Farewell Four Letter Friends . . .

In December my audio streaming service, Rdio, bit the dust . . . according to the company's design lead, Wilson Miner, the service was made for "snobby album purists," and I guess that's why it didn't thrive (the company filed for bankruptcy and Pandora bought what was left) and I guess that's also why I loved it and was willing to pay $4.99 a month for it-- I read Miner's quip in an article by Kevin Nguyen called "Burying Rdio, the Music App for Annoying Men" . . . and several days ago, while I was still in the process of mourning Rdio, I received a text message from PTel, my cheap mobile phone provider, and it's curtains for them as well . . . and this makes me quite sad, because they always provided Platinum level telecommunications (aside from the lack of service in Manchester, Vermont and the fact that I had to hold my phone out the window in my classroom in order to send a text message) and while this is serious stuff-- I've lost two pillars of my digital universe in less than a month's time-- I'll take solace in the fact that Netflix still works, and I'll encourage you to use Netflix to watch the funniest single episode of a sitcom ever made, "Charlie Work," which is the fourth episode of the tenth season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia . . . and you may be thinking: How can Dave claim he knows the funniest episode of any sitcom ever . . . how can I trust his opinion, when he can't even pick a good cell-phone company or a good music streaming service? and while I admit this is reasonable logic, I will humbly ask you to watch "Charlie Work," which has an insanely high rating on IMDB, and then if you can provide a single episode of a sitcom that you believe is funnier, and I will pit them head to head, and using my patented situation comedy arbitration method, I will determine an unbiased victor.

Dave vs. The Looming Specter of his Mortality

I was in a lousy mood last week. January really dragged-- lots of gray and damp weather. No joyful snowfall. The park is a muddy goose-shit filled swamp. The ticks haven't even gone dormant. And I was scheduled for an MRI on my shoulder on Friday. I expected bad news, as the doctor suspected a tear in either a rotator cuff injury or a labral tear. A rotator cuff injury would require serious PT and a labral tear would most likely need surgery.

My shoulder has been injured since the summer. I hurt it during a tennis match, screwing around with a topspin one-handed backhand. I can't get any juice on my serve (and I can't chuck a football with any velocity either). This shoulder injury (and my impending 50th birthday) have been really weighing on me. I'm not ready to hang up my racket yet. Beating my kids is too much fun-- and I've only got a few years left where I'll be able to do that (consistently). Or perhaps my run is over-- my shoulder burnt out-- and I won't get a chance to fade away.

I played indoor soccer well last Sunday, which should have bolstered my spirits-- but when I was crossing the ball, I caught the lip of a gym door with my toe-- and while I didn't hurt myself enough to stop playing, my ankle and knees were sore for days. I felt really old all week (until I drank too much Thursday night . . . oddly, Friday morning my knees were no longer sore).

I'm no dummy, so I started preparing for the worst a couple weeks ago. There's only one way to fight the looming specter of mortality: keep busy. My first project was to use my left hand as much as possible. Brushing my teeth, driving, pulling the wet laundry out of the washer, etc. I even started shooting darts left-handed-- which actually works fine unless I'm trying to hit the bullseye-- and I played tennis left-handed a couple times with my son Ian. My groundstrokes are pretty much the same-- I could always hit a decent lefty forehand and a lefty two-handed backhand is similar to a righty forehand-- but learning to serve lefthanded is a bitch. I went down to the park and practiced and I felt like a spaz. This article inspired me to keep at it. My left shoulder still has a lot of gas left in the tank, but I'll need a lot of mental fortitude to develop the fine motor skills necessary to play well lefty.

I've been preparing in several other ways for my impending midlife crisis. I don't want to resort to the typical shit: prostitutes, alcoholism, drag-racing, and dog-fighting, so I've implemented a preemptive strike on my mid-life crisis.

Project #1:

I've switched my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) from a PC to an iMac. I'm using Logic now instead of Cakewalk Sonar. I'm watching tutorial videos at the gym and learning a lot. I still don't know what I'm doing with Smart Tempo and Flex-Time, but I'm trying. Learning the new platform is keeping me off the streets and keeping my brain away from early onset dementia.

Project #2:

I'm reading some big books. I normally value quantity over quantity (aside form War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, and Infinite Jest). I'm barrelling through Uncle Tom's Cabin-- it's gripping-- and then I've got Tom Jones queued up on my Kindle.

In meatspace, I'm reading this absurd book.

This is mainly to irritate my fellow Philosophy teacher Stacey-- I've claimed that once I finish the book, she's not allowed to teach the class any long (unless she refers to me as The Philosophical Overlord). When I know Stacey's about to come into the office, I like to put my feet up, read something obtuse aloud, and brandish my new knowledge. A.C. Grayling is actually pretty entertaining-- for a philosopher-- although I skimmed the section on Empedocles.

Project #3:

Apparently, Google Play Music is going extinct. I've already been through this once with Rdio.

Remember Rdio?

No?

Serendipitously, my buddy Whitney just gave me a gift voucher for Spotify, so I've switched over. It's great, but I'm transferring playlists and massaging the algorithm-- so I'm spending a lot of time "hearting" songs and putting them on various playlists. I'm impressed with what Spotify spits out once you spend a little time on it. This project is not keeping me off the streets-- I use Spotify while I'm walking and driving-- so I'm working hard not to screw around with it while I'm driving and to look up once in a while when I'm crossing the street.

Project #4

So I was all depressed Thursday, because of the MRI on Friday. I drank too much and stayed out too late, and by the time I raced out of school and got to University Orthopedics, I was groggy and tired and hungry. They had a cooking show on in the waiting room. Guy Fieri ate various kinds of barbecued meats. By the time they called me, I was salivating.

They took me in, I put my valuables in a locker, and the guy told me the machine was a little loud. He handed me a pair of earphones. I lay on the sliding bed, my shoulder in the cup, and he slid me in. He gave me a little emergency switch and told me if I had any problem, to press it. I wondered why. Until I got in there.

I'm not sure if being tired and hungover was bane or blessing. The top of the cylinder was an inch or two from my nose. And the machine was LOUD. Not a little loud. SUPER-LOUD! Science-fiction loud. Weird grinding and banging and revving noises. And the music in the headphones was awful. Cheesy piano, occasionally interrupted by ads. Yuck. I didn't press the little button (or move at all) but I wanted to. Twenty-five minutes later, I was out and on my way to talk to the doctor.

While I waited, I could see the inside of my shoulder on the desktop. Looked fine to me.

Turns out I was right. Sort of. Fairly good news. No labral tear, no serious rotator cuff injury. Some arthritis, some bone cysts, and some swelling. Routine stuff. I didn't even need PT. I just had to do a bunch of exercises. And the doctor said I could play tennis! Right-handed! He said it might hurt a bit, and we could try a cortisone shot-- but I wasn't going to rupture anything. I would just be sore. If I really hurt it, I would know it.

This made me happy enough to get back to a project I've been putting on hold. I need a new tennis racket, an arm friendly one. If my right shoulder still hurts with the new racket, then I may still pursue playing left-handed. But I don't have to. I went to the gym today and did a bunch of shoulder exercises and I'm sore as hell. But I've eluded the looming specter another day.

I also think I need to make a doctor's appointment-- the appointment you make when you turn fifty-- and I think this is the appointment when the doctor will stick his finger up my ass.

Can't they just stick my ass in the MRI machine?

Primitive Struggles of Digital Man

Last week, after a year of touting Spotify, I had a sudden resurgence of interest in Pandora -- soccer is over and I actually have some time in my house now, and so I want my computer to spit out jazz guitar and ambient music and trip-hop songs while I do non-soccer things like reading and cooking and helping the kids with their homework -- but then I started to do some research, and there are some other music streaming services that do things similar to Pandora: Grooveshark, iTunes Radio, Google Play and the one I am liking the most so far: Rdio . . . I can't find any definitive opinions on which is the best, and so I am experimenting with all of them, in the hope that I will find one I really like and then actually pay for it (to assuage some of my guilt for pirating so much music in the past) but the big picture behind all this difficult "research" is this: in 2013, you don't need to own music.

Rdio Knows Me Better Than My Friends (and Pandora)

How did I survive this many years without stumbling upon the Finnish surf rock band Laika and the Cosmonauts?

Big Weird Musical Project

So I've listened to so much various music in the course of my lifetime--mainly jazz, indie rock, prog rock, alternative rock, punk rock, emo rock, psychedelic rock, garage rock, grunge rock, electronica, industrial rock, blues rock, jazz-fusion rock, new wave rock, and hip-hop-- and this eclecticism has been exponentially accelerated by platforms like Spotify and Rdio, and at this point, as I bumble into early onset dementia, I can't remember all the names of the albums that I enjoy (such as el Guincho's "Alegranza") and I don't have an array of CDs or records to peruse AND I am often talking to my Google speaker while cooking or talking to my phone while driving and trying to recall the name of the album I want to hear while engaged in some other activity, and so I have started making a spreadsheet, in the form of a Google Form, with the names of all these albums that I love (and the artist and genre) and then I'm going to print this massive list out and keep one print-out in the kitchen and one in the car and this list will serve as my CD case and then I can peruse the music I love and listen to a greater variety of albums (because Spotify prods you toward listening to the albums and music you've been listening to recently and their random function never goes deep into your liked albums and songs) but progress has been pretty slow-- I'm scrolling through my Spotify album list and slowly typing the information into the Google Sheet-- but the upside is that I am listening to a wider variety of music while I do this ludicrous task of trying to make my digital universe more analog.