Careless post

The biggest loss in humanity has to, unequivocally, be the onset of, or transition to, apathy.

Apathy, the way I process it, is much more wretched than hate.  There is a certain connotation of care in hate.  You hate, therefore you manifest a feeling.  Merely thinking about the person you hate evokes a feeling.  Yes, this feeling is hate, but feeling nonetheless.  Perhaps you just hate them because you wish they were different, perhaps they wronged you in a way, perhaps you were indoctrinated into the mentality of hatred by your lousy parents, or perhaps you were just born a hateful, fundamentalist, ultra-racist piece of shit.  However, you do harbor a feeling for a person.  And it is better than no feeling.  This, I call "care". 

Evidently, the subject of your hate would not agree with me and my, albeit arbitrary, assessment of which is better and which is worse.  Assuredly, I retain only a globalized, sociological view on this subject, for the purpose of this post. 

Recently, I had a person in my life (with whom I interact on a daily basis) transition almost the entire spectrum of this, so-called care.  I went from not knowing them to liking them, from liking them to disliking them then hating them, from hating them to loathing them, and ultimately to simply not caring at all about them, and largely ignoring them.

This actually made me sad.  No one had to announce this to me.  There were no fanfare, banners flying, no big announcement with an even bigger speech.  One day I just realized that the care in me, for this person, is gone.  They did and said things that I just ignored.  And this is a fellow human being, for crying out loud!  Yet, I could not bring it out of me to care anymore.  This person's presence evoked no feeling.

I am not going much further into the external circumstances that we were in, this person and I, but it suffices to say that those circumstances exhaustively aided this onset of apathy in me.

This is what I call the transition to apathy.

If you actually do not care for someone, initially, then I hold that there is no loss.   But if certain feeling for a human existed in you, but progressively evaporated and is no longer there, that is the loss. 

Where, do you think, did that feeling go? 

You may have heard me say in person, or read my ramblings on this blog, about how I hate people.  I truly do hate people.  I just wish they weren’t the dumbfuck sheep that they are.  Just walking around is one disappointment after another, seeing the ridiculous things that we do without putting half a mind to our everyday actions.  One slip-up and I hate you, yep.

However, as an individual whose path I have not yet crossed, upon the initial meet-and-greet, I always give one the benefit of the doubt.  In my mind, based on your behavior, you might, then, move in either direction – I might like you or dislike you.  But now I >>know<< you and I certainly have a feeling for you.

What must transpire between us for me to lose that feeling?

And that is merely speaking about those we know.  What of those we do not know at all?  Where does the feeling begin?  Does it begin with apathy or does it begin lopsided on some scale of care?

A couple of fundamentalists flew two planes into 3000 innocent people.  Do you not loathe them?  Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are suffering under famine and villainous paramilitary groups.  Do you not sympathize?  We’ve never even met any of these multitudes and multitudes of people, yet somehow they evoke feelings in us.  How does it happen that we grow apathetic, then?  How does one say “I just simply don’t give two shits about that?”

Human loss, that is.  

Getting Schooled

I signed up for a Songwriting class. I have been dabbling in this for too long with no aim and I decided that it would finally be reasonable to get some direction, or expert advice, or even just plain old tools to add to my arsenal.

I plan on blogging about it to document my experience. I will post here my weekly findings and other things related to it, as I do my homework assignments, think about what we learned, etc.

I signed up with Gotham Writers Workshop, a community of educators in creative writing of all styles.

I am attending a 10-week long course of 3-hour classes running once a week. My classes are on Wednesdays and they have a parallel course running on Tuesdays.

The first class was this past Wednesday.

The teacher is great. I tend to be very judgmental of educators in general. Subconsciously, I have found myself always trying to discredit them. It's sort of a defense mechanism built into us – if you are to participate in my edification, what makes you think you are qualified? Once they pass that barrier of mine, they are the Law, and I tend to absorb their every word.

I won't disclose the name of my instructor, because I didn't really consult with him. He has decades of experience in the business. He has written for all sorts of singers – from R&B to country, and anything in between; for film, for commercials, for pro-bono purposes, for pretty much everything. He has written hits for Gloria Gaynor, and Alan Jackson and he is currently signed as a songwriter for BMG. He has a cool dude aura about him, but he speaks very articulately and eloquently, utilizing a very rich vocabulary, which usually appeals to me.

The first class was good. I was twelve minutes late, no big surprise there. We are eight or nine students in a small room. It is very personal. I missed the introductions. I heard the teacher later say that we have a lot of musicians in the room. I am curious about who plays what.
The class was mostly about general introduction and history of songwriting in America. Then we went into most common structures of songs (particularly popular songs) and towards the end we touched upon ideas of initiating the lyric writing.

I expected that a lot of the initial material was going to be a refresh for me, since I've read some Rikky Rooksby books, and similar material from the Internet and other sources. However, I got from the class exactly what I expected: among the piles of repeat material, I learned some gems of very interesting, basic songwriting knowledge, that was very new to me. This, in and of itself, is already worth it all.

If I were to find one downside to it all, it would have to be the extensive listening of popular songs, that the teacher enforces in order for us to recognize the patterns and structures that he teaches.
I am not yet sure that this is a true flaw. I will wait to see if it is really bothersome or not. We do have three hours in this class, every week, so I seriously doubt it.

One interesting find on a personal note is – although I generally stay away from popular music and tend to not believe that the commercially-acceptable patterns (in any genre of art) are nourishing to artistry - I accepted the fact that some popular patterns taught are necessary. In music, an artist has a mere few minutes to capture a listeners attention, and convey a message. Our minds, as listeners, have simply been programmed over the years to recognize patterns that have been ingrained in us and are more pleasing, recognizable, and we tend to favor them. With this, I agree. As much as we would all like to make our art be unique and stand out, there is also the duty that we have, that is: communicate your message.

We have some homework to do.
We have to: a) write no less than two verses of a twelve-bar blues song; b) write two or three (no more, no less) titles for future songs – these titles must be accompanied by a paragraph, each, explaining what the concept of the song is. The blues song verses can be just recited, can be sung, can be sung along to an accompanying instrument, or can be even pre-recorded and turned in to the teacher to play in class.
It is Saturday now, and the homework must be ready on Wednesday. I have some ideas for the blues song, but nothing concrete. I will use some time right now, and get started.

So far, I'm happy with this class.