Last day of Mars, 2019.

I’m busy keeping a dying hashtag alive. Leave me alone.

Inspiration

As soon as I feel it inside me I like to regurgitate it in whatever format feels artistic as quickly as possible whenever I feel a statement has been called for.

Angst manifesting

Just saw a post in my neighbourhood social group site asking for donations of used handbags and purses for some goddamn charity or such.. Fuck you, I’ve only got one and you’re not getting it.

Things to do alone on holiday

watching porn on retina display in bed with morning coffee.

Eventually I do something

It can take me 5 years or longer to start and complete a lot of projects so I should just stop with the new year resolutions and such. This house still has a lot on the list but I am concerned most urgently with my personal needs.

The last time I had actual dental work done was when I lived in Los Angeles. It could have been 25 years ago. I have no idea of the actual date but I moved to Austin in 1997 and that’s 21 years and the last dentist visit was long before that.

There’s no excuse for it, really. I got caught up in a whirlwind of work and life in a new city. And shortly thereafter, the collapse of the company where I worked. Then I started smoking and drinking again which launched a decade of alcoholic excess during which time dental work was not a priority. My singular focus was making certain there was at least half a bottle of tequila in the house.

It has been almost 9 years since I collapsed on the patio and broke a number of bones in my face. This made brushing my teeth rather painful and nearly impossible on the upper left side where my cheek bone was broken. That was when the plaque started to build up.

Five years ago I did attempt to see a dentist. She recommended a deep cleaning of the teeth and along the gum line. However, she would not do the work on account of my high blood pressure. I tried various methods of lowering my BP but nothing worked. I had stopped drinking hard liquor entirely but the wine and beer were still impacting it along with the smoking.

I resolved in 2015 to do something about it, and again in 2016, and yet again in 2017. Being frustrated with myself, this was the year I decided to see a doctor and get this taken care of. I wanted to have the dental work completed before the end of the year. 

The blood pressure pills were helping but not solving the problem. Subsequently my doctor suggested I double the dosage which I started about a month ago. Unfortunately I have been extraordinarily busy at work and never scheduled the dental appointment. By early December it was fairly obvious this was going to get postponed into 2019. I wasn’t happy about it but at least the wheels were turning.

Near the end of the week before Christmas I started having sensitivity in the area where I have the plaque buildup. Nothing severe, just discomfort when rinsing with cold water for instance. Within a day or two, going into the weekend this became extremely painful, almost unbearable at times. Needless to say I had to find a dentist and with the holidays I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

The pain had begun to subside a little by Christmas Eve and Christmas day - at least enough for me to sleep at night.

On Boxing day I started making calls. One recorded message after another announcing they were closed until January. Finally, I found one who was open, had had a cancellation, and could see me that afternoon.

An x-ray revealed a crack along one of the upper teeth. The doctor had to schedule me for a crown which is due to happen this afternoon. He will have to clean the tooth and surrounding area, and then I can schedule another appointment for the remaining cleaning work and whitening. I have been so disgusted with my teeth and self-conscious for so long I am not sure how I’m going to feel when I see them cleaned up after so many years of neglect.

The good news is that I am getting started with this in 2018 as planned! Just barely! I am claiming that as a victory.

Self-created fashion dilemmas

Sometimes I wonder what the fuck I’m doing. For a guy who sometimes leaves the house only on Saturday and Sunday, and hardly ever for more than two hours, I own a ridiculous amount of clothing. There are at least 25 summer shirts and at least that many for milder weather and probably a dozen more for cool weather.

I’m trying to get in the habit of wearing a summer shirt under a mild weather shirt for cooler weather attire but the reality is that it would take me half a year just to wear everything due to the fact that I will often wear the same shirt both weekend days.  And why not? If I’m only wearing it for 2 hours on each weekend day, that’s just 4 hours of wearing time. I feel like 8 hours is required before something needs to be washed.

Perhaps I need to get in the habit of wearing these shirts when I’m not out of the house despite the fact that most of them are made to be seen in.  But if I like them, and I do, then why not wear them to please myself?  The bulk of the resistance is because I eat dinner on the sofa, after some drinks, and stains happen. On the other hand, I have stain removal products that seem to work so I need to let go of that fear.

Maybe I’ll start testing this idea with the shirts that are not at the top of my favourites list just to see how it goes.

I am also exploring the world of jumpers which have never been something I enjoyed wearing until I actually figured out how to wear them. Now that I have 4 or 5 of them another problem has been revealed. I can wear those over a summer t-shirt in lieu of many other cool weather shirts in my collection.

At least my fetish is largely confined to tops. I have about 4 jeans that I normally wear out, and my lineup of shoes is even more limited.  Unfortunately, I rarely wear jeans in the hot summer months and I own at least 15 pairs of shorts for that season. And over the course of two months I might rotate between 5 or 6 of them.  

I am not going to concern myself right now with summer attire in November. I can deal with that issue in about five months. My immediate goal is to see if I can start wearing more of these nice shirts during the winter, determine which ones are absolute faves and which are simply OK. Then maybe I’ll be able to whittle all this down to a manageable size. Or maybe I won't need to if I start wearing them at home on a daily basis. Maybe over the course of three weeks I could actually wear them all! What a concept!

One alternative is to simply not worry about it. Millions of people have all kinds of clothes they have only worn once or twice and will near wear again and yet they continue to hang there. I just don’t know that I can be one of those people. Either it gets worn or it goes out. I’m rather ruthless that way. I would much rather see eight shirts hanging that I adore rather than eight shirts I adore mixed in with 12 others that I simply like but wear once every two years.

We shall see how this goes. It’s something I can obsess about and we all know I need that!

Draining the spit valve

I cannot understand people who dislike jazz enough to make it known how much they dislike it. They have a screw loose. And people who love jazz have a bigger screw loose.

Jazz became big for me back in the 1990s when I was living and working in Los Angeles. Long Beach had a public radio station devoted to jazz which I discovered during the lengthy commutes and I became somewhat addicted to it. Prior to that I never gave jazz much thought other than a shrug of indifference at best. That’s rather odd being a child of the 1960s who was exposed to it in my early years — notably by its use in films and a British television series The Avengers which infatuated me for years.

During the 90s I went on to acquire a rather sizeable collection of jazz CDs. Some of them I still count among my faves regardless of genre while others I may have listened to once or twice. Granted, this was a period in my life where true hi-fi was absent thanks to an electrical storm and would get worse in years to come when my listening device was a desktop Bose radio/CD player. Many of them I acquired from one of those CD club memberships that would send you 13 CDs for a dollar or whatever, and then you were on the hook for another half dozen or so at full retail price.

I’ve never done well by loading up on music all at once. It is too much to absorb. CDs get heard once then moved aside for the next, and the next, and the next. So I’m glad those music clubs have faded into obscurity.  Meanwhile I have sat on this large collection of jazz now for well over 20 years.

About three years ago I finally got a true hi-fidelity sound system re-established with a nice turntable which shifted my attention even farther away from CDs for most of my listening.  Awhile back I started pulling CDs off the shelving with the idea of sorting through them, keeping what I do listen to, and trading in anything I don’t hold dear. For months now the CD collection has been a shambles. Once they were all neatly grouped on shelves with rock in one section, jazz in another, and a few oddball classical pieces stuck at the end. Now they are partially on shelves in the den, more on shelves in the foyer, and several dozen in boxes in the dining room.

As I’ve been sorting through them a number of times trying to make a decision about what to keep it occurred to me that perhaps it would be easier if I could determine why I want to get rid of them. That requires actually listening to them, or at least the first track or two, since many of them have not been played for two decades.

This has resulted in yet another revelation of sorts. I’m looking at all this stuff and realising that I have a huge amount of contemporary artists who were still newbies on the scene in the 1990s. Reading the liner notes I noticed many of them are doing their own versions or interpretations of works by true jazz masters from the past, and I don’t actually own very many of those, and frankly there are many I’m not even familiar with except through the works of others.

Ornette Coleman. There’s one. I find myself really wanting to get my hands on some of his stuff. Maybe even get it on vinyl.

Another thing I have noticed from reading the liner notes is there’s a ridiculous amount of collaboration between these people. Thanks to the CD club membership I have all these CDs by Joshua Redman, Cyrus Chestnut, Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Wynton Marsalis, and more, and you want to hear something funny? They all play on each other’s albums!

Nicholas Peyton with special guests Roy Hargrove, Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman.

Christian McBride’s debut album features Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, and Cyrus Chestnut.

The Roy Hargrove Quintet featuring Branford Marsalis, Joshua Redman, and Cyrus Chestnut!

For fuck’s sake! Can you spell incest?

I’m not knocking it. These are all accomplished musicians in what is apparently a very tight-knit community of jazz lovers often paying homage to compositions of jazz legends I do not own!  At the very least I should probably investigate what all the fuss is about if I’m going to call myself a fan of jazz. To be clear, I’m not completely bereft of exposure. I have some Miles Davis, Coltrane, Basie, and others. But there’s so much more.  And actually a few albums in my collection are by newer original composers I throughly enjoy and those have actually seen multiple playings through the years.

One album I played today totally blew my head off. Jimmy Smith’s Damn from 1995. This was probably one of more than a dozen from the CD club that got lost in the shuffle. Jimmy Smith was old school, born in 1925 and he was one with the Hammond B-3 organ.  Ironically (or not), his 1995 release featured the following:  Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Peyton, and Christian McBride doing songs by Horace Silver, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, James Brown, and more.  But it works and this one is a definite keeper.

I guess my point is that this process is a lot more complex than I imagined and I’m going to need to listen to a lot of jazz before I determine what can actually be sent away.

Eventually I plan to get some shelving for this stuff and get everything back in alphabetical order. Maybe. I think I love jazz so much I might want to have jazz vocals grouped separately from jazz instrumental works. This is going to take longer than I thought. And once I have all the jazz sorted out I'll get going on downsizing the rock CD collection.

Maybe that won't take so long. Will I need to listen to every Marilyn Manson CD to decide which, if any, to keep? One never knows.