Like socks, underwear and bad luck, I happen in threes. Well, at least today I do.

Tonight's show with Little Mountain was a happy success.

We played to a full, albeit small, room with more than moderate success. For a quartet of musicians all entering into styles of music that they are less than familiar with, we all came together quite well. It seems that we have two more shows in about a month. I'd say that by then we should be pretty good at what we are doing.

It feels good to be doing this again.

2 in one day you ask? Why yes, but I'll keep this one short.

In brief. I am a scaredy-cat. Oh, not every day, mind you. Only when faced with doing the things that I really want to do. Today's fear. STAGE-FRIGHT.

Tonight I join 3 other musicians on a very small stage to play publicly for the first time in a very long time. For the last 6 or 7 years I have been primarily a studio musician. It isn't that I am shy about people hearing my music. I have recorded songs for various advertising campaigns and films, I have played and sang with friends on roofs around the country (I like to sit on roofs a lot, ask anyone.), I have submitted my music to any number of forms of harsh criticism. Don't like it? Fine, someone else does. But the stage... Oh the stage... It's strange that it even effects me. I grew up performing classical and jazz for large audiences, but somewhere in my mid 20's even a 6 inch stage and 10 people started to make me sweat. It's always completely irrational. I'm not afraid that I'll be unable to play, I just get jittery.

Anyway, my hope is that sending this little bit of information into the digital forum will aid me in releasing that fear. It's either that or I imagine all of you naked. And, really I don't feel like seeing that.

I'm not even going to get started on this. I'm just too afraid of what seems like a very, very scary trend to me. Damn... I just started didn't I.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=621347

I know that we must all have a 'moral compass' and I am also aware that for most of the people in the U.S. it's some form of religious teaching. Even in my current atheistic state, I am forced to admit that as a young man I developed a deep fascination with religion as a source of moral grounding. I studied various forms of Christianity, paganism, pantheism and Zoroastrian, not to mention about 30 different flavors of Buddhism, and I'm sure that I walked away from it having been influenced. There are good ideas in all of the teachings that I studied. But I also walked away from it all with a deeper understanding of how I wanted to make decisions, and that was to do so under the force of my own will. Each decision that a person is faced with is an opportunity to evaluate the situation rationally, and a final conclusion can be arrived at by weighing out the effects of the possible outcomes. This understanding lead me to believe that, especially in important cases, relying too heavily on your moral compasses is just plain lazy.

The article above implies what I have been perceiving as a trend for the last decade or so. It could be that I am just slowly becoming more aware of the presence of actions being executed in the name of and through the schema of religion. But I am fairly sure that lawmakers weren't trying to influence the teaching of creationism in public schools.

I understand that these beliefs are held by millions of people, and that they wish to pass their beliefs on to the generations that follow them, but what I do not understand is the desire to have them taught in venues where they have not traditionally been taught. Isn't that what church, bible study and youth groups are for? It makes me angry that teachers have to be afraid of being sued for not giving intelligent design any facetime in class.

On the other hand, and in America as on Shiva there is always another hand, I understand that the infrastructure of the community must change with the desires and beliefs of the Majority. I don't like it, but I understand it. That is why my perception of a growing 'religious class' and their respective power in numbers is so frightening to me. I am the minority, and their beliefs, no matter how contrary to my own, will eventually effect me or any children that I might have.

isotope:One of two or more atoms having the same atomic number but different mass numbers.

So it's the same. Only different. That's my goal here on this blog, I'll be entering thoughts and findings that have the same thread (me) but are vastly different.

Today's catalyst: Family

Some people have close-knit families, some have distant, estranged, violent, submissive, cultured, hillbilly or passive-aggressive. Mine is just downright strange. Now I know that everyone thinks that their family is strange, but hear me out. I have no idea how my sister and I sprang from my mother and father's flesh. Sometimes I think that it must have been similar to the birth of Athena. I know for a certainty that my sibling and I split my father's skull wide open at some point if not literally, figuratively. Let me give you the gorey details.

My mother is an aging hippie. Yes that's right marijuana and all, right down to the core. She's been living in the mountains of California for the last 20 or so years, and shows no sign of wanting to come down from her sierra high. Mom was always the partier. First it was The Beatles, then it was The Who, then it was Zeppelin, then it was 4 o'clock in the morning and she couldn't stand up when dad got her home. She was the fun one.

My father is a genuine hermit. He wasn't always that way, but apparently when he came home from war, he didn't want anything to do with most of the human race, so he moved us into the northern California foothills from Los Angeles. The foothills were not then what they are now. There was no sign of suburban life, or even civilization at that point. We subsistence farmed and traded for a good deal of our food for a few years when I was younger. These day's he's a little bit better, but when I ask him to come visit me in NYC he just laughs so loud I have to hold the phone away from my ear. He dreams of one day retiring on a beach in Mexico. I don't blame him, it's a nice thought.

My sister is everything that I am not. We were mortal enemies growing up. From day one she played the innocent blonde victim to my older darker villain, or at least that's how she'd have it painted. She's the nurturing one these days. She takes care of the grandparents and studies to be a nurse. She is a loudmouth. She disdains most of the things that I hold dear, and I, in my turn, return the favor. She is still short and blonde.

Describing one's self is never easy to do. I think that you'll understand it when I postulate that there is an inherent bias to self reporting. In short I could rely on the trusty old ego and tell you that I am perfect. I am a god among men. But that would be misleading. I am neither of these. I am a musician, post-production audio engineer and corporate slave. I have perfected the art of wearing generic button down shirts for 9 hours a day and shedding it immediately to reveal whichever personality most suits my mood thereafter. I think it would be most descriptive to sum my qualities as comparisons to the qualities of my family listed above. I love being around people. I love being in the push of a crowd. I love being alone. I love working diligently. I love being quietly irreverent. I love the grit present in city and in country. I am a pacifist. I am intent on constant change and challenge.

Our family, until recently spanned California. Now with me in NYC I am further removed from them. We are not however, what I would call distant with each other. Despite physical distance and sometimes extended telephone absences we seem to be able to pick up right where we left off. Whether that be mid-insult, or mid-conversation.

Definitions

I should define something. I am a highly contradictory person. That is not to say that I will contradict everything in a unilateral fashion, but that if something crosses my path that appears to be in direct violation of my particular laws of the universe, I will argue against it. I am guilty of this to a fault. Today's societal misgiving happens to be Personal Responsibility.

The mention of legislative action is a common antecedent to one of my rants, as it was today. Do not mistake me though, for a knee jerk libertarian who would rather live in some isolated wilderness than be subject to the whims of a legislative body. I have no delusions of actual self government, but do have fantasies about Personal Responsibility.

I think that Personal Responsibility (yes capitalized) is one of the key underlying factors in some of the largest social changes that I have been witness to. Hand in hand with a burning desire to attribute every action, be it a tsunami, dog bite or allergic reaction, with intent, Personal Responsibility has reduced our social climate to that of a nursery school where every child runs to teacher (court) for validation (legislation) after skinning their knee.

I see that you are not convinced. Well, here's an example: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/111027760388.htm

and another:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11984

Some of you may refute my second example by citing this one:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/03/10/fat.lawsuits/

But I think that both of the above articles illustrate my example. Enough people in our society find it acceptable to blame a corporation for their own health issues that our legislative body feels the need to pass legislation codifying regarding the issue.

Or maybe I'll just point out that none of us even has the option of eating peanuts on an airplane anymore even though "Peanut or tree nut allergies affect approximately 0.6 percent and 0.4 percent of Americans, respectively." That is 6 or 4 people out of every thousand (source: National institute for Allergy and Infectious diseases) who have an allergic reaction to nuts.

So, I am sure that if you haven't already asked yourself, you will be asking soon enough "who do you blame?" That's easy enough I blame myself. I have not done anything to rectify the situation. I have not taken to the streets or the schools to educate the masses about the liberating effects of personal responsibility. I have not shouted from street corners that if you take responsibility for your own internal conception of the world as well as for the reverberations that you make in other peoples conceptual and physical realities, that you might just be able to spend more time doing what you want and need to be doing, rather than blaming someone or something else for getting in your way. Sometimes no one is at fault. Sometime there is no reason to the events in our lives. No matter how hard we try we cannot keep the world safe for everyone. And I argue that it is too high a price to charge against our personal freedoms to perpetuate a cultural trend that limits the options of the majority in order to accommodate the possibility of harm to a few.