My Fat Wednesday Weight Loss Strategy

Several years ago I got assaulted. I didn’t provoke it, I didn’t get anyone angry at me, I wasn’t arguing politics nor religion with anyone, nor was I racist or abusive of anyone. They came from behind, sneaked up on me, and assaulted me, as cowards often do. When it happened I was walking to the soccer field to play football. I was an assuming simple fit white male in his late 30s. It happened during the day in the middle of a university campus. Before it I was quite fit, after it I developed some dysfunctional coping strategies that lead towards tremendous weight gain.

One of these coping strategies that I developed to cope with my pain and trauma of enduring violence was to go shopping every single day. Another strategy was to buy a lot of junk food. Another strategy was to buy coffee too often. Needless to say I was gaining weight and losing money. Within a year I gained 60lbs and was in debt a few thousand dollars. But I was happier than not doing these things. This coping strategy allowed me to forget what took place, to forget how “weak”, “pathetic” and a “loser” that I was. These thoughts were what I ascribed to myself after the ordeal. They won that fight, didn’t they? I kissed the ground while they laughed. Clearly I was the one who didn’t prepare for this fight my whole life.

Generally I spent my days back then playing football for 3-4 hours a day, then changing in the washrooms, eating from the food truck on the corner, and sitting comfortably at the libraries composing music on my laptop and studying from various books that were on the nearby shelves. I was a student of life and of many subjects as well as pursuing my hobbies. I wasn’t preparing for a fight, I wasn’t training in combat skills, I wasn’t using weapons. If anyone knew the fight was going to happen and saw how the two sides were living their lives, they’d say I was wasting my time. The bullies were training in martial arts, fighting amongst themselves and with thousands of others well before encountering me. The fight was won before it even began and I was always going to be on the losing end.

Back then, before the attacks on me, I didn’t shop often, hardly ever, except for food. I made lunch the night before and brought it to university in plastic containers, warming it up in the campus microwave at a building near the soccer field. The only reason I bought food at the food truck is because I loved the idea of socializing with others in front of the food truck, and the people selling the food were quite nice to chat with. Once or twice they even gave me a free lunch for how much they loved my company. I got to know about their children, families, all sorts of life details that make people glad to see each other. But after the assault on me I couldn’t face anyone and I withdrew. This is when I began shopping.

Some days I’d go three times to a coffee shop and twice to a fast food place. I was charging everything on my credit card and racked up quite the debt. My minimum monthly payments were over $250 and that’s just the interest, without lowering the balance. I had to make a change. Plus I couldn’t fit into most of my clothes anymore, let alone my favourite sports stuff. I went from size 34 shorts to size 42. Back then I weighted 180lbs but after the assault my weight skyrocketed to 260lbs. Something had to change because I didn’t like where this was heading. I was coping my way but it wasn’t the way I wanted to live. This new victim life style wasn’t ideal. I loved sports, I loved being physically active, but now I sat at home eating and watching Netflix all day and chatting online. This was a new me, one I didn’t approve of.

So I came up with a plan a while ago and have seen tremendous results. It started off as a joke. I called it Fat Wednesday diet. Every Wednesday, Burger King has a discount on Whoppers, which I love buying. And the big change was that I decided instead of buying fast food whenever I felt like it, to only buy it on Wednesdays. Either a Whopper or something else, doesn’t matter. But Wednesday was my fattening day. On all other days I would make food at home. Over time this diet evolved into an entire life style.

Next I tackled the coffee issue. I decided instead of buying coffee multiple times a day I would limit it at first to just one cafe visit a day. Then I lowered it even more to just Tuesdays and Saturdays. I also lowered how much caffeine I am consuming when I make coffee at home on other days by making it half half or going fully decaf. As well I added tea to my assortment of drinks. One of my other dysfunctional habits was that I was buying a 2L bottle of coke very often. I added this to my Fat Wednesday and decided to only have coke on Wednesdays with my Whopper or other fast food.

On my calendar I noticed that Tuesdays I buy coffee, Wednesdays I buy a meal, and Saturdays I buy a coffee.  This gave me an idea.  What if I bought something every single day of the week, this would give me that therapeutic shopping experience and a reason to go for walks every day. I would walk for an hour and then buy something. So I made Monday my grocery day. On Fridays I buy fresh salad ingredients from the market and Sundays I buy something sweet like a cookie. So what once was shopping whenever the mood struck me, became a budgeted and planned exercise in healing.

Shopping allows me to control my interactions with others, makes me feel safe in that I am not randomly going places, and it ensures I have money left in the bank. The Fat Wednesday diet is therefore me cooking at home and eating out only once per week. This is quite sensible and is what many experts recommend anyway so I’m good there. Most days for breakfast I make healthy oatmeal with fruit. For lunch I have a soup and a small sandwich, and dinner I have with my family. I don’t put sugar into my drinks, and only have artificial sweetener on Tuesdays and Saturdays in my coffees.  I don’t use too much salt, I don’t buy chips, candies, or anything with sugar in it, not even bottled sparkling water. I also don’t feel like I am giving anything up – this is how I was raised. If anything I am returning to my childhood roots with this diet. I eat fruit almost every day so I have no need for sweets. Fresh oranges and apples and strawberries keep me perfectly happy.

So far on this diet I have lost 15lbs, and have paid off one credit and canceled it and am working on paying off my other debt. I am less afraid, less need to cope, less suffering from trauma and more enjoying life and doing things almost as much as before the events.  I am back to composing music, and I am exercising at home almost daily. I do thirty minutes of Tai Chi almost every day, sometimes I do Qi Gong, sometimes I practice with a Kettlebell and dumbbells, too. Life is getting better the more I stick to the Fat Wednesday diet. Buying something different every day is also fun even if it isn’t anything expensive. People like me don’t need a lot to make us happy. For instance, when I do buy coffee it’s never at Starbucks. It’s never a $10 cup or a $5 cup. My coffee costs $2.50 and is freshly brewed. Otherwise I make it at home for pennies. My ultimate goal is to again wear size 34 or 36 shorts, to slim below 200lbs, and to again play soccer while listening to music.  I am slowly achieving my dreams again.

Drinking Beer As A High School Dropout

Here I am in my mid forties, sitting all alone in my home office and drinking beer and watching old video games for the Dreamcast console. I have spent the whole day on Twitter, avoiding my chores, projects, and hobbies. The first of April is coming and a huge decision looms over me – do I enroll in a high school course towards completing my OSSD? Do I try a third time even though I had to withdraw from class the previous two times? Do I want to admit that I’m such a big loser that I couldn’t even finish high school by trying, once again, to do what the rest of you did in your teenage years?

When I was a teenager, it was the mid-’90s and life was grand. I lived in North York (Toronto) and loved every single thing I did. My hobbies included learning Slackware 1.0 (Linux), programming in C++, downloading warez (games), and composing music in trackers in DOS. High school at the time offered programming in boring Turing, biology, chemistry and physics and geography – who cares!  What a bore!  Studying covalent bonds, whatever those were, didn’t seem half as interesting as how to get LILO (pre-GRUB) configured on my 386sx-16mhz machine with 4mb of RAM.  Before long I was skipping classes.

It got to the point where my Calculus teacher asked me why I skipped 80 of 88 classes that year. I had no answer, I just told him math didn’t interest me. This wasn’t the real truth, for I loved calculus. But what was I going to say to him? Gee, learning from a blackboard and paper and pen is lame and computers are the future? Everyone who was smart knew that Linux would be the future. Back then we didn’t have Google, or books at the library, so I had to learn everything the hard way. Through trial and error. I had to use the man pages a lot, too.  There weren’t forums the way there are now, and there definitely wasn’t AI nor experts I could collaborate with. Everything I had to learn by changing one line at a time with plenty of print statements, and this held true for configuration files as well as source code compiling.

Many years later, after I had dropped out of high school and got a job in Toronto’s tech industry I would excuse my bad decision of leaving high school by saying there simply wasn’t enough time. And it was easy enough to buy into this illusion. I first noticed my faulty thinking when I explained this lack of time to my grandma. I told her my daily activities included hanging out with friends, rollerblading, coding, writing music, and playing with Linux. My grandma looked at me stunned, and she said that I was wrong in how I looked at things. She reminded me of her experience in high school during World War II! She had to take a train to school, not a subway. And at that it was a cargo train, without seating. She had to do homework, but also house work to help with the family, she had to cook, sew, clean, etc. I never did any of this. All I ever did was sit and stared at a computer screen. When I thought about it seriously, what my grandma said made sense. Except I was listening to it 25-30 years after the fact. She said I had time for both, school and personal projects, just like she did back in the ‘40s.

This was difficult for me to accept. I had always told everyone as well as myself that I was following in the footsteps of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – dropouts who made it big in tech. I felt I had made it big, too. In my 20s I was making more money than those who finished university and had “wasted their lives earning a piece of paper” – as I used to explain.  This of course wasn’t the reality. When I was a teenager my parents divorced. And a way I dealt with that was by imbuing myself into computers. I would put on my headphones and stare at the screen doing work and so it was a form of escapism or avoidant behaviour. Going to school meant having to deal with realities at home, which clearly I didn’t want to do. Writing music was more fun than studying chemistry or biology or physics even, but I had time for both. I could have had my mom help me at the dinner table after dinner for an hour every day!  I could have done my home work, passed my exams, and still composed all the music I wanted. I would have still had time to hang out with friends and play video games with my sisters. My grandma was right. I lacked time management skills. I was also poorly coping with the family situation.

Oddly enough there were no councillors calling my parents when I skipped class. My parents never talked to me about my missing of classes either. I don’t recall my dad ever asking me why I was home and working on Linux instead of at school. There was never a moment when a teacher asked me why I wasn’t showing up. I did still attend high school, but only the classes I liked. I would show up for lunch hour to hang out with friends, and gym was always what I was in. I sometimes attended economics as that interested me. I naturally thought tech would lead me towards running my own business. None of it ever materialized. THe lack of organizational skills I failed to learn in school lead towards a disorganized adult life. I had plenty of success in the tech world, but whenever something complex was asked of me I avoided it and skipped out. There were moments I even skipped out on work whenever a presentation was required of me. I got fired for it, too.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that this April I’ll be enrolling in high school classes as an adult. I have to admit to myself that for thirty something years I have been living wrongly. I have been pursuing things the wrong way, walking along the wrong path. I will need maybe five or six credits to graduate. I’m not looking forward to any of this. But it is time to set things right. It is time to finish high school. I believe my grandma was right. I believe I still have time for everything.

On Balance In Life

For as long as I can remember I had great balance in life. Or that is the image I’d like to project anyway. I don’t want to admit that I was obsessing over certain things because I feel the things that matter to me are universal and quality things in life. Above all else I value kindness, patience, hard work and love and peace. I am not a fan of conflicts, violence, or bullying nor do I like cheaters, criminals, or those who are in charge but really shouldn’t even work a lawnmower by themselves. So when my whole world came crashing down on me in my twenties it certainly was someone else’s fault and not a question of balance, right?

There I was, in my teen years, living in North York, in a street called Valleywoods – the nicest place I have ever seen in my entire life. We rented a townhouse, white with a black roof, we had a backyard that overlooked a forest with a river, too. It was heaven on Earth. During the day I’d go to school, middle school then high school, but in the afternoons I would spend time on my computer. I did everything available to me back then. Mind you this was before there was Google, YouTube tutorials or even books on digital art at the public library. I didn’t know anyone who was into computers as much as I was and so I had to painstakingly master every subject on my own.

In those years, unlike what popular media has you believing about teenage boys, I didn’t get into fights, I didn’t smoke nor do drugs, I didn’t drink or go to parties. Instead I was studying Linux, programming in several languages including assembler, I was doing 3D animation and mastering Photoshop image manipulation as well as composing over one thousand songs. I was at the top of the world! I also managed to squeeze into my days rollerblading almost every day for an hour, and in the evenings after dinner my best friend Abisaac would pick me up in his van and we’d pick up other friends and go places like Taco Bell or the movies. This is balance. Proper balance.

Through it all there was always my family with whom I spent time every day and even on weekends. My two sisters and I played a lot of Sega Genesis games, and watched shows like Babylon 5 and cartoons together. We bonded over these activities even though there was a seven year difference between us. I loved them dearly and it showed. When my parents got busy with work I would prepare dinner and even pick them up from school! This is a further extension of proper values and kindness that is so inherent in balance of life.

This all extended into my twenties when I worked for several tech companies here in Toronto. My day job involved sitting in a cubicle and dealing with various tech things. At first it was providing technical support for Sprint Canada’s dial-up Internet. Then it was building a database in Microsoft Access for Patriot Computers for an entire call center along with a graphical front-end and reporting tools for managers. Finally came my ISP job where I worked at a network operations centre (NOC) supporting Canada’s Internet backbone for a Tier-I provider known as UUNET Canada, and later Worldcom, which went bankrupt by $11B. Sensationalism is an American invention I think but this was a huge deal in the business world when it happened and soon after I left the company.

During this time I maintained balance in my life as well, despite being super busy. At home after work I continued my tech hobbies of composing music, digital art. I also had a fish tank and maintained it and enjoyed looking at the fish from time to time. My girlfriend was living with me and I enjoyed tremendously spending time with her. There was quite a few months when our Blockbuster Video habits of watching movies resulted in a bill of $500 just for VHS tapes and snacks in one month! Was this a lack of balance? Or a sign of tremendous joy? We watched a movie every night, we talked a lot, I composed a new song every day, programmed, worked 9-5 and was even the emergency on-call for the network after hours and at nights. I even managed to have a gym membership and with my work buddies we’d go several times a week.

And yet I wasn’t achieving anything of my dreams! It sounds like I had balance all figured out – but in reality none of it was fulfilling my needs. You see I didn’t want to have a girlfriend before I bought a house. I didn’t want to work for the same tech company for six years, I wanted to go explore other places of work after a year or two. I didn’t want to live in the same city all my life either, I wanted to move and explore. Despite working and playing so much I never once went on a single vacation to Hawaii or any other place. The only thing I could find to do with my vacation days at work was to take Fridays or Mondays off and have a longer weekend during which I wasted my time by playing XBOX games on my large CRT TV.  I wanted to have a dog, a backyard, a two storey house, with a tree and a garden. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to rollerblade, to play soccer, to hang out with friends and go to parties. I wanted to go to conferences for tech, for personal stuff, comic cons. I wanted to go to a concert or a sporting event every now and then. I didn’t do any of these things. How is that possible if I had a life of balance? I was approaching my thirties and my biggest dream, of having children, of being a father, wasn’t being realized.

The trouble was I am also disabled. I had cataracts at birth, whereas most people had them in their elderly years. So I had low vision my whole life and many things were inaccessible to me. Also the women who showed interest in me weren’t equally contributing to our relationships. For example, the woman that lived with me while I worked at UUNET didn’t work, didn’t study, didn’t do anything other than watch TV and eat food all day.  I was raised to believe that in love we accept the bad with the good so I tolerated this. And besides I loved her, I was not her father to tell her how to live her life. But here I was saving for a downpayment on a house, working overtime trying to save up money to build a family with her, and she was sitting there on the couch asking me what’s our next movie.  Day in and day out. It wasn’t working, it wasn’t fair towards me – I did all the work and she simply sat around like a kid enjoying herself – and so I ended it.  That’s when I noticed my life was out of balance with my dreams. Sure I had a job, and friends, and many computers, and a big TV and a surround sound system, but I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have photos of me on a beach with my dog running through the waves. I didn’t have home movies of a toddler growing up to be a man. I didn’t have what I wanted the most – love.

This was because my life was out of balance with things that mattered most to me. My life was balanced according to the normals of North American values. Money, job, shelter, food.  But not heart, spirit, soul.  So I started anew.  I quit my job, and went to find balance by living with my grandma for a few years. It was the most reinvigorating period of my life. And I did find balance in Belgrade once again as I knew I would. It was the most wonderful time in my life and I had the most fun that I can ever remember having. I slimmed down, gained muscle, helped my grandma declutter the attic and garage, took care of her when she needed it, played with local kids all day soccer, and in general relaxed composing music on my laptop. I found balance once again. And this balance didn’t depend on material things. It was based on real values from my dreams. Balance is only possible when it’s tied to our most inner cherished desires. Everything else is a lack of balance. It doesn’t matter how much money we have in the bank, nor how high a status we achieve in the corporate life. What matters is the heart.

A Song About Love

One of my new music projects is an album called The Four Horsemen. It is a concept album in that I envision talking about and composing about my feelings about my high school and middle school friends, people I knew in the ‘90s. I wish to express how I felt about them back then, how I feel about the distance, and how it makes me feel not talking to them any longer. Part of my feelings is friendship, but also love for the girls who chose to be part of my life back then.

The album will focus on the core four people of my life at that time, which were Bahman, Mikolaj and Glen, and the fourth being me obviously – hence the name The Four Horsemen. I envision writing a track for each of them individually and conveying what we went through together, and why things turned out the way they did. Back then I thought we all would be friends forever. But now, at the age of 45, I sit alone in my office wondering what they’re up to as we don’t talk anymore. Also some negativity was present and I hope to convey that with each song.

The rest of the tracks on TFH will be focused on my high school friends. People like Beez, Liban, Esmail, Mahyar, Wanda, Mike, Ben, Denuja – and others – were there others? Did anyone else go to that school except for us? The friendships were so amazing that I swear we were the only ones in the whole school. That’s at least how I remember it, empty classes, empty hallways, just us sitting in front of the swimming pool in the hallway next to the music room, playing cards, chatting, eating lunches. At that time, too, I thought we all would be friends forever – and here I am again in my office at the age of 45 all alone without any of them in my life. I think I was told one of them had cancer and was dying. Did he survive? Did I misunderstand? I have no idea. So I want to write what I felt, what I feel, and possibly touch upon the future where I see all of us being friends again, together, whoever is still alive – hopefully all.

So to get started on this goal I chose love as the theme for my first opening track. The song is called Terrorist Activity. Since I was madly in love with Wanda back then, it is about her and I even though we never dated. Here are the lyrics, and then I will discuss them.

Terrorist Activity, Terrorist Activity,
Terrorist Activity…

Wanda sat in my round, black bean-bag chair
Her pumpkin hair, like a wet rag
in her hands, neon-coloured Keyboard mag
Bjork on the cover, Wanda smiled.
oh yeah, a beautiful rag, I swear…

Terrorist Activity, night ops, sparks fly.
Air raid sirens, helicopters and screams.
Mortars one and two away, is it daylight?
The buildings sway but the nations still hold
terrorist activity, it’s here to stay.

History class, second row, there’s Wanda.
In her hands, orange juice, probably Five Alive
Imbued, chatting, didn’t have a clue.
I sat down, opened the textbook, another war.
This lesson was for us all.

Terrorist activity, it’s in the air tonight,
Phil Collins sings on CNN all day,
missiles away, nuclear subs are near.
Red flowers on a corner, another kid dead.
Terrorist activity, must be fun for the family.

I remember your beauty, so long long ago,
blue and green, spinning round, full of life,
now wobbling, red and black, dead as the night,
Dreams of us, three kids, a dog.
Oh Wanda why did we get old?

I want to rewind the film, all the way to Bjork,
to press play and live in your smile.
terrorist activity, forever.

In these lyrics, I go back and forth between two different time periods. I describe Wanda twice in the ‘90s, and I describe the current world full of terrorist and conflicts. Now I’m sure all those bad things existed back in the ‘90s, too, but back then as a teenager I didn’t watch the news so it was as if they didn’t exist. But these days I watch the news every day and world issues are of daily worry for me – a source of never-ending stress. The idea of the song is that the place where love was supposed to be in my life was filled by terrorist activity as reported by the news and as experienced here in Canada.  I describe a memory very dear to me when Wanda sat in my bedroom waiting for us all to get together for a night out, and I described the first moment I saw her at school in history class. But these events are juxtaposed upon world conflicts, and especially neat is the parallel between wars in the history book and current conflicts.

The closing paragraph is about the future, so technically there are three periods in these lyrics, the far past, the present and the future. And in this future I explain how my dream was to have a family with Wanda, even a dog, but instead the Earth will be wobbling and will be lifeless from all the wars. I imagine Wanda and I getting old in this world, each living our own lives separate from each other and imagine that we were separated by these terrorist forces that keep love from triumphing. I close the song by wishing to go back in time to that moment when she held the Bjork magazine in her hands, but then before I say I wish to pause life in that moment forever, before I can think of the word forever the phrase terrorist activity is inserted by the news and so a different message is all that remains of our dreamy love.

I am not yet sure how I will compose the music for this song. I have several ideas I’m thinking about. I can record it as a dark electronica track all the way through. However I am more interested in recording the war parts as dark and moody but the ‘90s memories of Wanda as cheerful. I have never really composed such a song before where I change the mood so drastically with each paragraph so it might be quite the challenge, which excites me. I love those types of compositions the most. I am also debating whether to make it a trip-hop track, slow down tempo, maybe even using vocoder for the lyrics. Unfortunately I don’t yet know how to use the vocoder very well, but I can learn I suppose. I have many options as I haven’t yet recorded a single note. The work awaits.

Superman Goes To Jog

My motivation is determined, in large part, by what I foresee myself accomplishing. If it’s something small I don’t even begin the task. If it’s monumental, I immediately drop every other project and get to work. I don’t plan my days, weekends, or quarters. I just wing it – that’s my time management philosophy, it’s always worked and I’ve always achieved more than most, until now. I am in a rut, the dumps, and I’m struggling to climb back to the top of my mountain top.

About ten years ago I was quite fat, weighing close to 260lbs. I am 5’10” and generally look best at around 185lbs even without a large muscle build-out.  But at 260lbs I am wobbling when I walk, my clothes don’t fit me right, I’m wearing baggy size 42 pants, as opposed to my more usual 34 or 36 shorts. When I am fat I don’t want to move, climbing stairs to my apartment feels like a chore so I take the elevator many times. Even carrying groceries and tying shoe laces feels like a difficult task where I have to hold my breath just to bend down to the shoes.  Being fat is quite limiting as it even negatively impacts my sleep. When I am fat I don’t enjoy sitting at the computer as I always want to go and exercise, only I don’t have the energy to so it’s a constant struggle. That’s when my super achieving ego kicks in. I call it my internal Superman.

My inner Superman makes me want to exercise at three times the intensity to make up for lost time. It makes me want to go for a jog when I haven’t even warmed up. It makes me want to lift 100s of pounds of weight at the gym when I haven’t even done a few lower reps. It makes me want to jog for 3 hours on the first run day of the season. Then when I have knee pains for a month, when my back hurts, and when I have a cold, then I think some secret magic voodoo was involved against me, that the whole world hates me, and then I stop working out. My inner Superman thinks he can do anything, and doesn’t care about the process. My inner Superman thinks I can jog even when it’s winter, rainy and slippery, or muddy even though I was blessed with disabled eyes and thus stuck for life with low vision at best.

I explained my predicament to my sister Lola a few years ago. You see I have two sisters, so I get double the advice, which I sometimes listen to. And I have started to listen to Lola’s jogging advice this year. First I began by changing my diet. I have swapped out pasta, butter chicken, and burgers for lunch, for soups and a boiled egg and a small sandwich – all of which I now make at home to save money and sanity. Then I took Lola’s excellent advice, as she is into running and has ran marathons several times. She told me to take it slowly at first, since I’m not a regular, and to ramp it up as I feel good in my body. Instead of jogging for 40 minutes in the cold she suggested I limit my first runs to 15 minutes at most. And even then to run for one minute and then walk for a minute. But the Superman inside me isn’t pleased with this. This feels like a pittance compared to what I want to achieve. Superman inside me wants to be an ultra-marathoner, to run 24 hours non-stop, to be the best jogger in existence. So for a few years now I’ve put off jogging because running and stopping makes me feel like I’m not really doing anything.

This was a great mistake and one I blame Superman for. He wants to achieve world shaking things, whereas I just want to fit back into my pants in my closet that have been waiting for me ever since my Kung Fu training days.  And then I had an epiphany!  What if Superman can be happy at the same time as I’m jogging properly? But how? How to appease his appetite for speed and duration while running start-stop like? Well, by looking into the future!  If I run without limits I will incur injuries and then I won’t be able to run or do other things at all, as has happened in the past. But if I take Lola’s advice, and start slowly and then over time ramp it up as I build stamina and muscles and muscle memory, in a year or two I’ll lose the weight and garner enough time jogging to be able to jog for a full hour non-stop!  After a year of start-stopping Superman will have what he wants. But I must endure the training period. And that’s only natural isn’t it? Training first, then success.

Superman doesn’t believe in that. In the movies about him we never see him training.  Or at least this was my mistake in thinking. I recently re-watched Superman and he does go through training. He discovers his powers one by one, like when he’s running against a train, etc. He doesn’t start changing the course of rockets, or moving frozen lakes on his first day on Earth. These things come with time! Similarly the Superman in me needs time to train. So if I wish to go for a jog while listening to a full music album, which is my goal, I need to take it slowly. This is what I’m learning this year. Coupled with my new diet, I feel I am on a winning track. Much thanks to my sisters and their advice. Superman will go jogging later.

Dreams of Montreal

Burger King is a restaurant selling mostly burgers. This is obvious. Montreal is a city in Canada. This is also obvious. Today when I tasted the Angry Whopper for the first time the two became quite similar.  And now I am making plans to move to Montreal from Toronto.  All because of a chance trip long ago, and my taste buds.  Who knew something so simple could be so magical.

I have for years lived in Toronto.  And have for years eaten the Whopper at BK.  The two went together and were almost inseparable.  On Wednesday’s BK lowers the price of the whopper, and like most disabled people I am living in poverty so this burger is one of my few thrills in life.  Another of my thrills is composing music, as that’s my main hobby and source of joy, but burgers are an instant gratification sort of thing. Within 5 minutes of eating I am happy as a little kid.  Whereas music composing takes hours and hours and days of grueling technical labour in a DAW like Reason to produce just the right sounds that soothe my perfectionist ears.  But today, for the first time, I took a chance on a Friday, to go to BK and try the Angry Whopper at full price.

It was mind-blowingly better than the Whopper. I didn’t open it up to look at its contents like I usually do with new food. I trusted that it would be awesome, and it didn’t disappoint at all. BK has done an amazing culinary job I feel.  Now granted, burgers are not the healthiest of foods and should not be consumed very often for various reasons.  As well I am leaning towards a vegetarian or vegan diet these days and so burgers are a rare meat delicacy I still have, reminding me of nostalgic feels from long ago when life was much better.  You know before all this technology came to save us from paperwork, from red tape, from waiting in lines, all the things that are even more part of life than they were before the saviour arrived.

This is exactly how I enjoyed my two or three trips to Montreal. I didn’t look up on the Internet where I was going, I didn’t look at a map, I simply got on the train or in a car and went to visit my sister or when I was in high school in the ‘90s we went to see a baseball game there.  All those times I went, it was an amazingly fun experience. In fact, Montreal seems to still possess that old world magic that is lacking from the grey boring Toronto where I’ve lived most of my life, sadly.  The people seem friendlier, the language is more soothing, streets seem safer, everyone seems more laid back and relaxed.  I didn’t notice ever the kind of ugliness that I feel surrounded by in TO.  And then there’s the Montreal cafes, which somehow are charming, compared to the utilitarian ones in Tdot.  I’m not sure if it’s just me romanticizing something I’ve only ever seen three or four times, or if it’s a genuine difference.  But I trust in this difference, with my whole heart.

So just like from now on my monthly burger is the Angry Whopper, I see myself in the future living and working in Montreal. What I wish to bring to the city is my music, my art, my coding expertise, my networking, my peaceful nature, and my desire to make it a better place than it already is. I have started making plans a while back for moving there through various tasks I do at home. For one I have started brushing up on French with Duolingo.  I take it seriously and study it an hour a day at least.  I can’t yet fully understand TV shows but thankfully here in Ontario we have two fully French channels and I watch them every day a little bit, a show here or a cartoon there, just to get the ear of the language.  I believe knowing French is a very Canadian thing, along with knowing English, since Canada is a dual-lingual nation.  So it’s also one of my long outstanding goals ever since I failed grade ten French.  It was my first class that I ever failed, and I wish to make up for that ever since.

The second step I have taken towards moving to Montreal is related to the dream of owning a condo and working in the tech industry.  Montreal has a lot of tech companies, and I have spent much of my years in tech, whether coding, doing technical support, or working for an ISP.  I do know a thing or two about ‘puters!  So I’m taking courses now in programming, focusing on web development and video game design.  I am working on my own video game in Unity that I hope to publish in a year’s time.  My main hobby is writing music in Reason.  I have already published two albums and have three more that will get published this month.  I keep composing every day for an hour at least and will be publishing a new album every month this year. All this together will hopefully allow me, a disabled man in his 40s, to move and to thrive in Montreal.

I don’t really know anything about the city mind you.  My sister lives and works there, but my designs upon this dream have little to do with her. She was the enabler I suppose, by inviting me over a few times and showing me her neighbourhoods and her work.  It definitely helped me to fall in love with Parc Fountaine for starters.  There I saw a part of my future along with the Mount Real.  I imagined myself jogging to the top and then back down every morning.  Then a shower and going to work every morning.  This is my dream.  So to this effect, this summer I will start jogging here in Toronto. First I need to lose about 20-30 lbs of fat so that the jogging isn’t hard on my knees. To achieve this I’m doing Qi Gong, and practicing Kung Fu daily as well as lifting weights and going to the gym.  I am working towards my Montreal dream on several fronts concurrently and hoping that it all pans out. I trust in the process that I have designed just like I have trusted in the process of writing music for all the tracks I have completed.  And let me say that I’ve done over 1,000 songs so far totalling about 20 music albums.  You could call me a musician.  And Montreal is definitely full of artsy people like me.  I see this as a win-win situation for me and for the people of Montreal.

What Is ORANGE13?

Suppose I was to give you a simple and quick answer and say that it’s a record label for releasing music – would there be a point to knowing any other details? But suppose there is a long explanation because it’s not really a record label and it doesn’t exactly exist – would a long explanation entice you to read more? Should I be mysterious and lead you on as many writers do these days with a hook somewhere near the end forcing you to read everything? I’m honest so I won’t do that. It’s a pretend record label that has become a blog category. Nothing more. I use it to release my own music productions and I use it to explore web design ideas.

I don’t know anything about running a business. But in January 2006 I said goodbye to my team at UUNET Canada (then Verizon Business, formerly WorldCom Canada and MCI Canada) to start a music label called ORANGE13. This is what I told everyone. They all signed a greeting card – some went through the trouble of encoding secret messages in printed binary form, which I never could decode. I’m just not that smart. I wasn’t quitting to start a record label, even though everyone knew my hobby was to be a musician. I was quitting because my girlfriend was abusive and I didn’t want that negativity to in any way negatively impact my co-workers, the customers, or anyone else at the company. I was quitting to protect what mattered to me a lot – all of them!

That is sort of the birth of ORANGE13 in my life. The corporate offices were located in downtown Toronto and on the top floor was a beautifully decorated penthouse. Like any other tech business, this was an ISP mind you, they had satellite television, showers, and a pool table, a BBQ, you know, fun things for us to socialize with and build that all-so-important team spirit. I loved going to that lounge area but there was far too much work and I was an overworking perfectionist so I never took proper lunch breaks. Many of us ate at our desks. Back then we were spending much time on IRC, on our custom made servers, chatting, exchanging tips and tricks of the networking trade. But one time I ventured to the lounge after work and that’s when ORANGE13’s seed was planted in my mind. For there was on the pool table a single ball left, the orange and white ball numbered thirteen and a pool cue. I immediately came up with the name ORANGE13 in my mind and decided right then and there that it would be the name for my music projects.

At the time I never really played pool. I didn’t get the game. Not that the rules were complicated, I just didn’t see the point to putting balls into pockets you know? Like I was in that building to do work, serious work, to route packets through the network, to configure BGP communities, to setup MPLS labels even, I wasn’t there to play pool. It felt irresponsible for me to spend any serious effort on pool, even though I worked there for six years and could have played a little bit every day and gotten really good at it. Nobody else on the team did. We played with our desktop Linux machines, and later when corporate took over from the US we played with our Windows NT shit boxes. No UNIX geek loves when corporate forces NT on them do they? Why is that? Why do we hate Microsoft so much? I mean they are coders like anybody else? As a musician I don’t hate U2 because they’re different than the music that I produce – yet I disliked Microsoft.

A year had gone by and I worked on more music, and then I got the brilliant business idea. I will hire my sister as she was a designer to make me a cool logo and business cards. That’s what it takes to run a business, a great image, right? So I worked tirelessly with her through 24 logo iterations, and she did such a fantastic job that my ORANGE13 logo is better than the Apple Computers logo I think! I mean it’s only fitting considering how amazing I am as a musician right? She made business card designs really quickly and I went to the local shop and paid good money and got like 2,000 cards printed. I gave a few to people at work, everyone was impressed, and then nothing. That’s right, nothing. That was the extent of how much I knew how to run a business. I was composing music daily, but never finishing any songs either. I had no product to sell, I had no website to market, I had business cards, and a logo! It was style over substance type of deal. I was a cluebag.

Then the unthinkable happened and I got a new girlfriend. She wrecked everything that could be wrecked in a man’s life. She destroyed all my friendships out of sheer jealousy, she made me cry often, she did this and that, it’s pointless to rehash it. But needless to say I believed that in love one has to put up with the bad as well as to love the good, so I thought if I wanted to be with her I needed to put up with all of her personality quirks – I didn’t yet know about mental health. She definitely had symptoms of bipolar, but I knew nothing about such matters. I was a driven passionate coder, musician and networking guy and I thought everyone else in the whole world was as sane as me! Boy was dating her an awakening I will never quite forget. After we parted ways I even stopped writing music for a few years because that’s how much emotional harm she had caused me. You see, I only wish to write music when I’m in a good happy mood. I find that there’s too much negativity in this sad world and I do not wish to contribute to it. So I want my music to mostly project happy vibes, and to nurture goodness. But she left me feeling sorry and down and I wanted to forget all about her and her sexy American accent.

So I spent a few years back home in Belgrade hanging out with little kids playing soccer, watching TV, and helping my grandma as much as I could. I cleaned the attic, the garage, the walls from cigarette smoke (did you know that walls turn yellow from smoke?), etc. It is there in Belgrade that I started, again, to compose music, and it was my usual happy vibe. The love of the kids and their curiosity of life, even dogs barking at night, it all coalesced into my rebirth. ORANGE13 wasn’t dead! The idea of me releasing music lived on even there. I had zero income, zero resources, and still I was composing some of the best music I knew I made to that point. I had brought my Macbook from Toronto with me and an old Toshiba and using them both I was in heaven. I never needed much in terms of hardware or software to achieve great results. My start in composing was in MS-DOS using trackers like Scream Tracker 3, and even earlier ones that made MTM files and MOD files which could only play four instruments at a time. I found some ORANGE13 business cards in my wallet, sitting there in my bedroom in our Vozhdovac home, and I wished to continue on my musical journey. I had fully recovered from my ex’s abusiveness.

Then a lot of terrible things happened, which is part of the reason why we fled to Canada in the ‘90s. I should have never returned to Belgrade, and now that I am once again safely in Toronto, I promised myself I will never return to Serbia for it is not a safe place for people with disabilities such as I am. You see I was born with cataracts and after a surgery at a very young age I would be left with low vision at best my whole life.  For one reason or another, while the people everywhere in the world are nice, governments are not, and Serbian authorities are quite mean. Without going into details let’s just say that their terrible attitudes followed me even to Toronto when I once again fled Serbia and even here they pursued me and in a way still do. So ORANGE13 never really became a real record label like I wanted it to.

I registered a website, but never built any pages for it. Well I did for a time, but it was a half-assed effort. It generally had nothing of any value on it. I still do not wish for the ORANGE13 dream to die though and I wish to use the name in relation to my music. I have so far released two music albums (including on Spotify and 100 other streaming services). I have three more albums lined up for release this March, totalling five albums. It’s not amazing music like I believe me capable of producing, but this is due to the abuse this world has put me through. I no longer feel the rest of you are worth my musical gifts. This is a feeling many victims suffer with and I am working through it. I feel music is my gift and one I need to share with people. I don’t exactly have designs on being rich or famous, I would much rather prefer to make money during a regular 9-5 job and releasing music for free on the side. I want my music to be a gift and freely accessible, and not some point of exclusion and luxury. I don’t need a private mansion with bodyguards type of lifestyle. I need a hobby and music makes me happy. So ORANGE13 lives on in blog form. It is now a name of the category where I write stories such as these, where I post things about my music. ORANGE13 is my music blog. That’s the simple answer. But it encompasses all my dreams about my most favourite hobby. And I have several hobbies let me tel you, but music is my most favourite one. I am still disappointed on a personal level that I haven’t yet collaborated with Depeche Mode. But I’m hopeful that can happen if I work really hard every day for a few years. Goals are important in life and that is just one of about a thousand I wish to achieve.  As for billiards, a few years ago I spent two good years playing pool every day at a Chinatown cafe and now I get it. Now I love the art of the pocket. But hitting the orange number thirteen has always remained a monumental move for me.

A Luxurious Adventure In The PATH

Like any disabled man I long for those moments of inclusion whereby I am one with the normies. You know, when you are wearing glasses you wonder what normal eye sight feels like? Similarly whenever I feel isolated I take a walk through the PATH to see all the employed, hip, and fancy fellow citizens and I pretend I belong. I sit there in the PATH eating my Burger King and feel like others looking at me might mistake me for a daytrader out to lunch. I don’t need a suit and a tie to be a daytrader, and I can fit in, as long as I shave my man face. But then comes the problem of going to the washroom, and this is for me something very stressful. I have low vision and signage in the PATH is terrible for those like me.

Usually I only walk around downtown Toronto between five routes that I have memorized. One takes me to Eaton center, another one to Distillery, another one to the PATH, and then within the labyrinth I know two or three routes. Otherwise I can’t go for a walk on my own. I just don’t feel confident in my old age. And let me tell you, 45 is quite old. I’ve survived 33 Canadian winters and many others in Belgrade. This in itself is quite an accomplishment! I’m very proud of this fact. But I did fall once or twice on my hip so maybe I’ll pay for that in my elderly years, I don’t know. Like any man I need more muscles to defend the fragile skeleton that the meat hangs off of.

Finding a washroom would be easy if signage was large, clearly labeled, and in easy to spot places. But in Toronto’s underground PATH the big fancy business owners decided to go with minimalistic style. So much of the signage is in the corner, out of the way, hard to spot, hard to find, and is even black icons on a grey background – of all things, come on! How am I supposed to spot that? So sometimes I beg my dear mom to come with me to PATH and teach me where the washrooms are. After two or three times I have it memorized and can go there alone from that point forward. Unless I know where a washroom is I can’t go to a place. I am like everyone else in this regard. My disability is visual but that limits me to ten percent of activities that others can enjoy.

So today I went by the Hockey Hall of Fame entrance and needed to use the bathroom. Now for some strange reason the cleaning staff synchronize when they are cleaning bathrooms. They do it at peak times, around 1pm, and they clean multiple washrooms at once so that none are available for public use. I went to one, it was being cleaned. I went to a second one, it was being cleaned. But I needed to go, so I discovered a third washroom around the corner of a corridor. The signage is poor and barely visible and I entered. Boy this was something magical.

The washroom had a waterfall, there was a little pond with fishes swimming in it, it smelled like cookies and cream, and there was no smell that I am used to in normal washrooms of feces and urine. There was no papers on the floor, there was no hairs around the sink, it was clean and tidy. There was also mood lighting like at a club! There was even music playing, it was dubstep of all things. I was in the stall minding my business and wondered if I made a mistake if this was some kind of private club washroom or something. It was unbelievably clean and nice and the toilet seats all worked, even the flushing wasn’t broken! Then I went to wash my hands, and to my left was young woman prettying herself up by tidying up her hair.

This was unusual, I have never seen a woman in a washroom before. In a corner was another woman standing playing on her cell phone. I immediately left and looked at the door sign. Now it all made sense. The reason why this washroom was so much more beautiful than any I have ever been to was because this was a woman’s washroom. The sign for women and men is quite similar, only the little square is a tiny bit triangular. Who knew women had such clean and luxurious washrooms compared to us men?

I prayed and hoped nobody would notify security. But just to be on the safe side I contacted a psychiatrist and explained what had occurred. He told me that yes, indeed, women’s washrooms are much nicer and that many men in his practice have made this mistake and have accidentally once in their lives entered the wrong bathroom and to not worry. He assured me I was sane. I questioned why do women have a waterfall in their washrooms and men do not? He said he didn’t know but would inquire and let me know. It did leave me speechless that even the floor was shinny like it was brand new. I’m used to the filth and the scum on the walls in men’s bathrooms so much that I thought women’s must be the same. Boy was today an eye opening adventure in the PATH. I hope that in the future men can learn from my misadventure and learn to invest more in their spaces. I’d also like a waterfall soothing me while I am in the bathroom.

On Music

Why do I compose music? It is a question I ask myself more and more. Especially after being assaulted. Why do I contribute to the world that has hurt me? Shouldn’t I refuse and protest? Shouldn’t I be upset and wait for an apology from you all for mistreating me so harshly? Doesn’t contributing good quality music for everyone’s enjoyment encourage mistreatment? I never used to wonder these things back as a teenager before I was wronged. Back then in the mid ‘90s life was perfect. I had my family, I had my high school friends, and I had my DOS tracker program for composing. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better life back then. I never once wondered why I wrote music – it was just something I did and enjoyed doing.

Back then very basic things were pleasant. Things like the falling snow or rain made me happy. I know most people aren’t smiling to walk in the rain with an umbrella, but I do! Rain makes me happy, as does snow, as does the sun. I like being outdoors. But I also liked sitting in front of my computer, composing for hours. I tend to be very diverse in the things I enjoy and that I spend time with. Back then in the ‘90s I used Scream Tracker 3. It has a text interface for music creation arranged like a spreadsheet into columns and rows. Special codes are typed into each cell, such as X00 for left pan or S91 for surround sound, and then when F5 is pressed it compiles the music and you can hear it until you press F8. Then I’d make more changes and press F5 to hear them. It wasn’t real-time composing like most people know today. It was a paint-by-numbers process or rather compose-by-numbers. It was more similar to editing financial data in a spreadsheet than anything else. The way to tell a quarter note from a whole note is by how many cells are between them. It took me two years to master it.

I got so good at writing music that a scene publication even published some of my techniques. The e-magazine was called TraxWeekly and anyone who’s anyone had an article published in it. It’s like an industry journal for science such as nature where scientists dream of being published. Only as a teen I didn’t have an ego at all, I didn’t dream of being a published author, it just happened organically. I thought my ideas could benefit others and emailed them. It was that simple! In fact I am quite reserved and even shy when it comes to sharing my art so unlike other musicians at the time I didn’t upload my songs to various BBSes or websites for sharing purposes. I would write over a thousand songs and never release any of them. To this day I still haven’t released anything except for one album. That one I released even though it’s in a rough draft form because I wanted to listen to it on Spotify and it was easier than making MP3s. Goes to show how faulty tech development is these days.

Writing music made me feel accepted in this sad world. It made me feel normal and one with others. I was born disabled as at birth my eyes developed congenital cataracts. I had eye surgery at eighteen months and could see but with low vision. So using big letters in MS-DOS programs was far easier to work with then today’s tiny widgeted interfaces. I blossomed under those conditions, whereas today it’s difficult to get work done, and I was able to pursue a wonderful hobby in my spare time. Whereas many teenagers partied with drugs, alcohol, marijuana and other not-so-wise choices, I sat at home programming, composing, drawing in 3D software and Photoshop, I was rollerblading and watching movies with friends as well as playing games. I led a perfectly healthy and happy life. Music was integral to it all. I never imagined that writing music would become difficult.

Several years ago I got assaulted. It doesn’t really matter by whom or why – there’s never a valid reason for violence anyway. People often make excuses like he said something or he did something or he looked at a person wrongly. But those are all insane rationales for bad behaviour. Violence can never be justified under any circumstances. However, it left me questioning everything, every step of my life. I question even myself while brushing my teeth. I wonder if brushing my teeth will lead to being assaulted again. It sounds ridiculous but hear me out. What if those who assaulted me were jealous of my perfect teeth because their genetics was inferior and they had tons of problems and thus they bullied me into not brushing my teeth with violence? Just one of my countless thoughts I’ve had ever since the world gifted me violence into my perfect life.

I also question whether wearing nice clothes will lead to further violence. I question if being strong and physically fit will lead me towards being abused. Jealousy is a powerful motivator for people with mental illnesses who are violent. And any point of a person can be perceived with jealousy. What if a bully is jealous of my talent in music composing? Maybe writing music is doing a disservice to myself as it will lead to further violence against me? What if the people bullying me do not want me to shine? I have to ask these questions because there is nobody out there working tirelessly to protect me and my interests, nobody. My mom cares for me, and helps me, but she can’t protect me, she’s quite old. Other than her, nobody here in Canada cares or even pretends to care. I’m basically on my own. Just me and my music. And music can’t protect me, can it?

As a teen I never wondered about jealous people and what damage they can cause. Nobody in high school made fun of me, nobody insulted me even though I have a lazy eye and don’t see well. All my friends were respectful, kind and supportive. What’s more back then they all loved my music and would encourage me towards stardom. But I was always afraid of success. Deep down inside I must have known about jealous people, about bullies, about the violent nature of the rest of you. I’m different, I don’t have any violence in me, I don’t even get angry, I find both of those concepts alien. But the rest of you suffer from it and I live in your world and thus have to learn to co-exist. I have to learn to write music without the bullies knowing. And that is difficult since I also want to release music.

I don’t have any designs on being famous. In fact I’m terrified of the spotlight. In high school, on days when we had to present in front of the class, I would not show up for class. In fact I skipped much of my classes and the teachers never once called home either. Strange, isn’t it? But it allowed me to focus on Linux and programming, which was a sort of school I suppose. My high school was teaching basics of variables and arrays in Turing, which was boring. This is why I was skipping most classes. Who needs biology, chemistry and physics when computers and spaceships would be the future! This was my logic back then. But these days I dream of going back in time and finishing high school. I dream of releasing my music as a teenager, of getting that important feedback from strangers, from industry pundits, from experts whom I respected. I dream of having spent my time differently. Of instead of playing video games of having gone dancing or playing volleyball. Now that I’m a victim of your violent world I dream of something better instead of creating something better, and that bothers me.

I had a goal last year and I tried to stick to it as much as motivation allowed. I made a new folder every month with the name of the month and in it I put my music making experiments. At the end of December last year I tallied up all my files. There was merely fifty of them. My goal for 2023 was to write music every single day and to release an album every month. I believed fully that I could release twelve albums in one year. And there’s no reason why I couldn’t. But fear of violent people, even here in Canada violence rules society, prevented me. I would sit down to write and then I wouldn’t save my work. I would be afraid that saving a song would lead to a fully released track and then bullies would be jealous and would assault me. It’s a type of victim’s paranoia that is self-protective yet not. So instead of writing 365 songs, I wrote only fifty.

This month I have the exact same goal. I want to release twelve albums. But I’ve lowered the bar. I no longer seek to make professionally sounding works, but bad music. I want to release twelve bad albums. That way bullies can not judge me, and they probably won’t assault me if they’re busy laughing at how poor my music is. This goal makes me happy and I realize it is a stepping stone towards a full music career. Most notable artists do not release their experiments, or their bad takes, but I also believe in the #buildinpublic mantra. I want others to learn from my mistakes – I want a better world I suppose that is it in a nutshell.

I want a world of people holding hangs and singing kum-baya. I want people dancing, singing, and playing sports. I am tired of all this violence everywhere. Whenever I look at cable TV channel lineup for the day it’s either violence in entertainment form, violence in the news, or violent TV shows, or something boring. There is nothing in between, there is very rarely an educational show – maybe one nice show per day is all that is available here in Toronto. I remember back in the mid ‘80s when I first started watching TV daily as a kid in Belgrade, we had only three channels and it was packed with good quality content. Almost every show was exciting and interesting. Now some are tempted to say that this is because I was younger. No, show quality has deteriorated definitely. It can be measured. Netflix is all the rage these days, and they produce their own movies, and much of them are formulaic and repetative concepts from the past. Man with gun running around a city type of shows. Nothing interesting have I ever found on streaming services. So I stick to composing music and art.

In fact despite having low vision I’ve taken up a new hobby that might surprise you all. I’ve started to paint with a brush just like my dad Dubravko. I am not very good at it but that is not important whatsoever. I am thrilled every time I put a paintbrush to a white canvas. I enjoy it so immensely. I feel alive when I’m painting. Today, of all things, I’m going to sip herbal tea and paint something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time – I’m going to fill every part of the canvas with a different colour. A kind of kaleidoscopic effect. I’ve never done this. And maybe that’s what music will evolve to in my life. Maybe music reminds me of a weaker me, one who got beat up, abused, locked up and ignored. But painting still doesn’t have any negative connotations. And this is the most important thing. What emotions we associate with our art, with our creations, will be out there in the world. And at no point do I ever wish to contribute negativity to the world through art or any other means. I know a lot of victims of abuse write hateful rap music, or other negative lyrics or art pieces – but I do not wish to embark on such a journey. I wish to ignore what transpired and focus on positivity just like I did when I was a teen, happy in my comfort zone, creating and contributing to the world that made me that happy. Maybe by painting for a while it will bring back all those good vibes that I once associated with art and then I will be able to, once again, freely enjoy composing music. That is the ultimate dream. To feel free to create.

Explaining The Song Concepts

Generally speaking my hobby of music composing is not going well. I got assaulted a few years ago, several times in fact, and ever since then music has felt like a doomsday activity. Everyone in the mental health area is preaching arts as a form of therapy, but I don’t want my favourite past-time hobby to be therapy – I want it to be fun, a joyful celebration of being alive. I want my listeners, my future audience, to be people filled with awe and joy. So I’ve stopped writing music mostly because I am torn between it being a therapy and it being joy. But that all changed yesterday.

I was reminiscing about the past. Maybe a decade ago I attended the first few meetups of Songwriter’s Meetups in Toronto. They took place at a pub to which I could get to easily. I am disabled, as I was born with cataracts, so I have low vision and getting around the city is always problematic unless I have someone to take me places. Back then a lovely woman, Belinda, took me to the first few meetings and allowed me to memorize the route. At the meetings we presented music and everyone loved my songs. I’m a great musician, why wouldn’t they? Okay, okay, I’m not so great, I don’t make any money from my art, but I enjoy the composing process. And there at these meetings I met a bunch of really nice people, one of them was Neel Modi.  Yesterday I visited his website and read a blog post that he had a heart attack a year or so ago. I was shocked, he’s so young. But he says he lived sedentary sort of life. This terrified me, because first of all he’s a wonderful dude who helped me a lot and gave me great song feedback. Second of all I do nothing physical all day for years now ever since I was assaulted, so what if a heart attack is in my future?

So I’ve made a commitment towards exercising daily for 30 minutes. Not just any type of exercise but to break a sweat for half an hour! I will do Tai Chi, and I will go to my local YMCA most days of the week. At the gym I will do cycling, rowing and ellipticals. And at home I will lift weights and do body-weight exercises. I don’t yet feel comfortable with gym weights, but when I learn how to do things on my own I will expand perhaps. I’m not a fan of huge muscles, they limit flexibility which is quite important in life. And all this energy fed into my music.

I’ve decided on writing music every single day for three hours. Usually when I compose, I come up with some lame name for a song title, and then I write for a few hours under that name. I have no direction, no purpose, no concept. I am just exploring sounds. All of last year I had a folder called “23XX” into which I dumped my works, sorted by months, like a photo album. I was surprised that some months I did absolutely nothing. While other months I did a lot of work. It was undisciplined and disorganized. Yet I spent enough time in total that had I focused it all on an album I could have published it by now! It’s like spending hours on Twitter/X instead of on a focused effort towards writing one novel. While I gained much knowledge, it was also wasted effort. I’m now going to do things from a greater structural perspective and it’s going to be great.

To this end I am going to write an essay, with words, before I write each song. I am going to explain what thoughts I want to convey, what feelings, what emotions. I’m going to describe the instruments and the influences that I wish to use. A sort of a blueprint for music in words. I might also collect images that inspire the emotions and thoughts and provide direction. Only when this essay is done, which I imagine will take about an hour’s worth of effort, only then will I proceed to start the actual song. At this point I’m planning to publish each song essay as a blog post. I will also do a mind map initially before writing words on paper. I think writing an essay of at least 1,000 words on a song which I hope to seriously complete after investing 30-40 hours of work into, is not just wise but essential for success. We use blueprints when constructing houses. We use plans when fighting battles. Writing a song is a problem to which there are many solutions and this is one that I am going to undertake. I also believe in the #buildinpublic mantra so sharing my stories about my music will keep me honest and on point. See how helpful it was for Neel to have shared his story of his heart attack? He has saved my life as well as his own!

But to give you a taste of what this is all going to look like let’s take my latest project. The song’s working title is “Leslie And Dave’s Calculator”. One Christmas celebration as a teen I was at their house, they were our family friends and good neighbours, and I unwrapped a gift which was a calculator which I never knew existed. It had a printer attached, a small one, and a roll of paper went inside. And anything I typed ended up on paper. It was probably meant for accountants. But to me as a kid it was a fabulous way to spend a lot of hours having fun and watching the printer do it’s thing. It was battery operated but also came with a wall plug. I had enormous fun with it. How did they know I would love it so much? Regardless, just recently I heard an amazing song that makes me happy each time I hear it. Kraftwerk’s Pocket Calculator seems to be an exact blueprint for exactly the kind of song I want to compose. It’s got very few layers. It doesn’t have overly complex melodies or baselines. The drum section is simple and barely features a base drum. The snare is very interesting as far as choices go. The lyrics are also quite simple repeating “Pocket Calculator” over and over. I love this song very much and am going to make my own version of it in Reason 10.

That short paragraph is essentially what I am going to write for each song I’m going to compose. A sort of description of the thoughts behind the concept, explanation for lyrics, melodies and choices of instruments, as well as influences. Posting on my blog about each song will also provide public exposure for my works and my art form as well as give me a platform for creative writing, since it is also another one of my hobbies that I love very dearly.  Some people spend their time imbued into violent content, but others are more like me, engaging in positive creative energies. Which one are you and what are you contributing to the world? That is an important question we all should be asking ourselves given all the problems that go unresolved. I have also made a decision to donate a large chunk of any profits I make to various global charities doing good around the world, but more about that later. Much thanks to Neel for his blog post, no thanks to his heart attack, and much thanks to everyone who read this.