After the triumphant solo gig Friday night, this has been a particularly bad music week. I've finally given up on Clusterfunk, the reconstituted funk/R&B/early disco group with serious jazz leanings that played a month of Tuesdays in late 2001. Why? It's been, literally, something like eight months that I've spent trying to just get five or six people in the same room with instruments to bang out a demo of some sort so that we can start gigging, and it just refuses to happen. So I'm throwing in the towel.

This speaks to another pattern I've been somewhat troubled by lately, and that's this tendency for failure when I explicitly pursue something. I made some noise a while back about how my life gravitates toward certain decisions, and that maybe I need to reach out and grab things a bit more in the current climate, but it seems that every time I reach, I miss. Right now, this trend is mostly living in the musical and dating spaces, and probably has enough exceptions (like Friday night) that I'm forgetting to kill the theory. Except that it feels more pervasive than that. A lot of the stuff I've been successful with, I seem to have just fallen into, but that could be because of that same tendency to make small moves that ripple into bigger things further down the line. Maybe I'm jumping from those small moves to much bigger ones too quickly. I don't know. The fact is, I don't like to quit, and this week has suddenly become all about quitting, and it's bothering me.

Speaking of, Nitrous Foxide once again might be biting the dust. Another member leaving, for perfectly good reasons, which is opening the door for any and all dissatisfied parties to bolt at the same time. If I wanted to be a pessimist, I'd say that things seem to be blowing up right as I took over the stewardship of the band, but the outstanding issues and problems are much older and run much deeper than even my tenure, so I won't be that defeatist. That said, I feel like things are starting to turn around with the band, and there may be one last effort to save it, but it's looking grim. Of course, there's an entirely different pessimistic take on this, which is that the band is up and dying right when I'm the guy on the hook with several clubs around town, which makes me look bad.

I've played my drums something like once in the last three weeks. This may be a factor in my bad attitude, but with my feet still recovering from recurring treatment, it's tough for me to get motivated to leave the house much.

I would appreciate it if my few stock holdings would suddently shoot through the roof, because that would make my life much easier right now. Vivendi is doing it's darndest, I must say. I love it when I'm right.