Love and Money

If you walk down the street in downtown Calgary you can almost smell the money. This is boom town; black suits and white cowboy hats, big trucks and long limosines, cell phones and starbucks, laptops and leather shoes. A young proffesional type walking swiftly, talking on his blackberry, stepping over a bum who looks up at him as he passes without a glance or a second thought, dirty rough hands half raise a partly crumbled Tim Horton's cup.

At the bus stop, no suits. Courderoy dreadlocks eyes glance at me from behind oversized headphones. A young woman sits in the bus shelter, one hand on a baby carriage, watching a couple across the street walking close, hand in hand. 

On the bus, crowded, elderly lady sits with bag on seat next to her. Middle aged man with leather jacket standing next to me, glancing furtively at her. She notice's, but doesn't let it show, doesn't move or look or smile or say hello. Middle aged man with leather jacket next to me gets off the bus. The elderly lady looks at my shoes, she doesn't move.

So much opportunity, so much fear. So much for these lines that glance and skew...

Books that have changed the way I write

Five great books

Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, by Ken Kessey

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Not that you give a shit, but these books are all works of sublime beauty. And if there were any justice in the world, you and everyone else would have read them already by now. But hey, maybe that's part of their magic. Nobody cares. (Or maybe you do care and maybe you have read them, in which case I'm a horse's ass)

No generation wants to make a world where Van Gogh's fate is repeated. We just can't help it.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but moderately. The great class, they who affect our imagination, the men and women who could not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas - they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar. -RWE

You tired old blog. We thought you were the future, but we didn't know facebook was waiting to eat you alive.

Motivation has elluded me. If ever I had a muse, it has deserted me these past weeks. I mean, I had an idea, sort of. But then, as the idea grew, it changed. It morphed from this train of thought to that train of thought, from one angle to another and then another. Before long I just got frustrated with the whole damn thing. And now I have a deadline staring me in the face.

But maybe it's not so bad. Deadlines can do wonderful things. Of course sometimes they do vicious things.

So here's the deal. I'm writing an essay about what it's like to play music and make absolutely no money at it; or worse, make a couple bucks at it. When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I'm a musician. My JOB is cooking for a deli, and being a student takes up most of my time. But I think of myself as a musician. The thing is, I never make any money at it, so a little  part of me feels like really I don't count as a musician so I should stop telling people that it's what I do. I mean, I don't do it for a living. If anything, music eats up my living. I spend all this time playing in a band and busking out on the streets or down in the subways. I was busking just recently and this guy told me to get a job. I couldn't fucking believe it. I have a job. It's a shitty job to be sure, kitchen work's like that. But the way he said it it felt like he was telling me to shut the fuck up cause no one wants to hear it; go get a job so we don't have to listen to you anymore. 

In busking, like everything, there's good stuff and then there's crap. I like to think that I'm usually in the former group, but you know, sometimes I wonder.

Ah screw it.