Guitar

I was playing guitar, something I cannot do when not dreaming. It seemed very clear to me suddenly: a finger on a particular fret on each string would produce a note. You just had to know where those notes were and play one at a time. In my dream I seemed to already know where the notes were and was playing beautiful notes.

Musso

In a casa particular in Cuba I picked up a German translation of a novel by French best-seller Guillaume Musso that had been left behind by another tourist. I don't know German, but I could follow the plot ok. It was absolutely the most execrable thing you could imagine. I didn't know who Musso was but now I do, unfortunately.

C**a

So I went to a certain nation to the South of us. All the clichés were in evidence. The 1950s Chevys, the Buena Vista Social Club, the decayed infrastructure & European tourists, the revolutionary murals. I had no contact with the literary or academic world. Instead, I was pure tourist. At every restaurant we were serenaded with Bésame mucho, Quizás, Quizás, Quizás, Guantanamera, and Compay Seguro's "Chan Chan." We hated that song about three days into the trip.

The bookstores only featured books about Fidel and Che. Museums chronicled the history of the Island until about 1964. The people and landscape were extraordinary, but it was tough living as a clearly privileged person just because I carried the tourist currency. It is rare for an American to speak Spanish there. People often thought I must have had C****n parents, since I spoke Spanish with a more or less C****n accent when I was there.

The tourist dollar is worth 24 times the national currency. A person on a salary might earn 50-$200 a month in the national currency, but a taxi driver could net that much in equivalent tourist money with a few trips a week.

Back

I'm back from my summer vacation. I am continuing to refine my life-style. I need to make fundamental changes in many aspects in order to stop getting in my own way. I have eliminated a lot of idle web surfing and binge watching. I am going to follow more rigorous schedules and make the best of everything that is in my power.

Being in a third-world (technically a second world, I guess) country for a few weeks changed my perspective. I realized that my obstacles are largely self-created. I have enough money and time, I just need to manage them better.

Epitaph for a Cautious Man

He came and left
and left things as they were

Self-improvement

After endless self-improvement
the self is pretty much the same

Weirdly proud

I was frustrated when first writing songs that they all sounded the same. Of course, I only knew one key, and I had a limited number of harmonic moves to deploy. In retrospect, though, it makes sense to develop the same material in three or four different ways before moving on to something else. I've continued to do that: I find an idea, melodic or harmonic, and use it for at least two songs.

Having a style, then, having one's songs (or poems or scholarly essays) sound like one's self is not at all a bad thing. I'm wondering why I thought this was even a problem. Style stems from limitations (or more positively the finite number of things within one's repertoire) and from a set of preferences, what one wants to do in the first place. (For example, my use of "one" in this post is irritating to me. It is not my normal preference at all, but I just fell into it. But it is not discontinuous with my style, either, just an added wrinkle. The post still sounds like me.)

Each chord has a color. Yet all my songs together, composed of different chords, have a kind of coloration. Not a single hue, but a composite range of tones. I am weirdly proud that I can do this at all.