Tag Archives: guitar

Split Focus

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So I had idea of what it might be like to have multiple personalities earlier. My guess is that most people will stop reading now. If not, just keep in mind that I’m not meaning to offend anyone for whom this might be a sensitive issue.

Earlier this afternoon, I was playing a song on guitar, and I noticed something: I moved around, mentally. It was as though I wasn’t alone. I mean, I never felt what I would describe as another presence in the room, per se, at least not physically, but for a little while there, it did seem as though I adopted the perspective of someone else, someone who wasn’t ‘me’ (at least not in a way that I could recognize), but yet someone whom I was definitely immersed with.

This ‘not me’… ‘person’… I didn’t sense them exterior to myself. As I was playing guitar and doing the best I could not to sound like crap singing along, I started paying extra close attention to what I was doing. Some time had passed. I was barely conscious of the fact that I had been talking through my thought process out loud to myself. From the voice/perspective of what I can only describe as a bonafide music teacher.

Memorize that picking pattern. Start over. Do it till you get it right. Slow it down if you need to. Now keep doing it right. Again. Again. Again. Good.

You’re slouching. Support your voice, from the diaphragm.

Feel the dynamics, don’t just play them.

Quit it. You think you’ll have time to stop and burp if this were live in front of an audience? Either disguise it or wait.

Listen. You hearing that? That’s what this part of the song is supposed to sound like! Keep it up.

So, a mix bag of tips and pointers, complements and constructive criticism, all of which I learned from my teachers from high school and college. Seems like I’m just regurgitating information, right? I’m not so sure. It felt an awful lot like I was both myself saying the things that I know that I already knew AND I was someone else, someone who was hearing all of it as though for the first time in either a very long time, or perhaps even just for the first time, ever.

Logically, I know I wasn’t ‘hearing’ anything, let alone anything new, but it sure as hell felt like I was.

Maybe I just have an over active imagination, which would usually be a good thing, being an aspiring writer as well and all, but in this case, when I ‘realized’ this seeming split was taking place, there was difficulty ‘disengaging’ from it. When I felt like I was wholly back into my own head space, it was almost like breaking a spell, snapping out of it.

I’m not claiming to have multiple personalities, or to know the first thing about what it’d be like through the eyes of someone who does. What little I know about the topic comes mostly from tv, so… I know essentially nothing, in other words. This little ‘episode’ could have been any number of things (petit mal epilepsy?), but it did get me thinking: What if it were possible to adopt/permit the presence of additional personalities by choice? Would we? Should we?

My default attitude would largely have been “hell no!” Too much at risk. What if an unwanted second-party internal personality became dominant and unrelenting? Could we ever trust a source guaranteeing that that could never happen? Who’d be willing to be a guinea pig? Maybe a neurological ‘sandbox’ environment would allow a safe, mental buffer space with which to experiment, but is anything really ever completely safe?

Regardless, after this experience, I realized that I might actually be down to try it. What I feel I could now expect, should the technology ever be developed and proven ‘safe’ (less dangerous than getting into a car and crossing town?), is that an additional internal personality would manifest itself in the form of coach, teacher, trainer, etc. In other words, for someone who wants to learn a new hands-on skill and/or improve on one, it would just be a simple matter of turning on a pre-selected ‘voice’ in your head (probably downloaded from a reviewed and rated repository), only you feel what they feel, you understand exactly what they’re trying to convey.

Essentially, if you want a demonstration, you simply tap into the appropriate bank of compiled experience (could have a name, a personality modelled after someone in particular, whatever) understand a set of directly-relayed instructions (should feel natural if you adopt enough of the alter), and then, simply, do.

Also, the free version should be the only version. Open source that shit.

Title Optional, So Long As It’s About Routiney Stuff

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I’m still most definitely struggling with getting into a consistent daily routine. I have been trying to get up before 11 am for a number of mornings now, but I never seem to have the foresight or the discipline to place my phone, which acts as my alarm clock, somewhere out of reach before I fall asleep at night, leaving it at the mercy of my sluggish-but-nonetheless-somehow-cat-like reflexes fighting tooth and nail with the touch screen’s “reset” button just for the sake of resuming, for the love of god, that blissful state of sweet dream-filled slumber before the audible assault disrupts and ravages my still barely conscious-level of sensory awareness well into submission, utterly beyond some unfathomable point of no return or other.

Also, I have a thing for elaborate, extended-but-not-quite-run-on sentences, by the by.

Anyways, I am under the impression that most people are up between 7 and 8 am most weekday mornings. How awful. Unless they’re simply morning people, in which case, they’re just plain weird in my books. It is inconceivable to me why anyone would voluntarily torment themselves so, but it’s not my place to judge. I suspect that a great many people abide by such a torturous weekday morning routine out of some dreadful sense of ‘responsibility’, such as being able to get to work on time, in which case, the effort might be considered anything but ‘voluntary’.

Casting my old and deep-seated beef with forced work schedule-related anything (morning wake up times not the least of which) aside for now, I can see a number of benefits for being able to experience this thing normal people call “morning” after waking up rather than the part that occurs at the ass-end of night time before going to sleep. You know, at least once in a while.

On the up side, I have been meaning to change up my diet to something that can remotely be described as “balanced” and “healthy”. Apparently poutine, perogies and pizza (the three P’s) don’t count. I am happy to announce that I have successfully begun to implement some of those long-awaited changes. This passed week has brought veggie matter and my internal digestive fluids together in abundance for the first time in… Gosh, I just don’t have that many fingers…

I’ve been careful to keep existing sources of protein in my current dietary intake, as well as to include some new ones. Also, I’m making a conscious effort to cut back on wheat, which ain’t easy since I pride myself on my ability to happily subsist solely on often wheat-based, sugar-saturated breakfast cereals at all hours of the day. Doesn’t mean I don’t still eat junk, but I do so far, I’m managing to do so far less often as I was.

I’m not what most people would ever think of as being over weight, so it’s not for physique reasons that I’m pursuing these changes. I just want to get my body used to running on higher quality fuel so that it stops retaliating with loads of acid reflux every time I have a coffee, or with irregular bowel movements as a result of me pushing my digestive track practically to the brink of a complete “shitty work” stoppage. Something about union dues for kidney workers, the rising price of gas in the intestinal energy sector, a breakdown in the management of the enzyme department, and just a rotten cultural attitude on the local gut-based microbial level in general.

Other routines I’m trying to get into, with mixed success, include being physically active a little every day. Even a simple 30 minute walk around the neighborhood every day or two would be a huge step back to my old, healthier habits.

And then, of course, there’s a range of creative endeavors I want to become fluently productive with. I’ve been a singer-songwriter for years, but I still have to push myself to practice singing and playing guitar (whether it be original material or covering a song by someone else) for at least some amount of time each day in order to keep my chops up, as well as to hopefully develop further as a musician.

If I can share some honesty with you, sometimes, I’m afraid I’ve hit my potential as a musician rather pathetically short of what I had dreamed, and that all I’m doing now is performing maintenance upkeep on a rotting corpse of what once might have amounted to genuine talent. I’m hoping that that fear is baseless. I’m too stubborn to quit, but I can’t stand the thought of being stagnant forever.

When it comes to writing, I struggle even more so to invest adequate time practicing, but that’s precisely why this blog exists. If nothing else, my goal for writing is to post a blog entry as close to once per day as I humanly can. Obviously that isn’t always going to be the case, but the ‘real’ goal sits more at posting no less than one entry per every two days which, so far, seems to be well within my means to continue accomplishing. Better than nothing.

And, as stated in my very first entry, the whole point of this blog is to provide writing practice. The way I see it is that, ultimately, this is all meant to eventually serve as scaffolding for a major literary project I’m working on slowly but surely. In the meantime, it is also my hope to eventually cultivate something of a community where people can go to to get up to date info on what I’ve been up to in life.

Not that my life is normally ever exciting enough to warrant having online followers or subscribers, but I do have enough of an artistic passion to create content that may hopefully one day be of great interest to a great many people. These are still the humble beginnings. Establishing and keeping to a routine is one of the major keys I have towards realizing my long-term goals, and it ain’t easy. Not for a world-class slacker like myself, at any rate, but at least I’ve begun proving to myself that it’s never too late to get started and make real progress.

[Edit: Nearly 10 years on, and while things have variously been better and high points had been reached, little of what this entry includes differs from what I could describe today. It’s almost a relief: I thought then that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. I can see now that I couldn’t have tried hard enough to make an appreciable difference. I need to focus on other dimensions of self-improvement, since diet, exercise, and sleep consistencies are fundamentally out of the question]