What if? What if my brain exploded? Read below to see the aftermath

People procrastinate. We all do in one way, shape or form.

There's always "what if's?" Usually it's because of fear.

The "What if's" are usually bad. It's never "What if I enjoy this?" Oh my!

It's usually "What if I die"", "What if I lose?" and so on.

I'm guilty of it. But at this moment in my life, I am least affected by it. The "What if's" have gotten a bit more serious, but I have become more laid back.

Now I have thrown caution to the wind, while still keeping an eye on things so they don't orbit into chaos. But I'm letting whatever happens, happen.

You can only stop the water flow as high as the damn wall. Right now the water is starting to overflow the wall, and I'm enjoying the trickle, and can't wait for the torrent to break through.

I'm going to be busy. But I know it's going to be worth it.

Failure is an option. But success is where I'm heading. I know what I want, and what I don't. My what if's are more like "I can't wait". I have almost no fear, just a few nerves, which are okay. We're allowed to have butterflies in our stomach. We're only human.

What's the point

The prompt to this story has nothing to do with it, per sé. Truth is, yesterday I went to my office of my old IT business. The office is technically a glorified storage unit right now. I'm slowly shifting stuff out of it, but there's still a lot of things to clear out. However, I have until December to get it all out of there as this is where my rent is paid up to.

While at the office, I spoke to the other IT guy next door to me. Somehow the topic of time came up. He said that there are measurements for everything. However, time has always eluded people.

I retorted with "Well, time is made up, perhaps not time itself, but the value it has had put on it was made up based on observations over a long period of.... well... time. Everything is made up. It's all invented."

There was a moment of silence.

Much deep thought over what I just said. There was very little spoken, but a lot to digest.

Instead of 60 seconds in a minute, why not 75 or 80. Then maybe we'd only work 6 hours a day instead of 8. Don't do the maths on that, I could be way off. But that's the point. I could make up any number. The number 8 has that value because it was made up. Much in the same way one minute equals sixty seconds and not sixty one or more. Or less!

Prices are made up. When you decide to sell your house, there's no value on it. The real estate agent comes in and guesses a price based on what other agents guessed around your neighbourhood. A $5 dollar note is printed on the same piece of paper as the $50 note. So why are the two not the same value?

My house is just as nice as the one next door. But theirs might sell for $50,000 more. Why? They're both identical.

Words are made up too. They're all just stupid sounds when you think about it. Yet somehow we make them just right so we all understand each other.

The letter "E" makes an "eh" sound. But why doesn't it make a "joo" sound?

If you think that sounds silly, an "E" can't possibly make a "joo" sound. Then think about how in other languages an "X" has an "heh" sound, or the letter "J" makes a "ye" sound.

And when I later thought about it all, I asked myself, "What IS the point of it all?"

Why is there money when we use to live for hundreds if not thousands of years before hand using a barter system just fine?

Why do we have to "work" for someone else, so we can survive?

Think about that for a minute. Why do you work? To get money.

Why do you need money? To pay bills and buy things.

Why do you need to pay bills? Because you use other peoples things.

Why do you need to buy things? Because we want something or need it but don't have it.

Why do we need it? Because we've been told so.

What if everyone took their money out of the bank tomorrow and kept it under their pillow? All the banks would go broke. But how will you get paid? Well, it worked in the good ol' days when you got an actual pay packet. An envelope with money in it. In fact, I use to get paid like that only 10 years ago when I was a motorcycle mechanic.

Then I could use my money to save or to spend.

I still have to pay my bills. So I get some solar panels, cut myself off the grid and no longer have an electricity bill. Phone? Nah, just allow people to pop in if they're passing by, again, like the good ol' days.

What about land rates? Last time I looked, I bought my land. But I still have to pay someone else rates on my own land. And that someone else is the government. So there's almost no choice there. But what if you didn't pay your land rates? What's the point of the rates? I understand water rates, power, waste disposal. But land tax, on land I already bought and paid tax on when I bought it? Hmm, why?

What's the point?

It's all made up. Someone, one day decided to create land rates. And everyone paid it. And now, hundreds of years later, it has morphed from bully tactics of the chief or king to our dark overlords, otherwise known as Government.

I once read a book that suggested the more money you make, the more expenses you have. At the time I thought it was stupid. Now, I think it's even dumber!

Why? Because as your wages go up, so does the cost of living. I know when I bought my house 10 years ago. Our power bill was $140 per quarter. Now it's up around $320. Our water bill use to be $80 a quarter. Now it's $180. We could fill a grocery cart at the supermarket and not spend over $100. Now I spend $100 bucks and walk out with two plastic bags.

I don't want to make it sound like doom and gloom. But I can't help but think that a group of people, or in fact many groups of people someone pulled the wool over everyones eyes. And the general public is paying for it.

The other day I was listening to the radio and they were talking about the safety signs that go up in school areas to remind motorists to slow down, reducing or preventing the likelihood of children getting killed during the times when school is about to start, and finish. This gives children a safe period of time to walk home, or to the car, or cross the street.

The subject on the radio was about the cost of the signs. These signs are large, have flashing, high brightness LED's. And are also solar powered. A couple of three metre tall poles, and add some labour to erect each sign and according to our latest government information via the budget reports, each sign cost $90,000 to erect.

Ninety Thousand Dollars!!!

I think each sign is worth about $2000, and a lot of the cost would be shared between the labour hire and the solar panels. The rest is a $5 electronics kit from Dick Smith.

$90,000.00

Talk about making up stuff. Someone made that price up, and some other idiot agreed to it, spent millions on a couple of flashing lights and walked away, proud of themselves because they are looking after our community.

But then, my friend would say "But you voted for the government". Which makes it my problem because it was my choice. I voted for these idiots.

Truth is, the people I vote for never end up in power. But I don't even want to vote. Though I have to because it's compulsory.

The real truth is, I'm starting to lose the plot. I can't see the point of working so damn hard to enjoy what little time I have left in the day to enjoy my life.

Maybe that's a really negative way to look at things. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just the same old guy I always was. Realistic. Or I'm talking complete crap and you can tell me to shut up. Either way. I'm done for now.

Busy bee, busy Steve

I've been a busy boy. When aren't I?

Well, more busy than usual. In fact, busy enough to not even be able to get online and blog, read, email, chat, etc.

Craig and myself have been busy with gigs. I've been busy with the music school and general stuff around the house.

Craig and I have been performing for about the last 6 months as a duo act called "The Snakemen".

Here's some video of us performing at our latest gig this past Saturday. It was a charity event put on by a lovely young girl new in town who helped support us. Craig and I just like to play music. We throw in some covers, but it's mostly all Craig's original music. Modern Australian folk music, stories about past and present Australian heros, zeros and complete strangers.





And there's more video coming soon.

The battle within

There's another blog I read of a friendly acquaintance whom I see once in a while. He's a great guy with the same problems we all face every day. Life's course.


He wrote an entry that talked about a guy who went into the mountains and sat with Buddhists. And while he was there for other reasons, he soon started believing in what the Buddhists believed.


In the end, the resistance to change is futile. We are all influenced by our surroundings and as such, I wrote this reply to his blog entry.




The war inside each of us is the greatest battle of all.


Some people keep their battles inside, not bottled up. Just internal. Meditating and medicating themselves through life's course. Learning as we go, until we expire and move on to the next light.


Sadly, there are a whole lot of people who expose their battles for the world to see. Their war is fought on the outside, and unfortunately takes a few casualties with them, the ones they hurt around them as their mace of life turns around in circles. The carnage wrecking everyone else's life in their path.


There are things in life we can choose and there are things we can't avoid. The last 7/8ths of my life have been clobbered my people around me swinging their mace around and taking me with them. I'm on my own ride now. The first time in life where I know where I'm heading but I don't know where I'll end up.


Cheers
pipsqeek

Haven't I met you before?

Déjà vu. It means Already seen in French. is the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the recent past), although the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain.

This was taken from wikipedia.

Why bring it up? Because I'm a fellow who experiences this on a daily basis. Sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it is so profound that I almost know what the next word muttered will be.

I experienced a profound instance of Déjà vu the other day. I was at a Singer/Songwriter competition with my friend Craig. We perform a duo act full of original, modern, Australia, folk music. There were many other performers there that evening. And while I'm quite active in the music scene in Sydney, I'm not as well connected as people are lead to believe. To top things off, the other performers there that night were totally unfamiliar. I had never met them in my life.

Yet, when staring at the lovely Renae, I swear we had met before. I knew her and her face was vividly familiar. But how? She was from a town 300 kms away. A town I've passed through but never stayed in. My circle of friends, even the ones up past her way are not part of her circle of friends. So how can she look so familiar. So familiar in fact that I swear I know her. I'd bet my house on it, I'm as sure as day I know her.

Another performer that got up to play was Ben from Narabeen. I've never met him either. I don't travel to Narabeen. It's just not a place I go to. Ever. Yet there he was, and I'm staring at him too. Trying to figure out why he looks like someone I know too well.

Renae ended up sitting at our table and my wife spoke to her. We still don't know how I know her but we exchanged business cards and got chatting. We still have no idea. But either way, she's a nice, young and pretty girl with a great attitude. It's refreshing to see there are younger people out there that aren't bored, glued to the TV. They're out there performing live music and going out of their own way to do it.

Ben was the best sounding person on the evening. Better than us. Better than the guy who won first place, better than the guys who won second place, and better than the trio that won third. In fact, when Ben got up on stage and started to play and sing, on his own with his guitar, it was as if the stage lit up. He really made the place come alive. With previous performs just playing by numbers, as I like to call it. It's when you go on autopilot. When you just go in there, play your bit and walk off.

Ben and I exchanged business cards also, and I like how he did it too. Japanese style.

This is where he hands you his card with both hands and bows. You bow while you take the card with both hands. Nothing is said, you inspect the card as a sign of respect, place it safely in your wallet and then continue the conversation. I've always loved this greeting, though never stepped foot in Japan, I found it yet another familiar and comforting experience to have taken part in an official exchange of cards.

I see a lot of cool experiences with Ben coming soon. So watch this space.

From all that in one night, the last few days since then has had me wandering around working at the music school, which I'll have photos of soon. Teaching music and talking to people, all the while thinking about Renae and Ben. Two people I connected with and somehow have already met.

Maybe it was a past life. Maybe it's just that they're such cool, laid back easy going, fun loving musicians that I just got along with them so well that everything just clicked.

Or maybe it's what I've read about Déjà vu. It's that you subconciously want to meet people like this that when it happens in real life, you feel as though it has happened before because you've almost or perhaps have dreamt about it.

Either way, I like the idea I once invented about Déjà vu....

... Meeting someone for the first time that you have a familiar feeling about is because you have already met them once before, maybe 100 years ago, maybe 1000 years ago. And in that life, you were both musicians, perhaps you both even met in the same exact spot you met in 100 years ago, when the club use to be a factory making glass jars. Or 1000 years ago in a battle for territory, maybe you were just two kids who met on the field to play.

A lesson in Language - a prompt from Dizzy Dick

Who's Dizzy? This guy.

Dizzy wonders about stuff, much in the same way I do. He asked me to write something up about languages, a topic he covered not long ago because my comment on it was worthy.

I guess it was, so here's a story about languages.

English, being a language was my strongest subject in school. For years I argued my way into the top classes. I enjoyed English because it intrigued me how, when and why things were the way they were. Someone had to have figured it out. Someone had to have written the rule book. Starting with a capitol letter, punctuation and so on.

The least used characters in spoken languages are the colon and semi-colon. Most people don't know where and how to use them.

I knew in school. I also had no issues differentiating between the words "There", "Their" and "They're" and all the other words that sound exactly the same but are spelt differently and mean something different.

Don't confuse me with someone of intelligence. While I know the difference between the three words, I don't know what that difference is called. I also don't know what synonyms, antonyms, nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc are.

Probably because I was never taught it. And there lies the problem. The people that don't know the difference between there, their and they're were never taught it either.

So it's pretty fair, and stupidly obvious of me to say we don't know anything we haven't been taught.

Fair enough.

But why is Wednesday spelt the way it's spelt?

Why is there a silent "K" in knife, know, knee?

These were questions I asked in school. But no teacher had the answer. I was told to be quite and stop disrupting the class. I was also told a host of other words which I won't go into today.

Words are a funny thing. And that's only in English. There are words in other languages that don't exist. But they do in English.

Other languages don't have the problem of having three words sounding exactly the same but meaning different things. However, they do have an issue with the same word having different meanings when used in certain context, different context.

Yep, languages as a whole are pretty poorly designed. And that doesn't even take into account how the young kids of today speak English, using acronyms my generation invented for speaking on the Internet like "WTF, CBF, LOL, ROFL" and so on, now used in real conversation with people face to face.

Some people say that the youth of today are degrading the English language. As someone over 30, who speaks English "properly", I'd be quick to agree. But I don't and I can't.

I'll explain why. It's very simple actually. Think about this next time you shake your head at the illiterate and broken speech of some young hoodlum. Imagine what Shakespeare would think of your "proper" English and how degrading and illegible it is.

Languages change, some new ones can be invented, while there are cases of other languages disappearing, while some languages are based on older ones, they are seldom the same these days, and will be share less commonality in the future.

The truth is, language morphs, it's allowed to. What was spoken as little as 200 years ago is considered "funny". What we speak today will be read in ancient history and spoken of as a "funny" language. And what their ancestors read and hear will be considered "funny".

When you break it down further, and I'm going to hurt your brain for a moment... you'll realise that all language is a series of silly sounds someone invented. How on Earth we comprehend these silly sounds while not being able to understand others (ie: other languages) makes me wonder why there's such a difference at all. Regardless of how different our characters may be from English to Arabic, from Chinese to Armenian, we all have the same sounds. But the German word "Ausfart" to me means "Australian Fart" in German actually means an Entry or Exit point. And while I see humour in "Exit" point. It is furthest away from a fart, considering you'll see a sign displaying this word in Germany at nearly every freeway exit.

But when you break it down, the letter "A" has the same sound in German as it does in English. Following the "U" and the "S" there's nothing unusual there. And the rest of the word "fart". I just wanted to say that word. But seriously, again.... there's nothing unusual there. In fact, each character is pronounced pretty much as it would be in the English language.

Right... Well, I'm going to stop now because my brain is starting to hurt.

Cheerio! :)

Stranger things have happened

I'm sure everyone experiences a point in their lives when you sit up and go "whao!".

I had an experience like that last night. When I told my wife, she just shrugged it off like it happens to her every day. Anyway, I'll get to the story.

Yesterday was Friday, and when I looked at my calendar, I had a ton of stuff to do. But once the working day was over, all I had to do was pack the car with me musical instruments and head over to the studio for rehearsals and also auditions.

Since our singer is in Melbourne and we have had to fly him up for every gig, it has made performing for this project rather expensive. At the same time, our bouzouki player could not longer commit to the project and had to leave.

But the show must go on, and well... it kinda didn't for a few months. Five to be precise. When we got back together, we were all rusty. But that was over a month ago now, and we're back on form.

Being that we're back on top of it all, it was time to start looking for a local singer and maybe another bouzouki player. Bouzouki players all seem to have a similar trait, unorganised, non-committal. So we have put that idea to bed for now, and decided to see if we could find another musician to make up for it, with a different instrument.

No luck, however we did find a young kid who plays African Djembe. He's a whipper snapper. But he plays well. He doesn't get our jokes though. Either that or he doesn't find our immature sense of humour funny. After his first audition with us, he was thinking that perhaps this music was out of his league. So before he left, I told him about how when I first listened to the music, I thought "Oh shit, what have I got myself into?" I told him that my wife said "Well, you wanted a challenge, stop complaining now that one has come along. Get in there and take up the challenge." She was right. Hate that.

So far, the story is pretty ordinary. Nothing unusual there. Big deal.

Last night the kid returned. Glad to see he's going to give it a go.

There was one other thing about last night... a Sydney based singer. Val mentioned it was a female. No problem there. It might make us behave a bit more civilised. So, there we were last night, we got comfortable in our rehearsal room and started to just have a impromptu jam when this crazy girl with big hair bursts into the room announcing herself and asking where Val is.

I stopped her midway through her outburst. Pointing at her, saying "Get lost!!!! I know you!!!! What the hell are you going here?"

I had not seen this woman for about 4 to 5 years. I use to work with her when I was employed in IT. The craziness was overwhelming.

To top things off, I was checking out my Facebook account the other day and one of my friends on Facebook had her as a friend, and her face was on my page telling me she could be my friend. Funny part was, I clicked on the link and asked for her authorisation to be a friend.

Two days later, she's responded to a random advert we posted looking for a female singer and is standing right in front of me. I sense a big catch up happening soon.

We didn't get to hear too much of her last night, because she was still getting her head around the songs. But I have heard her perform before mainly as a singer/actor on stage in theatre productions. This is her main thing and responding to the advert we had online was something she decided to do purely for a change out of her normal cliché roles in theatre.

I was pleased to hear that because what we perform is different and challenging.

Last night turned out to be quite surreal. My bubble burst when I got home and my wife foiled my enthusiasm by saying "whoppedie doo" Not in those exact words, but to something of that extent.