Drum Circles

           
            I went to a drum circle. I never felt more empty in my life. I got there a little late so I sat outside the circle with some other guy. He had a blank empty look on is face. He could have been a robot spy for all I knew.
            I grabbed a drum and sat on a love seat. A man walked up to me- without me knowing it, I had sat on his shirt. I apologized. His shirt looked like part of the couch to me.
            I started drumming and true to form at most drum circles no one was holding down the bass. I looked around the room and people were frantically drumming away. I was like having a room full of lead guitarists. Whatever, I'll hold down the bass.
         The man whose shirt I'd sat on kept looking over at me. I wasn't sure why. He looked just like a snake oil salesman.
          The hostess brought the drumming to a stop and suggested that people outside the circle find a seat in the circle. I got up to move toward an empty chair. I was reaching for it to sit down when the snake oil salesman cut in front of me and took it. I stood in disbelief. I would have said something if it weren't a drum circle in a respectable home. My idea of a drum circle is good vibes. I let it go, sort of.
           Now I was sitting behind the snake oil salesman, and the energy of the drumming picked up. I was pounding on my drum pretty hard. All the while I was thinking that my drum was the snake oil salesman's head. I'd look at his head and pound my drum left, right, left, right over and over. I really took it out on him. Deep down that's what I wanted to do, I just wanted to slap him silly. We were instant enemies in my mind.
           So much for good vibes at drum circles. Sometimes they're just pure evil.

Ideas

         
            I hit a lull in my writing. I haven't written a song in months and my blog ideas have dried up some. I have ideas, but they're not very good, so I'm letting them slide. I don't like to force things onto paper. It makes me feel funny inside as if something's wrong.
            Lately, I'll have a good idea but it will turn into a bad idea real quick. I'll try to fix it the best I can, but it doesn't always work out. Ideas have a point of reckoning where you have to decide whether to put the work in or abandon ship. I usually abort the mission if I have to try too hard. It sounds counter-intuitive, but that's the way it works.
           I never set timelines or completion dates. Nor do I set quotas for myself. It's not a numbers game to me. I'm amused when I hear someone say I want to write a song a day, or ten songs a month. I never understood that. It seems silly to me. I rather write a good song, however long it takes, then write a bad song in a day.
          Bad ideas tend to eliminate themselves eventually, at least in theory. I've written some horrible things, but at the time they had meaning and seemed to be good ideas. So you never really know. Your mind can play tricks on you. It's best to have someone you can trust to give you their honest opinion about your work. And even then I may or may not listen to them. That's the kind of guy I am, a regular stubborn know-it-all.