Sketches of an Adequate Blog Post

by Brendan Cavanagh

I have to work ALL DAY today, which is a bummer because I have all these ideas for a post today, and little time to fully divulge any one of them. So I'll assemble here a small collection of the few things that have been on my mind lately:

Playing Piano

I'm bored. Oh look, the piano. Sigh, I guess I'll entertain you with a few ditties. What's that? First I think I'll pretend like I don't really know what I'm doing. Tickle a few keys here and there. Throw in a few sharps. Oh hey, I'm improvising (even though I don't really know how). Now I'm leading these arbitrary sharps and flats into a real song- Hungarian Dances No. 5? Sure. Now they know I know something of considerable merit. I'll throw them a few bones and play it twice as fast. Bask in their applause.

I think I'll just jump right into an impromptu set list. Up next we have Rage Over a Lost Penny by Beethoven. I'll play it really loud like, sound more important than I am. Just like Evgeny Kissin.

What's that? Something more contemporary? Oh all right then, I'll just play The Beatles' Let It  Be. Nah, I think all I'll give you is the opening piano bit and just a couple notes of the first verse (because that's all I know).

Yeah, okay, let's jam a little bit. I'll play the same two chords over and over and over- Bob Dylan's Sittin' On A Barbed Wire Fence.

Let's play Hungarian Dances No. 5 again, see if we can successfully play that cascading waterfall of notes in the middle of the song. Damn it! I can't do it. Try again. Again. Again. Give up. Start over. Give up.

Okay, let's take everyone's mind off my inability to play those notes and impress them with my best song- Pachabel's Canon in D. Yeah. I think I see a tear in my parents' eyes. This song is still impressive after seven years.

Oh, I'm going to attempt to jam some more, even though I know I really can't do it. These black keys sound real good together. I bet everyone thinks I'm playing a real song. Nope!

Fur Elise! Just the good part.

Uh...Hedwig's Theme!

Rage Over A Lost Penny again. Okay, I give up. I'm going to get up like everything that just happened wasn't a big deal.

Mix CDs

I love and hate making mix CDs. I mean I agonize over making them. There was one time when I was trying to make a then-important mix, and I spent several sleep-deprived nights trying to narrow down 150 songs to twenty, ultimately settling on a double CD containing in total about forty songs. Like anyone, I become invigorated by the prospect of constructing a decent playlist of songs that I feel are important to me for someone who is important to me. Except I think I put too much thought and effort into my mixes. Like, I somehow hope that there's an easy way to arrange all these different types of songs together in a fluid fashion, so that the CD will maintain a constant and unbreaking flow. But that's just so damn hard to do. Eventually what ends up happening is the first six songs on my mix will sound incredible when placed one after the other, but I give up attempting to fit the next fifteen songs in an engaging way that I see fit. But I know it still sounds awesome. And then right when I make it, all of a sudden everything on the CD seems so cliche and then I fear that the mix is too strictly temporal in that it lists the songs I'm crazy about at one particular moment in my life. So I'm afraid that in the near future, even I will find my own playlist dated and obsolete. But maybe that's the great part about my mixes- that they catalogue the most important songs to me in one particular chapter of my life and paint a picture of how I'm feeling at that point. Sometimes I think I should just start making mix EPs because they'd be about five songs long and undeniably powerful and groovy.

An Incomplete Poem Inspired By Mada's Latest Post
(from the point of view of John Wilkes Booth's reanimated wax figure at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, upon seeing the armies of resurrected Lincoln's surrounding him)

My only regret is that I had but one life to live

Four scores of top-hat hordes advance upon my waxen figure
Adhering to the commands of a long-fallen leader
146 years of lying in a tomb culminates in honest revenge
He emancipates his way through courtroom suits

HEY CONOR, LOOK HERE LOOK HERE, CONOR

What's your favorite movie, and why? Mine for a long time was Shaun of the Dead. While it's still one of my favorites, I feel like I'm clutching at it, trying to tell myself it's still my favorite, even though I know I've seen many better movies. I think Annie Hall or something has probably taken over its number one position. But I'm afraid to let that happen. What do I doooooo?