So yeah. I mean, obviously I can't read your mind and get to all the *real* reasons that you'd be wanting to move on, so I'll just kinda riff on my experience and hopefully it won't come out too narcissistic. I don't really have time to write this down in a narrative fashion, so I'm just going to bullet point some of the thoughts I still remember from that period.

• One of the things that I remember well is the space that was opened up in my mind for not having a clock ticking in the background until I hit the road again. I'd had that clock in my head for so long that it was strange to not have it there anymore. I imagine that getting out of jail must be really disorienting for the first little while.
• An interesting thing – my wife and I had been married for a couple years and together for several by this time. We owned a house and had two kids now, but we'd never really lived together until I quit that band. That was a revelation that took some trips to therapy to reveal, because “things should be great – I'm finally off the road, but things are actually terrible! WTF?”.
• I was also immediately struck by how I was able to form a bond with my oldest son that I'd never have been able to form if I hadn't quit. The lack of that ticking clock also meant that he could count on me being there for bedtime and reading stories and all that. There was no more Dad going out of town for a little while. This was wonderful.
• Along with this however came unemployment. I skipped out with an idea and a path to follow but not the means or skills to execute the idea, and my path was very high up on a hill from where I was at the time and required a lot of lost, spiritual bushwhacking to get to. This meant scrounging hard for freelance web dev work for the first year, and not making ends meet, which was brutal enough but...
• Couple that with what I remember most clearly from that period. This was 2010, and a *lot* of people were out of work, so there were more than a few stories in the media about this situation. The more thoughtful of them described the loss of “identity” that comes along with the loss of employment. I can only relate this to my own experience...
  • Being a musician is a very monastic pursuit in that we feel it as a calling from a higher power to follow this path.
  • It is, at the same time, a very self-centered pursuit in that you're basically going out and strutting like a rooster in front of a hall full of people every night and putting all other obligations on the back burner to do so. This requires pretty much total, all encompassing dedication on the part of the musician toward this pursuit. When you take that away (in my humble opinion), you're taking away much more than just a job and a lifestyle. It requires a shift in personal purpose – a mental, emotional, and spiritual retooling that was the most excruciatingly difficult thing I've ever been through. Couple this with the job market in 2010 and I definitely looked back and wondered if I'd done the right thing a lot. (even though I knew I'd done the right thing....)
  • Also, like I said yesterday, the letting go of that dream was really, really hard. I knew it would be, but the difference between committing to and doing is just as hard as the other major life commitments – marriage, fatherhood. After my share of those types of commitments, I realize that there is a strangely dissonant mental space between making and following through on these types of commitments.
• The gigging musician gets used to having people tell him how cool he is regardless of actual job perfomance. Turns out this is the opposite of how the rest of the world works. Removing this stimulus is actually a good thing, though. I wrote about this here – Pruning the Ego

I did a lot of yoga and had a lot of therapy for the first year because I needed something to hold on to. Then at this point, Tyler Grant and Billy and Drew basically saved my life by opening up that slot in ENB and then letting me fill it. My very first trip out with them I (seemingly randomly) landed 2 contracts and went from desititute to fully employed within 4 weeks.

Like I said in that post yesterday – it's complicated. I knew at the time that I was making the right decision. I did not know at that time how long the investment would take to actually come back, though. This was basically hubris, but I thought I could engineer a lucky career landing since I'd lived an extremely luck-filled life up to that point.

I've often considered this whole experience to be the actual transition to adulthood for me.

---

So this is not the cheeriest summary, right? But this was mostly the wartime account, which you'd expect to be burly. After that year, things started steadily improving.

• I found plenty of work once I actually learned enough about my new trade.
• We had #3 in 2012, shortly before ENB began to wind back down.
• I took a full time job, my first ever, in late 2012 because the pressure of working for myself while supporting a family of 5 was just a bit much. It felt sad at the time, but this job has turned out to largely be the team experience I always longed for in RRE, and I'd consider the past 2 years to be as fruitful a creative period as any I've ever had. I'm just not on a stage doing it. Rather, the stage is different and I don't have to pack up every night.
• I'm making grownup money now, which changes your outlook on life in a really crazy way when you don't have to constantly choose between paying the power bill and buying groceries.
• I have a really amazing relationship with my wife now, and I can tell you for a fact that we could not have gotten to this place with my still being in that situation.
• I have 3 of the coolest little boys, and I don't ever have to tell them I won't be home for a little while.
• I'm happy now. Even though it was fun, I was not happy then.
• I always knew that I didn't want to be on the road forever, but exact how to accomplish that didn't reveal itself to me until shortly before I began this blog (6 years ago now).

In short, the investment that I viewed it as at the time didn't work out *how* or *when* I wanted it to at the time, but that's the great thing about life. It has more than worked out – it has come back big time. These subtleties and complexities are what makes life what it is, yknow? Perhaps this is why so many people just keep on doing what they always do, whether they're happy with it or not. It also makes it hard to sum up in a Facebook post.

I salute you though, and anyone who decides to change something they're not at peace with. Please reach out if you ever want to.

#life

And I wonder – will you miss your old friends once you've proven what you're worth? And I wonder – when you're a big star, will you miss the Earth?

I heard some news this weekend that really shook me up – that one of my old musician acquiantances and his wife of several years had recently split up.

He's a young dude and his band is killing it, and I know first-hand how rough that is on a relationship, so it was not suprising at all. Yet somehow it was also simultaneously shocking.

It's brought up a lot of emotions and thoughts that I didn't have time to jot down, but I had this weird feeling all weekend. This feeling like I had to get off a plane that all my friends were on, and that plane later went down.

---

Another buddy of mine just moved to a new town, stocked with tons of music and musicians. He's trying to make a run at it, and is out and about meeting musicians and going to shows. It's causing a little bit of strain on his relationship, since his girl is out there for work, not to socialize.

I empathize with both parties. Once the music bug bites you, and god forbid you find some success with it, it's almost impossible to find anything to do with yourself that feels as meaningful as that. Pursuing music and playing music is one of the highest callings I've ever felt. I think it's kind of a miracle that I didn't go completely off the deep end when I walked away, and another miracle that I've managed to find a work situation and a home life that together have surpassed music in terms of how much, I dunno, living I get out of life now.

But on the other hand, I don't talk to God nearly as much as I did when I was playing music full time.

---

So yeah, I heard that news and my reaction was both really sad for them and really glad it wasn't me, and I'm guessing that's kinda what they call “survivor's guilt”. In my opinion, it's basically impossible to be the kind of man you want to be for your family at the same time that you're being the kind of musician that you want to be for yourself, and for that higher calling. That's why it feels sort of like a curse to me.

#music #life

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

And here we are, but first – a story...

---

Yesterday was my 4 year old's 5th birthday. Michelle and I go back and forth about who's going to take video and who's going to take stills for singing “Happy Birthday”, and decide I'll take the video.

We get up to the part where she's lighting the candle and my phone stops recording – “Your phone is full, please manage storage under blah blah blah...”. This is an iPhone 6+, bought it two months ago. Obviously I bought the 16GB model, but this was never a problem with my 5c so why would it be a problem with the 6+?

It has been a problem with my 6+. I just deleted all my music and podcasts off of the phone less than a week ago, and as you can tell from the screenshot, whatever is on here does not add up to 11.something GB of stuff. Not to mention, why is there only 11.something GB of available storage in the first place. The OS is taking up over a quarter of the disk space??

So I'm googling last night, trying to figure out what's taking up the space on my phone. Obviously something is cached it would seem to me, but I have no control over what this is or how to free up that space. Some random post advises me to backup and restore the phone, which seems really janky to me, but the poster says this will wipe the cached stuff and only leave “your stuff”. I decide to try it, even though I'm respecting myself a little less at this point (I'm a developer for pete's sake, not some non-technical moron who has to search the internet for how to free up storage on his phone. Or am i??).

I'm told by iTunes that I don't have enough free space on the phone to restore from the backup I've just made. I'm wasting my life being frustrated at a phone at this point, rather than spending time with my wife on our son's birthday.

I have a moment and I remember why I jumped to Apple gear in the first place...

---

After years of loyalty as a Windows user, after years of hating Justin Long's smug pre-hipster persona as the cool kid in the commercial opposite John Hodges, I bought a new HP laptop with Windows Vista on it. I felt betrayed. It was such a poor, clunky experience that I immediately regretted buying the laptop. Two weeks later I bought an iPhone, as chronicalled in part 1 of this series. It was, I can honestly say, life changing. It just worked. It didn't nag me, it didn't crash, it didn't hide useful features behind 3 submenus, it just worked. It catalyzed the entire career path I've been on for the 7 years since I bought it.

You can guess where this is going. My iPhone 6+ is no longer a device that “just works”. It does the exact opposite and costs me video of my 5 year old's birthday. I guess Marco Arment wrote about this a month ago, but I'm officially done paying this much money to be frustrated by technology.

---

I'll go ahead and say it – if Jobs were still alive, he would've fired the motherfucker who even suggested shipping their top-of-the-line phone with only 16GB of storage, not only because it makes for an obviously crappy user experience but because he had an apparently much clearer long view – that happy customers keep coming back and unhappy customers flee at the first opportunity.

My first opportunity is in 10 months when my T Mobile jump plan comes back around. I'll probably go retro, since I have less than a home screen's worth of apps installed on this thing anyway. The only ones I actually really use are Email, Twitter, and Reddit, and arguably all of those on a phone are just ways to kill time when I could be enjoying the life around me.

Life moves on.

#life #random #iphone

This shit is all very scary and confusing to you right now. You're about to walk the plank into the unknown. This will be the last “principled” career decision that you make up until the point that I'm writing you this, and you will learn a hell of a lot from it – about yourself, about your marriage, and about life in general. Shit's about to get really difficult for you, in a way that you sense now, and that's why you were up unable to sleep at 3am last night.

There will be no gentle landing, and that hail mary pass that you're hoping to connect with that idea of yours isn't going to connect, at least not as neatly as you need it to. And certainly not as quickly as you need it to.

I'm writing you now to let you know that it's going to be alright. You have this cocky hunch that the move you're making is going to be the best move you ever made, and it will be, mostly in ways that you can't really get yet. But you're going to pay for it, too.

The investment that you're making now and over the coming years is going to come back in a big way. Don't let knowing this make you work any less hard though – it's only under this pressure that you get where you need to go. It's only by putting more time into something that's more difficult than anything you've tried to do before that you get where you need to go.

Now go.

#life

I started this blog almost 6 years ago. Looking back it was basically chronicling the beginning of the darkest years of my life. It was also, however, chronicling the beginning of the most creative years that I've ever had. Lot of shit went down for me 5 years ago, and being a nice round-number-type anniversary I've been going back over these old posts a lot lately, especially the ones where I really took a lot of time to lay it out exactly right. The creative fire is one that I wrote almost exactly 5 years ago, and it startles me now how much I knew intrinsically about the journey that lay ahead of me. It took me a couple hours and several cups of coffee in a Boulder coffee shop to transcribe that passage, by the way, prior to one of my last CO shows. You were there, IIRC.

I truly thank God for that blog post I read, wherever it was, that said something to the effect of “start a blog”.

So, my man – start a blog. I firmly believe everyone should do it. Whether it's a thing you keep doing or not, it doesn't matter. You are going through a rough period right now. I had no idea how close the two of you were, and my heart hurts for you reading what you wrote on *someone else's blog*. You are of of my most intelligent musician friends (a big part of the reason I like you so much, even though we rarely get together), and I had no idea you were so articulate in print. Not that I'm surprised...

Articulate your grief more, friend. Write it down. It's not only therapeutic to analyze how you're feeling and why, you will be profoundly glad when this period is behind you and you can look back and truly remember exactly how you felt now. Because you wrote it down.

I love you, brother. JG

#life

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I promise I'm better at all aspects of what you're trying to sell me than anyone in your entire “company”.

Thank you, John Grubb

#life

Enlightenment is realizing that the straight job with the commute and the boss actually provides more of what you were seeking from the experience of being a professional grade musician than being in a professional grade band.

For the first time ever I'm part of a team with stated goals and long term plans laid out in service of attaining those goals. It's an amazing feeling that I wouldn't have had I not given the band thing the commitment that I did.

So thank you, Railroad Earth, for letting me have the experience that gives me the perspective that I have now.

And thank you, ABM teammates. Looking forward to it.

#life

Hey Dennis, I became a first time WNCW member during the Gospel Truth a few weeks ago. It really is a different feeling you get listening to a radio station that you're helping to support, but that's not my point...

I moved up to New Jersey for the Railroad Earth gig a very long time ago now, but I'm an App State alumni, class of 2001. I've been trying to get back down to somewhere in the WNCW listening area ever since but despite my best efforts, me and my family have gone and grown roots up here. I don't know if I'll ever make it back down there, and that makes me sad.

But lately, I've been listening to Goin Across the Mt every weekend on some NPR app on my phone and hearing your voice makes me a little less sad, so thank you.

#life

I love this blog. It's amazing how much I used to write. I was so young and so passionate! My ego was totally huge! I had no idea how much of a ride I was really in for! It's a good thing, too!!

So yeah. I got a job. I've been bouncing around a bunch of different technologies for the last few years, trying to figure out where to land, what to do, what to be. Emmitt-Nershi is kind of chilling for the time being, and I happened to find out this was going to be the case the day I got a call back from a recruiter to tell me that the interview that I went on a few days earlier wanted to talk to my references...

---

So let's back up a minute. I'd been out on my own (a rather precarious place to be), freelancing whatever web stuff I could get my hands on and playing some really fun bluegrass with ENB. We had our third back in April of last year, possibly the most handsome Grubb boy yet, although they're all pretty much in a league of their own as far as cuteness is concerned. You never realize the ways in which your life is going to change when this whole new-kid thing happens, but the biggest difference this time was that I had absolutely no time or energy to go and scare up new work. We had been at about 80% of bandwidth with 2 kids, and now we were permanently at about 140%. My earnest advice to young parents – two is enough. Maybe if we had family nearby or something, but damn.

So anyway, throughout the summer I'd been fielding emails and phone calls from recruiters, kinda curious what would stick. I got one in August or so asking if I might be interested in a full time gig. I was interested in not having to chase down new work and I was interested in a salary and benefits, so sure, what's the gig? It turned out to be a Drupal gig in the publishing business up here in Jersey, not NYC (where the vast majority of programming jobs up here are).

So to make a long story shorter so that I can finish it, it turns out they're working on a lot of really cool stuff at a very transitional time for the company. It's the publishing business, and perhaps you've heard a bit about the upheaval in that particular business sector lately? Anyway, this company has been around for decades and has a couple dozen different magazines, mostly really technical trade magazines, stuff for which I have no background. They have websites in support of all of those magazines though, which means about 24 websites – half of which had already been moved into a large D7 multisite install, and the other half of which were in the process of being migrated into the same base.

Of 120 people in the entire company, there are 3 Drupal developers, of which I'm one. There's a “web production” team, but what they actually do is build emails. There's a dedicated designer who has been doing the front end/theming stuff for all these sites that we're rolling out, but she's leaving next week for good. What that means is that I'll probably be put somewhat back in charge of the front end (where I started), but in the meantime I've been working with a dude named Mike who is exactly the guy I've been looking for for the last 4.5 years. He's really good, really patient, really free with his copious knowledge, and seems genuinely stoked to have me on board. And over the last 4 months or so, my skills have started really snowballing.

I still suck at this stuff, but I'm getting a lot better, and fast. I'm getting pretty comfortable with the Ops part of DevOps, and am even writing some decent Drupal code. I've been working on a contract project for the last 3 months and I can confidently say that it would probably be over my head if not for the stuff I'm being exposed to on this gig. If nothing else it's given me a lot more confidence that I actually know some stuff now. They in house bugtracker is called Redmine, which just happens to be a Rails thing. Nobody in the company knew Rails or Ruby server setup, so it's become mine. It's a huge PITA, but I'm learning a hell of a lot about this tiny little OSS community around Redmine, and how to run a production Ruby app that gets a fair amount of traffic. And the hell that being stuck in a Ruby deployment situation can be.

I was given a ginormous Dell laptop running Windows 7 as my work computer – the only thing that looked like it might be a hiccup in the awesomeness. Given that there are only 3 real developers in the entire company though, the corporate process and restrictions that I've been afraid of for the last 34 years were pretty much non-existent, at least as far as what I could do with my laptop were concerned. I installed a VM running Ubuntu 12.04 the second day and have been working in Ubuntu for 8 hours a day. This is in addition to working between 10 and 20 hours a week on the contract work that I still have, and unfortunately have to do to make the ends meet (supporting a family of 5 in NJ is expensive as it turns out). I don't think I could keep up a 55 hour week forever, but who knows? Practicing and practicing and practicing in the service of getting really, really good at something has pretty much been what I do since I've been a teenager, so in that regard I'm well equipped.

I finally feel like I'm at the station, though not on the train yet. This is the training ground I've been looking for for 4 years now. My mission for this year is to get really involved with the Drupal community. I didn't get very excited by D7, but D8 is looking like Drupal is finally going to broaden it's scope into a project that encompasses modern development techniques that are going to be useful beyond Drupal's borders – a rather big hangup of mine as far as putting eggs in the Drupal basket is concerned.

So anyway, that's about it for now. Need to play more music, but I will again some day.

#life

So here I sit, at the end of another brief tour, watching the sky get lighter outside the windows at the St. Louis airport. Listening to a bit of the new Bon Iver record, which is beyond terrific to the point of being maybe the record of the year for me. We'll see.

It's not that I haven't had much to say (though I haven't had quite as much to say), it's just that the time in which I used to say it has been filled by the consequence of my prayers for work being answered. I've been very, very busy this year and not a moment too soon. I jumped off my last gig in desperation; desperation at a job that I just wasn't feeling anymore and that finally qualified itself as being the wrong path. To wander that far down a path such as that one and then decide to bushwhack my way back up to where I could see the landscape again was a life/career move I'd probably have considered a bit more carefully had I known just how hard it would be. The undergrowth was dense. The way was dark. Had I not found the way back to be already overgrown I'd probably have turned around and asked for my old job back. Or maybe not.

Forgive all the flashy metaphor, but I've just driven 4 hours to the airport after a gig in the middle of Nowheresville, Missouri and I've got the perfect balance of coffee buzz, time, exhaustion, and an itch to write.

So anyway, I get the title question a lot this year. In short -

I split RRE with grand ideas and a grander mouth to broadcast them. The crusade was to put together the solution to the music industries problem. Because there weren't enough smart, capable, connected people working on the issue already, apparently. Part of last year's journey was a pretty extreme pruning of my ego, and it hurt. I had (and still sort of have) a pretty good idea about an open source angle to the music business that hasn't been done before, in my opinion because it explicitly doesn't make anyone any money except for the artists who implement the solution. I had a few other people convinced it was at least part of a good idea, and a few of them were kind enough to trot me in front of business types who could give me some feedback. The conversation generally ended shortly after they asked me “so how does it make money?”. Well, the idea is that it doesn't make you money. Kthx.

I understand of course, and learned a hell of a lot about early stage startups in the process of all this. Chiefly, I learned that I was seriously lacking in the ability to implement any ideas that I might have, either now or in the future. So I decided to fall back and work on what I could work on, which I chose to be the technical end of the equation. Always was good with computers.

I picked up a very few clients last year, those who were desperate enough to hire me. I went to a few networking things, mostly centered around Drupal, and went to several job interviews. I received some fairly harsh smackdowns at these interviews, typically during the technical part of the interview, and did not receive any jobs.

Somewhere around last November I was pretty damn close to the edge of “all I could take”. That's when I saw the ENB gig up for grabs, so I grabbed it. It wasn't much (by design) but it was a direction, it was good music with guys I already knew, it was at least a tiny bit of income. I started in February.

About 10 days into my tenure with ENB, I got a couple of emails on the same day that have turned out to be all the work I need. But it didn't stop there.

Somehow in the process of all this, I've become a fairly well-rounded, intermediate programmer, and one who has a pretty good sense of how to figure out the infinite number of problems that he's never encountered before. I've learned more programming languages, acronyms, protocols, tools, toolkits, best practices and shortcuts for being an effective (hireable) programmer than I could've guessed I'd be capable of. In April something amazing happened. I had a technical interview for a freelance gig based out of Austin TX that went astonishingly well. We talked about Git and Drupal and Ruby and handwriting SQL for half an hour. It was fun. I got the gig, and that was the little gig I got that month. I've been getting gigs left and right all year. It's insane. It's wonderful.

So basically, I'm making about 90% of my income on this computer here, and I do the ENB thing for fun and to stay connected and relevant to the scene I really care about. I've been in technical woodshedding mode all year, but I sense that it's about time to start trying to crack the nut that beat me this time last year. I've had a few things fall in my lap in the last couple weeks that are pointing me in that direction again, to try and see what I can come up with that could contribute to the music scene. I'm not trying to “save” it anymore. I'm not really sure that “saving” the music industry is what needs to happen right now anyway. As much as I am completely in LOVE with Spotify for the last month, they pay the artists about 1/10 of a piece of dog shit for royalties on the tunes that they stream. Nobody could make a living on what they pay out. Excuse me, no artist could ever make a living on what they pay out. I hear the labels have found a way to keep making nice profits in the midst of all this supposed bloodshed. So the brass ring is still sitting there, waiting to be grabbed.

#life #bluegrass