Another way to say sleep...

Saturday night in New York City. Saturday, September 11th. Not much to say on the topic of memorial, just that I get emotional every time I read my sister's account of her day that day (in Arlington, VA) because I remember how stressful that was not knowing what was going on before the plane hit the pentagon. Surely, it can't compare to the experience of those who lost loved ones, or those who survived or witnessed the terror first hand. Nonetheless, that's my experience of it. And I do get emotional when I stop to really try and get a scope of the whole tragedy, how many people died, how sudden and unexpected it was and what a spectacular and horrific scene it was, especially in that it played out live on television to most of America.

I made it a point to try and glimpse the tribute in light out of the south facing window of the break room at NY 1 but, because of the angle from which I was viewing and the fog rolling in, I could only see what looked like one indistinct blur of light. The view from the Manhattan Bridge was no better, as the D train rides on the track that is on the north side of bridge so the rest of the bridge sort of blocks out some of the skyline. Last year, it was completely shrouded in cloud as I tried to view it from the hill in Sunset Park. Either way, I was reminded distinctly of the Bat Signal. After all, NYC is essentially Gotham.

In all serious, it was beautiful to behold, even on an eight inch TV monitor in the room where I work, with a reporter standing in the foreground.

Now, I contemplate sleep (let's face it, the trend these days for me to talk about sleep in my blogs probably stems from the fact that, right before bed, and as an antidote to sleeplessness, is the best time for me to write). Tomorrow is the first day singing with the choir at the Unitarian Church and I find myself chanting inside, I will write music for the choir, I will write music for the choir. And I intend to, in fact, I started to a few months back but I keep getting side-tracked. The notes are all still there from what I started and in fact, I just got inspired to offer up one of my piano pieces from the spring of '08. The unfinished ones. Ergo, this is incentive to actually finish one or more of those pieces. I found one that is a perfect candidate for a prelude or postlude for one of the services. It's currently called The Way We Dream and I have no idea where I got that title but it's a very catchy bit in a 7/8 meter (for those of you who don't know what that means, I'll try and explain it sometime). I wrote it on the piano when I first had it moved into the house in Greensboro where I lived during Grad School. I've always liked it and it's fun to play, it's just that the opening motive could be played so many different ways and I would just keep going with it until my mind would say, "okay, this should be doing something else by now."

The next question is, Am I going to perform it? Sheesh, I don't know. I haven't been confident in my playing in a long time. Which will sound silly since I have a degree in piano. It's certainly a consideration. But there's also a resident genius choral director/organist/pianist/multi-freakin'-instrumentalist in the house at the good ol' Brooklyn UU, if I can't get up the gumption to play my own piece. I'll surely have to run it by him first though anyway.

Either way, between that and the Bulgarian pianist, I may finally start to build up a little momentum here. Composing is hard enough but then when you factor in needing to do something else that is not music that takes up to 10 hours out of your day 5 days a week, commute included, just to to eat everyday, it can seem damn near impossible. Especially when I come home to a wreck of a room that is a wreck precisely because it is so small that there's nowhere to put any of the inevitable accumulation of mail, note paper and general detritus, so it all gets piled on top of piles until you have to do something about it before you can do anything productive at all!

I can see this is quickly becoming a rant, as evidenced by above run-on sentence, when it was meant to be a simple checking in and letting you know what's up. I guess I get frustrated when I juggle all these things just so I can be comfortable when comfortable doesn't afford me any creative stimulation. Nor does it afford me the time to let said creative stimulation manifest. So, I ask myself some days, when in the hell am I ever going to get my momentum back? I think about wanting to write music but I can barely find time to sit down and do it. I think about wanting to play with a band, too, and I realize that it's been so long since I've even plugged in my guitar amp (it certainly hasn't been connected to any outlets in this apartment that I've been in since March...that should give you some idea).

I have to remind myself though, on a regular basis, that I can't jump to the absolute, and that I actually have made headway in the past few months. And I'm doing just fine. I'm sure Beethoven's room was a horrible mess, too.

Anyway, I'd better go and do that thing I usually do right after finishing what I'm doing now.