{"id":1217,"date":"2009-02-07T07:42:01","date_gmt":"2009-02-07T07:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=1217"},"modified":"2014-12-28T12:44:28","modified_gmt":"2014-12-28T12:44:28","slug":"ho-hum-awake-again-naturally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=1217","title":{"rendered":"Ho hum. Awake again, naturally"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Look, I know that there are some freakazoids who would actually get up this early (peers at watch), at 07.30 on a Saturday morning even if they didn&#8217;t have to. But I&#8217;m not one of them, oh no.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d love to still be in bed, snuggled up to a hot woman, dreaming little dreams of whatever the hell it is that I dream about but I don&#8217;t know because I am unable to recall my dreams when I lose the state of unconsciousness that we call sleep.<\/p>\n<p>I feel cheated.<\/p>\n<p>I feel cheated twice over.<\/p>\n<p>Cheated the first because something in my psyche has woken me when I have no need to be awake.<\/p>\n<p>Cheated the second because I do not remember my dreams.<\/p>\n<p>So instead of slumbering onwards I sit here with a mug of tea, a quarter pound of grapes and the interwebs.<\/p>\n<p>Would you like a grape? I&#8217;ve got a couple left. No? Are you sure?<\/p>\n<p>Do you like the music?<\/p>\n<p>I bought this album last night. It&#8217;s a singer\/songwriter called <a title=\"James Casto\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jamescasto.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">James Casto<\/a>. I think I spent USD 7.99 at <a title=\"CDBaby\" href=\"http:\/\/cdbaby.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">CDBaby<\/a> and for that meagre amount I got two albums!<\/p>\n<p>Nineteen tracks? Unlimited listening time? For USD 7.99? How can that be bad?<\/p>\n<p>I played one of his tracks &#8211; Perfect Day &#8211; on last week&#8217;s podcast. So he wrote me a nice email to say &#8216;thanks&#8217;. So I bought his albums because he was so nice. There&#8217;s a kind of karmic cycle there, deep in the niceness.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of niceness and music, I wrote a review of a guy&#8217;s work of art this week. To be honest I wasn&#8217;t flattering. I almost slaughtered it. But I was faithful and respectful and wasn&#8217;t mean out of spite. I just pointed out where, in my eyes, ears and brain, it fell down.<\/p>\n<p>I need to say that I have, once or twice, killed albums to death in some reviews. But overall that&#8217;s not my style. Tell it like it is but try to be helpful &#8211; that&#8217;s my usual style. And it&#8217;s what I tried to achieve earlier this week.<\/p>\n<p>So how surprised was I to get an email from the composer\/artist to thank me and to ask if I&#8217;d review his draft work and help him shape his future tracks?<\/p>\n<p>So surprised that I haven&#8217;t quite been able to respond to the guy. Yet. But how nice was he to ask? And he&#8217;s offered to pay the standard journo rate which, naturally, I&#8217;ll decline. I mean I&#8217;ll do the job but I&#8217;ll decline the fee because what he&#8217;s proposing isn&#8217;t writing a subjective review, what he&#8217;s after is some help to make his sound available to a wider audience. And I&#8217;d love to help with that.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like helping people with their writing; of course one does that, one just&#8230; does it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve just released today&#8217;s podcast &#8211; Episode <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">51<\/span> 50 &#8211; which I recorded yesterday. Recorded yesterday because today we&#8217;re going to meet Amy &#8211; if the weather doesn&#8217;t get in the way.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll be honest about this, I&#8217;m looking forward to it and apprehensive in equal quantities.<\/p>\n<p>Amy is a very shy person. Perhaps shy is the wrong word. Introverted in the company of new people is probably a better description. And Soph and I aren&#8217;t. I&#8217;m anxious that we might swamp her, that she&#8217;ll sit there and be overwhelmed by the &#8216;usness&#8217; of us. But it will be nice to meet her. I hope it works out and that the disappointment of meeting us won&#8217;t be too much. Well, when I say &#8216;us&#8217; I guess I mean me. Meeting people in RL can sometimes be such a let down.<\/p>\n<p>Ho hum.<\/p>\n<p>Vin and I are supposed to be going showjumping tomorrow at Allenshill. I wonder if that&#8217;s going ahead after the snow we&#8217;ve had this week? I&#8217;ll give them a call today while we&#8217;re out.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder where my motivation is for going showjumping tomorrow? Vin and I had a lesson with JP last Sunday. Vin was a twat. He got himself so wound up, told himself that simple things were beyond his reach. Vin and I have taken a real step backwards this winter.<\/p>\n<p>Sad about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Look, I know that there are some freakazoids who would actually get up this early (peers at watch), at 07.30 on a Saturday morning even<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}