Daily writing prompt

What’s the trait you value most about yourself?

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I have decided that I am not going to come up with a serious answer. No, that would require more self reflection than I am comfortable with. You’ll get an answer, and it’s an honest answer, but it’s also a smart ass, sarcastic answer. I don’t do the whole self analysis thing very well. I go looking for positives and find an infinite number of negatives and I end up depressed and miserable and I just don’t want to go there today. No thank you.

Back in my Community College days I took an intro to psychology class and I learned a little factoid that turned my brain upside down and, unfortunately, confirmed a suspicion that I always had about myself. The factoid is that people who suffer from depression often have an accurate view of themselves, while people who don’t suffer from depression often have too rosy a view of themselves. They see themselves as better or more important than they actually are. I had always thought that was the case, but to read exactly that in a psych textbook blew my tiny little mind in a way that I had never imagined. It seemed to confirm why I was always so depressed.

So what is a trait that I value about myself? I am really, really tall. Six feet, four inches tall. Almost but not quite two meters. I can always reach the top shelf. I totally value my height. It’s one of my best traits.

There. I answered your damn question. Let’s all move on with our lives now.

Daily writing prompt

List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.

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Three jobs I would have if I didn’t have to worry about money. I have two that come to me instantly. I will have to think on the third a little…

• Musician. Sure, there are people who make a lot of money in the music business but there are some false truths here. First, 99.999% of people who pursue careers in music don’t make any money. Second, with the notable exception of Miss Swift, the music industry doesn’t really exist anymore. There are a few folks hanging on to the past model by the skin of their teeth, and a lot of legacy artists who are too big to fail, but for the most part, again with the exception of a certain Miss Swift, there is nothing left of the industry. If money were no object though, that would be my first choice of a new career. Hell, in 1989 it was my first choice of any career. It didn’t work out though.
• Photographer. People make a living with it, but how many more fail than succeed? I don’t know for sure (unlike the music biz, where I absolutely do know for sure) but I bet the percentage is pretty high. If money weren’t a factor though, I would give it a try. I’d have a portrait studio and I would do landscape shoots and I would do travel photography and all of that stuff that I would do today just for fun.
• Blogger. I have no desire to try to make money off of this silly little personal blog. None at all. Zero inclination toward blogging for a living. Nope. However, if money were no object, I would totally do it. I would just write blog posts all day. No one would read them, but I wouldn’t need to make any money so it wouldn’t matter and it would more or less be exactly the same thing I am doing now. I would put a twist on it though and I would make this a travel blog so that I could use not needing any money as an excuse to travel all the time and I’d just write about everything I do while traveling. Jen and I were fantasizing about a where-we-came-from trip last night. It was inspired by yesterday’s writing prompt. Travel to Scotland and Ireland and see our heritage first hand. I could write blog entries about stuff like that for a living, you bet… assuming I didn’t actually have to make any money doing it. So I guess I would do it for a “living” if you know what I mean.

There you go. Three fantasy career choices that would not pay the bills, if I need not worry about ever having to pay the bills. As it is, being a programming supervisor at a medical software company is doing all right by me. I think I will stick with it.

I am going to answer this one honestly even though I don’t really have an answer and what I am going to say is just an embarassing embrace of a really dumb stereotype. I apologize to everyone I am about to insult and offend in advance. I truly am sorry for not knowing more about your history and culture and reducing your marvelous heritage down to something silly and stupid. I am so sorry. So very sorry.

My father’s mother’s family came to the United States from Ireland. I think I used to know where in Ireland but I don’t recall at the moment. Was it Clare? It might have been Cork or it might have been Kildare. I don’t recall.

My father’s father’s family came to the United States from Canada, Nova Scotia specifically, but prior to that they were in England. They don’t count for this discussion. Partly because I am not really interested in the English piece of my ancestry, but also because he pissed off in 1950 and my father never saw him again so the hell with that dude. Also, there is some portion of that family that may have come from France. I say that because my name, which is very English, appears to have originated in French. That’s too far back for me to have any real information though, so the French piece doesn’t really enter into the equation at all.

Both of my mother’s parents came from Newfoundland. At the time, Newfie was not technically part of Canada. It was an English protectorate, or something like that. Prior to that, both families were in Ireland. I have no idea where. I’m not sure my mother ever knew exactly where.

When I think of my heritage, I think of Ireland. Unfortunately, I know jack shit about Ireland, or Irish culture. I know that Gary Moore and Rory Gallagher were killer guitar players who are both no longer with us. I know that U2 is a great band even though there have been a couple of phases in their recording career where they went to places that I didn’t want them to go. I know that historically they have been kicked around by their English neighbors. I know that within my lifetime they underwent massive political upheaval that included home grown terrorism. I know that technically they are two nations when they should really be one.

So is there an aspect of my cultural heritage that I am particularly proud of? I don’t think so. I can’t really say either way. It’s embarrassing that I know so little.

No, the thing that I am most proud of is a silly stereotype. I am honestly very proud of this but yeah it is a stereotype when you connect it to Ireland. I’m sorry for this. Truly and seriously.

I am a red head and I am fiercely proud of it. Well… as proud of the color of one’s hair as one can reasonably be. Red hair is generally associated with Ireland, is it not? There are a ton of red heads in Scotland too, from what I hear, but no one ever tried to make fun of me by asking if i was Scottish or not. Nope, it was always har har you have red hair har har are you Irish? Well hells yes I’m Irish, wanna make something of it asshole?

When I was a kid I hated having red hair. I was picked on and teased and hassled and ranked on all the time. It sucked. As I grew up though it turned into something positive. Something other people (people with taste) were jealous of. Hells yes, I am a red head. Don’t you wish you were me?

So when it comes to my Irish heritage, there really isn’t anything culturally that I am particularly proud of. There is that one little insignificant genetic trait though. That one little blip in my DNA that gave me red hair (and amazingly at age 52 I still have it… though there’s a little more grey mixed in every day). I’m pretty freakin’ stoked about that little Irish bit, I tell you.

So again, my apologies to the great people of Ireland for reducing their history and culture and achievements down to the color of my hair. I don’t mean it to be a negative. I don’t mean to be offensive or insulting. I really should know more about where my family came from. Maybe I’ll start doing some research and read a history book or two. Maybe this is just the push I need to broaden my horizons a little.

Daily writing prompt

What brands do you associate with?

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I friggin’ HATE the term “brand”. Talk about your arrogant asshole corporate buzzword speak. We’re not a soulless corporation out to put profit over the wellbeing of the people, we’re a brand. Oooooh. No, screw you, jerk-wads, you’re a friggin’ company and no you are not people and no you do not deserve to have the freakin’ vote!

UGH! I HATE THIS TERM!

To answer the corporate buzzword bullshit question though…

Gibson guitars, specifically Gibson USA. I can’t afford anything from the custom shop. I own four of them (a Les Paul Custom, a Les Paul Standard, an ES-335 Pro, and an SG Standard) and am constantly drooling over the idea of owning more (a Firebird, a Les Paul Junior, and a Les Paul Standard with P90’s).

Apple. I’m quite the fanboy as I type this on my MacBook Pro while wearing an Apple Watch and looking at my iPhone 14 Pro Max sitting on the desk next to me, and knowing that I have an iPad sitting on a charger in the next room, and a pair of AirPod Pro Max next to it, and lamenting that my little AirPods fell out of my pocket at the airport the other day.

Still… I absolutely loathe the term brand. Fuck that noise.

Daily writing prompt

What could you do more of?

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What could I do more of? I feel like I am lacking in so many areas of life. Nothing so much as to be a problem, but many things where I just want to be doing better than I am.

• Helping/supporting/being there for my wife. I do some, but not nearly enough. Not even close.
• Helping/supporting/being there for my step kids. Again, I do what I can but they are so far away from us now it’s very difficult. Any time there is the slightest hiccup in their lives I just want to drop everything and go running and I just can’t do it when they are a couple of hundred miles away.
• Helping/supporting/being there for my extended family. This mostly includes my father, but also in a big way it includes my niece and my three nephews. I never feel like I am there for any of them. I chip in for my father when I can, but not nearly enough, and as for the four kids, am I the worst, most useless uncle on Earth? I think so. I am doing an abysmal job at being an uncle.
• Helping/supporting/being there for my staff at work. I think I am doing an okay job as a supervisor, but I could be doing so much more.

Those are the big ones. There are a slew of other areas where I could be doing more that fall under personal, mental well being kind of things. More music, more photography, more travel, more exploration, more community stuff. Those sorts of things. They are clearly secondary to family and work though.

So I guess my answers for today’s daily writing prompt are pretty much the same as most of my prompt answers. Family, work, personal things. I feel like a bit of a broken record, but they are the most important things in my life, you know?

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

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The best advice I’ve ever received… I’m not sure. Does it count as advice if it was something you were 100% going to do anyway?

Uncle Johnny was my father’s brother and my godfather. While the godfather part is technically meaningless to an atheist, it still has meaning from a family perspective. He was an alcoholic who lived a very hard life before getting sober and straightening himself out. He was an inspiration, and very likely the reason I have never really touched alcohol. He was a type two diabetic in his later years and his health went down the crapper in a major way at the end. He died in a horrible yet thankfully quick fashion and I miss him a lot.

When I first started dating Jen back in 2007 his diabetes was out of control and it cost him his lower leg. He was in and out of the hospital and various rehab and half way houses as he needed more and more surgeries and more and more physical therapy to deal with his new reality. Jen used to go with me to visit him.

In the short time that Uncle Johnny knew Jen, he was really taken with her. He was a huge fan of hers, and of our relationship. Sadly he never met the kids. Bellana was six and Harry was four and Jen and the kids’ father had an arrangement that said new relationships should last for six months before the kids become involved. We were still under that six month mark when this particular conversation happened.

Johnny was in a bed in a rehab place. I think Jen was with me for this particular visit but she was out of the room for some reason. He asked about the kids and I told him I still had not been introduced to them but the big day was coming soon. The advice he gave me was simple and while it is clearly the best advice I can remember receiving, I was absolutely going to do it anyway so does it still count? I don’t know. I don’t recall the exact words but the gist of it was, you make sure you do right by those kids, Rob.

By the time he said that to me it was already becoming a primary life goal. Still, I hope I’ve made my uncle proud.

On a lighter note, there was another, earlier piece of sage advice that Uncle Johnny gave me. I was a teenager at the time. He told me, again paraphrasing because I don’t recall the exact words, put off shaving as long as you can because once you start you can never stop. I wanted to follow that advice, but I looked really awful with a spotty, patchy beard and I just had to shave off what little there was as soon as it became visible. Here we are almost 40 years later and I still look terrible with facial hair. He was right though. As soon as I started shaving it became a regularly scheduled pain in the ass.

Thanks for the advice, Uncle Johnny.

Daily writing prompt

What things give you energy?

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Another vague and kinda pointless daily prompt. Oh well. They can’t all be bangers.

The literal answer is food and water, right? Biochemistry and all that? When you feed your cells they produce energy and you get to keep running without issue for a few hours or so. I took a biology class in high school. I took a chemistry class in high school too. I never took a biochem class. What I’ve learned in that regard comes from either learning about my step son’s type one diabetes, or just listening to my step daughter talk about her job.

The figurative energy sources are more interesting, but also pretty obvious and straight forward. What gives me energy? Being with my wife. Being with my step kids. Being with my niece and nephews, though that doesn’t happen often because I am a terrible uncle and likely just a terrible person all around.

Being creative gives me energy. For me that means music, both making music and just listening to music, or playing with the cameras and photos as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes a good movie or TV show can be a source of energy on some weird level. A good book can do the same.

Traveling can do it. Driving on a road trip, visiting a new place, exploring something or somewhere. What does not give me energy, quite the opposite, is spending time with crowds of new people. That just sucks the life right out of me. I think that is the textbook definition of an introvert. Maybe?

Okay, there are a few vague thoughts on this vague question. I guess it got the job done in that it did prompt me to write more than a few words worth of a post. Success.

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.