Acceptance

I am thirty years old now. I still have a strong desire to write music. What has left me though is the desire to be recognized as a prominent musical genius. Which I will never be and I am willing to accept that. What matters to me most now is the ability to do what I feel I must do. Which is write music. To write music regardless of what people think and instead write music because that's what I was put on this earth to do. I have spent so much time, money, and effort into studying and practicing music. Practicing enough to be musical but not enough to be a virtuoso and I am fine with that. In the recent weeks I have been practicing and sharpening my very dull musical literacy skills. I can continue to write and improve my overall literacy skills while also earning money to pay off my student debts. This is what I am going to do for the next two years of my life. The job that while pull me out of the hole of debt is truck driving. That is of course if everything goes to plan. If those plans fall through, well then I must do what humans do best and adapt. Here is to doing what we ought to be doing while also living.

Changes Changes Changes

For the past year I have been residing in central west Vermont in a small farm town. The town folk or friendly enough and the vistas are breathtaking. The winter I experienced was absolutely brutal and the worst winter I have ever had the pleasure of living through. The spring and summers are full of bugs and heavy with humidity.

I have been living on the family farm of 600 or so acres since I have been out here. I never visited my father's side of the family until I came up here last year with my cousin and a good friend of mine. We were on a cross country road trip. When we stopped in Vermont we stayed with my father and his girlfriend for a week before we hit the road again. During that time I decided it would be cool to live out here for a bit. In doing so I could get to know my father and the rest of family. I could continue my education at the local community college, study music, and experience a new way of life. My father guaranteed I could find work and that I could even work for him during my stay out here. To be honest, my father spouted off a nice long list of promises and not one of those promises has been kept to this day.

However I did find work with a wise retired carpenter building a small lake house on lake Bomoseen. The pay was so good I invested into musical equipment in hopes that I can make progress in that area of my life too since music has been the center piece of my life for fifteen years now. I wanted to get a music career going. I wanted to get paid doing anything music. Whether I would be playing bass or being some guitar lackey for a band. It didn't matter to me, but that didn't work out as I sit here now typing this out.

What happened instead was I met musicians that already had something good going on for them or I found someone who could not dedicate the time to a project. One project in particular I managed to jump in as an upright bass player had no direction. We had huge potential, but nowhere to direct our dedication (I'll past up a sample of one of the first get together we had).

So music did not go the way I had hoped. And to be honest I am scared to go out on my own to perform on a nightly basis. Nor do I have the funds to go out every night to perform. I have student loans to pay off and until I get those paid off it is not wise for me to be playing musician.

I am now looking into ways where I can contribute to society. And I am looking for a job which will provide me with consistent work so I can pay off *all* my debt and break free from that burden. I want to buy land in the Mojave Desert and build an earth based house called an Adobe house. I want the land the house is on to be powered by self-sustaining environmentally safe electricity. I want to start my own business (I don't know what yet) and I want to create a community environment that is focused on spreading knowledge and teaching critical thinking and problem solving without huge egos being involved.

The first step from here is to get that job. I have been heavily looking into Over the Road trucking and I think it is a good choice for me at this point in my life. However it has been difficult for me to get into it. My heavy weed smoking over the past five years of my life has caught up with me in the past month. So I must wait until late June before I can start applying with trucking outfits. There is a new standard of drug testing that can reach back ninety days. It is called hair follicle drug testing and it is surrounded by half truths and myths. After some intense digging I found consistent information that revealed the answers to most of the questions I had asked myself regarding the ability of the test to detect weed. I stopped my drug abuse on Feb 25th of this year. I got tired of it and how it made me feel in everything I would do. It really was a problem. But I have conquered it and I am ready to steam roll forward and really accomplish things that are worth accomplishing.

As a matter of fact, I have a phone call to return.