Category: Generic

Failure-Free

Daily writing prompt
What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail.
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This is a loaded question. I had to think about it for a while and I can’t decide on one single answer.

What would I try to do if I was guaranteed not to fail. My first thought was a career change. I would become a professional musician, which was my plan when I was 18 years old. Sure, there really isn’t a functioning music biz anymore, but if I was guaranteed success I would go for it.

After that thought I took a step back and tried thinking bigger. I mean, I could do anything with a guarantee of success, why think so small? I could be an astronaut. That would be sweet. Why stop there? I could be a physicist and an engineer and design and build a faster than light engine and then be the first astronaut to visit another solar system. Yeah, now we’re talking!

How about this one. I could become a tech entrepreneur, buy twitter back from that musk nazi putz, remove all of the nazis from the user base, remove all of the disinformation and make the content guaranteed to be factually accurate so that the fascists can’t spread their idiotic lies, and on top of it all I could make a Musk/Bezos level salary and then spread great big gobs of money around to huge numbers of people who could benefit from it. Yeah, that would be fun. Screw you, fascists!

After that I started thinking that I was outside of the spirit of this particular writing prompt. Maybe it’s more looking for one time events. A single thing that I would normally be afraid to try that if I were guaranteed to succeed I would give a shot. Skydiving. That was the first thing that came to mind. I would never in a billion years want to jump out of a plane, but if I were guaranteed not to end up squashed like a bug against the very unforgiving ground, would I do it? Probably not, but maybe.

No… the more I think of it, the more I would go with the successful career in whatever passes for a music business today. That’s where I would put my guaranteed-not-to-fail energies.

World Record Pace

I’m dizzy with speed and excitement.

I punched out of work at 5:31. I left the house to go to three stores at 5:40. I went to the UPS store and shipped a return item back to Amazon. I went to Home Depot and picked up an online order. I went to Best Buy and returned a laptop. I was home at 6:15.

Round trip with three store visits in 35 minutes! Holy crap! How did that happen? All three stores were on route 28 in Salem, NH. If I try to do the same trip in December it will take 5.5 hours, at least! Wow!

Sorry everyone, I just had to share this. It’s a traffic/retail miracle.

We Did Not Win

You can tell by the fact that I signed in to work this morning that we did not win a billion gajillion dollars in the Powerball lottery last night. We didn’t even win a free ticket. Oh well.

On the upside though, I think I got a little raise today. Just a little one. There isn’t a lot to go around for raises right now so anything is welcome. The usual process is that someone tells me a raise is coming and then I get a document spelling it out. Today I got the document without anyone telling me it was coming. It works for me though. It’s not much but it’s enough to keep me in sea salt and vinegar peanuts for a couple of months at least.

The 1.5 billion gajillion dollar lottery would have been preferred, but I’ll take what I can get, with a smile.

Favorite Artists

Daily writing prompt
Who are your favorite artists?
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My favorite artists are all musicians. I’ll give you a short list, okay? I think the word “art” is probably a little too pretentious given the type of music all of these folks make/made. That’s okay. I like what I like, you know? You know it when you see it and all that.

  • Rush. I was a kid in 5th grade the first time I heard Rush and they had a monumental effect on me. They rewrote my future, musically and pretty much socially. They set me on a path as it were. It was odd how as their musical directions changed over the years it always lined up perfectly with how my own musical tastes were changing. They were always right where I needed them to be.
  • Throwing Muses. Rush changed my musical outlook when I was a kid and then continuously adjusted it again and again throughout the rest of my life. Throwing Muses did the same thing to me when I was in high school. Like most high school kids I was sure that I had the world figured out, musically speaking at least, and hearing The Muses for the first time turned that entire outlook upside down and backwards and inside out. It was a monumental change. I owe this band so much.
  • Eric Clapton. I share this one with a frustrated sigh. His career has been long and varied and huge swaths of it are totally uninteresting. Also, he’s demonstrated on a couple of occasions that he is a bit of a schmuck, and that is upsetting to me. Really, he’s just a spoiled child who seems to believe everything he reads even when what he reads is idiotic and clearly untrue. Putz. Still, from the start of his professional career through his first drug fueled semi-retirement in 1971 or so his guitar playing inspired me to play guitar in a way that no one else ever did. Before I heard Cream I was curious about learning the guitar. After I heard Cream I was obsessed with the idea and HAD to learn to play guitar. Clapton did that to me.

Those are the big ones. If art is meant to inspire then those three are the biggest sources of inspiration for me. It seems too short a list though, so let’s add a few honorable mentions for luck.

  • Jeff Beck
  • Yes
  • Pink Floyd
  • Genesis
  • BB King
  • Jimmy Page
  • Albert King
  • The Pixies
  • Nirvana
  • Pearl Jam

Just to name a few.

Be Careful Out On Those Internets, Kids

I am not going to share any details because a: it’s not my info to share and, b: it’s none of your damn business.

Having said that, be careful out in the wilderness that is the internets, kiddos. It’s dangerous out there. You click the wrong link and someone scoops up your login credentials and BOOM, you’re private info is public. Worse, it happens at work and your company’s private info is public. Worse, worse, it happens to your customer and your customer’s private info is public and then you have to dive in and try to clean up the mess.

No one I know or work with was involved in such a thing, but the clean up when it happens to other people around you can be super stressful.

So be careful out there. You don’t want to go through any of this crap, and you don’t want to accidentally put your friendly neighborhood support staff through it in your place either. Yikes, bro.

Favorite Hobbies

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
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It’s been a while since the daily writing prompt was so blatantly a repeat. They’ve already asked us about our hobbies, and recently. Oh well, once more into the breech?

My Number One hobby is music. Playing it, listening to it, writing it, recording it, thinking about it, everything. Guitar and saxophone, analog and digital, if it’s musical I’m into it. Except country music. Hell no on that front.

Honorably mention go to photography, I’m not good at it but putting a camera (digital or film) into manual mode and getting an exposure right is pretty cool. Another would be writing this silly little blog. I sure do it enough, right? Being a hockey and baseball fan is another, though my 21st century attention span keeps getting shorter and shorter and it makes it tough to watch games. I like good TV and I love a good movie. I used to list reading near the top of my hobbies list but ever since I started wearing bifocals it’s just become more difficult to focus my eyes than I ever thought it would, and they get really tired really fast.

So there you go, probably the same list of hobbies as the last time they asked about hobbies.