Fourth day and dampness starts to set in. I didn't bother going for day five.

So jeans have a new three day rule. In fact, if Joann doesn't mind me walking around in my underwear on Sunday, I'll never have to own more than two pairs of pants again. Think of all the room for storage.

Which leads me to think of creating a new business where you pay people to wear your jeans for two days, so that when you slip them on on the third it's like you're suddenly bohemian without all the hassle.

Which leads me to thinking about all the new rules I've learned since I stopped wearing khakis and started getting real:

Rule Number One:
You Can Never Clock Out. Sure, it looks a lot like you haven't moved from the couch since Christmas, but you have filled out three yellow note pads full of ideas and lists and to-dos. Nothing may happen between 9 and 5 but at 2:30am you suddenly realize the perfect camera angle for Monday's video shoot. Phillip Seymour Hoffman dies of a heroine overdose and all you can think of is that it might be a good idea to work on your interview voice.

Rule Two:
Control Your Spam. At last count, and try not to vomit, I am currently active on more than 20 social media sites, because who knows, who knows? But it does mean my email address is a virtual melting pot of online advertisements. Cleaning out my inbox (A task with which I am an official Jedi knight) has taken over a large portion of my administrative blocks.

Rule Three:
Tea is Lovely. Nothing like a cup of tea.

Rule Four:
Wednesdays Are Really Hard. I block off my week with a list of things I would like to accomplish. I do allow for some fluidity, but it helps me to focus on one task at a time. Mondays, I blow through my schedule. So much that I usually break into tasks for Tuesday (or video games). Tuesdays, I slow down a bit, but if I've got eight things to do, I'll usually get about six done. Wednesdays, it's more like two. It's not laziness, I just run into all kinds of problems both work related and social that I only seem to get the bare minimum checked off. That and laziness. I'm seriously considering just taking Wednesdays off and working half of Saturday.

Rule Five:
Don't Forget What You Believe In. I have always felt very strongly about where you draw the line between the product you produce and customer demand. I have never believed that the customer was right, in fact, I've always believed that the customer was wrong, like, super wrong, and if they don't like your product, well, gee, then they're not your customer. Concessions, of course have to be made, quality and service are essential factors, life in a vacuum is no life at all, but there's a tipping point where you, as the producer no longer produce what you want to produce and the customer is still never fully satisfied, because, and I'm sorry to break your marketing degree's heart, the customer is NEVER fully satisfied. The model I preach is very simple. Produce a product that you believe in, find opportunities to sell it.

Any other way is just crazy to me. No, crazy is the wrong word. Uninteresting. Uninspiring. Not my cup of tea. And very easy to dismiss when it wasn't my own butt on the line.

But now my butt's on the line, and I get fifty song listings a day, 99.99% of them are looking for something I'm not. What freaks me out is that a lot of them are so similar, I start to get myself a little crazy thinking I need to relearn everything I know about songwriting.  But there are over 7 billion people in the world and I need to find just a few thousand. And it's not my butt that's on the line, it's my heart. And if I can't find a few thousand people who love my stuff like I love my stuff, it'll break.

But better a broken heart than a broken spirit.

I guess.

TBT: Closed Systems

That's a very young me in the background.

A very young Wendy in pink.

An ageless Rich in the red apron.

And, I'm pretty sure that's Evangeline Lilly chewing her thumbnail and waiting for a call-back for LOST.

March, maybe April, 2000.

We were all lucky to be alive then after the Y2K disaster. Lucky to be alive, and lucky to have jobs.

Wendy sent me this picture a few years back and I had kept it in my office in-box since. After I left the coffee shop, I put the picture in my iPad cover, which is where it sat until it fell out today while I was enjoying my morning tea and playing Scrabble.

I picked this picture because I haven't had a cup of coffee in about a week now.

Breathe.

It'll be okay.

Now, for those of you that didn't get to know me in real life, I'm pretty much a coffee junkie. I haven't gone 24 hours without a cup of coffee since I was fourteen years old.

That's nearly a quarter century for those unwilling to do the math.

My love of coffee took me from junkie status to a full blown career. Everything I own, everything I've been able to do, the roof over my head, and the socks that I should go put on cause its getting cold in the studio, I owe to coffee.

But my new life is filled with a completely different kind of stress. Oddly enough, the coffee that gave me the multitasking powers of Shiva, was now contributing to this really unproductive shiny object frenzy.

I've spent a decade being in three places at the same time, but now I need to be super present and concentrating on the task at hand, and I can't.

So I've been sipping tea instead.

And I can't say it has made a world of difference.

But just enough to prove me right.

So back to the picture, I don't remember a lot of the 25,000 hours I spent working in an apron, but I absolutely remember this one.

Rich was a company trainer and he was teaching us the various methods of home espresso brewing.

Closed systems versus open systems.

You see, in a closed system, you have a tank that boils water and creates an astounding amount of pressure for pulling your espresso, but you can't continue filling the tank. You have just enough pressure to steam some milk and pull a couple of doubles and then you have to wait for it to cool down a bit before you add more water.

An open system allows you to continually add water to the tank, but doesn't create the same level of pressure, so you can't steam as good a pitcher of milk nor pull as good a shot.

We stopped carrying the closed system machines five years after this picture was taken cause they were really hard to use and very expensive and a tough sell to anyone but the geekiest of aficionados.

Them's the breaks.

Volume versus quality.

So yes, I remember this training. In fact, I remember every training I ever went to. Every lesson learned. Every trainer who taught me something new. It was, by an outstanding margin, the best part of the job.

After the training program was dismantled, because it was hard to use and terribly expensive,  I was very sad for a very long time.

Everyone knew it was a mistake, but no one who knew better had the power to change it.

Volume versus quality.

Go ahead and mourn the buggy whip maker, because he was really good at it.

Anyway, had it continued, I would not be doing what I am doing now, I guarantee it. And I don't regret a minute of anything. Wins, losses, erosions, loves, hates, and both feet in mouth awkwardness.

The point is this: Do what you can to reduce your stress, don't mourn a life that was never really yours, and enjoy learning new things, cause even though it may amount to nothing, at least you'll have something to blog about in your old age.