solo piano 20100318

yelyah

Today sucked.

I had been working on a longer post to explain it. But I’ll basically just sum it up as follows [ed. note: consider that this was the shorter version. Haha]:

• I live in a part of town where noisy neighbors are a problem.
• I seem to be atypical as an artist, in that I’m not “helped” by life drama. It doesn’t generate new material for me. Instead, it locks me up.
• I was completely locked up today because some neighbors decided to leave their dogs outside all day barking and whining (even though they were home).
• I get extremely distracted by outside noises and there is no place in my house that is protected from outside noises. In fact, with today’s problem, I’m already in the room that was as far away from the problem, as I could be.
• It basically took all of my mental energy to… unclench… in order to write this piece.
• A lot of the drama is the fact that I don’t know what to do. Past experience has made it pretty clear that one or both of the people who own the dogs have mental problems, so I’m not about to start a war with a crazy person.
• It seems to be a problem that is escalating. As in, they’re leaving the dogs out more and more, and the dogs are teaching each other to get louder.
• Sadly, for me, there seems to be a tipping point where, once I’ve heard the noise enough I basically become gun shy and start to expect it. At that point, I become hypersensitive to it and I end up hearing it way more often than if this were the first (or a random) occurrence.

And basically I’m pissed because I woke up today with intentions to work on a song I was excited about. And then the dogs became a problem.

I even took a bike ride at one point because I wanted to work on the lyrics (and I figured I could juggle lyric writing and steering). I assumed the dogs would be back in the house by the time I got back but no.

So all of the enthusiasm for the song got gobbled up by the angst of “oh great, another long term noise problem”. And hence why I found it extremely difficult to change mental tracks long enough to write this.

Oy vey.