When I registered this domain a million years ago, it was to build a community site for some friends of mine. I knew a lot of people at the turn of the century (been waiting forever to use that one!) who were recently coming out of the academy and into the world beyond. They were artist, musicians, writers, and poets who now faced up to the reality that the world at large doesn’t much care for individual creations in a financial way. That is to say, we were all starting to choke down day jobs.

Throughout my academic career I took it as a given that I would end up teaching at a university. The sheer dollar value of my student loan debt and a few decisions that decidedly limited my options took me down a different path. I quickly realized that pursuing an academic position wasn’t really for me. I would be doing a lot of things that I didn’t much care for in the hopes that I would have time and support for my creative work. Those ideas carried me to the end of my PhD coursework and no further. I left dreams (and nightmares) of the academy behind and did something else.

What is that something else? It’s outside of the scope of this blog. I don’t talk about my job here for many reasons, not the least of which being that this site and the work that I do that is associated with it has nothing to do with my day job. In the Venn diagram of life they don’t produce any intersections. Nuff said.

The community that I hoped to establish fell to the wayside. People found out that day jobs become careers and the old definitions that one has of oneself sometimes fall away and are replaced. The painter becomes an illustrator. The writer becomes a grant specialist. The musician becomes a system administrator. It happens. People change.

For a while the site was a place I would put up all kinds of links and documentation about Free Software for making music. I had some good links and some good HowTos but as I slowly moved away from that way of doing things, I let it drop. I would rather use software to make music than spend my days tinkering with software for its own sake. I still find it amusing to geek out about this or that, but it’s not central to how I spend my time.

From that, I turned this into a blog solely about my music and what I’m producing. It’s going to stay that way for a long time, but I want to add in whatever I can find about the life of those of us who clung to our disciplines in the face of the day job. Those who couldn’t put down the pen or the guitar. People who create in their other time. Subtle, eh?

Here and now I’m a composer and a musician. That’s what this site is all about.