beautiful, funny, sad & true

Well, it seems to have happened again.  I lost my writing momentum.  This is not the first time this has happened, as you’re well aware if you’ve spent any time sniffing around the blog.  Despite being unemployed and having neither a wife nor a family to take care of, I have a very busy life, and sometimes I’m just not sure how much of it—good or bad—I want to share with the Internets.

I do know that a good way to get the momentum going again is just to start typing and see what happens.  Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Worth mentioning is the fact that I seem to have developed a pinched nerve near my right shoulder blade, which makes my index finger numb and causes occasional fits of shooting pain through my arm.  This makes things like driving a car, playing musical instruments, and using a computer (in other words, most of the things I do with my life) much less fun than they normally are.

I was housesitting for almost two weeks for FrenchSinger and his wife, keeping their three cats company while they were on vacation in Canada.  In addition to the cats, they have a good-sized television, and all the major movie channels, and a Netflix subscription, which meant that this was the primary activity for the majority of my time at their house:

It’s not exactly the greatest picture in the history of pictures, so if you can’t quite make out the details, it’s me lying on my side on the sofa, with two of the cats perched on my leg.  A couple of times, I could swear that vegetable matter was beginning to form between my other leg and the sofa, as I watched marathons of shows like Kitchen Nightmares and Top Gear.

I also got my passport, at long last.  A couple of my friends who live elsewhere in the world have been bugging me to get one for years now, but the hassle and expense (years of underemployment are taking their toll) of ordering my ‘real’ birth certificate as well held up the process a bit.  I had the same problem that Barack Obama did, with an unofficial copy, which used to be perfectly acceptable until the world went crazy.  No more, however, since my shiny new passport is here in my hot little hand.  Well, not in my hand right now, but you know what I’m saying.

The brochure that came with it says on the front, “With your U.S. Passport, the world is yours!”  So it would seem.  Now all I have to do is use the thing, as much as possible.  The first place will be beautiful Vancouver, B.C., for a gig in a few weeks.  The most likely places after that are Switzerland and France, although who knows; I may get a random jonesing for Iceland or Japan or somewhere like that.  I’ll keep you posted.

I’ll leave you with what is currently my favorite piece of music.  I came across it in a documentary film, and looked it up in the credits, and have been obsessed with it ever since.  It’s “Nimrod”, from the Enigma Variations, by English composer Edward Elgar.  It’s absolutely stunning, and well worth the four minutes it will take you to watch this video of the excellent (and very stern-looking) Daniel Barenboim conducting.

There, see?  I told you.  Beautiful, noble and epic.

Incidentally, I’m still taking submissions from guest bloggers.  I had three or four people say they were interested, but I suspect that my own lack of blogging momentum was contagious to them, and the interest seems to have temporarily waned.  So come on.  Let’s all ‘fire up’, as they say.  Actually, I’m not sure who says that, but let’s do it anyway.