I, the Preacher

“There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour.  This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.”

I rarely pick up the guitar anymore.  My small (but upscale) collection of three guitars is neatly stacked in a corner of my unfinished basement, laying on an outdoor rug we used to have under our dining table to keep the kids’ food spills off the carpet.  I visit occasionally to check intonation and re-fill the humidifying sponges that keep the guitars from cracking in the dry Utah climate.  But I don’t play much.  Sometimes I feel like Rufus Sewell must have felt in “Uncorked” when Nigel Hawthorne asked “What force in creation is strong enough to persuade someone who can play the guitar you just played to dump that guitar in a cellar?”

My love of guitars is deep.  Each of my instruments, past and present, has a story.  One that comes to mind is my old Fender Stratocaster, which I bought at Herger music in Provo in 1996.  I bought it out of necessity: I had been playing electric guitar on my uncle’s 1980’s Fender Mustang, but the finish was gone and the neck pickup was hopelessly dead, so it was time for a new guitar.

I had a part-time job in high school, and had enough money saved up.  I went to the Herger shop with a friend one Saturday, and after three hours of admiring rows of brand new Fenders, Gibsons, and Paul Reed Smiths and cardboard cutouts of Slash, Jimmy Vaughan, and Mark Knopfler, I walked out $315 poorer with a fire engine red Mexican Fender Stratocaster.

That guitar was a beauty, and I think it had magical powers.  Somehow, my dad could hear me playing it at 1:30 in the morning from one floor and four rooms away in our house, even without an amp.  I didn’t have a case for it, so I dragged my Strat around wrapped up in an old flowered bed sheet to keep it from getting scratched.  I never trimmed the strings at the nut end of the guitar, and they stuck out 2 feet in all directions.  Very sharp.  People always said that some poor dog was going to get an eye poked out.

But I loved it.  Even though it was a lower end guitar, it was a Fender, it was red, and it was mine.

I don’t have it anymore.  In 2001, about five years after my visit to Herger, I sold my Strat to a pawn shop the week after I broke up with my first girlfriend.  I had spent the night after we broke up drivering (a combination of wandering a driving) around Provo, thinking how the roads and buildings I had been over thousands of times before looked so different.  It was a strange feeling.  It was as if my vision had collapsed to two dimensions.  Nothing I saw or felt had any depth.

I sat numbly at my desk for the next three days with my headphones on, listening to the Vertical Horizon song “You Say” over and over and over and over.  A new semester of college had started, but I didn’t see any point in going to class.  I didn’t see much point in anything.  Everything was dark.

I wanted to act out and do something emotionally jarring, something crazy that would help me feel like I was still in control.  Kind of like smashing your finger with a hammer to forget about a toothache.  So that Saturday I packed up my red Fender Stratocaster, the only thing of any value I owned in the world, and drove  to P & S pawn on 300 South in Provo.  The man in the pawn shop opened up a big blue book, leafed through it to the guitar section, squinted for a moment, and said "$70.”  I was so determined to do something stupid that I hardly thought twice about it.  I took the $70 and left my guitar with him.  It was one of those things that you do when you don’t know what else to do.  I hope it has a good home somewhere.

Other guitars have come and gone, and I’m now down to three: a Norman B20 acoustic with an aftermarket Fishman Matrix 2 pickup, a Trans Amber Gibson Les Paul Standard with a 50’s neck, and a Fender Aerodyne J-Bass.  Even though I don’t play much anymore, I do try to take care of my instruments.  I think I’m subsconsciously trying to preserve them, keep them in the state they are in, so that at some future day when little ones aren't little anymore and my career is more of a souvenir than a prospect, I will be able to pick up my guitar habit again as if time had not passed.

I do play occasionally, partly in an attempt to retain proficiency, and partly in an attempt to remember what it felt like to be me ten years ago.  I always practice the same way.  I pull out the guitar and tuner and strum an E chord, make a few adjustments, strum a D chord, make few more adjustments, and hide the tuner back in its special compartment in the guitar case.

Then I play scales in the A position.  I go right up the A major scale: A Ionian, B Dorian, C# Phrygian, D Lydian, E Mixolydian, F# Aeolian, Ab Locrian.  Then the G harmonic minor scale and all of its modes.  Then B minor pentatonic (the “blues scale”).  I’ve never been tired of that scale and I never will be.

Finally, I’m ready to play something.  I try to learn new songs now and then.  I’ve recently been trying to learn “Echoes” by Pink Floyd.  It’s got an interesting chord progression in C# that ping-pongs between melodic minor and major scales.  It’s not difficult, and it’s one of those songs that’s both emotionally and intellectually appealing.  I love this song mostly because of two videos I’ve seen of Pink Floyd performing it: one from the “Live at Pompeii” movie (which you can see here), and the other from a 2006 performance at the Royal Albert Hall by David Gilmour and Richard Wright (which you can see here).

After 15-20 minutes on a new song, I end by playing through a few of the old songs I've been playing since high school.  They're mostly Beatles numbers: Blackbird, Revolution, Cry Baby Cry, Mother Nature's Son, Across the Universe, Here Comes the Sun, You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.  And then I'm done.  It isn't much, but playing guitar for as few minutes every now and then makes me feel like me again.  Makes me feel like there's something to live for.  And that's all Solomon, the wisest of the wise, wanted.  Something to flavor his day to day~

What About Normal People?

I drive home after work on the old highway.  I could pop the freeway and get home faster, but I prefer the scenic route, which takes me past the cemetery, climbs up and kisses the mountains, then descends into town past the multi-colored storefronts jumbled together along main street.  The plate glass windows in these rectangular brick structures make them look like oversized dioramas.  They were once family-owned drug stores, furniture stores, theaters, and meat markets.  Now they are mostly eclectic clothing retailers, who wanted these buildings for their “retro” vibe.

The highway continues past city hall and the new two-story library, past the grocery supermarket and the Walgreens, past the little Victorian houses that have been turned into thrift shops, and finally out of town until it ends at my house on the outskirts.  My drive home is one more opportunity for me to seek beauty in the simple things of life.

As I was driving home on the highway the other night, I saw a billboard (there are many of them) of a female soccer player accompanied by the caption:

“Kicked her way to the top.”

This message was followed by the italicized inscription: “Passion.”

The person in the picture was Mia Hamm, who (as a casual U.S. soccer fan) I recognized right away.  She’s famous.  Wikipedia says Mia scored more international goals in her career than any other player, male or female, in the history of U.S. soccer.  Mia also has more caps (a soccer noun meaning international match appearances) than any other female player in soccer history.  In short, Mia is regarded as one of the greatest soccer players, if not the greatest player, in the history of U.S. soccer.

The explicit suggestion of the billboard is that Mia achieved greatness because of her passion for playing soccer.  And I have no doubt that’s true.  The implicit suggestion, however, is that I, the billboard reader, can similarly excel if I have equal passion.

I’m not sure.  I am one who appreciates greatness.  I try to surround myself with it.  In my office, I have a framed print of the cover art from Abbey Road by the Beatles, IMHO the greatest band of all time.  On the shelf above my desk, I have a red leather bound copy of the Lord of the Rings, tour de force of J.R.R. Tolkien, whom I consider to be one of the greatest authors of all time (though perhaps not the greatest, it’s difficult for me to give anyone that distinction).

On my shelf at home I have a box-set the Star Wars movies, which I consider to be the greatest films ever produced.  I use a Lenovo laptop, an Apple iPad, and an Android smartphone, all of which I consider to be the greatest and best of their kind.  There’s some element of satisfaction in seeing and using these objects, and recognizing the superlative achievements of their creators.  It’s true, but sometimes hard to imagine, that human beings produced these things.  Mere mortals are capable of greatness.  And that greatness does not come without passion.

The problem comes when I consider this question: What about the normal people?  I’m a normal person.  Can normal people be great?  Because, let’s face it, very few of us achieve what Mia Hamm, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Tolkien, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs did.  And few of us would want to achieve it.  Achievements like that frequently require a tremendous sacrifice of time, money, relationships and sanity that we wouldn’t be willing to give.

Nevertheless, I still want to be great at something.  I’ve tried to be great at some things before.  When I was in junior high school, I tried to be great at basketball.  We had a driveway whose grade was not conducive to the installation of a basketball standard, so I became a basketball nomad in my neighborhood.

One of my favorite practice spots was a backboard that had been cemented into a rubber tire and sat upright in the cul-de-sac across the street from my house.  I would start at my front door and dribble across the street to shoot baskets.  It usually took a long time to get their, though, because each bounce of the ball had to be either between my legs or behind my back.  If I lost control of the ball, or if the ball bounced somewhere besides between my legs or behind my back, I had to go back to the front door and start over.  When I finally made it to the hoop and finished shooting baskets, I repeated the dribbling exercise back to the front door.  It was hard, and in the beginning it often took hours to get across the street and back.  But I got better, and after a while was able to handle a basketball like it was part of my body.

I wanted, more than anything, to make the school team.  When basketball tryouts came around my seventh grade year, I felt like I was ready.  This was the time when all of that hard work paid off.  And at first, it looked like it would.  I made the first cut.  But that was as far as I got.  I practiced more than ever, but in eighth grade I was cut after the first day.

I ninth grade, I thought I might have a better shot, since I now in a new school with new coaches to impress.  I had continued my dedication to practicing.  I made the first cut again, and I felt like this would be the year.

The second night of tryouts, we were asked to pair up with another tryer-outer and shoot free throws.  Each of us was to take 20 shots, and then come back and report how many we had made.  I paired up with my best friend (who had also made the first cut) and we gave it our best.  He went first.  He made 17 out of 20 for a respectable 85%.

Wanting to make the team so badly, nerves got to me and I missed my first four shots.  I eventually ended up making 13 out of 20, for a dismal 65%.

I knew that the coaches were not going to want a player of my height (at the time about 5’9”, not tall enough to play center or even power forward) that was a 65% free throw shooter.  So the obvious answer was to lie and say I had made more free throws.  That was, I was sure, the only chance I had of making the cut.  I wasn’t going to get greedy and say that I’d made every free throw, but 18/20 seemed like a believable number, so I was going to go with that.

I walked up to the assistant coach to report my (fake) results.  I waited my turn.  I spoke.  I had “18” halfway out of my mouth, but at the last second I bit down, pulled it back, and mumbled “13.”.  I don’t whether it was because some higher power was watching over me, or because my conscience was screaming, or because my best friend was standing there, or what.  But I didn’t tell the lie.  And I didn’t make the cut.  That was my last year trying out for the basketball team.

And so it has gone.  Later in high school I tried to be great at ballroom dance.  I took lessons, participated on formation teams, danced in national competitions, and traveled the western U.S. putting on shows.  But, in the end, I was too poor to afford private lessons and expensive costumes.  I never won a competition.

When I was in college I tried to be great at body building.  I lifted weights three hours a day at 24 Hour Fitness for four years, paid for an expensive personal trainer, ate a six-meal-a-day diet and drank dozens of gallons of vomit-worthy chocolatish protein water.  But in the end I was too embarrassed to go fake-baking or even take my shirt off.  I never competed.

A few years ago I tried to be a great recording artist.  I spent a year and about $8,000 that I didn’t have writing and recording a masterpiece, a rock opera based on the Harry Potter books.  I wrote for eight months, composing melodies and connecting instrumental leitmotifs.  After recording, I used six weeks of post-production to make sure that there wasn’t a single annoying sibilance anywhere in the entire two hour running time.  But in the end I lacked the marketing chops to get the album any exposure.  Only a handful of people have ever heard it.

What I’m trying to say is that I think I’m a passionate person, but my passion has never gotten me to greatness.  I’ve tried to kick my way to the top many times, but have always been a few kicks shy of a kata (I studied kung fu as well, but my teacher died of a brain aneurysm in the middle of my training and that was the end of that).  Why haven’t I been as successful as Mia?

What about the normal people like me?  Does a lack of great success imply an abundance of total failure?

I know a lot of great people.  My dad is one of them.  He’s never achieved anything “great,” and if you ask him, he’d probably tell you that he was a failure as a father and a businessman.  But he’s not.

Last November my family and I were about to be homeless.  With two young kids we were yearning for more space than our two bedroom townhome and 100 square foot yard could provide, so we put our townhome up for sale.  We hired a good realtor, created a listing on the MLS, priced to sell, and waited.

The house sat on the market for months.  We had lots of showings, but no offers.  When October came, we decided to take it off the market.  For some reason, we didn’t.

Out of nowhere, in November we had a showing and an offer in one day.  The offer was for our asking price, and we thought we’d be foolish not to take it.

There was one problem.  My wife, a passionate aficionado of Victorian and Craftsman architecture, had been through every suitable house in the area.  We had lose bidding wars for several of them (nicknamed the Dream House, the Boring House, the Yard House, and the Saxon House), but had lost each time.  With the winter approaching and the market at an ebb, we had nowhere to go.  And we had to be out of our townhome soon.

We lowered our standards in a fit of desperation and found a newer brick place.  Although it wasn’t antique and had several problems (it was a foreclosure), the masonry exterior was very attractive and the interior rooms were well organized.  Although it wasn’t what we wanted, we succumbed to the threat of homelessness and made an offer.

We had good credit, and hoped to close on the house immediately so that we could move in (the house was vacant) the day we moved out of our old place.  But we ran into another hitch.  The second-story wood deck on the back of the house was only half finished, and the bank’s inspector decided it wasn’t safe.  The joists were warped, uneven, and not properly supported, and there was no railing.  Our loan application tentatively denied pending deck repairs.

Repairing the deck was going to be difficult.  We had planned on spending all of our money on the down payment for the house so that we could get a lower interest rate.  We looked at our options, but it soon became clear that we would have to do the deck ourselves on the cheap.  Which really meant that I would have to do it myself.  I got nervous.  I’m not the handiest guy in the world, and my love of home improvement projects is right up there with my love of law school exams.  I didn’t have the first clue how to begin.

My dad came to the rescue.  He went out, bought all of the materials, hired a local kid to help him, and went to work.  After the first couple of days I joined him, and we worked for the rest of the week late into the nights.  Even with his help, however, I had a dark feeling that we weren’t going to make it.  The winter was about to set in, and we were moving slowly.  As each day went by, the feeling of depression got heavier and heavier.  We weren’t going to make it I thought.

On the last night before the house was the be re-inspected, we were working well after dark.  It looked hopeless.  I wanted to give up.  My dad worked on.

About 10:30 p.m., I was removing a post I had installed incorrectly.  I don’t know what I was thinking, because II was pulling as hard as I could on that 4x4 piece of redwood about six inches from my face.  And then it came.  I rammed it into my teeth about as hard as I could, nearly knocking myself out.  I reached up and touched my mouth, and it felt like my upper lip was gone.

It was so dark that we couldn’t really tell how much damage I had done to my face, although I could feel quite a bit of blood coming from my mouth.  There we were, it was nearly midnight, the deck wasn’t finished, the inspector was coming in the morning, and I was bleeding everywhere.  Things looked and felt hopeless.

My dad was unfazed.  He got back to work, and somehow we finished.  At about 11:15 p.m. we got the last piece of wood on.  I was sure that my soon-to-be neighbors would hate me forever for running power tools that late into the night.  But the thing was done and we were going home.

The next day was the inspection, and we passed.  My dad had sacrificed an entire week and a whole bunch of money, and didn’t get anything out of it for himself.  He didn’t get any recognition for what he did, no awards, nothing worldly.  But I will always remember and be grateful for him.

It’s late, and this post has gone on too long.  The wet November snow is decorating the ground outside.  I’ve just turned the gas fireplace off because I’m too hot.  Tomorrow I’ll probably spend most of the day cleaning bathrooms and grocery shopping with my kids.  Maybe, if the weather permits, I’ll have a little time to try and get some more of the Trex put down on the deck (a year later it’s still not done, but that’s another story) before the winter really sets in.  I won’t have much time, if any, for myself.

But I will have time to take pictures of the mountains.  I will have time to read “Ozma of Oz” to my 4-year-old daughter.  I will have time to throw my 2-year-old son up into the air.  I will have time to sit on the couch next to my wife and watch “American Pickers.”  I will have time to prepare my Sunday School lesson.  What else is there?

Quadrophenic, for a Moment

I thought I would like using Blogger on my iPad 2.  There’s something appealing about the idea of reclining in my half-painted living room/kitchen next to the gas insert fireplace, bespectacled and tapping away thoughtfully on my fruity white tablet.

Except, instead of tapping away thoughtfully I’m swearing away thoughtfully while I try to create coherent sentences.  Even if I’m able to type every word correctly on the iPad’s soft keyboard, iOS 5 will “help” me when it doesn’t recognize the word I typed by making a suggestion of a word it thinks I want to type.  If I don’t opt out of the suggestion, the word I meant to type gets replaced by the word Apple wants me to type.

I’m often looking at my hands rather than the screen when I type on the iPad, since I’m trying to make sure I push the right letters and there’s no tactile reassurance to guide my fingers.  But because my eyes aren’t on the road, I sometimes don’t notice auto-correct in the crosswalk until it’s too late.  For example, the other night I was trying to tap out the following tweet:

“Kids and I are reading Ozma of Oz.  Love those stories, and they’re great for little ears.”

Thanks to iOS’s helpful auto-correct feature, what I actually posted to Twitter said:

“Kids and I are reading Oxnard of Oz.  Love those stories, and they’re great for little ears.”

“Oxnard of Oz”?  Really?  What is that?  Never mind the fact that the iOS version of the tweet is funnier than my version.  I’m tired of my meaning being auto-corrected.  It feels like I’m living in a George Orwell novel.  Pass me my Nexus S 4G, man, and liberate me.  Oh wait, Android does the same auto-correct thing.  Crud.

So, to reduce my stress level, instead of tapping out the rest of this post on the iPad 2 in the Blogger mobile site or Quickoffice, I’ll be keying it out in Google Docs on a ThinkPad.  I’m not sure the sentences will be any more coherent, to be honest, but at least I’ll have a fighting chance.

I never thought I would quit music.  I took piano lessons from age 7-12, played the cornet in the 6th grade band (wanted to play saxophone, but we already owned a cornet), and sung in choir in junior high and high school.  All of that might point to a lifelong proclivity for music, even though I’m really not a talented musician (not as good as my brother anyway).  My obsession with music has been more that, an obsession, than a talent.

My real obsession with music took root when one day, at age 16, I heard a friend’s brother absentmindedly strumming the guitar.  He wasn’t playing anything complicated, probably a three chord progression.  The guitar wasn’t low end, but probably didn’t cost more than $300.  Nevertheless, his performance was a moment of epiphany for me, one of those rare instances in which I was able to understand something differently than I ever had before.

The only thing with which I could compare the experience, for the reader’s sake, is to the moment when you fall in love with a good friend, when you gaze at someone you’ve seen a million times before and suddenly, unexplainably, feel an attraction that’s never been there.  It’s an experience that’s impossible to anticipate or replicate, and extremely difficult to explain if you’ve never felt it before.  I’ll leave the comparison there.

As I absorbed the harmonic blend emanating from those steel strings, I suddenly appreciated the beauty of the instrument he was playing, and the rich, subtle timbre of the sounds it was capable of creating.  But more importantly I greatly admired the skill of the player, even though I, in my as-yet uneducated state, recognized that it was elementary.  Nevertheless, my eyes were fixed on his hands.  A thought materialized in my brain: “I ought to learn to do that.”  And with that thought came a plan and a vision of what my life was going to be from that day forward.

My mom had a caramel-colored guitar which she had taught herself to play, and which she occasionally slipped out of its cardboard case and strummed awhile.  As soon as I got home that night I located the instrument and dug around for the dog-eared guitar songbook my mom kept in the front closet with the piles of old vinyl records.

Ahh, those records.  I grew up with those records, which mainly consisted of the Osmonds, John Denver, Neil Sedaka, Manheim Steamroller, and the Carpenters.  None of which are in my own personal collection, even though I appreciate them as early influences.  But I digress.

I found the guitar book (it had a painting of Yanni on it which I think was actually supposed to be George Harrison), ripped it open, and found “Here Comes the Sun.”  I think I played about three hours that night, until my untrained fingers were in such pain that I could not coerce them to perform any more.  I didn’t sleep much that night.  I remember waking up over and over, my fingers in the kind of intense, achy pain that only a guitar player knows.  That pain would not subside for the next three weeks.

So powerful was the experience of watching that guitar performance, that guitar playing quickly became the main part of my self image.  As I’m sure is the case with most guitar players, I tried to start a band as soon as I had memorized three chords.  I got better at playing the guitar, eventually moving to electric guitar on a cheap Mexican Fender Strat.  I grew out my hair, shaved a lot less, started thinking in phrases like “my parents don’t understand me,” stayed out late at night with smelly touring musicians, and dreamed that my high school rock band (“Rash”) would make it big.  We actually did make it big, sort of.  We took second place in the high school battle of the bands.  That’s big, right?

Even though my dedication to music as a lifestyle has waxed and waned since that time, the rock musician part of my self image has never left me.  I’ve upgraded my guitars and owned various amplifiers.  I’ve mastered home recordings, posted podcasts, and performed rock operas.  I’ve owned, pawned, and re-owned thousands of dollars worth of music gear.  No matter what I’ve done, where I’ve been, I’ve always had the thought in the back of my mind that if I could just get some time, if I could just get a few days off, I would put together that superlative album, that meisterwerk that would turn heads and generate downloads.  I can’t express adequately express in words the intensity with which that longing has burned in me.

I’ve actually been working on for the past six years that was supposed to turn into that meisterwerk.  It’s a concept album called “Sky Burial” which follows two characters, David and Katherine, through a spiritual relationship that borrows religious aspects from various faiths, including Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity.

The story begins with David’s funeral.  David and Katherine are soul mates, and David dies while Katherine is away.  Before his death, David chooses to be buried in the sky (a Tibetan ritual, the gruesome details of which I won’t go into here), and a grieving Katherine follows the Drigung monks to the charnel grounds and witnesses the sky burial.

David, his spirit and body separated, is also witness to the burial, and his spirit follows the Eurasian griffons into the sky after the burial is complete.  He then visits the bejeweled house of the elephant man (combining Christian and Hindu aspects) and requests that the elephant man return him to the earth so that he can be with Katherine again.

The elephant man agrees to return David’s spirit to the earth, but warns David that this may be an unhappy experience.  Blissfully unconcerned with the elephant man’s warning, and yet feeling somehow melancholy, David follows a road between the clouds back to Katherine’s house on earth.

When David reaches Katherine he realizes that she cannot see or hear him, and that he can only communicate with her through her dreams.  The two are delighted with this arrangement at first, and find new depth to their relationship.  But it soon becomes apparent to David that despite their mutual love, their aphysical relationship is hurting Katherine because she is neglecting her waking life in favor of her intangible life with David.

Deeply hurt by the realization that he needs to move on and let Katherine live her life, David runs away and hides himself in the body of an airplane that crashed near the city where Katherine lives.  Depressed and secluded in the wreckage, he sees a ray of starlight that penetrates the twisted metal and hears the voice of the elephant man descending from the sky.  The elephant man explains that David knew, deep within himself, that he could never really be with Katherine again, and that his attempt to return to her, while understandable, was misguided.

The elephant man promises David that if he will return to the sky, he and Katherine will both be able to find peace.  David accepts this invitation, and starts up the road into the sky.  As he ascends, he looks back toward Katherine’s house and sees the light still on.  Unable to speak to her one last time in a dream, David finally feels that he is doing the right thing, and silently says goodbye to her.

I originally intended to arrange this album so that it could be performed by a single vocalist/guitarist, but as I began rehearsing the songs things started to go in a different direction.  I performed almost all of the songs from the album with my last band, The Ring of Scribes, over various shows that we played last year.  I had hoped to save my money and record the album at a studio sometime in the near future.

It’s not going to happen.  I’ve lately realized some things.  I’m 33 years old.  I am a husband and a father of a little girl and a little boy who need me.  I have a half-finished home that needs my attention, a career in the law that excites me, and a life that is incompatible with the time and dedication that such a project would require.

So a few weeks ago I quit.  Not just the album, but music altogether.  I forced the dream of making this album, and the other albums I surely would have written, out of my mind.  I grew up.  I retired.  It’s for the best~

Why I'm Doing This

Blogs come and go.  They’re easy to begin, and easy to end.

I’ve had several blogs.  I had a personal blog on my website, when I had a website (a travesty of design done mostly in Microsoft Publisher), on which I tried to write a few clever travel logs.

I had a second blog called “The Ring of Scribes,” where I tried to write about my intense and headachey musical projects.  That blog died a slow death.  In fact, I didn’t really bury it until last week.  It got a lot of hits because of some technical posts I did about music equipment, but there was never really much substance to it.

I had a third blog called “Admon Adaia,” a name which I made up by combining Hebrew names and was supposed to mean something like “the red earth is a witness of God.”  It was part of a story I had been writing, and still work on occasionally, about a person who is so old that he can’t remember anything at all about who he is or where he came from.  Eventually, when he finally faces death, he travels across the desert to find the secret of his near-immortality and gains some education and perspective along the way.

All these blogs are now dead, buried in some HTML graveyard in Asia no doubt.  They’re mostly gone because, as so many others have, I’ve realized that you have to write about what you know.  And what I know has never seemed worth writing about to me.

My days are mostly the same.  I get up around 6:30 a.m., shower, and download the latest news and tech podcasts to my iPod nano.  I get dressed in jeans, button up shirts, and a brown blazer, and drive to the historic Utah County Courthouse in my fading maroon 1996 Toyota Tercel (“Juliette” I call her) while listening to the podcasts.

I step into my office at about 7:30 a.m., a beautiful room with high ceilings and rich brown moldings left from the days when craftsmanship in architecture was still in demand.  There I am surrounded by the few things of worldly value I have collected or been given.  My grandmother’s uncle’s bar admission certificate, dated April 1911, hangs on one wall in its museum glassed frame, the one thing in my office that says “lawyer.”  On the desk is an antique cigar box, circa 1950, hand-enameled in a brilliant burnt orange, which I purchased down the street at the Cat’s Cradle antique shop for finishing my first year of law school.

Overhead on the hutch, leaning against the wall near the ceiling, is a 3D poster of John, Paul, George, and Ringo marching across Abbey Road in a funeral procession.  A few white shirts and a gray suit hang on a clothes rack against the back wall, and an ornamental globe is perched on a chest of drawers.

All this frames a large hardwood desk, which is the real thing of value in the office.  I spent a couple of hours polishing it up when I moved in, so impressed was I with its beauty.  Two weeks after I moved in it was almost destroyed when water mysteriously started pouring in from the ceiling, but I was quick enough to move it out of harm’s way (no easy feat) and dry it off before any warping occurred.

It’s a plain office, but it suits me.  I start my days off with prayer and meditation, and then move quickly on to my work as a public defender.  That part of my life is not plain, and is flavored with many secrets I will take to my grave.  But I am of course prohibited, both legally and morally, from discussing them here, and will have to leave my professional life alone on this blog.

I spend the evenings with my family, eating my wife’s delicious cooking and playing with the kids, and then about 8:30 I give the kids their baths, we read to them, sing with them, pray with them, and put them to bed.  At about 9:30 or 10:00, I have time to do what I want (it’s 11:26 p.m.) now.  Finally, it’s bedtime.

It’s not the romantic life of a traveler, and entrepreneur, a journalist, a musician, or an author.  Which is why I’ve always thought that it wasn’t worth writing about, at least not directly.  But I think I’ve realized that the spice of life is in finding the beauty in ordinary, everyday experiences.

So that’s why I’m starting a new blog.  To help me find the beauty in the commonplace.  To help me suck the marrow out of life, even when life is busy and seemingly monotonous.  To ponder and reflect.

I’ll end this post with a poem I wrote about plain, ordinary things, which I entered into the Utah State Poetry Society’s annual competition this year (it didn’t win).  I nicked the title from a Pink Floyd song, but not the concept, so I hope Roger will forgive me:

~Two Suns in the Sunset~

I asked for a room with a west-facing window
because I knew you would want to go
in the gentle glow
of a last summer's evening.

You always liked the sun-kissed colors best.

Fifty-three years ago
I promised I would never leave you alone
And now your breath is still
Your soul is at peace

And I have kept my promise.

In a moment I will break the news
to Winnie and Luke
Our two babies who are all grown up now
waiting at home for my telephone call.

But let it wait one more minute.

This is our last chance
to watch the clouds turn sunbeams into memories
and I want to keep it
just the two of us.

I will miss you, my love.

On warm sunlit evenings like this
I will miss you most of all.
In the restful July twilight
my aching will be greatest.

But I know you cannot stay.

So I gaze out the window frame
as you fade into the western sky
Radiant hope of humankind
and best friend saying goodbye

Two suns in the sunset~