Mood Music

I am a moody person. Anyone who hangs out with me will tell you that. We aren’t talking axe-murderer anger or suicidal depression, but I do get a little manic and a little down. Well, to be honest, I get a lot manic and a lot down. Yes, I know there are meds for that and can attest that they are tasty.

Meds aside, there are some things that affect my mood more than others. Family crises get to me faster than anything else. If one of my sons is having problems, I have problems. When my siblings are have issues, I have issues. Dealing with my ex-wife can push my buttons and make me a kind of manic mad, but to be fair she has been easy to get along with lately. (I really need to send her boyfriend a thank you card.) The one thing that can change my mood faster than anything else is music.

Playing my guitar is one of my favorite – and least expensive – forms of therapy. I have been playing more than a couple decades and enjoy it. Do you have those things you do just for yourself? This is one of mine. If other people enjoy it, too, that is great; however, I enjoy playing while sitting on my back patio on a warm summer night with all the lights out. The other evening I did just that. It was dark out. The only sounds were the nighttime lullaby of insects accompanied by a Fender acoustic six-string. I played for about half an hour and stopped to take sip of from a high-ball glass. It was not High Ball. It was a Comfortable Coke. During the interlude, a voice called from over the fence, “Please, don’t stop.” My neighbors had been there the whole time I was playing “Stairway to Heaven”, “Behind Blue Eyes”, “Wanted Dead or Alive” and a whole litany of songs that I can’t remember now. I gave them another thirty minutes before calling it a night. It was a good mood kind of night.

This got me thinking about how music influences moods in me. I have several playlists on YouTube that express my moods at the time, but each can have an amazing impact on my moods. (The seemingly incessant commercials lately affect my mood, but I digress.) I have one playlist called Fun that has everything from Brad Paisley to Spin Doctors to Gin Blossoms. It is playing right now as I write, making me smile thinking about some friends of both genders who could be the topic of “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”.  This playlist is great to have on to keep my A.D.D. in check, giving my mind extra stimuli while I write, so I don’t go off on tangents about things like friends who can’t be wrong. (It doesn’t always work.)

The most influential playlist is not the Fun one. There is another called Sadness that can drag my into the depths of sorrow as I hear songs that bring back memories of lost loves, missed opportunities, and mistakes that still bother me today. There is one song in particular by Hinder called “Better Than Me.” Hold on one while I play it. Yeah, this one does it. It is about a man telling his lost love that she can do much better than him.

I told myself I won't miss you

But I remember

What it feels like beside you

I really miss your hair in my face

And the way your innocence tastes

And I think you should know this

You deserve much better than me

That song reminds me of more than one lost love. It is one of those where I look at myself and all my selfish times. Brad Paisley’s “Whiskey Lullaby” is another that reminds me of paths that I almost took when my life fell apart a few year ago. But these sad songs serve as cautionary tales for me, not just an opportunity to wallow in self-pity and self-loathing. Most sad songs have become that for me as I have matured. Well, I try to make sure they are not pity parties.

Then there are the ones that just simply Rock It. That is what my playlist is called. It has everything from Skillet’s “Awake and Alive” to “Pain” by Three Days Grace to Nickelback’s “S.E.X.” As I look at the songs I chose to exemplify my Rock It playlist, I wonder what I was thinking as I chose those. I’m pretty sure I put them on there on different days. But these songs are good to get me up and moving, or angry if I need it. These are the ones that move me and spur me to action.

As I look at all of these, I wonder what it is about music that moves me. Is it the beat? The harmonies? The kicking guitar solos? Yes. It is all of those for me, plus the poetry that touches me. It is the words set to music. Poetry read aloud can be moving when read well, but add the music and you really have something. Poetry has enlivened the hearts of minds of people throughout history. Homer still captures the hearts and minds of modern man as do the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. Perhaps the lyrics of “Love Bites” by Def Leppard will not stand the test of time like those classics; however, if those words touch one person, they have significant meaning.

For me, it is the poetry mixed with the music – country, jazz, rock or classical, well maybe not classical – making all the difference. It is the way lyrics add depth to the music and the way the music increases the impact of the words. Music is the perfect example of the sum being greater than the individual parts.

What Do Women Want?

I have long pondered the question of what women want. One of my favorite bloggers, Sara Tungate, recently had a post called “Bad boys for the win.....er....or not so much”. Check it out. It was very insightful. She made a valid point that women want a good guy with a little bit of edge. That got me thinking. Do women want the nice guy? How about the good man? Maybe a bad boy? I asked several female friends and discovered that all of them said “yes”. They want the nice guy who is a good man and a bad boy. How hard can that possibly be?

Let’s look at each of these character traits. The nice guy is the one who stereotypically finishes last. At work, I have seen how being a nice guy comes back to bite me. Trusting others is not something that I do very well. But being a nice guy in a relationships is much simpler. It is being the one who listens when she needs to talk. I’m not talking about nodding and going “Yes, dear,” without paying attention to what she is really saying. Trust me. That doesn’t work. This guy will let her vent about work, about friends, about you, about whatever she wants to vent about. The nice guy is the one who will let her bitch without thinking she is one. Listening to her problems without – this is the hard part guys – offering a solution until she asks for one. Yeah, I know. It is tough being the nice guy. He is the one who will hold her when she needs to cry or make her laugh when she needs to lighten up. The nice guy is the one who cares more than he can sometimes say. He does it by just being there.

That leads to being the good man. He is the one who stands up to her when she needs someone to gently, but firmly, be a man. The good man is not a doormat who will cave-in in the hopes of keeping the piece to get a piece. He does the right thing for her even when it is not the easy thing. The good man loves her just as she is – flaws and failings included – but would be the first to stand up to any man, woman, child or barking dog (that is a kind way to say “her bitchy friend”) that points them out or makes her cry because of one of them. The good man is the lover in the truest sense of the word – he loves her with everything he has, everything he is, everything he wants to be. He is loyal and trustworthy. He is her golden retriever – always there, always loyal, always loving.

Speaking of loving, that brings up the bad boy. The nice guy and the good man are the ones who make her feel good about herself and give her security. Those are absolutely necessary, but they can also get a little boring. That is where the guy’s bad boy nature comes into play. This is the part that is fun-loving and funny; unpredictable and imaginative, sexy and sexual. This is part that wakes up on a Saturday morning and makes love like it was the last day on earth; then takes her hiking or biking or to roller derby without any plan or purpose. This is the spontaneous lover of the woman and lover of life who will find some kind of mischief for the couple to share. This is the part of him that finds the second sandbar at the beach and makes swimming in the ocean in the middle of the day something more erotic than anything a movie could conceive. This bad boy is the one who will hold her hand while they climb the fence to have a 3am picnic with oysters and Wild Turkey on the home team’s fifty-yard line. He is the wild card that keeps things interesting and slightly dangerous.

So ladies, what I have discovered is you want the nice guy who is there for you, the good man who will care for you, the bad boy who will dare for you. Sounds like fun to me. Guys, let’s try it and see what happens. I think we will have a lot less complaining, a lot more loving, and a hell of lot more happy women in our lives. I’m in. Guys, who’s with me? Ladies, make sure you tell the nice guys, good men and bad boys what you want.

See that comment section down there? Let me know what you think – especially you ladies – because if I’m wrong I want to know.

Obsession

My name is Doug and I’m a write-aholic. I can’t stop myself. The other day I didn’t write anything and I started to go through detox. It wasn’t pretty watching myself shaking and sweating. My legs were weak. The headache that accompanied all those other symptoms was impressive, too. As soon as I sat down and wrote something, I didn’t feel any better. Now that I think about it, it may have been that I tried to jog for the first time in a few months that caused all those problems. Lesson learned: Just write, don’t jog.

Before I tried my hand – or more accurately, fingers – at writing, hearing about writers who had to write seemed silly. They had to be making up stories that made them seem so much more important than they really were. I mean really, who in their right mind could possibly have a compulsion to write? No one. I still think that’s a correct assessment. No one in their right or left mind could have that overwhelming desire to put words on paper or screen. Speaking as someone who is more than a little odd (I prefer eccentric which sounds a lot better that than weird) and a lot out of my right mind, writing is my obsession.

There are days when I look at the screen and wonder what will be on there by the end of the day. There are also days when I look at the screen and know exactly what I’m going to write, which usually turns out nothing like I planned. Then there are days like today when my mind is running the gamut with a desire to write a historical novel that has been floating around in my mind for a couple weeks to a current day psychological thriller (yes, Abby Chilton’s sequel is in my head) to a near-future, scifi story about the internet. I have no clue what I will write today, only that I will write.

Writing is more than what I do. It is who I am. Writers’ obsession with words allows them to give a piece of themselves to others through their words. Those words give readers a glimpse inside the heads, hearts and spirits of the writer in ways a non-writer can never share. When you read my writing, I am allowing you inside. You can see bits and pieces of me in every character, every scene, and every nuance I create with simple words. Trust me, it is more of surprise to me than you.

As a very private person – notorious among my family, friends and acquaintances for not allowing any one person to see the whole picture that is me – the idea that I am sharing so much of myself with total strangers all around the world is astonishing. Yet, it shouldn’t be. As a writer, this allows me to open up in ways that I am incapable of doing in my day to day life. This is a safe place to be myself fearlessly. All of my strangeness can be laid out for all the world to see. My madness – both anger and insanity – can be channeled into words on a page to make others laugh, cry and wonder.

If someone does not like my writing due to style, subject matter, or bad taste (mine or theirs), I can live with that. Like everyone else, I want to be liked, loved and told all kinds of nice things. But, I also know that not everyone will like me and the things I have to say. Writing allows me to be myself and let the chips fall where they may.

Writing is my passion and my obsession. It is my art and my science. These simple words are the way I take you into my heart, my mind, my world. Come along with me and let’s explore where places that only the mind of an eccentric madman can go.

The Cigar Box

As a child I was fascinated by cigar boxes. It’s not what you think. They smelled like my grandpa. He always seemed to have a stogie in his mouth with one end glowing orange and the other end chewed up. It was great. The best part about his cigars were the boxes we kids got for school the next spring. He would take empty cardboard boxes that had contained his cigars and paint the outside so they looked like the boxes we would get for school. They held pens, pencils, protractors and those lethal weapons known as compasses. I suspect a student would be in major trouble for carrying the stiletto pointed devices into school now. When I was young, we would be in trouble for not having them.

One year, I think it was around third grade (give or take a decade), Pa brought me two boxes. The green one he had made me had an accident. Just after painting, it fell off his workbench and into a pile of sawdust. The lid was ruined. Or so he thought. Ever the frugal Scotsman, he picked it up and added another layer of spray paint over the sawdust-infused lid. It made it something special. I had a rough-lidded box for my desk and a spare one he made just in case I didn’t want that one. I took both, not wanting to hurt his feelings. The one with the weird top was kind of strange. Taking it to school was not high on my list of things to do.

The first day of school arrived and I found myself with two boxes for my desk. I quickly placed both in there, not wanting anyone to notice the odd box. Within an hour, everyone knew about the sawdust-covered box. EVERYONE wanted one. I was cool for a few days. I bragged that I was sure my grandpa could make them for anyone who wanted one. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. Fortunately, most people forgot.

There are no empty cigar boxes around my place. I did try a King George cigar once, long after Pa was gone. Once! That was one vice I chose to forgo. The one cigarette I tried also made me sick. Don’t worry. I have plenty of other vices. My addiction to chocolate malts is legendary at my chocolate malt addicts support group.

Isn’t it amazing the things that make the biggest differences? Sometime a mistake can be the best thing. When I look back on the last five years of my life and see all the things that have gone so horribly wrong, I am finally grateful. Without all the disasters and catastrophes, I would not be the man I am today. Today, I am a writer, a dreamer, a furturist, and someone who loves life. None of those words would have been used within a mile of me even three years ago. For the first time in a long time, I can say I like the person I am becoming.

The mistakes in my life, like cigar boxes that fell in the sawdust, have turned out for the better. I wouldn’t want to go back to a cigar box without the saw dust. That is what makes it special. That is what makes it mine.

My Madness

I was asked why I write several times a week in my Random Thoughts blog but only write infrequently here. This is where I get serious. This is where I overtly share my thoughts and beliefs, anger and pain, joy and love. Here is where you see me metaphorically naked – none of the obfuscation of my thoughts under a veil of humor. It is here that I write when I have something worthwhile to say. Guess what? I found something that moved me.

 While preparing to write, I will listen to music, watch the news, read a blog, enjoy a podcast, or scan YouTube for inspiration. Last week, my oldest son shared with me something on YouTube that has had me transfixed all week. Jason Silva has a channel called Shots of Awe. (Click the name to check out the whole channel.) He has a passion and enthusiasm that is truly contagious. After watching several of these micro-movies, I came upon one that didn’t just speak to me; it screamed a rock opera that echoed through my mind. It was called “Creativity is Madness”. In this short, Jason compares the mystic and the madman who swim in the same waters. It is the mystic brings back something to share with others.

While sitting in my favorite coffee shop a couple weeks ago, I must admit to looking like the mystical madman. It is really hard to decipher which is which when you are in the moment. There is something that I do that keeps the myriad of story ideas that are constantly assaulting my mind from becoming merged and melded into a misanthropic mess. If you have seen Iron Man 2 or 3, you have seen Tony Stark’s holographic workspace. He can move things around and see how they fit together. I do the same thing with my virtual storyboards – but mine are all in my imagination. No one else can see them. I forget that little details sometimes. The few of my friends who have watched me storyboarding say it is somewhere between “too cool for words” and “a commercial for someone who needs a straightjacket”. It must look more like the latter when you do it while forgetting you are in a coffee shop. One of my fellow patrons was courageous enough to approach and ask me if I was all right. What they really wanted to know is if the things I was seeing were telling me to do bad things and did I have my meds handy. Madman won that one.

I don’t know what to call my madness; insanity, creativity gone viral, a mind that sees the mundane as miraculous. For all I know it’s a tumor. All I can say is that I am seeing possibilities where there was nothing but pessimism four years ago. There is the problem of pain that C. S. Lewis so eloquently addresses in the book of the same name. Friedrich Nietzsche also addresses it quite well when he says: “Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know it makes us more profound.” (Yes, I did reference Lewis and Nietzsche in the same paragraph. Both have important things to say.) That profound person that has that phoenix-like resurrection from the ashes of pain can see the world more clearly than the paper-man who has no depth and is burnt into ashes. My stories share that sense of rebirth whether it is a man who lacks power on earth only to be indispensable in a spiritual realm or a man and woman who are both terribly broken who find healing with one another. Each time I share some of my own pain through fiction, it bring healing and peace knowing that I have let go and let the phoenix fly higher.

You have to ask yourself the same questions I ask daily: Am I a madman? Am I a mystic? Or am I just me? I think the answers for all of us to those questions is a resounding yes. I am all of the above. The only question is: How mad are you?