Don't Kill Yourself (honestly, that's all this is about)

I just learned of the suicide of yet another close friend of mine.  I'm mad, hurt, and so, so, so sad.  Part of me thinks, "I don't get it, how do you get that low?  How does not existing anymore seem preferable to your troubles?"

Of course, my two friends who killed themselves believed in God and an afterlife.  So, in their minds, they were not ceasing to exist, but just changing planes in the great jetway of the cosmos.  But I don't get that either.  Doesn't every belief system preach that killing yourself is a one way ticket to pain and suffering.  Surely an eternity of suffering is worse that trying to figure it out here.  Right?

I'm back to where I don't get it.

Obviously, after you learn something like this, you mind goes looking for clues, "could I have foreseen this?"  prevented it?  Were there signs?

Of course there were fucking signs.  Everyone has their bad days, the key seems to be getting past the bad days.  A super long string of bad days or a few super bad days seems to bring out the urge to live no more.  I'm sure everyone has had at least that in their life, even if they never thought of taking their life.

I never got to say good bye.

In 2008 I learned that one of my dearest friends, O, had killed herself in 2007 after a long bout with Schizophrenia.  We'd been estranged for many years, but I always imagined us together as old people, as friends or lovers, once all the other stuff was out of the way, careers, kids, the things that can get in the way of living.

I'd been searching for O for a long time and the internet always held promise, but I never figured out how to use it effectively.  She was private and paranoid, even when I knew her, so it was always going to be hard to find her, plus at least one other person shared her name and career path, making searches more difficult.

I eventually had the idea of looking for her sister and was talking to said sister on the phone within a day of finding her.  If I'd thought of that a year earlier, I could have spoken to my friend, as she would have still been alive.  It was my belief in Facebook that lead me to look for O's sister.  I truly feel, in the Facebook era, you can locate anyone, as long as their name is unique enough.  By contrast, good luck finding the John Smith you're looking for.

Hearing of O's demise I felt robbed of my future with her.  She was a fighter.  I couldn't believe she, of all people gave in.  Still, there were those signs, the paranoia.  Part of me was not surprised at all.  It seems 911 was the trigger for her downfall.  Evacuated from her home she took the attack personally, internalized it, and never really came back to reality, at least the reality we all accept and know.  It seems she'd never forgot me either, meaning, I could have made some difference, maybe not "the" difference, but some.

Yesterday, I learned of the death of my mentor, who killed himself decades back, though, as I said, I'm only just learning of it.

G was my counselor at camp the last year I was able to attend.  He was magical and magnetic, everyone was drawn to him and uplifted by his optimism and good cheer.  Being the oldest of his campers he made me his unofficial assistant counselor, since he hadn't been assigned one.  I'd always wanted to get to know G better, but fate put us in the best possible position to become friends.  In time my great respect for him was returned as he seemed to take a liking to me too.  My camp session ended and I left, but my little brother was attending the next session, meaning I'd return a few days later, only to say hi really, but it allowed for another turning point.

One issue G had helped me cope with was a girl named L and the demise of my relationship with her.  He didn't have a high opinion of her, so I couldn't figure out why I liked her so much.  She was beautiful and she showed an interest in me, need I say more?  But I didn't see it like that then, so in the day between my session of camp and my little brother's session of camp, I wrote out a seven page, college ruled, history of my relationship with L (which had spanned two summers and letters in between).

When we went to pick my brother up I asked G if he'd read what I wrote and our friendship took another turn because he was, as he described it, dumbstruck with the quality of my writing (I'm not going to say I've maintained that quality, as I haven't kept practice, lol).  Not only that, but regardless of what he thought of my ex, L, he now understood why the relationship had meant so much to me.  (On I side note, I now believe that my relationship with L was sabotaged by one of my closest friends who actually wanted to be my girlfriend, as she often relayed messages between L and myself, but that's another whole post which I'm not likely to write).

I think those seven pages convinced G to be pen pals with me, and we remained in regular contact for years, right up to his death, as I now know, but back then, his letters just stopped.  I assumed we just lost touch, because I was moving a lot at the time (my father was in the Army) and I changed addresses three times the year he died, so it was easy to imagine letters getting lost when they stopped.

In those letters, G helped me so much.  It was the darkest time of my life (isn't adolescence the darkest time in everyone's life).  And I came the closest to suicide I ever did while we were writing.  He's the one who first suggested Lao Tzu to me, and it helped so much.  But now, I'm looking back on that, realizing, while he was helping me to stay alive, he was within months of taking his own life.  Read on.

And this is the ultimate irony.  G was the first one to tell me "it gets better", long, long, long before it was an internet meme.  And, having guessed at the circumstances which lead him to take his life, I only wish I'd had the chance to tell him, "it gets better".  Because it does.

Don't kill yourself!

Don't kill yourself!

Don't kill yourself!

Loops or No Loops with that EDM (part 1)

Hate starting with an unattributed quote, but it's so good, I can't let it pass.  Some designer in some documentary I watched once said, he didn't really know what he had designed until years after the fact.  Because, he explained, for the first year a woman owns one of my garments, she wears it the way she thinks it should be worn, or the way she believes I think it should be worn.  It's only after it's been in her closet a year that she begins to wear it the way she wants to, and it's only then, when I see it on the street, that I really know what I have designed, when my customer stops caring what I think.

I don't design clothes, but this characteristic he's talking about is pervasive when engaging in any creative endeavor and I think it is closely related to the 10,000 hour rule.  I think it's especially true when it comes to new technology for creativity.

I first opened the music making program Garageband in 2005.  I hadn't really made any music in about 7 years, when the PC running my midi system died.  I had purchased a guitar in 2001, not with the idea of making music, but with the idea of learning how to play guitar.  I practiced on and off, leaning scales and chords, not songs.

I opened Garageband because I needed music for a video.  Once again, video was driving me to make music.  I was curious to try Garageband, because I knew that even non musical people could make "original" music with it, and I was curious to see how that worked.

I had seen other programs for non musical people to make music with, but they were all too limited, in the sense that, everything sounded like it came out of that program, not like it came out of the "composer".  I could quickly see how, in Garageband, you could make music with no skills at all, and how you could make something really original if you made unusual choices (say, mixing a classic rock acoustic guitar riff with a reggae drum pattern and a jazz organ loop).

At the time, I'd recently launched a business designing iPod products, but before that I'd really been concentrating on painting and photography.  I had no plans to start making music as my primary means of creative expression, but I really liked Garageband and wanted to delve deeper into it, to see how good it could be, using it as it was designed to be used by non musicians.

I built a jazz track, using jazz and "non" jazz elements.  Taking midi loops designed for one instrument, and assigning them to a different one.  Using the same midi loop between two different instruments to have them "talk" to each other.  As I built more tracks, my imaginary "band" started to take shape, the leader played the sax, the talented drummer played all styles (jazz, rock, electronica, reggae, you name it).  The bass player played all three types of bass, acoustic floor, electric, and keyboard.  And the guitarist could also double on the keys when needed.  I knew where each member of the "band" would stand during their shows and placed them there in the mix when making "my" songs.

Funny to call these "my" songs, since I didn't write a single phrase of music for them.  Thought I transposed and rejiggered some of the loops into new musical phrases, mostly they were melodies written by others, but in my songs, they became the leaping off point for some "improvisational" jams my virtual band performed.

I have a friend who really likes jazz, so I decided, at some point, I would do an entire album of these loop based jazz songs for him as a Christmas present.  A one of a kind CD that he would have the only copy of, in the world.  If Garageband was the designer's garment in my closet, the jazz album was my first 6 months with it.  I was trying to use the program to the very limit of how I thought it was intended to be used.

The next 6 months saw me realize a dream I'd long had of doing a Christmas album that blended Rock and Electronic Dance Music.  I love non-traditional Christmas albums and have a little treasure trove of them.

Now I felt like I was going to take Garageband a little bit outside of it's intended use.  Employing the same methods I'd used making the Jazz album, I began to build my Christmas tunes.  Of course, I couldn't use the musical loops in Garageband this time, because I needed traditional Christmas tunes.  However, once I had the main melodies in midi form, I constructed the tracks exactly the same way I'd constructed the Jazz tracks, but leaned the style towards the rock/EDM hybrid I was aiming for.  I was still using Garageband's loops for drums, though I had also found some additional sources of drum loops, which I was using as well.  When I finished the Christmas album, I felt I had really used Garageband up to and past the point of its intended use.  And that was important.

Because, along the way, painting and photography had become impossible to pursue, owing to the state of my apartment at the time.  The business designing iPod products had reached a successful conclusion.  And I had decided to try devoting all my free time to the making of music.  I could see the possibility of doing original music in Garageband, and getting very good results, but I had to exhaust the program first.  I had to use it to it's very limits before I could begin to go beyond its scope, which was necessary if I was to create some truly original music.  Almost more importantly, this time, video would not be driving me to make music.  It would exist for itself, a departure for me, a scary one.

To be continued.