NP: The Police, Message In A Box (CD)

I'm trying to look at the positive, at the possibilities in front of me, but it can be difficult sometimes. Basically, when you're faced with the unknown, you can assume the best, assume the worst, or try to hang on to a headspace closer to neutral. I tend toward the latter, but with so much uncertainty continuing to be uncertain, I feel like I'm falling off the wagon. I need good news, not just continuations of the lack of definitive news one way or the other. No news is good news, my ass. And this goes for pretty much everything across the board.

I could, of course, try to effect that good news, wring it out of whatever stones I'm juggling at the moment, but aside from being more poetic than I am most of the time, it's also not really my style. I was expounding on this over the weekend with a new friend who doesn't yet know all my idiosyncracies, that I don't try to do big things, to have big goals. I nudge. It seemed to make sense at the time, but in keeping with the overall theme, time will tell. The notion is that if every little thing I do is in a vaguely positive direction, then my life is generally good and happy, and will bring me where I want to go. I'm not going to go so far as to question what may or may not be a life philosophy of sorts, but some days it's harder to see it that way than others. The problem being that if there's only a vague notion of where you're headed, there's an even vaguer notion of when you've actually arrived.

Yesterday I realized that I'm just not practicing my drums enough. Steve pointed out that, on the cover band gig, I had a tendency to play dead-center on the beat, which is the easy way out when compared to manipulating the "front" or "back" of the beat to open up space. This wasn't at all surprising, as it's what I do when I'm not at the top of my game, and Steve happens to be very, very good at it.

With the current self-improvement kick, which is minor in scope but hopefully getting bigger, the practice regimen should change, although finding out where my other metronome went is a factor. Because if I step into that new drum shop that used to be Andy's Music, I'm going to buy a new drum throne, too. I know this, and I need to protect against letting my burn rate balloon too much. It's much better now than toward the end of last year, when I kept getting saddled with unavoidable big tickets, but I can't let up.

I do know that all of this could just be idle pessimism taking it's temporary toll on me. And it probably is. It's not like I'm just sitting around waiting for my life to happen, but there's a natural cycle of ebb and flow to everything, and the ebbs are carrying the day.