That was interesting. I posted a bunch of stuff to Soundcloud, which I guess I will not be cancelling after all. Too much work moving all that stuff to YouTube or anywhere else, really. Just hope they don’t go out of business. Soundcloud, that is.

Most of what I posted was piano music the likes of which I’ve always wondered if there was an audience for. It is not masterful playing. It is practice. I play at half tempo, make mistakes, stop and start. As long as it’s clear that this is what it is then I think an audience might appreciate the little window it opens into how much work goes into learning a single piece of music. Then again a lot of people would not know the difference between Lecuona at half tempo and Lecuona at full tilt.

The recordings are all from 7 years ago. They were in a folder called “Piano Takes”, but among the few dozen recordings was one of me attempting a podcast. I did not realize how many “shows” I put together but never uploaded. This particular segment featured me reading from a dictionary and from a copy of the Yellow Pages. It’s not a new idea but I have fun with it. I remember a comedy show where a woman said that when she was a child everyone thought she was so funny that she could make reading the phone book funny. So she started doing that, reading the phone book on stage. It really was hilarious. I was not trying to be funny but I guess the very idea of reading aloud from a dictionary or phone book is comedic in itself.

I was up stupid early today. Early for me, that is. I should be tired as hell but I don’t seem to be. I talked to Clyde for a while, asking him what I should do with this precious gift of a day. He didn’t have any ideas. Neither did The Wookie. I’ve been on my own this day, not getting the usual rah-rah support from the stuffed animals, who typically stage a parade and give speeches to pump up my enthusiasm for being alive.

I found a sweet little piece by a composer who I cannot say is obscure, but he’s not widely performed save for a couple of well-known trifles. This will make a good “name the composer” video if I can get it together. It’s an easy enough piece but, as I remember so well from college, easy pieces are not always easy to pull off. Easy pieces are why we chose to become musicians, are they not? You can bring so much of yourself to easy pieces.

Feeling restless. I am at the Vanilla Sky, which is conspicuously empty today, as it was on Monday when last I was here. I think there is an hour, a minute even, when this place is suddenly overrun by screaming babies. That moment has not arrived but I think it might be due.

Going back to do some work. Or something.

…

Now it is Thursday. Everything upstairs  from this paragraph was from Wednesday. I was up stupid early again today. Clyde talked me into applying a new theme to the payphone site, and The Wild Thing was there helping me along. It’s not perfect but nothing ever is. I actually liked the previous look but there did not appear to be an easy way to make it full-width.

Being up at 5am is kind of a jolt to my system. Until about an hour ago all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. Now I’m past that. I think I might hit up the LIC Beer Project in a little bit. A friend says their IPAs are “wonderful”, which I think is a strange word to use in describing BEER.

I only know of that place because of a time I was here, at the library on 21st Street, and a friend texted me to ask if I knew of the LIC Beer Project at 39-something 23rd Street. I did not but, since I was nearby, I decided to go past the place and see if it registered in my memory. Then I would respond to the text message. So I get over there, in what is a total asshole part of AsLIC, and find that — just as Don said — in the middle of this blight is a pretty happening place with live music and a huge crowd of people. As I was getting ready to text the friend that this place was new to me I heard someone calling my name. It was Don. He was getting his tires replaced at the tire shop across the street from the LIC Beer Project. We got a laugh out of this pretty random crossing of paths in such a relatively remote spot.

They have weird hours, but I guess in that location you can’t expect to be busy until 4am every night. They open at 4 and close at 11pm on weekdays. Being up at 5 gives me license to drink earlier. Yay.

I don’t really have anything to say. My brain is fried on lack of sleep and this keyboard which I so adored has become pesky and malfunctioning. It somehow now produces the £ symbol instead of the crosshatch, and the @ and “ keys are reversed, which makes almost no sense. A cheap replacement is easy to come by but I’d rather stick with this one if I can.

I was pretty impressed with myself after discovering all that piano music I’d recorded. It was a lot of stuff and some of it was pretty damn good. I got over it quickly enough but it was a little weird at first finding all these hours of recordings of which I had absolutely no memory.