Daily writing prompt

What’s your all-time favorite album?

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I cannot answer this question. Normal people can, but I cannot. I don’t have a favorite album. I have a nearly infinite number of favorite albums. They are all different. I react to them all uniquely. I can’t pick just one. I’ll give you a very short list of a subset of personal favorites that will likely appear very long but is honestly just a small portion of the overall total. You have been warned. In no particular order, here goes nuttin’……

• Rush
  • Moving Pictures
  • Permanent Waves
  • Clockwork Angels
  • 2112
  • Hemispheres
  • Hold Your Fire
  • Counterparts
  • Vapor Trails
• Throwing Muses
  • House Tornado
  • Untitled first album
  • University
• The Beatles
  • Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  • Revolver
  • Abbey Road
  • Rubber Soul
• Yes
  • Close to the Edge
  • Fragile
  • Going for the One
  • The Yes Album
• Pink Floyd
  • Dark Side of the Moon
  • Meddle
  • The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
  • Wish You Were Here
  • The Wall
• Genesis
  • Selling England by the Pound
  • Foxtrot
  • A Trick of the Tail
• BB King
  • Live at the Regal
  • Live at the Cook County Jail
• Cream
  • Disraeli Gears
  • Wheels of Fire
• Crosby Stills Nash and Young
  • Deja Vu
• Deep Purple
  • Machine Head
  • Made in Japan
  • Deep Purple in Rock
  • Fireball
  • Burn
• Led Zeppelin
  • Houses of the Holy
  • Presence
  • Led Zeppelin II
  • Led Zeppelin IV
• Jeff Beck/Jeff Beck Group
  • Blow By Blow
  • Wired
  • Truth
  • Rough and Ready
• John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
  • Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton
• Derek and the Dominoes
  • Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
• Emerson Lake and Palmer
  • Brain Salad Surgery
  • Trilogy
• Fairport Convention
  • Unhalfbricking
  • Liege and Lief
• Jefferson Airplane
  • After Bathing at Baxters
  • Volunteers
  • Crown of Creation
• King Crimson
  • Red
  • Discipline
  • Starless and Bible Black
• King’s X
  • Gretchen Goes to Nebraska
  • Dogman
  • Tape Head
• Kristin Hersh
  • Hips and Makers
• Mahavishnu Orchestra
  • Inner Mounting Flame
  • Between Nothingness and Eternity
• Mission of Burma
  • Vs
  • The Obliterati
• Nirvana
  • Bleach
  • Nevermind
• Pearl Jam
  • Vitology
  • Vs
• Peter Gabriel
  • III (Melt)
  • So
• Procol Harum
  • Home
  • A Salty Dog
• REM
  • Life’s Rich Pageant
  • Document
  • Reckoning
  • Fables of the Reconstruction
  • Green
  • Automatic for the People
• Robin Trower
  • Bridge of Sighs
  • Twice Removed from Yesterday
• Smashing Pumpkins
  • Gish
  • Siamese Dream
• The Who
  • Who’s Next
  • Quadraphenia
  • Live at Leeds (Deluxe Edition)
• Traffic
  • Traffic
  • John Barleycorn Must Die

I promise that is a microscopically small list. I basically ignored all of the Boston based bands that I obsessed over through the 90’s and early 2000’s and for bigger national/international artists I tried to only list the very top favorites, but I could easily have written a list 10 times this length.

So in summary… music is a pretty big deal for ol’ Robbie the Red Head.

Daily writing prompt

Which topics would you like to be more informed about?

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I want more information about literally every topic. Literally. I am not using the word literally ironically, I am using it literally. I would literally like to know more about everything.

How about a couple of specifics, just for discussion’s sake?

• Programming. I would like to have more information on multiple programming languages, both syntactically and theoretically, not to mention architecturally. I want to be able to program efficiently and cleanly in more than just the one proprietary language I use for work. Java, C#, C++, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, all of those and more. How do they work, why do they work, how do I make them do what I want them to do? All of that would be groovy
• Home improvement/carpentry/plumbing/general contracting skills. I know nothing… and I own a house… and it leads to financial expenditures and stress that if I had a decent skill set to use as a foundation neither would be as bad as they can be
• Music theory. I know a ton about this topic, but the mountain of knowledge I have barely scratches the surface
• American fascism. Why were so many of us so surprised by the bullshit that bubbled to the political surface in 2016 and has covered our nation in filth ever since? I would have really liked to have had more info about what was coming down the pike ahead of time
• Photography. I wish I knew more and was better at it
• Guitar playing. I wish I knew more and was better at it
• Healthcare. I wish I knew more about it from a personal standpoint and from a knowing the options available to us standpoint. I felt so lost with my mother’s situation. I never want to feel like that again, but it’s already here. I thought I knew a lot about Covid, but now that I have it and I am helping my wife get through it, I don’t know jack. It’s stressful and I don’t like the way it feels, both in terms of my own health and in helping take care of someone else

Okay, there are just a handful of topics I would like to be more informed about, and they are just off the top of my head. Like I said, there are literally a zillion gagillion more topics to list. This will do for now though. Enjoy, I guess.

Daily writing prompt

What would your life be like without music?

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The answer to this question is simple. Without music there would be no me. My life would be 100% different and completely unrecognizable. Music more or less defines me. We can’t have one without the other.

When I was little I liked to listen to my parent’s record collection. My father had a copy of The Beatles Sgt Pepper that he won from a radio station. He wasn’t much of a fan, but I loved listening to that record. When I was about to start fifth grade I started taking saxophone lessons through school. Before the start of ninth grade I started taking trumpet lessons though school. Before the start of 10th grade I started taking guitar lessons through a music store in town. When I was in high school I started playing guitar in bands with friends and we started writing our own songs. We also played the occasional gig. When I first went to college I was a music major playing saxophone and studying audio recording. My main focus was playing guitar in bands and writing songs though. I was hooked. I still am. Completely.

Starting in elementary school, fifth grade or so, I started developing obsessions with multiple bands. Fandom in the extreme. Rush, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Cream, a few others. The older I got, the more bands I added to my obsessive fandom list and the more varied genres were represented. Rush was the king of all obsessions though, by far. They are still top of my list.

All of my closest friendships developed either directly through music, or partly through musical fandoms. That includes my wife. We met online and one of the things we bonded over were our love of The Beatles and Rush. In fact, we went to see Rush together a whole ton of times at various locations throughout the US and on one occasion we actually left the country to see them. We had tickets to see them in Hamilton, Ontario. We made it to the city in time for the show but hit a snag once we got there and didn’t actually get to the show, but we tried.

These days, at age 52, my primary creative outlet is still making music. We’re trying hard to get the band back up to speed in a post covid world (ironically, as I have covid right now), but even without the band I still play the guitar as much as I can, and I still write and record music as much as I can.

So in summation, I would not exist without music. Apart from my family it is the primary love in my life. Apart from my family it is my primary interest. It’s vital to my existance.

So no music… no me.

Daily writing prompt

How do you celebrate holidays?

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Alert! Alert! Bad Question Alert!

Who said we celebrate holidays? Well, depending on the holiday, of course. How does one “celebrate” Veteran’s Day for instance?

Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year, we do all the standard stuff. I guess the only way to answer this broad, vague question is to say that I celebrate holidays with family. Jen at least, but the kids come home for the big ones. There are some holidays we more or less ignore. Easter, for example. We don’t celebrate Easter at all.

So this was a bad question. Too broad and too vague and just bad. It’s been a while since the daily prompt was as rough as this. Here’s hoping they follow it with a streak of good, fun prompts. Fingers crossed.

Daily writing prompt

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

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I haven’t thought about this in a long time and some of the details are hazy in my memory, but there is one epic cooking fail that jumps to mind, partly because it was a sort of public event.

I can’t remember if we were still living in the Duplex on Ashland Ave, or if we had already bought the house. Was it before or after Fall of 2010? I don’t know. I think it was in the old place. We invited our friends Larry and Nawal over for a cookout. The plan was for me to try to cook chicken breasts on the grill for the first time ever. Jen and I found a recipe online for a marinade that sounded really good so we went for it.

We whipped up the marinade and let the chicken breasts soak it in for however long the website said. Then, with our friends already on their way over to us, I popped them onto the grill in the back yard and followed the grilling instructions to the letter. I may have the timing off, and I may be over dramatizing the events, but I seem to remember needing to open up the top of the grill to flip the chicken for the first time coinciding with our guests pulling into the driveway. I could be wrong about that.

There was a healthy amount of smoke billowing out from under the closed grill’s cover, but nothing that seemed unusual. When I opened the top though… the entire interior of the grill was engulfed in a conflagration the likes of which I had never seen before. There was so much fire and so much crushing heat that I expected the very universe itself to start melting. The four gloriously marinated chicken breasts were burned to black cinders, though I do recall they still smelled really good. Our friends came into the back yard and saw me staring blankly at the inferno, unable to process what was happening.

I believe we ended up ordering pizza that night.