Feeding The Masses

I can be so mean sometime. At least I get accused of it often enough. I don't feel like I'm being mean. It's just that I have an odd sense of humor. I take what other people say about the other and write the same words they use to accuse other people of being themselves. I get my taunts straight from the other person' s arguments, but they never recognize what I write as their own. Candidly, I'm not so sure I would recognize my own words as my own if someone took the trouble to do unto me what I do unto them.

My intent is for people to recognize what they really, really wanna recognize about themselves in order to understand their own rules of conscience. This is only possible, in my opinion, by owning up to what we accuse the other of what we'd be like if we did and said what they do and say. This one woman I communicate with infrequently doesn't understand that she uses the same argument with other people that she uses with me.

It's the same argument no matter who she attempts to communicate with, but she refuses to see that it's not us she's talking about. It probably isn't her either. Aye, and there's the rub. Other people constantly and unknowingly break our own subjective rules of conscience. Our rules of conscience are set up to help us to become the sort of person we're modeling in the other. We get mad or happy about other people when they do right by our chosen rules of conscience or wrong us by doing what we've convinced ourselves we ought not to do.

The rules of conscience we set up for ourselves and try to use as guidelines for becoming something else than what other people accuse us of being like are actually useless. We do what we do anyway. How we interpret our own behavior is another matter altogether. Fanatics are usually the last ones to admit they're being fanatical about the subject they're obsessed by.

I'm all in favor of being obsessed and getting fanatical about some topic or subject that interests one. I've never met anybody who went there that didn't eventually come to doubt the validity of their keen interest to some degree. I've seen it happen in one hugely embarrassing moment, and I've seen it wither on the vine. Sometime people get obsessed about stuff they don't have any talent for, and that probably gains the worst embarrassment when their effort falls apart. Some take forever to recover from such shame.

I know it's ridiculous, but I'm looking forward to having played the major and minor scales daily for at least a year or so. A few months ago I strived to learn which keys had how many flats and sharps in them in a very rote manner of just memorizing them from a written list. I've discovered that's the hard way to do it. Learning to play the scales and which fingers to use to play them makes the process a lot easier. Following the Circle of Fifths in order to play them is the same thing.

The reason I'm looking forward to having played the scales for at least a year is based on what I learn intuitively from my daily practice about the relationship of the keys to one another. There is so much I don't know about playing the keyboard that any small accomplishment in understanding truly amazes me. It seems like when I'm practicing the scales I'm constantly muttering to myself, "I shoulda known that... I should have known that. Why did I ever think that was so difficult?"

I always thought that if I knew how to play the scales and practiced them long enow that everything else I needed to know about music theory would just come to me. That's how everything else except math and English grammar has been for me. I may still be right if I live long enough. It could take me the rest of my life to learn the scales properly. I'm almost sure I'll die of old age first. That is, if somebody I've insulted don't outright kill me first. I take a lotta chances that opens the gate of that possibility. Why would I not? Something is gonna kill me. Why not choose my own murderer?