I joined the US Navy (well, thirty years ago)

January 4, 1988 I boarded a bus to the Naval Training Center in Orlando Florida. It's gone now, a park.
While there, towards the end of the first week I began to pray for someone in my company to die. He sounded like he was going to. He had a dry, hacking cough that was so loud and... abrupt, that the fire bell over the door would resonate and continue to ring after he had a coughing fit. It served to bridge the slight pauses between his coughing fits that lasted all night long. I'm sure he was miserable because I was. He didn't die. Finally I got to sleep. I'm not sure if his cough stopped or if I just finally collapsed after nights of not sleeping because of his noise. I know it happened multiple nights, many, many, many nights and I hated him for it well after it stopped because I didn't trust it to stay gone.

After completing basic training I stayed there in Orlando but moved over to the Naval Training Center, just across the base, where I attended Nuclear Field "A" School as a Machinist Mate. When I finished that I changed buildings to go to Nuclear Power School and did really well in that. That I loved.

FINALLY the reason I'd joined. Science. Nuke stuff. I loved it. I didn't ace it, but I was in the top of the class. As our class dwindled, the attrition rate was huge on the "dark side." It was called the "dark side" because the classes were hard enough that you never saw the light of day because you were studying so much you never got outside. Well, sort of.

Remember the cougher from the first paragraph? He was also in school, but he was still in "A" School for "Electronics Tech" which went longer, and then he was in Power School, but I was still ahead of him. He had plenty of free time and I was doing well enough, even on the dark side, that we hung out a lot. Went to a lot of movies.

I listened to Def Lepard's Hysteria and Guns 'n Roses' Appetite for Destruction on repeat just about non-stop for most of that time. Those are still two of my favorite albums ever. Not just because they're great albums, but because of where I was geographically, and in my life at the time. It was fun and warm, and we were in Orlando, Florida. You know what there is to do in Central Florida when you're young and have no bills? Everything. That's what there is to do.

I bought a car, a white Renault Encore that was, when I looked at the owner's manual, originally owned by a lady from a place called Ogden, Iowa. When I bought it I didn't know I'd soon be moving to a town about 45 miles from there.

So, long story short, too late. That guy with the cough? We wound up getting married last year so we don't introduce each other as "old Navy buddies" quite as often as we did for decades.

So, happy anniversary of joining the world's greatest navy, and I'm glad he didn't die from pneumonia... I guess.

Could I have a B# followed by an E# please?

Today I learned why there is no B# or E#.

I'm playing some Rocksmith and trying to learn/teach myself to play guitar and the missing half-steps between the letters B & C and E & F have bugged me for weeks. Today I remembered to look it up.
The reason is... wait for it... wait for it...

Because.

Yup. That's right. It's just cuz. The notes are all a half step from each other, just those were named the way they were because the note-namers felt like it. They had to, kind of, because there's 12 notes in Western music and if they'd done the A, A#, B, B# thing they'd have wound up with A-F for notes and no G at all. Ab would have been the same as F# under the no-G notation.

The musical among you are saying, "Shut up Rich. That's obvious." But it wasn't obvious to me. I thought the letters were all whole steps from each other and couldn't figure out why I couldn't half-step between B-C and E-F. Would it create the brown note? Would I crap my pants if I ever managed to do it? Nope. They're just named wrong and it stuck. No biggie.

So, with a light heart, an enlightened head, and finger tips that are starting to callous finally, I go to bed. A great mystery solved.

If you're interested in learning guitar I heartily recommend JustinGuitar.com's Practical Music Theory.

Also, we went shooting today to celebrate a friend's birthday:

Neither of these are me, but the .22 in the foreground is mine.

Music and the savage breast

I remember when I was little believing I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. That is very possibly true. I'm not a singer. My voice is not my instrument! There are those that don't sound good even in the shower, they can often be found in the early days of American Idol calling the judges half-wits... but the viewers are laughing at them... too bad their friends didn't tell them to stop. On the other hand, telling them to stop might have been even worse.


I also assumed since I couldn't sing that I had no musical ability and was in some way broken. I don't know anything about music. I remember taking a music appreciation segment in class in, I think, sixth grade. It's when I learned to pronounce Chopin. But when it came to musical instruments or anything like that I always deferred and said, "I can't. I'm tone deaf." People would look at me with a pitying look and wander off shaking their head at what a sad, sad life I must lead. Mostly I didn't notice my handicap. It didn't qualify me for bitching parking spots or any gubment handouts so I figured it just wasn't that big a deal or I'd get something out of it. (That's a joke people, lighten up.)


I don't really listen to music much either. It's often on in the background and I hear it, but I only really pay any attention to lyrics. My favorite group is Extreme. I like their lyrics. I recently got into a discussion with the other half about the merits of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I didn't like it. Some songs didn't even HAVE lyrics and I didn't remember them. When they'd come on while I was listening to it I'd skip on to the next song or tune it out. I just didn't like it. This caused quite a stir... I think the final straw was when I said, "They're a decent keyboard group, but how are they different from say, Simply Red?" That didn't go over well at all. At some point he said, "Maybe you're just too ignorant to recognize good music. You don't play anything and you don't really listen to music at all. Do you even remember if there was a guitar in that song?" I turned my head sideways like a dog trying to figure out a typewriter and asked more than said, "No?" Exasperated he changed the subject. Evidently David Gilmour is quite the skilled guitarist. I've watched him play, and if the camera stays on his hands I can see it and hear it and appreciate it. Put it in a song with my eyes closed and I'm wondering if the new employee will show up on time or if I need to start going through my second string interviewees. If there are lyrics the rest of the music goes away entirely in my head as my focus switches automatically to the lyrics, the words. I'm a very verbal thinker.


I started taking one classical music piece a night and listening to it with my eyes closed, no distractions, just listening to it. Listening for the repetitions in the pieces, the changes in the musical sentences, trying to pick out different instruments and follow what they do. I was getting there. In unrelated news I was having the beginnings of a midlife crisis and feeling a bunch of existential angst and a friend told me to get off my ass and learn something new. It'd help knock me out of the rut I was in. Finally I decided he was right. My ignorance was getting in the way of my enjoyment and the only way to be unignorant was to learn an instrument. I knew I was tone deaf so assumed it would be an uphill battle. He has 4 electric guitars and an acoustic so I chose a black Schechter, electric, to use as my practice guitar. (The "he" here doesn't refer to the friend that told me to learn something new, that's a "she" and her blog can be found here, you should go read it after you're done here.) I have no idea of which one it is. But it's a nice guitar, humbuckers, switches, knobs and crap I haven't a clue what they are sit there making what they do better while I curl my hand into some desiccated monkey's claw around the neck. 


Two days of practice later I can strum an E-chord mostly and can play scales badly. I hold my fingers too far from the strings to do it quickly, a bad habit I need to unlearn. I'm doing all my learning from the Internet, lots of YouTube. I did buy a chord booklet leaflet thing showing me what the chords are.


Finally I decided I should find out how tone deaf I really am. Maybe this is a waste of time. If I can't tell if the guitar's in tune what's the point of plucking away at something if my A is really an F sharp? Off I go to the Internet and take a tone deafness test and...  I scored 86.1%. 70% is Normal Performance. 80% is Very good performance and 90% is Exceptional performance. I'm closer to Exceptional than Very good... I suspect my tone deafness is a result of self-limiting beliefs I have in myself. This score was with zero training in music. I wonder if I'd have done better with some musical training/practice. I suspect the score would have improved as some of the nuances would have, perhaps, been more obvious. But maybe not. Maybe it's the ear's ability to discern. I don't know. Either way. I can no longer tell myself I'm tone deaf as i'm obviously not.


The trick is now I've got to undo 30 years of thinking, "Nope, can't do that." The test is a good start. As I get better playing I imagine that will help give me confidence as well. It's kinda cool to know I'm not broken. Well... I am, but not tone deaf lol.

Music and Writing

I'm not a fan of listening to music when I write. Part of the problem is the words. I find a part of my brain starts following those words. Especially if it's a song I like. More dangerously if it's a song I don't like but that has hooks in it that pull my brains out through my ears. "Tom's Diner" is one such song. The intro to that can get stuck in my head for days. When my brain goes haring off after those words I'm screwed. My words can't keep up.

Some songs are distracting because I dislike the artist so much I'll start some sort of weird mental spiral about how much I dislike them, and how stupid is the radio station that they'll still play them, or how'd they end up on this Pandora station?

So, when I write I'll either listen to classical music or if the muse has really set me on fire I'll listen to some electronic techno stuff around 180bpm and type until my fingers cramp. As much as I like ambient stuff it's no good for writing. I find myself slowing down too much. I'm, in the words of Grace Jones, "A slave to the rhythm." Although to be more truthful it's be "slave to the beat."

Dead silence isn't good for me for writing. I don't know why, but if it's too quiet I hear other things, odd things. Maybe a fan or some white or brown noise would be useful as well. If music weren't practical. I don't know. I've never tried it for writing. I've used brown noise to sleep to though... probably having the sleep association attached to it would make it a bad choice for writing.