She don't care no more, she gets paid on Friday

A bit of tiring day. Moved stuff around at work - filing cabinets, tables, a safe - and went grocery shopping afterward. My ride home was marred by a terrific amount of traffic. Frustrating. And even more frustrating was the phone call I had with a friend who thought we made concrete plans tonight when it was my assertion that we didn't. Put me in a conflicted kind of mood.

I'll probably work on music tonight. Been listening a lot to the songs I put down last week. I like them quite a bit. Some are more unpolished than others, to be sure, but I really like the songs themselves.

My experiment of sending songs to people was not a rousing success. My main intent was to send Scott songs because we'll be working on them together soon, but I figured I'd send a few to select others who I thought might enjoy them. One person responded.

Look, I wasn't expecting a cavalry of immediate praise; acknowledgement of receipt would have sufficed. "Hey, got the file" would have been better than the wall of silence I was met with. I'll be writing songs whether these people give a shit or not, but isn't it bad form to not even acknowledge the fact that someone shared a piece of himself with you? And it's not like I'm a ceaseless self-promoter, hawking my wares to all and sundry ad infinitum. As a confident and viable songwriter, I should probably be doing more of that, but I don't. In other words, It's rare that I share music with people and when I do it has more significance than if I was doing so constantly. Or something like that.

Artists are in a tricky position. On one hand you have to be sensitive in order to create effectively, on the other you have to be thick-skinned when facing the scrutiny of the public. Music is one of the few aspects of my life that I feel I'm adept at and make it mostly for the sheer pleasure of it. Yet, it's nice to get feedback, to be acknowledged.

I feel like I spend a lot of time supporting other people's endeavors. I'm not always successful at this and, despite my efforts, some may feel I've fallen short in that regard. I don't know, but I do know that I hardly extend myself to others. I kind of hate what I'm about to write because it sounds real fucking whiny, but there are only a couple of people that are close with me who show an interest in my life. You know, something along the lines of, "So, what have you been up to?".

To be frank, I'm okay with that most of the time because my life as constituted isn't chock full of exciting events (which is why I keep a blog - ha!). It really doesn't bother me that much, especially because I know my friends do care about me, but it does bother me when I share something I'm proud of and put care into and get zero response. It's rude and dismissive. Maybe I need perspective.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. I'm going to continue making music and there will be people who like it and there will be people who don't. There will be still others who are indifferent. It doesn't matter. It's all subjective anyway.

For the record, I'm not angry at anyone, but I am disappointed. It's a dangerous game to expect people to respond the way you'd like them to respond. That road is fraught with bad tidings. So, on the heels of this silence, I'm left wondering if the non-responders even listened to the songs. Maybe they couldn't be bothered. Or maybe they listened to the songs and hated them and didn't want to tell me. Or, better yet, maybe they're so in love with the songs that they feel like they need to avoid responding via email and instead sit down for a lengthy pow wow and go over all the wonderful things I created. Could it be that my songs had such a powerful effect on them that they were rendered speechless and unable to function in any other way? It's happened to me before. When I first heard "If I Had A Million Dollars", I was a drooling gimp for a month. Of course that wasn't the result of me enjoying the song.

I'm going to go make music and you can rest assured I will not be sending any of it to anyone barring Scott and maaayyybbeeee one or two select people. The rest can go fuck themselves.

Did I just say that. Seems I did. Ha!