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Monday night’s open mic was a good gathering. A number of people that I hadn’t seen in a while – Morell (who suddenly has a first name!!! Arschell!) has retired and threatened  to come out to the open mics more frequently – and I’m down with that! Dave Benham’s son Thilman came out and shared monstrous cello riffs with us, and then everyone’s batteries failed! Fortunately, no more than one failed battery per act, so I didn’t have to break out more instrument mics…

Tuesday’s open mic at Busboys and Poets was a small exercise
in territorialism, with a new-to-me manager walking in as I was setting up and
asking “I was wondering who was using my events room” and my taking that as the
opportunity to say that if Busboys was advertising their open mic as heavily as
they ought to then she’d KNOW who was using her event room… and that I’ve
been doing this once a month since last fall.

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 I handed her a bunch
of posters, requested some more support from the venue and got on with my day.
Unfortunately, I think that lack of support is really beginning to take its
toll – we had our lightest turnout YET – though I can’t even really just blame
the venue on that one… my feature didn’t even show. Sickness struck, but I didn’t
know about it till a half hour before we ended the night.

Definitely some issues to work on.

Sigh.

In my downtime I tried putting together a “webcast” version
of Monday night’s open mic at Teavolve – basically stitching all the videos
together, doing a LITTLE bit of multi-camming and dubbing in the main board mix
– adding the Teavolve and Focus logos and then creating a youtube “premiere”
event rather than just slapping it online. It’ll go Live tonight and we’ll see
if anyone cares – I’m NOT optimistic – but think it COULD gain momentum. Unfortunately
the amount of effort involved probably means this method would be impractical.

The idea would be that maybe I can funnel and focus a bit of
an “EVENT” out of it, regain some of the energy that we used to get from the
Livecasts – but – it means that on top of the 5+ hours spent actually at the
event, the 1+ hours spent offloading and cataloging everything, I spent another
2+ hours editing everything, rendered for 7.5 hours, spent another hour
uploading and creating the event and tonight will spend another 3 hours hosting
the event… so the model adds another 5-6 hours or work + almost 8 hours of
downtime for my computer… I do a LOT of impractical shit but that may simply be
over the line.

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HOWEVER – we’ll try it out! We go Live at 7pm tonight here : https://youtu.be/mjNnN9ExzbM

 (you should be able
to access this link later too, at which point it should be like any other
youtube video)

….May 29^th, 2019…

Feeling stressed OUT. No real good reason for it. I got up,
thought I was going to have a completely work-from-home kind of day precisely
because I’d forgotten about a meeting, got reminded of the meeting, raced and
got to said meeting and got there late but still had a great meeting. Came home
and beat the thunderstorms, back to work-from-home day sans much angst, and
though there’s still things to do on my to-do list, I don’t think I’m going to
do them at the moment because enough of my to-do list is done, that the rest to
be done to-do items can get done tomorrow.

Stupidly, I think I’m still stressed over blowback to my
Sofar post – just seeing people who I think of as individuals that SHOULD
respect my opinion tossing it into “well, I’ll take that into consideration”
when weighed against an article by someone they don’t know at all. I’m not
social-scientist enough to say for sure, but I think a lot of that just comes
from negative bias. We’d rather get our hackles up over something that someone says
is unjust than discover that… sometimes things just aren’t quite the way you wish
they were. We Live in a capitalist society – I’d be worried if a for-profit
company WASN’T trying to cut corners and make a buck because then I’d have to
be suspicious.

On that front – the meeting I had today was a good one,
gathering two people that I perceive to be if not necessarily idealistic, then
at least well-intentioned – and probably idealistic to boot, except my jaded
self feels that there might be connotations of naïveté attached to that word.
One of them is younger than me with big ideas, the other is older than me with
big ideas and I felt sort of bad cause I worried that us two olds were ganging
up on the youth cause we had so many negative stories… but we had very specific
negative stories… worried that our young friend was being circled by vultures,
carrion birds eager to take advantage of his positive exuberance.

Though I Love playing music and believe that’s my purpose in
Life, sometimes I can be made very, very happy simply by bringing people
together.

YOU should know YOU! Enjoy.

*leaves the room quietly*