“Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.”

–Pink Floyd

If you take a moment to think about it, you may agree with me when I say that time is really the true meaning of this life (if there is any meaning at all).  It’s the very medium through which our lives on Earth travel.

How we use our time is about the most important aspect of our individual lifetimes.  I believe, and generally think most people would agree, that the best use of our time is to explore, learn, and love.  Deceivingly simple.  Disarmingly straightforward.  True nonetheless.  Time is mired in contradiction—we are all so painfully aware of it, yet blissfully unaware all at the same time.  We know it’s there, we sometimes manage to “feel” it going by, but it is so abstract that it is utterly intangible beyond vague concepts of our three-dimensional minds.

Time is the untouchable.  The uncontrollable.  The crux of our lives.  And nothing pisses us off more when it is lost or wasted.  You can work hard to regain lost money, to refill the void of lost love.  But there’s nothing you can do about lost time but hope you have enough left to make up for it.  That makes it the ultimate currency of our lives.

And in the end, the only way to achieve the fundamental perspective of the lives we have lived is to take a step outside of time to view it all as one, comprehensive whole.  A blob of interconnecting moments that we can hold in our hands and can hopefully say: “this is good.”

But the bottom line boils down to one simple, inescapable fact about time: without it, we have nothing in this world.  So what else is there to say about it?  It’s our most precious resource, one to be used wisely.  And I won’t take up any more of yours for the moment.

It’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice and preparation to be an expert at something (notably in the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell). 10,000 hours to be a genius, to be a success. The Beatles are the common example. They were no overnight success; by the time they started hitting it big, they had played over a thousand shows (mostly in Germany).

Ten thousand hours is a pretty long time. It’s well over a solid year of practice with no sleeping or eating to get in the way. If you practiced something for two hours a day, every day, it would add up to over 13 and a half years. At the time of this writing, I’ve been playing guitar for about 15 years. Sometimes I’ve played for 4 hours in a day. Sometimes I’ve played for no hours in a day.

Am I an expert musician? I wouldn’t personally say so. But I’ve certainly come a long, long way. The thought of going back and doing it all again is almost excruciating. I’m at a point where I really feel good things are happening and I’m actually ready, willing and prepared for them to happen. But that’s a tough place to get to. If you had told me even a couple years ago that I’d have to wait at least another couple years, I’d have gone a little crazy. Sometimes it’s really good to not know things.

But what I wonder about the 10,000 hour rule is if emotional time counts. There have been countless minutes that I did not spend working on music, for example times when I couldn’t do it because I was stuck in a classroom learning about the symbolism of The Great Gatsby. But many of those same minutes were spent in a place completely away from where I physically was. A place where I was composing music in my head, conjuring ideas for promoting the next show, dreaming about the feeling of being in the recording studio with a guitar in my hand, laying down a track that moved me. Those were genuine emotional hours I’ve put into music. If they counted, I’d say I reached the 10,000 mark long ago.

Practice makes perfect, but passion makes it authentic.

Today is the perfect time to think about tomorrow.

We all have plans for 2010, grand or otherwise.  I never really make resolutions because they just feel like I’m trying to convince myself to break habits I don’t feel confident breaking.  Plans usually have more structure and wonderfully loose ends, whereas resolutions are uncomfortably finite.

Now is the best time to think about later.

What are some of my goals for the year?  Inspiration; I want to be inspired by life and I want to learn from the ways people around me are living it.  Passion; I love what I do when it comes to music.  I’m also planning on loving life itself.  The ups, the downs, the in-betweens.  Mission; I hope to spend the year working hard but also having meaning behind what I do.  Meaning creates drive, and drive gets you places.  Connection; I hope to feel the transcendence I’ve felt so many times before from the interconnectedness of the people I know, the people I meet, and the people I learn about.

I also want to floss more.

Only time will tell what 2010 will bring, but I’m planning on making the best of it.  2009 was an unbelievable year for me for so many reasons.  It only makes me fascinated to wonder what the next one will have in store.

If you’re interested in a little thoughtful inspiration for the new year, take a look at this free eBook: What Matters Now

And since I didn’t post it before, I’ll close out ‘09 by posting the new Shaimus video for “Like a Fool”

Birthdays are a lot like New Year’s Eve in that they are often a time when people reflect on the year that’s past, how they’ve grown, what they’ve accomplished, and maybe mistakes that they’ve made.  Some people fret about another year that’s gone by and how much shorter life seems after every 365 days.  Other people don’t think about it too much at all and just use it as an excuse to party.  I think I’ve done all three at one point or another.

But usually I spend at least a little time reflecting on all the things that have happened and how much I’ve changed over the course of a year.  I assume the average person goes through about as much or as little as I do in any given year, so I rarely find the need to openly share things I’ve learned or accomplished.  But as you reach your mid and late 20s, I think it’s only natural for a lot of people to start feeling like their youth is slipping away more and more quickly as their age rises.  I’ve certainly felt that before, but I’m finished with it.

In the relatively unconventional life path I’ve chosen, I can’t use the lives and accomplishments of my peers as a comparison to my own, even if they’re in the same industry as me.  Life is long and I have a lot of time to do all the things I eventually want to do (hopefully, anyway).  I set no deadlines and I make no ultimatums.  I have goals and aspirations that I work towards every day, and as long as I’m doing everything within my power to be where I want to be, the rest is out of my hands.  All I can do is live life to the fullest extent that I know how; seeing where it takes me is the whole adventure of it all.  I have found that getting too specific with life’s grand plans only takes away from the point.  And the point is the unknown.  I prefer to keep specific goals and projects to shorter term time frames.  It makes so much more sense this way.  If you say “I’m going to do this before I’m 30,” you’re putting unnecessary pressure on yourself, causing you to worry about it now and later be disappointed with yourself if you don’t meet the arbitrary deadline.  Especially when there’s plenty of time afterwards to accomplish the goal just as well.

Don’t say “I’m going to see the great pyramids before I’m 35.”  Don’t say “I want to be married by the time I’m 30.”  Keep the hopes and dreams, and lose the deadlines.  Your life will be so much more fulfilling that way.  Of course, you still have to go out there and DO it.  You have to live your life.  You have to work towards the goals every day.  But if you say you want to see the pyramids before you’re 35, you might wait until you’re 34 and start to panic.  So start now.  Or start later.  But I think it’s a good general rule to not apply anything with the word “dead” on it to my life, so that includes deadlines.

I want to live in New Zealand someday.  I’m not sure when, but I definitely want to.  It could be when I’m 32.  It could be when I’m 52.  I’ll figure it out at some point, but I haven’t yet.  And that doesn’t matter.  Life’s not passing me by, I’m just along for the ride.  I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

Social networking.  A now-ubiquitous term that conjures images of Facebook, nerds, wasted work hours, and (thanks to recent Foster’s commercials) grimy Australians shouting at each other from a distance.  These days, it seems you can’t enjoy a useful website without having to sign in, make a profile which reflects the person you’d like to be in the cyber world, and start spending your time networking, “friending,” and generally sucking up precious minutes connecting with other theoretical people.  At this point, while I don’t mind having to sign into various sites, the social networking side of things starts to scare me off; as soon as I know I can have buddies, friends, or whatever-the-hell, I think about how much work goes into doing that, how little energy I actually want to exert on it, and how having a small buddy list makes you look inadequate and renders the whole thing pointless (not to mention the question of whether or not I would insult potential “friends” by not adding them due to my high level of apathy).  Can’t I just post some videos online without seeing the dreaded e-mail that says “jdpstudman wants to be your friend?”

I’m generally in the minority on this from what I can tell.  Social networking as a prerequisite for a successful site can only mean, I assume, that most people demand the feature in as many aspects of their daily lives as is possible.  So I’m not one to knock it as a concept, really.  I’m a “live and let live” sort of person–I don’t generally care what you do as long as you’re not hurting me or others.  People can social network the shit out each other for all I care.  And it’s not as though I take no part in it.  I’m on Facebook daily and I enjoy reading the occasional witty status update (operating word: OCCASIONAL) and seeing photos of my friends’ recent drunken escapades.  But I just can’t bring myself to fully embrace the extent to which it’s taking over our daily lives.

Because I enjoy Facebook, I try to make it my primary, and if possible only, mode of social networking.  I don’t want to log into ten sites a day to see what YouTube videos random people have posted.  It’s because of this that I’ve all but abandoned MySpace, the original outlet of most people’s networking needs.  But MySpace is a good example of a necessary evil for musicians; I don’t really want to be on there, but it’s important for all bands to have a page.  It’s like Twitter, which has been blowing up as of late.  I do have a “personal” Twitter, but it’s just a feed of my Facebook statuses and I never really use it other than that.  I’d probably avoid Twitter altogether if it weren’t for the fact that it’s important for Shaimus to have a presence on the site.  Maybe I’ll use mine more often later on, but for now it’s really just kind of there as a placeholder for when I decide what I really want to do with it.

This blog is no different, really.  I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what specifically to use it for.  Just news updates?  Boring.  Deep, intimate descriptions of my thoughts and feelings?  Too personal.  A long, thoughtful post every six months?  Seems too infrequent to keep anyone interested.  Constant little posts about what I’m doing?  Seems to revealing or mundane.  So what, then?  I’m still not really sure.  One of my least favorite aspects of social networking is the constant urge it gives you to say what you’re feeling at any given moment, and the constant feeling of others that they’re close to you and keeping up to date with your life by reading a few sentences a day.  I don’t want anyone to think they know me via the Internet, and I’m a private person who is well aware that in my industry the more success you have, the less privacy you often get.  I’m increasingly cautious of what I put out there online, how I present myself, and how much I reveal.  But at the same time, it’s so great for musicians to use the Internet to connect directly with fans and have them feel involved.  It’s a double-edged sword for sure.

And so I’ll continue pondering and strategizing my online presence, probably to no end.  But luckily I have no obligation to decide either way what kind of “social networker” I am.  Many people have found their place, but I have not.  And that’s OK for now.  I’ll just continue on with my everyday life as I normally would, but with an option to be a little more “connected.”  I just have one simple request: don’t buy into the idea that just because you CAN constantly update people with your activities, it doesn’t mean they really care that the club sandwich you had for lunch had way too much mayo on it.  Some things are best kept to yourself and left a little sacred; the inane things are the most sacred of all.

Oh the silence around this blog has been deafening lately.  Though it’s easy to say I’ve neglected my duties, that’s pretty inaccurate since I don’t technically have any “duties” to take care of on my site.  The easiest promise to live up to is one you don’t make, so I’ve happily made no promise to update at regular time intervals.  But it’s true that long stretches between posts doesn’t do much for my blogging cred, though I still subscribe to the “quality over quantity” school of thought.  Or anything over quantity, really.

Spring has turned to summer, and the mercury has steadily risen.  What have I been up to?  Everything and nothing at the same time it would seem.  I’ve had vast stretches of off time that were used for extensive relaxing in addition to countless menial tasks meant to get my life in order and accomplish personal goals.  When Shaimus lost a guitarist this past spring (though we are making our triumphant return to the stage on August 4th at the Troubadour), I came upon even more unexpected free time than I had even planned on, and one task I’ve taken to has been laying down some music that I’ve been meaning to record for ages.  More on that in a (near) future post.

Some things over the past few months have gone oh so well.  Others have gone oh so poorly.  Such is life, so “they” say.  Although I wouldn’t mind life strictly going well for at least a little while.  A few months here and there, maybe?  I suppose I could be asking too much.  I think a recent story sums up my life as of late quite well.  Perhaps it does the same for yours:

Five years ago, I was at a party for student employees at Berklee College of Music, where I worked in the Media Development office.  They had a raffle with gift certificates to Newbury Comics, a popular local music/comic/pop culture store.  The biggest one was worth $100, and by a rare stroke of luck I happened to win it.  For a college student, a hundred bucks seemed like a pile of gold bricks, so I set it aside and plotted what CDs and DVDs I would add to my collection.  A few days later, it was gone.  Whether I had misplaced it, unintentionally thrown it away, or was the victim of theft I had no idea.  But there was no trace of it.  I silently cried on the inside.  Then I moved on with my life.

Flash forward to May 2009.  Hank Woods, my former roommate/one of my best friends/guitarist of the Mike Lombardi-fronted rock band Apache Stone, calls me one sunny afternoon. While this sort of occurrence is not out of the blue, what he asked me about was.  “I seem to recall about five years ago you lost a Newbury Comics gift certificate,” he said.  Turns out, while discussing the finer points of the music business with a friend, Hank had pulled out a book that he hadn’t opened since college.  What should fall onto the street but my old prize.  What are the odds?  And conveniently, just days later he was headed from New York City to Los Angeles and would be able to hand it directly to me.  I also discovered that Newbury Comics, a local Boston company, happened to have a website that I could order from.

What a rollercoaster of luck I was on–win $100.  Lose it without a trace in Boston, MA.  Have it found five years later in New York and returned to me on the West Coast.  Then to top the story off, after browsing the Newbury Comics site for an hour and figuring out what I would be getting, I went to check out only to find that you can’t use their gift certificates online.

Chalk that last one up to life, but I’ll have the last laugh anyway.  Just might take a little more than five more years.

I recently came across a blog called “Not Always Right,” which details people’s run-ins with moronic customers while working retail jobs.  It’s pretty addictive to read the accounts of jaw-dropping stupidity, and as someone who has worked retail in the past, I sadly relate to many of the stories.

I hated retail with a passion.  Customers tend to believe that since you’re trying to make them happy, they can walk all over you and treat you like shit because it’s their right.  Of course, not all customers are assholes; I met a lot of really cool, nice people while working in the accessories department of Guitar Center.  But the fact is, I have story upon story that would unfortunately qualify for inclusion in the aforementioned blog.

One of the reasons I left my Sunset Blvd sales post was that I just don’t have the right attitude for customer service.  When people prod me, I tend to prod back.  When someone tries to put me down, my initial response is generally to put them in their place with an acerbic remark of some sort.  I just wasn’t made for retail, it would seem.

One of my favorite stories from working at Guitar Center has to do with a very common occurrence of idiocy that happened every day in that store—people trying to haggle down prices on small items that they are not planning on buying in bulk. A guy came up to the counter and said, “What’s the best deal you can give me on those D’Addario strings?”

My first response when people asked me that was to simply turn my head, look at the price, and repeat it right back to them. “$3.50 a pack, sir.” His response: “Is that the best you can do?”

At this point I’m already irritated with the guy. He makes no attempt to work up a rapport with the employee who has the power to give him a discount. He is trying to haggle down one of the lowest-priced products of one of the lowest-priced items in the store, guitar strings. But I was usually happy to accommodate such requests if they were looking to buy 10 or 15 packs at a time. So the rest of the conversation went as follows:

Me - “Well, how many do you want to get today?”
Him - “Oh, just one.”
Me - “Is that the best you can do?”
Him - *grumbling* “OK, OK, I get it.”

He proceeded to buy it at—gasp—full price. From then on, a co-worker of mine referred to me as Evan “Is That The Best You Can Do” Brown.

Every year of my life, I learn a little bit about myself (I really can say the alphabet backwards while intoxicated). Every year, I marvel at how my life has developed over the past 365 days, how I’ve changed, the people I’ve met, the experiences I’ve had, and how life never ceases to fascinate me. This year was all that, plus a little more. I think I may have grown up more in the past year of my life than in the rest of my 20s combined, for a number of reasons.

As a disclaimer, I still enjoy many childish, stupid things. But much of my life so far has been wallowing in a tepid pool of immaturity, one that I’ve seemingly started to climb out of at least a little during the ripe old age of 25. I grew out of a few behaviors that I never pictured myself growing out of. I finally had some tangible realization that I am, in fact, not invincible—something that just about every guy has to discover, I think, but no less grounding of an experience even when you know it’s coming.

I started occasionally feeling like an adult for the first time in my life, too. After a few years of watching many of my friends and former classmates getting married, I thought I must be way behind in thinking marriage sounded like the most insane idea in the world to me right now. It still does, of course, but it was just that feeling that came along with it, the feeling that I’d never start feeling “grown up,” that I started shedding a bit recently. One weird moment was the day I finally realized that I can literally do anything I want, any time I want. Wanna go to Hawaii for a week? I can do that. Want to drive to San Francisco just to look at seals on the wharf for a weekend? No one will stop me. It seems such a stupid thing that I should have known all along, but it just never even occurred to me until now. Those seem to be the things that made me start becoming a little more self-aware and grown up—things that I felt like I should have known all along, but were inexplicably foreign to me.

But I think the biggest step in this latest chapter’s awkward stumble into adulthood was the shocking (and slightly horrifying) epiphany that the mindset of feeling young never really does change too much. Sure, you may feel a little older and a little wiser, but there’s not going to be a magic switch at age 40 that makes me feel like a responsible grown up. I’m still probably going to feel more or less how I feel now in another 20 years. It makes sense, of course. How many 50 year olds have made stupid, childish decisions? Plenty. Remember thinking how old a 45 year old seemed when you were a kid, but you couldn’t understand why they always insisted, “Hey, I’m not old yet!”

And along with that bit of knowledge comes the slightly more disturbing part: it never is going to get any easier. In fact, all the easiest stuff is behind me. Being a kid and wanting so hard to be “grown up” was the easiest time I’ll ever have for the rest of my life. But you’d never understand that as a child.

So here’s to another year of learning, another year of exploring, another year of living. I have a long way to go (hopefully), so I’d better roll up my sleeves and prepare for the road ahead. And when anyone asks me if I feel older today, my answer will be simple: no! Now that I’m starting to feel like an adult, 26 seems pretty damn young, indeed!

I never quite understood when people worried about their personal indie cred. For some people, listening to a pop band that sounds polished and radio-ready is equivalent to selling their soul to Lucifer. That sentiment is fine if the band sucks. But what if the song really is catchy and really is fun to listen to? You shouldn’t have to apologize for anything. Sure, maybe you’re a devout follower of Bright Eyes, but so what if you hear a Paramore song on the radio and think “hey, that actually kinda rocks?” You’ve done nothing wrong. If someone else thinks you’re somehow less legit as a human being now, I don’t know why you’d want to hang out with them in the first place. Their approval means nothing.

The opposite situation is just as mystifying. With some people, if you say “hey, you should listen to ‘Red Eyes and Tears’ by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, it’s a bitchin’ song,” they’ll crinkle their nose and say “I’ve never heard them on KROQ, I don’t want to listen to them.” What they don’t seem to realize is that they had never heard of the All-American Rejects a couple years ago, but the band still existed. There’s a LOT of great music that will never be heard on the radio. There’s also a LOT of ass-kickin’ tunes that rock the airwaves. And it’s more than OK to listen to them both.

It’s sort of like clothing, and how people dress like hipsters, goths, punks, rockers, or whatever. In order to completely fit in and be accepted into certain walks of life, you have to dress like them. I can think of nothing more ironic than the cliques that represent rebels or outcasts that won’t embrace you unless you look like they do. No one has dressed a certain way their whole lives. They’re all changing their lifestyles to fit in where they feel like they belong. Personally, I’d rather belong right where I already am.

Or maybe I don’t really belong anywhere. That’s sort of how it’s always been, anyway. I never really fit into a certain group in High School. But I never really cared. I always felt like being in one group would limit my access to the others, that I could never get the full experience of life from a single perspective.

But forget that philosophical crap. I’m talking about music. Listen to what you like, period. Forget all the pretense and preconceptions and just enjoy music for what it is. Remember why you love it in the first place. Only then can you really appreciate everything it has to offer. I like Crowded House. I like Elliott Smith. I like AC/DC. I like Muddy Waters. I like Elbow. I like Aerosmith. I don’t care who thinks what about the music I listen to. And I don’t care that the way I dress doesn’t do much to define who I am (though that could always change as I am making my way through an image-obsessed music industry).

Sometimes I don’t fit in as well because of this attitude. But I’ve found that fitting in less often means standing out more.

Nothing here is set in stone
Nothing’s ever set in stone
Everything I have some day will fall apart and fade away

-The Bravery

Why do humans search for meaning in life? Why does the fear of regret prompt us to follow dreams, pursue grand plans, and make us try to live a life that will serve a purpose and allow us to say “I lived a meaningful life” before we die? Is the fear of being forgotten in our genes? Do atheists and theists alike agree that there is some bigger picture that we have a duty to minister to? Why is it part of human instinct to justify one’s own existence?

No other animal does that. Every other being has the same instinct, purpose, and day to day goal: survival. Sure, we have that instinct, but the ability to ask “why” makes our lives completely unique. In some ways I’ve answered my own question: with more advanced brain power, we can’t help but kill some time wondering about shit. Who hasn’t looked at a dog and thought, “boy it would be nice to just sit around all day, be happy and not get bored.” But it’s like Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; he’s so amazingly smart that you couldn’t possibly give him something to think about that would completely cure his boredom or ease his depression. We have to occupy ourselves with curiosity.

But while I am sporadically envious of the blissfully ignorant, my abstract thinking ability has also revealed to me the ludicrousness and futility that is the survival instinct in itself. Our own demise is guaranteed, even most animals seem to realize that. So not only do we fight to last as long as we can, we have the irresistible urge to procreate to ensure that something of ourselves or our species continues on. But why? What is the point of surviving only to meet our ultimate doom when the planet is destroyed or when the universe collapses back on itself?

There may be an abundance of unknowns regarding life, but one of the few things we know with some certainty is that everything we know will come to an end at some point, even if that point is in the distant future. So is our constant clamoring for meaning simply our way of dealing with this one seemingly unavoidable truth, this great uncertainty caused by a single certainty?

Well, I have my personal theories. But who the hell knows?