Robin Williams, Sadness, and the Lie of Success

After a day of musical rehearsing which should have been enjoyable, I got home last night feeling like I wanted to be somebody else.  I laid in bed and wondered to myself why everything has to be such an effort.  I wanted life to be easy.  Then, my wife, who was browsing Facebook, told me that Robin Williams committed suicide and I cried.

Robin Williams was not my favourite comedian, nor celebrity.  Rik Mayall died recently, for instance, whose comic work I hold in higher esteem.  While upset, I was not moved to tears.  Normally, a dead celebrity produces a shoulder shrug and a "meh".  In fact, I've spent much of my life chortling at Robin Williams' roles in sappy dramas like Patch Adams, What Dreams May Come, and that concentration camp movie, the name of which I care not to remember.  Yet I cried when he died.  Here's why.  

The first reason is obvious.  He spent so much of his life trying to cheer people with his comedy, to improve lives, and make life on earth better.  Those dramatic roles he chose were often inspirational people who taught us the importance of joy, laughter, and life.  To suicide himself seems to render his work fraudulent, like he was lying to us the whole time and in the end, sadness wins.  

It is not as simple as that.  His death should not be the entire meaning of his life.  

He battled depression.  I know what that's like.  I know what it's like to obsess over joy and sadness.  The depressed always do.  We wonder why we're not as happy as we should be, we wonder when we'll stop being sad, and we worry about the happiness ending.  An evil self-critic is constantly nattering at us.  Yet when that voice is silenced, the joy we taste is overwhelming.  Its memory sustains us through the brutal times.  I suspect, though I'll never know for sure: the non-depressed do not, and cannot, appreciate joy the way our fellowship of the sad experiences it.  

In short, he was more than just a sad clown.  Yes, that was really Robin Williams rolling on the ground, weeping and pouring gasoline on himself in Death to Smoochy.  He drew on his personal despair to make the role of "Rainbow" Randolph real, so real that many viewers were disturbed.  But that was also him in Dead Poet's Society, drawing on his energy as a nurturer, trying to help us live and see through all the bullshit that makes us unhappy.  

However, this is not what made me cry.  

What made me cry is this: Robin Williams had a huge house and tons of money.  He had talent.  He had fame.  He had children.  He had work whenever he wanted it.  He had professional respect.  His acting roles inspired and moved millions of people.  In short, he had success.  Yet he still hated himself.  

His death exposes a great lie: Success = Happiness.  I was taught that if I strove to improve myself and my lot in life, my reward would be happiness.  But it's just not true.  Wealth, fame and power did not save Robin Williams, and it cannot save me or you or anybody else.  

This is either the saddest thing ever, or the most freeing.  It's sad because I will constantly be duelling my personal demons.  But it's freeing as well, because I now see how little Success actually matters, and how little Failure matters conversely.  I can stop worrying about it.  A life of happiness can be lived without them.  This leaves me with more time to pursue actual happiness instead of stuff that doesn't matter.  

As I lay in bed last night, talking about Robin Williams with my life, I could see how easily I could die like him.  Someday, I could hate myself so much, be so full of despair and regret, that I asphyxiate myself.  If that day comes, it won't matter how famous or rich I am.  But just thinking about it has made that future seem more dim and distant.  I can be happy this instant, regardless of the success of my career.  Right now, the trees are green, the cat is fuzzy, my kid wipes the table by herself, and I love them all just a little bit more.  

When Robin Williams killed himself, he was not thinking about me or my happiness.  Yet his life and death have touched me and instructed me in a profound way that none of his movie roles ever could.  Thank you and farewell, O Captain, my Captain.  

Life is but a Dream

They say that vulnerability is the new strength.  I'll share, then.

In winter of last year, I succumbed to depression.  It was really a shame, because things were going swell.  I was exercising daily, writing well, and fulfilling my promises as father, husband and home-maker.  Yet, I began to feel a tiny tug of anxiety, like a discordant note on a piccolo that shrieked in my mind every few minutes.  It was the first tone in a pathetic symphony that I play every year when the sun departs.  I didn't want to believe it was happening again, and tried as long as I could to hold my life together.  I had big plans for the winter, after all.  Then, a couple weeks before Christmas, it all collapsed.  No more writing, no more exercise.  Only the barest minimum of parenting duties pulled me from my bedsheet hideaway.  While functioning, I was exhausted, forgetful and dopey.  Life was a boring fever dream, full of disinterest and worry.

I clawed my way out of that depression.  I enrolled in an online depression therapy program offered by the University of Regina, learned techniques to cope like deep-breathing, thought challenging and graded exposure.  My personal trainer introduced me to yoga and helped me stay active.  As spring dawned, the bout subsided.  I borrowed a light therapy box from a friend.  I have an arsenal of new skills to deal with my depression when it returns.  

It's over.  And yet, as I try to understand this annoying-as-shit condition that I battle, I must make a painful admission.  It's getting worse.  Winter has always been a trigger for me, but the last few years, it has seemed darker and more hopeless.  Last year, I managed to delay symptoms until December, but when they hit, they were merciless.  Some days I felt like my every limb was tethered to a talking 100-pound weight that periodically said, "You're not good enough."  

So, why?  Seriously, what the fuck?  Why should it be getting worse when in the last few years, I have become a landowner, I have seized my destiny as a freelance writer, I witnessed the birth of one who can only be described as the perfect daughter, my band is doing great, and my every comfort is assured?

There are many reasons, but the last I discovered only recently, and it was the most devastating.  I was watching an episode of reimagining of Battlestar Galactica with my wife.  This, as many of you know, is a good show.  When I watched the first season of this show in 2005, I was enthralled by it.  Yet as I rewatched it, I was bored.  What had changed?  Not the show: it can't change.  I had changed.  And I wasn't enjoying it because I was waiting for it to be over.

And what was I waiting for?  Nothing.  I had no plans for the next hour.  Eventually, I would put my kid to bed.  Yet in that stark moment of realization, I knew I would be mentally absent through her bedtime routine, waiting for my own bedtime.  Then, as I put myself to bed, I would be waiting for sleep.  Then, in the morning I would read Facebook, waiting to be less groggy.  I would shower, waiting to eat.  I would play with my daughter, waiting for her nap so I could get some work done.  Each hour was a preamble for the next, each day a trial to be endured before the next.  And so rolled the weeks, months and years, waiting for some indistinct moment in the future when I will be happy.

It was terrifying to realize that almost all my moments on earth were spent waiting.  For, in the process of waiting, I was never present.  I was not living.  In moments when I should have been happy, I was anticipating the next moment when I would be sad.  Joy vanished.  I became intolerant of times when society expects me to wait, such as traffic or a boardgame with friends.  Existence was a foggy limbo, lingering for an unfulfilled promise.  Every aspect of my life became polluted with waiting: I just have to wait for tomorrow and I'll be less tired, I just have to wait for Kara to be of school-age and then I'll have more time for work, I just have to wait for my writing talent to be discovered and then I'll have money, I just have to wait for winter to end and then I'll be happy.  But really, humanity's only true promise is delivered by the Grim Reaper, and he does not deal in happiness.

This waiting bullshit stops now.  So many times, I have heard people say that you must grasp your happiness in each moment.  I think I finally understand that now.  Each time I realize that I'm waiting, I challenge that thought and try to engage my senses, somehow, to remind myself that I'm alive and each moment is mine.  Even in a supermarket checkout, where I am expected to wait, I can still talk to people, still admire some pretty woman on a magazine cover, still whistle a tune.

Old thought patterns die hard, and breaking those habits is difficult.  But I can already feel joy creeping back.  It is so wonderful to resume enjoying things again, after so long being numb.  Sometimes I get so filled with happiness that I cry.  I wept over a song that Pinkie Pie sang on My Little Pony last week.

I'm back, bitches.

ps. If life seems like an unfulfilled promise, don't wait.  Therapy is good.  Seek it, and remember how to live again.  Here's the service I used: https://www.onlinetherapyuser.ca/

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.com/

Book Review of "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon

I consider myself a conspiracy theory connoisseur.  On one hand I mock them because they're so silly.  But I'm also fascinated by them because I love trying to understand why somebody could believe them.  And I'm drawn to them because, at various times in my life, it has been convenient to think of myself as a victim.  When the world seems full of conspirators controlling my life, it is easier to weather my failures.  If I can blame my lethargy on water fluoridation and my lack of writing success on corporate cabals, I don't have to work to change myself. 

The last decade has seen an explosion in conspiracy theories.  I'm very interested to see some oldies-but-goodies return to popular consciousness, such as the Bavarian Illuminati.  I'm also fascinated by some newcomers, such as the Reptoids.  Others have returned in new forms: the communist water fluoridators of yesteryear have been re-imagined as corporate masterminds.  Conspiracy literature has exploded as well, notably the novels of Dan Brown.  

Of greatest interest to me, however, is a small movement of public consciousness which derives ironic pleasure from the contemplation of conspiracy theories.  The theories are cast in a silly light, with many, any and all conspiracies being true at the same time.  It is given game-form in Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati.  In literature, it's The Illuminatus Trilogy.  This intellectual tree has borne hilarious fruit since the 80's, but the seed of the tree was planted in the 60's.  The name of that seed is The Crying of Lot 49, a novella by Thomas Pynchon.

Oedipa Maas learns that her ex-boyfriend Pierce has died and named her executor of his estate.  She travels to San Narciso, California, to settle his affairs.  As she does so, she begins linking clues, partly left by Pierce, others by happenstance.  Soon, she becomes convinced of the existence of a secret mail-delivery system called W.A.S.T.E.  An elaborate alternate history of Europe and the United States is spun, featuring armed conflict between the Thurn und Taxis delivery company and the U.S. Postal System versus a group of evil postmen called the Tristero.  As she learns more, the people she knows and loves are gradually eliminated or isolated.

Pynchon's writing style is cerebral.  It takes some work to decipher many of his sentences, not only because they can be structurally strange, but because some of them last for more than a page.  Yet these sentences are not ponderous like those of previous authors who attempted ultra-long sentences.  Rather, they're free-flowing and goofy.

The point of this book is its journey, not its end.  For the alternate history is funny and elaborately researched.  There are a lot of silly moments that left me laughing.  However, the ending is just not there.  Without giving away anything, the story ends right before where a climax would have been in a normal book.  After so much time spent fleshing the history of the Tristero, the book ends just before Oedipa has direct contact with it.  This is, no doubt, intentional and some readers may gain a lot of postmodern pleasure from it.  However, I love a good ending, so for me, I have to say that I saw what Pynchon was going for there, but I wanted more. 

What truly struck me about this book is that it seems like its from the wrong decade.  The style is similar to the confused, acid-soaked writing that came from the 70's, yet it is ten years early.  Truly, The Crying of Lot 49 was a work ahead of its time.  It might still be ahead of its time.  I say all these nice things about it, yet I recognize that I didn't enjoy it that much.
3 muted post-horns out of 5

Book Review of "A Clash of Kings" by George R. R. Martin

A Game of Thrones, the first book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, is about as perfect as fantasy fiction gets.  I had high expectations when I picked up the second book, A Clash of Kings.  Would it have the same beautiful characters?  The same expectation-defying plot?  The same attention to medieval life and battle?  The same breathless page turns to see what happens next? 

The answer, sadly, is "no".  But that doesn't mean that Clash isn't great.  I'm still enamoured of Martin's universe and I've already picked up the next book in the series. 

I mentioned in my review of Thrones that Martin occasionally slipped into cliche in his description and fretted that in later volumes, after experiencing success, he might be less vigilant about editing his prefab phrases.  This is, indeed, the case in Clash: the entire writing style seems less intensely accurate and more relaxed.  The book is longer than the first and I suspect that, had Martin's editor or internal editor been more vigilant, certain events and passages could be removed to make the action tighter. 

In fact, the entire book seems less intense.  This is evident in the first half.  Martin takes time to prepare his massive conflicts, and his protagonists, mainly the Stark family, spend a lot of time being depressed and fretting over characters that we either don't care about or haven't met.  I confess that I lost my copy of the book for half a year.  If Clash had the been the manic page turner that was its predecessor, I would have been desperate to find it.  But I wasn't. 

Well, I found Clash of Kings in the zippered top pocket of a suitcase I had laid in the basement.  Eventually, the sails of this becalmed book fill.  Once more I found myself swept into the battles, intrigues and surprises of the unhappy isle and its bloodsoaked throne. 

The book continues to follow the viewpoints of the same characters who survived the first book.  Two more characters are featured, Davos Seaworth, a low-born smuggler turned knighted sea captain serving the now-dead-king's brother, and Theon Greyjoy, a hostage returned to the Viking-esque, brooding, troublemaking Greyjoy family.  Unfortunately, I didn't like either of these characters much.  Davos is dull.  Theon chapters are hard to read because he's an infuriating dink.  However, their antics were far overshadowed as my favourite characters, Tyrion Lannister, the Stark girls, and Daenarys Targaryen continued to brighten the book. 

I won't get into the details of all the awesome stuff that happens.  If you loved the first book, you will find the second worthy.  It's just not quite as perfect. 
4 off-camera battles out of 5

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.com/

Epistemic Closure and Me

In his article, "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community", conservative Bruce Bartlett describes his fall from favour with America's Republican Party.  In it, he uses the term "epistemic closure".  In his context, he uses the term to describe a state of affairs where forms of cognitive dissonance can be comfortably ignored within a bubble of like-minded friends and Fox News.  Basically, he argues that conservatives have created a system where they can ignore not just contradictory viewpoints, but evidence, science and yea, reality itself.  This is not just an issue for Bruce Bartlett and conservatives.  It's everywhere. 

One of the things I try not to take for granted is the stunning rise, during the youth of my generation, of the internet.  As a shy high school student, I called the internet for the first time in a computer lab in my high school.  The computer went shhhhh boing eeeboing-boing.  It was all text-based.  Now the internet is an essential service.  It's the flagship invention of our Information Age.  As a writer I can research any topic without leaving my home.  As a consumer, I could watch movies on Netflix all day and never see them all.  And as a Man I can... do other stuff.

The Truth, as based on evidence and scientific findings, has never been more available.  Yet people seem more confused than ever.  For my lifetime has also seen the rise of something sinister: extremist politics.  Since that day in the early 90's when the school's computer went boing-boing, the world seems to have filled with evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, radical free-marketeers, paranoid left-wingers and conspiracy theorists.  These groups were around when I was a kid.  However, what makes them more powerful today is that they can pick up a keyboard and find hundreds of people to agree with them.  They can live their lives avoiding cognitive dissonance and differing viewpoints, digging themselves deeper in layer-upon-layer of justifications, gradually believing stranger and more incorrect things.  I know how easy it is to get caught in this world, because ten years ago I was One Of Them.

It all starts with not wanting to be wrong.  In 2001, the world's political landscape changed suddenly when The World Trade Center in New York was destroyed.  Sitting American President George W. Bush experienced a huge upswing in popularity.  I hated that.  His presidency was already infamous for its stupidity and dishonesty, so when he said that a cell of fanatic Muslims was responsible for the attacks, I doubted him.  I wondered if, because he benefited from the attacks, he might be responsible.  I turned to the internet to satisfy my doubt and found thousands of viewpoints that reinforced what I already wanted to believe: "I am not wrong in doubting".

This was my gateway into the world of epistemic closure that is far-left conspiracy theory.  Every conspiracy theory needs three things: an antagonist, followers who feel victimized, and a will to believe.  For small-c right-wingers, the antagonist is a vast organization that includes corrupt politicians, communists, media outlets and hordes of deluded thralls.  Small-c left-wingers blame different organizations.  Fanatic Christians and Muslims believe the Devil is at the centre of the conspiracy.  Others think it's freemasons, extra-terrestrial intelligences, or a race of reptile men.

I was in the small-c left wing camp.   I felt I was the victim of a group of shadowy rich men who continuously tread on my rights as a human, elect and bribe politicians, control dishonest media outlets and make a mockery of democracy.  As I write this, this theory doesn't sound so crazy.  That's how a conspiracy gets you: it starts somewhere real.  William Randolph Hearst was a rich man who influenced politics with money, owned yellow media outlets and drove America to war.  Rupert Murdoch, with his ownership of Fox News, is Hearst's modern counterpart.  The world is full of rich men who love to wield their power.  

I lived in this world for several years.  Every day I would log on to whatreallyhappened.com and check out the array of news sources which spanned mainstream outlets, to hazy sites like infowars.com and prisonplanet.com, to sketchy publications like Pravda and the official media outlet of Saddam Hussein's government, to the lowest level of left-wing newsmaking: angry bloggers sitting in their basements making stuff up.  I was angry, too.  Who wouldn't be angry in a world where 9-11 was an inside-job by the American government?  Or Al-qaeda is an invention of Israel's Mossad?  Or hundreds of American soldiers die daily in Iraq and are not reported? 

I wanted this world to be true.  It wasn't just about being right or not being wrong.  Believing in a story like this added meaning to my life: I felt like I was doing something important in opposing the conspiracy.  And believing in the conspiracy made me feel smarter than everybody else. 

Then, suddenly, I stopped.  I was tired of being angry and powerless.  I was reading something claiming that yet another group was responsible for 9-11.  At this point, I had heard that 9-11 had been engineered by Al-qaeda, the CIA, the NSA, NORAD, the Bush White House, the Mossad, the Israeli Army, Cubans or the Rothschilds.  "So which group is it?!" I exclaimed.  And I had no answer.  For you see, I didn't know.  I wasn't there and I didn't see.  I would never really know, it was beyond my power to know, and it was not my responsibility to know.

That was step one of my recovery and it felt great.  My anger dropped away so suddenly that I sighed.  I stepped out of my house into the sunlight, breathed warm autumn air and felt great. 

Step two of my recovery was a little more difficult.  At this stage I looked at my past beliefs and realized that not only did I not know what happened, but my past claims were most likely wrong.  It hurt to admit.  In trying to add significance and importance to my life, I engaged in insignificant and unimportant activity.  In trying to be smarter than everybody else, I became ignorant.  In trying so hard to be right, I was wrong.  

Step three was a little easier.  I realized that there are people in the world who knew what happened.  These are people who are trained to know.  There are intelligence experts all over the world who agreed Al-qaeda is responsible.  There was also Al-qaeda itself, that claimed responsibility for orchestrating the attacks and training the pilots.  The simplest explanation was that these people were right. 

It's easy to fall into the trap of epistemic closure.  I feel embarrassed about the things I thought and said, but I have to remind myself how easy it is to believe incorrect information in the age of the internet.  It's even easier now.  On Facebook, an article with a crazy title goes viral quickly and people will share it without checking sources. 

Let's take a look at this shitty internet situation.  I just Googled the word "reptoid".  Here are the first ten results.

Result 1: Wikipedia.  Anybody can edit Wikipedia.  Because of this, it has a reputation for inaccuracy.  Unfortunately, it's the only search result that is critical of the idea that reptoids control the world.

Results 2, 3, 5 and 6: Conspiracy websites Reptoid Research Center, the Reptoid Wiki and the Alien Research Wiki.  These sites will tell you that a conspiracy of anthropomorphic, maneating reptiles are masquerading as humans and ruling the world.

Results 7 and 8: YouTube videos of reptoids Johnny Depp and Alex Jones supposedly shapeshifting.  (The Alex Jones shapeshifting video is especially silly: yet another example of conspiracy theorists claiming other conspiracy theorists are part of the conspiracy)

Results 4 and 9: results unrelated to the reptoid conspiracy.  A guy nicknamed reptoid has weird photos and a Swedish magazine is named "Reptoid". 

Result 10: Urban Dictionary.  Absolutely useless for anything.  It's uninformative, not funny and fuck fuck fuck I hate Urban Dictionary. 

Here is the point I'm trying to illustrate.  If somebody tells you that Queen Elizabeth II is a shapeshifting flesh-eating reptile, it's difficult to find proof on Google that she's not.  The only sane site on the first page is the perpetually-scorned Wikipedia.  To search further, you will have to wade through scores of unsourced frightmongering conspiracy sites, irrelevant links, broken links, advertisements, mirror sites and porn to find something useful.

It's the Information Age, people.  Why is it so hard to find sourced evidence that reptoids don't exist?  It should be front-row, centre.  Instead, Google has provided me with a series of results that will support an unhealthy belief-system, hedged by random crap.  The Information Age was supposed to disseminate knowledge.  Instead we have a multimedia minefield where banner ads decorate the desperate squeals of mentally-ill persons trying to be correct. 

There has to be a better way.  How about this, Google?  How about letting media outlets, universities and research companies register as "scientific" or "sourced", and if you search with a specific Google setting, these results will come up first?  If Google can SafeSearch porn, it can help the world filter its bullshit, ads and inane yammering.  

In honour of this occasion, I am going back over my posts on this blog and deleting one that was poorly-sourced and spreading misinformation.  I won't tell you which one, though.  It's still hard to admit that I've been wrong.

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.com

Book Review of "Sacred Origins of Profound Things" by Charles Panati

Charles Panati is a renaissance man.  He's published books on history, the supernatural, science, word origins, and my favourite: his tome about endings, which covers sundry topics ranging from death to disease to extinction.  This book, Sacred Origins of Profound Things: The Stories Behind the Rites and Rituals of the World's Religions, is about the divine. 

Though this book is about world religions, Panati's interest seems to be attracted by the Roman Catholic Church and Judaism.  By comparison, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu and the Protestant and Orthodox Christians are given only passing mention.  Even so, the scope of this book is massive, covering how humans understood the gods, The God, Satan, the afterlife, religious garments and dogma for thousands of years. 

Panati's tone attempts to be impartial, but it's difficult.  Some of the rationalizations, bizarre interpretations, circular thinking, and blunders made by religions in the past are simply difficult for a modern reader to take seriously.  Also, Panati cannot resist a good digression and will often interrupt his narrative to tell a funny story.

I started reading this book in January of 2012.  Eleven months later, I'm finally finished.  At 500+ big pages, this book is a massive commitment.  It wasn't always an interesting journey, particularly the chapter about Catholic vestments, but I have returned much wiser.  I was unaware, for instance, of the amount of non-biblical story that generations of Catholic thinkers have heaped upon the Biblical Mary, mother of God.

The Bible says a teenager named Mary was betrothed to a man named Joseph, though she did not "know him".  An angel named Michael appears and tells her she is/will be with God's child.  She then gives birth to Jesus.  Jesus is raised by his mother, amongst brothers and sisters, until he gets killed by Romans.  Mary sees him briefly after he returns to life, and then she vanishes from the pages of the Bible.  Let's assume that "not knowing" Joseph is a correct linguistic interpretation.  She is the Virgin Mary, after all, and it would be cruel to dissect her greatest miracle, carrying the Son of God without having sex. 

At some point in the early Christian church's history, it started to get more prudish than its Jewish fathers.  Then it got a little more prudish, then ridiculously prudish.  Sex, female anatomy, burst hymen, and birth became abhorrent to Christian thinkers.  They blamed femalekind for original sin, which bore as its wicked fruit, sex.  From this viewpoint, 2000 years-worth of story was interpreted or invented onto the Bible's original text.  Some of this tale is dogma, some of it merely widely believed by those in the know:

Mary's parents didn't enjoy having sex, so therefore Mary was born into the world without original sin.  Jesus didn't have a vaginal birth, rather, he was magically C-sectioned in a ray of light out of her womb, keeping her hymen intact.  Her maidenhead remained intact after Jesus' birth as well, as it turns out all those brothers and sisters were Joseph's from a previous marriage.  When she died, her body laid in the ground for a couple days without decomposing, because bacteria and graveworms don't eat virtuous people.  Then she crawled out of her tomb and ascended.  These days, she ventures out of heaven to tell children to build shrines and convert Russia to Catholicism.

That's interesting.  I did not know that.  If this sort of thing appeals to you, you'll love this book.  Without a doubt, many readers may experience cognitive dissonance, particularly Catholics who may be surprised at the things they are REQUIRED to believe.  As I mentioned before, the book is very long and has boring bits.  Luckily, it's written to easily choose which chapters to read, and you can put it down for long periods if you so wish.  Therefore I rate this book, speaking Infallibly of course:
4 self-inflicted stigmata out of 5
-----

In other news, I put the finishing touches on my fourth screenplay, "The Rising".  Also, Rosie's Knife was finally published in the final issue of Dark Recesses Magazine.  Read it here: http://www.cuttingblock.net/darkrecesses.html.  It's been a good month!

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.com/

Knocking the Windowpane

If pride cometh before the fall, you can expect my next drop to shatter my skull (again).  The Residuals will soon celebrate our album, Knocking the Windowpane, at our CD release party.  The event is at the Woods Ale House, October 6th, (2012), at 9:00 PM.  There will be a concert, CD signing, and a free Paddockwood beverage for your $5 entrance free. 

So how am I feeling?  A year ago this album was just a frightening concept for my ego and pocketbook.  Now I don't care if we ever sell another copy.  Listening to the culmination of all that effort in my car, seeing Kara tap her feet in the back seat is reward enough. 

And what an experience!  When we entered PulsWorks studio in December of last year, we were worried.  Some of us were terrified.  We were rehearsed and prepared, but as we sat before the microphones in the centre of the room, we were tense.  Were we making the right decision in our choice of studio?  The standard amount one can expect to pay to record an album is $10,000, but we were budgeted for half that amount.  Would our miserliness ruin our work?  Would we mess up and cause a fiasco?  Were we good enough to record an album?   

Indeed, nothing seemed to go right those first hours.  As we struggled through Patsy Geary's Jig and Miss McLeod's Reel, fingers fumbled, trembling hands strummed uncertain chords and tempers rose.  Ted's pipes squawked in the dropping humidity.  (We preserved a relic of our frustration at the beginning of the Patsy Geary Set track: Ted's drones fail to deploy and he growls, "Oh, you son of a gun.")
 

At the end of that day, we decided to try one last track.  It was Rick's song, The Blue Diamond Mines, a Jean Ritchie ballad about working coal mines.  For four brief minutes, everything went right.  We had a near-perfect one-take wonder instrumental track.  "It's a good thing we did that," said Rob, "Because if we hadn't, there wouldn't be a second day of recording." 

Over the next months, we got better at recording.  We relaxed.  We started to have fun.  And we also ripped through tracks with confidence and the good musicianship I've come to expect from my band. 

Soon, our instrumental tracks were recorded.  We left the big room we chose for its acoustics and entered a tiny padded room.  That was a fun day!  It's cliche, but we all experienced shock at hearing our voices in high fidelity (do I really sound like that?)  We recovered quickly and completed all of our songs in record time!  (notice the hilarious double-meaning there?) 

Next came editing.  Rob and I joined our engineer, Brady, in the studio to turn our work from kinda good into perfect.  It's amazing what a good sound engineer can do.  It's not just adding echoes.  The three of us surfed all of our music for not just the best takes, but the best sections of each take.  Seemlessly, Brady cut the rotten bits out, substituted good bits, and subtly blended the result so it didn't sound dumb.  His wonderful gadgets and gizmos were also able to easily change the duration of sung lyrics so that we sounded way tighter than we actually are. 

Perhaps some ultra-traditionalists are pumping their shillelaghs in the air in fury exclaiming, "Editing?  Why would ye want ta do dat terrible t'ing?"  It's worth noting that all the editing we did used pure "us", just the best of us.  No pitch correction tools were used.  Each track was recorded with all instruments in the same room, playing at the same time.  Also, no animals were harmed.  Also, go to hell you stereotypical conservative Irish straw-men! 

Rob recorded his tracks from prison

Then, one summer day, the recording and editing was finished.  I remember it because it was the day before my birthday.  Also, I fell down my front steps at home from exhaustion as the tension left my body.  As I was lying on cement at the bottom of my deck unable to move from fatigue, relief, and also pain from my twisted ankle, it became apparent that I was carrying a burden of stress from this project. 

At the time, I thought the stress was over, but there was more fun in my future.  There was the manufacture to arrange and make sure it would be in Saskatoon by FolkFest.  There was the booklet to design.  And also licensing.  Ohhh, the licensing.  Take it from me, if you're going to record an album, make sure you either write your own songs or borrow from the public domain.  8 cents per song per album may not seem like a lot of money to pay in licensing fees, but you pay tenfold in time-wasting as you fill out forms and hunt for composers on the internet.
 

Regardless of troubles, our baby is here.  I can be critical and severe, particularly regarding music, PARTICULARLY my own music, but I actually like our album!  My peeps tried their damndest and they succeeded in producing one hour of pleasing music.  What's it like?  Think Great Big Sea minus the drum kit and minus the cheesy songs designed to get them laid.  Or maybe imagine what the Dubliners could have done if they drank less. 

Knocking the Windowpane truly redefines Irish traditional music.  Nay!  Music itself!  Junk your other CDs, dismantle the recording industry, disband the Metropolitan Opera, send Bob Dylan to the gibbet, throw the Black Eyed Peas to the wall, dig up the corpses of the great composers and burn them.  You won't need 'em after you buy Knocking the Windowpane.  Am I over-selling this? Perhaps.  But I still think the Black Eyed Peas should be executed.
 

As the result of our hard rehearsing, our act is better.  We've doubled and trebled the number of gigs we've been playing.  However, for the Residuals, our big project is over and now we have time for some rest.  Rest, in this instance, means learning new material, enjoying alcoholic beverages in moderation and generally not worrying about stuff.  It feels good. 

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