Brain Trauma: A Working Hypothesis

September 29th, 2009

I'm not quite claiming that brain damage is a good thing in general, but here's how it seems to have been the one constant catalyst of my life for the last 20+ years.

Age 6: Spinal meningitis sends a fever through the roof exposing my brain to dangerously high temperatures.

- Developed interest in tap-dancing
- Developed interest in drumming
- Began harmonizing obsessively
- Began switching songs from minor to major and vice-versa

Age 12: Heat-sickness after all day at an air show sends fever sky-high again.

- Self taught to play drums in a couple days
- Self taught to play basic guitar
- Began clogging lessons, skipped to second year classes in two weeks
- Quit school

Age 17: Massive concussion erases entire week of memory, slows speech semi-permanently, slows reading.

- Improved unnaturally fast at guitar over the span of a month (noted by several friends)
- Took GED test. Passed with honors with no junior high or high school education
- Absorbed massive amounts of information regarding recordings technology. Started engineering records professionally.

Age 26: Punched in the face by a mugger. Mild concussion. Forgot names of room mates temporarily.

- Quit band and enrolled in acting school
- Moved to New England
- Started writing essays
- Took SAT, Almost perfect scores in writing and reading sections
- Enrolled in writing class at Vanderbilt U. Straight A's

So maybe it's all in my head. Or maybe it's all in my head!

Always Love

September 28th, 2009

Always love. Hate will get you every time. Always love. Even when you want to fight.

Nice words, huh? Easier said than done. I've wanted to love for a long time, and honestly sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't I like to think I'm getting better at it, but not without thousands of hours of practice.

Honestly, I still haven't nailed down how to love in every environment. For example when I lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey for 3 months this year it was all I could do not to fight. It's a really oppressive place, see. Where I am right now it a very supportive and positive place, and my love generators are firing a lot anyway naturally, so it's easy to push them over the edge into constant yesness.

But I will say that in every phase of love I go through it seems to become easier and easier to embrace everything and say “perfect!”, so that's why I think practicing a lot really does help. So I'll keep doing this. It makes me really happy.

So keep practicing!

I love you.

Crazy, I'm Crazy for Feeling So Crazy

September 27th, 2009

Everyone has reasonable thoughts and unreasonable/absurd thoughts. Lets define “crazy” as the inability to identify the unreasonable thoughts as such. Furthermore, let's categorize different degrees of crazy according to different degrees of awareness of the absurdity of one's thoughts.

Now, on a scale of 1-10, how crazy are you?

That's right! 1! The only possible answer! See? It's all a trick to keep a brutha down! Ain't no such thing as crazy!

I biked to Brooklyn again tonight. It takes 45 minutes by bike. Pretty much the same as the subway.

Today was beautiful. In my mind and in my universe. Goodnight.

Wielding a Bicycle Chain...

September 24th, 2009

As children, my brother and I spent more time on bicycles than we spent doing anything else (besides sleeping). We rode obsessively for the better part of a decade. Many times my first thoughts upon waking would be looking forward to just being in motion on my bicycle. Hours a day, day after day, summer after sweltering summer, we rode (and crashed) our bikes with Christmas-morning-like enthusiasm.

Until I was 10 years old my bikes were all comprised of junked components welded together by my grandfather, a detail which seems much more special to me now than it ever did as a kid. The other detail I wasn't keen to was that the bikes were all extraordinarily heavy and ill-geared. I just knew they worked. Over the years they were thrown to the ground, launched off ramps, tumbled down hills, left in the rain and snow, and recycled through 4 children. And they just kept on working. I don't actually recall one structural failure of any kind.

Then I hit my mid-teens. I started driving and traveling longer distances for work and recreation. I still loved biking, but there are few towns in which it's really easy to cycle and mine was not one of them. In recent years, even when I had a nice bike and a nice day to ride, I'd use my car. It's “easy” and “fast”.

Although any experienced biker has passed hundreds of cars in stalled traffic, and knows the joy of parking-hastle-free travel, it wasn't until I moved to New York that I re-discovered the child-like joy of regular cycling and many of the true benefits of donning a helmet and wielding a bicycle.

I showed up in New York two weeks ago with a duffel-bag and a $130 bike and felt like a kid again. I actually always feel like a kid, but that's another story. I started small, biking down the designated safety-zone, the greenway for bikes and pedestrians. I live right by it so there's no hazardous transit to safety. After a few ventures down the length of Manhattan, I branched out onto the streets. That's when my long-forgotted instincts began to kick in. Over the following few days I became more than the cyclist I thought I was. The childhood decade of cycling muscle-memory came flooding back, and I found myself in moment after moment of speedy bliss! You've heard this sort of thing before, but there really is some kind of zen state I reach after a few minutes zipping around on a bike. It's not really calm, but very focused and alert, more balanced, and with a quicker reaction time.

It took me all of 10 days to muster up the courage to bike from the upper west side to Brooklyn. Not on the greenway; I've already become bored by it's safety. I've been barreling right down Broadway, it's the most direct shot from where I live and work, to where I go to school. Fortunately it's also the most fun.

I've been dreaming of some pretty intense cycling trips for next summer. Have you been on a long bike trip? How long? What should I know?


Big Brother Noah

We'll Have You, Oh Yes, We'll Have You

September 23rd & 24th, 2009

The thing about dating overseas, is that it's totally different from dating in real face. It's not really that it's worse, it's just different. Depending what you're looking for in a relationship it may not fit your requirements, but that's not to say that it doesn't work for anyone at all. Here are benefits of a romantic relationship which are not negated by the overseas part:

-Consistent caring attentive contact
-Regular affirmation and moral support
-Constant contact with another perspective

Can you think of more? Post it!

Benefits of a long-distance relationship not found in zero-distance relationships include:

-Increased personal time
-Schedule flexibility and independence
-More money! (Yes, dates are expensive...but not on Skype!)

Can you think of more? Post it!

I've decided not to take the sub at all until I'm intimately familiar with this city. So many people who live her can get anywhere on a subway for aren't familiar with the geography. I want to connect all the dots...hopefully before it gets ass-cold!
_______________________________

Class yesterday was awesome! Maggie (my teacher) said my partner and I did very well in our exercises, and she said I brought the best activity. I'll tell you about that; we do this repetition exercise with our acting partner where we repeat eachother for a long time. It's interesting because the repetition sort of takes a life of it's own and you start to read all kinds of subtext in your partners behavior. The thing is, it's easy to get heady and start paying a lot of attention to yourself and getting all heady (bad for acting. To avoid this, we do a difficult activity while repeating so it absorbs to much brain power to get wrapped up in ourselves.

Anyway, I brought in my guitar and itunes and was teaching myself a really difficult guitar solo. It was really fun and worked out nicely.

Notes from yesterdays class include, but are not limited too:

-Let your partner play on you
-Take everything personally
-Fuck It
-Move on
-NOW
-Always connect.
-CONNECT, YOU SELF-ABSORBED ASSHOLE
-PERSONAL
-6
-(Scribbles)
-Not late, NOW
-Polite people are LATE
-I live here
-Difficult, Simple, Specific
-Rehearsal: DON'T FUCK AROUND

_________________________________________________


Pat and I went to Peacefood today. I think she enjoyed it and she met my boss, Eric. They really hit it off and got along great.

Finally, this evening I went to dinner with daughters family. Talking to the children, William and Wyatt, I began to notice many similarities between their upbringing and mine. They include:

-Home-schooling
-Taking care of a vast garden and orchard
-Baking their own bread
-Raising chickens and harvesting their eggs

Ways in which their upbringing differ from mine include:

-Lack of fundamentalist Christianity

Kudos, Warners. Kudos.



Oh Crap! Kevin just put up the video to Say Goodnight!

Late night on Maudlin Street

September 23rd, 2009

Dear Mom,

I met a fellow named Adam Levy. He's a phenominal guitarist and songwriter. He also plays guitar with Norah Jones. He said he'd love to play with me sometime, although I'm sure that will take some mental manifestation on my part. Luckily, I'm a pro at it!

Also, I met this singer (performing with Adam) named Leah Siegel. I meet singer-songwriters all the time in Nashville and most are pretty mediocre. Some are downright bad. Leah, is downright good and you should listen to her music.

New York Times dining section today: Vegan Fare, Spiced With Sophistication
Yes! Peacefood review was positive! (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/dining/23vegan.html?_r=1&ref=dining)

Also, I met some blogger for the CNN site who talked to my boss Eric today about blogging about us. I don't know if it was an interview, but whatever, it's neat.

And I had a great time practicing with my acting partner Vivien!

Also, at dinner the other night I met this nice lady who is a vocal coach. Apparently she works with lots of actors and such (she just got back in town from working with actors on a show called “Glee”. I hadn't heard of it, but this is a promo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIzimBcUUnY)

Anyway, once I accumulate some funds I think I will contact her about some coachage. Yes I would do the shit out of some musical theater. For that matter, I'd be happy to channel my clogging background through a tap-dancing filter and do some Fred Astaire!

And I biked to Brooklyn in the dark tonight and felt like a badass! I found this area of broadway that was all kinds of over-the-top lcd-screen and neon-lit and brimming with asian tourists. I think that's time square, or times square, or some such. I'll go back with I'm not dodging through traffic and 25 MPH on a bicycle.

I'm wearing a helmet.

Love,
Enoch

Tell Me That You've Heard Every Sound There Is

September 22nd, 2009

On Ice:

Northern folks like less ice in their cold beverages than southerners. There are several distinct possibilities here. 1.) It's not as hot here and therefore less threatening to frigidity, thus, less ice is typically needed to maintain coldage. 2.) People want more “bang for their buck” and are willing to forgo chill for beverage volume. 3.) The pace here is faster; it's not common to leisurely stretch a beverage out over the course of an hour, so there's no need to keep it cold that long.

On Yoga:

Apparently some of the things I've been doing with my body for fun since I was a child are advanced yoga moves.

On EMDR:

It's a kind of therapy which involves, through one method or another, drawing your eyes from side to side as you work through unresolved experiences. One of the methods uses sound. Low sounding beeps alternate ears, causing an automatic eye response. This is what happens during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. “Let me sleep on it” has real validity in this context. Sometimes, when memories have strong emotional content, our minds will react in such a way that we'll wake up before ever processing “filing away” these memories properly. That's where EMDR comes in.

On Stereo Recordings:

Until the late 50's all recordings were in mono, meaning the sound came from straight ahead of you. There is a reason stereo recordings took off in the way they did and are still popular. There is a reason the first stereo Beatles records were such a big deal to the generation that first experienced them: WORLD-WIDE EMDR THERAPY FOR EVERYONE. Aid in the EMDR effect, Beatles records were often hard-panned, meaning instruments and voices were panned to the furthest L/R points in the “stereo field”.

Those records healed people in a way unavailable before.