MY WRISTS AND HANDS are gradually going arthritic. What a drag. Most days I'm fine...although when I do pushups I have to do knuckle pushups instead of regular ones. My right wrist doesn't like to bend up hard against my hand anymore. And if I carry heavy furniture and support it entirely with my right wrist the wrong way, I can just drop it. Today my left wrist and hand are hurting, and that's a new one by me. I couldn't figure out what was going on until I picked up my daughter, as I always do, and slung her up on my hip and supported her with my left arm, cradle her with my left wrist and hand...and realized where the aggravation was coming from. So I can't hold her like that anymore. Shooting pains today, through the bones of my left hand and wrist. Woke up with them. Growing up so young looking for so many years sort of led me to feel like age couldn't touch me. Now age is reminding me, I guess. The earth is reminding me that one day I will return to the dust, that bones are not so solid after all. Even my very frame—this thing that props up my very heart and lungs and face and skin—is, too, ephemeral. I never feel so mortal as these days my body complains. Oh, I know, I talk like an old man. I'm only 38. (And once that was OLD to me, too!) But then again, in some ways, I've talked and thought like an Old Man since I was young. And...in some ways I still think and feel like a child. I guess I always will. I guess that's what makes it so hard to notice the body aging. As my mother always told me "Consciousness has no age." Shoot. I must make some bronze sculpture before it is too late! I must kick some ass. Damn. Or at least get an ace bandage to wrap around this wrist.

My hands are pretty much the most important part of my body to me. Well, of course my eyes and my face do compete. Especially my eyes. Without my hands or eyes, the art I could make would be considerably limited. I wouldn't be stopped...but I would have less choices, that's for sure. And especially playing guitar and the congas. Guitar is very strenuous on the hand, very much so. But I love doing it. It's probably my favorite instrument. Aside from my voice. My voice is my favorite. But damn, when I say I have nine guitars, I'm not kidding. (And a violin!) Anyway, I'm not complaining, really. I mean I am complaining, but at the same time I keep in mind the Def Leppard drummer. That vato who got his arm chewed off by a shark, and he was a drummer and a drummer only! And he didn't give up. So. What are a few aches in the bones?

Always good to have perspective. I remember I was living in welfare housing when I was 17, out on my own. My mom came to visit and saw where I was living...and I guess it upset her. She told me then that she felt it was her fault that I would accept that kind of life. But I saw it a whole different way. I told her then that I saw it as my life had prepared me. It had prepared me for what could happen, and so I wouldn't be freaked out when blows came my way. And you know what? It's true...you can't freak me out with circumstance. What I didn't know was that even those days at Eva's Cottages were good. Because they gave me perspective. Now, if things get tough, I can look back (and I can look back on a lot) and say "Hey, at least I'm not at Eva's Cottages anymore. Where two of my neighbors came after me with guns, and where my best friend was a schizophrenic pillhead." I think too many people don't have enough perspective. I flew first class for the first time a week or two ago. It was amazing. I was standing in line waiting with the rest of the rabble and after like ten minutes a woman came up and was saying "Now where is the first class check in?" And she went and walked right to the counter, because the First Class Check-in was a couple poles around a red carpet, with no waiting. And I was like WUT? FIRST CLASS CHECK-IN??? What am I doing standing here?So I hopped the sweaty line, and began my trek through Privilege in the Sky.

And it just went on and on. Big seats, gorgeous food, movies that weren't even out on DVD yet, special bathrooms. While I am soaking all this up with a grin, a woman ordering food a few seats ahead of me in First Class began complaining because they were out of a certain item that she wanted. She said "Oh, this is the story of my life!" And I was thinking, Damn. Really? I was thinking she should be so lucky if flying first class and having to pick another meal—a meal that Economy/Coach doesn't even have the option of ordering—was the Story of Her Life. I was thinking You oughtta be jumping up and down weeping with gratitude if that is the Story of Your Life.

Perspective.

They brought us this huge snack box at one point between meals, and the cabin behind us got none. I opened this thing and it was like a full pantry of cookies and crackers and cheese. There was a woman behind me and across the aisle with a child, and I took about half my stuff and turned around and gave it to her without saying anything, and she took it without saying anything back. I think she was probably smiling, but I kept my eyes on her kid. Just to communicate, nonverbally, why I felt she should have the food—not because she was brown. Nah, it was because her kid wouldn't understand "First Class" vs. "Economy." Anyway, I didn't want to embarrass her by meeting her eyes...in case, you know. In case she imagined I wanted some kind of big Thank You. Anyway, I think we were cool. It wasn't like I was some aristocratic figure tossing her coins. I think we both understood—by my inked arms and my non-formal attire—that I was sort of an anomaly in First Class. Hell, I'm the one who usually barges up there and uses their bathroom with an "I dare you to stop me" look in my eye. I don't care for such separation. Not even when its me up there. It makes me feel funny. I'm in conspiracy with poor people, you see. No matter what ends up happening to me. Of course, like most, I want to be rolling in piles of money one day. But despite what my cynical ex-employer Allen told me about all sensible young men eventually becoming Republicans as they aged and found success, I will never forget what it's like to be hungry. Or to not have the things I long for. No amount of success or comfort will ever make me become someone who could enjoy it sitting next to others who lack. I'm not noble, and I'm not saintly by any means. I'm actually pretty shallow in many ways. Maybe I'm just easily embarrassed.

Nah, that can't be it.

Who knows.

Perspective.

It's taken me a lot of time to gather many of the things I have. All I really want are good tools to make my music and my art. Well...that's not really true. I want a sunny yard. And friends to have over, and maybe an in-ground pool one day so me and all my friends can chill in that pool. And perhaps some frozen margaritas. Good stereo equipment. And health for my family.

But that in-ground pool with blender drinks and good music pumping is about the height of my dreams. I guess at the top of the dream ladder I see myself having enough money to fly my friends out for that party. But Nez, you say—once you get successful and rich, won't you be chilling with people who have enough money to fly themselves? Nah, I reply. Because I probably wouldn't care for the types who can fly around at a moment's notice. I'd probably reject them for less affluent friends...who would probably come over and trash my house and steal my video games. But hell, I dont have to get rich for that to happen. In fact, that has already happened. What are you gonna do? Rich or poor, I'm betting its the same. Friends are a great, big, pain in the ass. But life without them is lonely.

So yeah. I remember when I was still a teenager, all I had was a cheap, fret-buzzy guitar and a tape recorder. I'd sit in the bathroom—because the natural reverb in there is good—and sing...record it. The songs from those days, you can hear my foot slapping the tiled floor. Then, I'd play the tape in the stereo, and record that with another tape recorder (through the air, no lines or wires) while I sang a harmony or did a guitar overdub. That was my "multitracking" at the start. I'd even do little fills or solos with a cheap casio trumpet sound. Again, no line in. Just playing it into an open-air condensor mic. The tapes (yes, they were actually cassettes) were hissy, but the songs were definitely heartfelt. Often funny...sometimes clever. Most were interesting, I'd say. Some even approached Good. I was so free with what I was doing that none were average or forgettable, tho they definitely should have had their own genre. Perhaps a subbranch of "terribly ambitious amateur recordings." But I was loving it. I was dreaming. Always dreaming.

Dreaming of a good guitar, or a real keyboard. Dreaming of the ability to record myself decently. dreaming of some amorphous, vague, amazing thing called a STUDIO. Not that I even knew what one looked like or what to expect from it. But lots of dreams. When you are broke and either hopping from state to state with friends, or working minimum wage (at 17 I was working two min wage jobs actually, not much sleep and no social life), even a $350 mixing board may as well be a million dollars. A $200 microphone (and good mics can actually run into the thousands) may as well be a candy-apple red GTO. You aren't gonna get one. And such things can seem so far away you might not even dare to dream of them.

Of course, I'm going to suggest you do anyway.

Over time, I've gathered many tools. Granted, those days were about 18 years ago. (That long already? Damn.) But in the meantime, I've gathered all I need to have my own little studio. Some of it has come relatively recently. It is more satisfying than I can tell you.

Sometimes I sit in my little studio room and just look at the things I have now. Because it's rather mindblowing to me. Yeah, true...I'm easily impressed in this regard. I know people who have a setup ten times the worth of mine. I don't even have a Mac Pro. Just an iMac.

But that's the thing. It's so easy to get caught up in owning Things, or getting the Better Thing, that we can easily lose sight of those days you were sitting on the edge of a tub pushing "Record" and singing into the air as the tape deck caught the sound of your bare foot slapping tile. You can easily get too crazy with the degree of quality of your gear, one increment topping another, always wanting the more advanced unit...you can easily forget that you have what you do, and that you are damn lucky to have it. And that it works. And that the most important part can't be upgraded.

I have not forgot. As I said, sometimes I just sit here. In silence. I look around and just smile. By myself. (I know, I'm a little crazy. But it's all good.) I'll sit here and silently remember when instead of a real pop-screen for my mic, I used pantyhose stretched around a bent-up coathanger that was rubber-banded to the mic stand. I remember when my mic stand wasn't a real boom stand, so I had to lean it over onto something, because it had no retractable extending arm. I think back to when I wasn't just trying to keep a signal-to-noise ratio tight, I was recording so much hiss on my tapes recording with multiple tracks of open-air hiss that my youngest brother said to me "That sounds like you recorded it behind a waterfall," and so, I named that tape Behind the Waterfall. I think back to when I didn't have congas or bongos, and no notion of what a "drum loop" would one day be, but instead recorded myself beating on the mattress with sticks to make a beat. (One of my least successful improvisations, when it came to equipment substitution, I admit.) Perspective. As I said, I have a lot of memories in this way.

And I, too, get lost in the silly chase toward perfection. Of course...it's not silly. It's what makes good art in the first place. It's what makes good work in any area. As a direction, chasing perfection (and here I fail to resist adding the rhyme "erection") is an admirable and necessary thing. But when we get lost in that...it's easy to completely miss the mark. I guess that's always part of the awareness thing.

There's a real challenge in finding how many takes a scene should be shot, how many takes to go after the vocal track. You need to find that balance between practiced competence, and raw energy. A few takes and the energy is high...but there will be flaws. Too many takes, and you can smooth out all the burrs, but you smooth out the spontaneity and the guts, too. I've gone to both extremes. It's a zen thing. A balancing act where you fall if you try too hard to stay on the wire.

I dreamed of having a four-track recorder ever since my friend showed me his. I was 19. I was blown away. Blown away by this machine. It was made for me.

I guess I've never gone into it here, how long I've been obsessed with recording. I've written about fifty pages (literally) on this. So I won't do it again here. But suffice it to say that my mother handed me a recorder with a mic when I was about five, and I used to sing and talk into it, and loved it. That began my fixation...or maybe fate is not so linear. Maybe I was born to have this leaning, and her giving me the recorder was part of that destiny. Who knows. Who cares. All I can tell you is that I was so...taken with the whole function of recording—that you could capture life in this way, hold it, store it, play it back and hear it again—that it became a major and obssessive interest of mine...and remains so, to this day. I have hundreds of cassettes of my life, of songs, of phone conversations, of fights, of days I got arrested, of my eldest daughter crying and me playing guitar notes to match her wails, ala Plant and Page (but with no tour bus), of poems, of random moments...and when I was 19 and first operated a four-track, well. I knew I had to have one.

This line of thought threatens to take us on a long(er) journey, and I'm not going there. I've been typing this far longer than I expected anyway. But I did get that four track. Then I sold it to have cash for a roadtrip. Box unopened. It hurt. But I guess the roadtrip was more important.

Six years later, I finally got an eight-track with a large tax break check. ("Large.") And then, eight years after that, if you were still recording on tape, you were a dinosaur. So I made the move to digital. Or I tried.

And I've been chasing a good sound since. Because in analog, sure I had a lot of hiss, comparatively. But then digital came...and with it a huge host of problems that analog recording never presented. Ugly clipping instead of warm fuzzy distortion when you overloaded your levels. Weak sound, as unless your preamp was strong, you weren't going to be using enough data to get a real level. Drivers. USB mics suck, and data doesn't flow fast enough. Lots more money to be spent on all this. Firewire ports (do you have any? Do you have enough?), and it goes on and on and on. Until one day you aren't even recording, you are spending all your money and time chasing a simple signal. You get buried in technology, and forget what it's all about.

And then you hear a song like this. Or like this. And you remember.

How many instruments? One or two. A few at most. Vocals, congas (djembe, I think), guitar. Vocals, piano. Why do songs so spare—recorded in one take, no less—bring shivers to my frame, or tears to my eyes? It ain't the mic. It ain't the length of the firewire cable. It ain't the clarity of the recording.

It's the heart. It's the belly, and nothing but. It's a genuine communication of emotion and experience.

This is an important perspective, and one I try to bring into many areas. Not just music. We can even talk about blogging, or writing. We can imagine crucial truths getting ignored in favor of a discussion of the way in which we are framing them. We can talk about getting lost in the vehicle as it is driving off the road. Or going over the edge of a cliff as you yell at your passenger for staining the leather interior. We can imagine a maestro testily waving his hand, his nose high in the air, feet firmly planted on the deck of a ship as it plunges to the floor of the ocean. Pick your metaphor or application. And tell me, if you only had a few breaths left, would you scream or sigh...or sing? And can you answer without thinking it over what the difference is between the three?

THE CLOUDS OUT MY WINDOW look painted onto the sky. They look like those clouds in The Simpsons. I had to do a double take. But you know what They say. Art imitates life, while life imitates a Matt Groenig cartoon.

I'm getting hungry. And the Advil® didn't take my wrist pain away. The warm shooting pain is almost erotic in its depth and reach. A repeating pulse, or flash of liquid heat, inflaming a nerve path. Wracking and ramming playful neurons between the monkeybars of my ulna and radius.

Sometimes pleasure and pain switch masks and confuse me. They trade off laughter and tears and I just tumble between. They both know that either way, I'm an easy dance partner. Because in the end, laughing or crying...it doesn't matter. I just want to dance.

And that is the story of my life.