Arthur was right

about many things, but chiefly about the daily struggle of people to survive in today's world being more than enough to keep them busy enough so as to preclude any definitive action in response to the inane, insane crap that our porportedly wise elected leaders are foisting upon us in the guise of policies geared towards the best interests of the common person.

A recent email from a surprising source:

It would appear that perhaps you have been lured to the dark side: a typical distracted American too wrapped up in the struggles of everyday life to be bothered with updating the postings on his blog. It's hard work, but it is important.

Yup! I checked your blog, only to find that the author has not checked it recently. I've been taking some classes, so depending how the work schedule falls, I can spend up to 87 hours a week in either work or class, with a maximum of six round-trip commutes which average 74 miles each. Say what you want about the money, I would rather have serenity and time to look at my feet.

In my copious amounts of free time, I have to ponder my country and the wise choices which have led our economy to circle the toilet. So, really, I have put all of my ponderances about the rest of the world on hold until the middle of May, but then there are all of the people who used to be my friends that I have not had time for either, so perhaps the international community is on hold until at least June.

Since leaving the Alley, the structure of a typical day for me, not to mention week or month has been radically redefined. Instead of trudging off to the same location every day to perform pretty much the same tasks over the course of weeks and months, my cell phone has become the key to gainful employment through the local office of IATSE, the stagehand's union here in the U.S. and Canada. Earlier last year I was working quite a bit with the Houston Symphony which gave me a little bit of structure, but that has gone by the wayside as the result of some jealousy, a blackball vote on my membership, and a decision to pass on the gig due to its glaring similarity to what I had just left at the Alley. I am doing most of the shows for the Society for the Performing Arts, but for the most part the bulk of my gainful employment is achieved by "working off of the roster" waiting for the phone to ring (or buzz in my case - old habits die hard). Most times the gigs are one or two day affairs, but one never knows when a call may turn into a little more. Case in point: the office called last Tuesday at 1 in the afternoon asking if I could be down at the Ballet for a load in. I was able to get down there to replace an electrician and figured it would be good for a few days of work. I transferred over to carpentry on the third day and am now on the show crew for the run. So what began as a potential two or three day gig has morphed into a three week stint. I've met a bunch of guys I hadn't worked with before, and gotten to work in another space in town.

It's a scary existence (especially in this day and age), but also an exciting invigorating one.

However, it affords me a lot less time to sit in tech, surf the net for news stories, get outraged, and write reflective blog posts full of long run on sentences. I'm still thinking on all of the events and personalities in our lovely world, just not purging as often as I'd like. I guess my priorities have changed a little since leaving the Alley. My posts and their frequency seemed to be an unintended result of being cooped up in a dark room for 12 hours a day over stretches of two weeks every two or three weeks between September and July for nine years. The time that I have now not spent working is filled with some of the things that I wrote about here: working at KPFT, albeit not in the capacity I initially anticipated, but I'm happy doing whatever it is they need me to to keep the place going - and playing bass with a band I joined in September, Fahl and Folk. And the time spent not working on those projects is spent dealing with life rearing its ugly head in the form of roof replacement (planned), furnace replacement (surprise!), and triangle trips on airplanes during the holiday to see the folks that otherwise would be relegated to phone calls every two or three weeks.

Lately my pondering has been turning in the direction of the lyrics to a classic from The Who ("Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...") when confronted with not necessarily reneged upon campaign pledges, but certainly re-conceived ones (declassification of White House emails, complete draw down of forces in Iraq) and also the concept of just when a faceless coldly calculating inhuman multi national corporation stops becoming a group of individuals that have the same base needs and wants and fears as the rest of us and becomes the entity (Sorry to disappoint you Arthur, but I still have to believe that we all have some things in common - like eating and sleeping and craving physical contact from another being). More on those and other conundrums later.

Meanwhile, check out Arthur's latest posts and help out if you can. Things over his way seem to have taken a dramatic turn the wrong way if we are to continue enjoying his eye opening unique commentary.

And above all, continue to ponder and talk and/or write about your thoughts and feelings on the state of your world with others. It's one of the only ways that things may improve eventually.