When I feel like I can't do anything, I have to do something.
So I spent a large chunk of last week cleaning out and re-arranging my home studio/office and the library upstairs.
I have a nice set-up, it was part of the implicit bargain we made when we downsized and moved across the river into a new house about 18 months ago. Our house is a bit smaller, but we are better about using the space. The downstairs is our living/entertaining zone, which we keep uncluttered and zen. But upstairs, well, I have a room in which I can turn my guitars up (so long as I plug in my headphones) and pile up stacks of books and DVDs and magazines.
I've always wanted a room like this, and as I've gotten more serious about writing and recording music it's helpful to have a dedicated space in which to set up microphones and amps. I've got a little Mac Mini and a modest-sized monitor dedicated to running Logic Pro, a keyboard (it's Karen's, and she's been known to come upstairs and plink out a little Schubert now and then) I can't really play, and various other toys used to make sounds.
There's a guitar-based MIDI controller I'm learning to use and a hand-held hockey-puck thingy that can be finger-drummed on. Even if I couldn't play a note, I could keep myself amused in here for hours.
This isn't a man cave; there's no recliner or mini-refrigerator, no Girl-Haters Club signs. I don't retreat to my lair to watch football (I usually watch football on a muted iPad I carry from room to room) or to sulk like Achilles in his tent.
It has proved to be a very useful space, particularly in these last eight months or so, and doesn't even look terribly cluttered when I clean off the music stands and roll up the cables. It's served well as a place to record videos and music and converse with people via Zoom.
I write here sometimes, though usually these days I prefer the dining room table downstairs. When the dogs start barking at bicyclists a block away and one or both of the adults around here start shouting at them to "stop it!" it almost feels like we're back in the soothing tumult of the newsroom.
I really like my studio; it gets good light from three directions and occasional visits from curious terriers wondering why they haven't seen me in a while. For the most part I keep it quite presentable (at least according to my standards), and suspect that absent the anxiety felt last week I wouldn't have felt the urge to move the fairly big bookcase out of it and down the hall to the library where we probably should have put it in the first place.
In my defense, we divested ourselves of a lot of books before we moved; I wasn't sure we needed to keep the fairly big bookcase, and we only did so because it is a nice piece of adult furniture and shelving always comes in handy. But I felt a little bad for it having been relegated to a corner of the studio, where it wasn't holding many books but mostly printer and photo paper and other office supplies like blank CDs and DVDs, outdated computer bits and pieces, dog-eared instruction manuals, journalism awards and the like.
It was a proud piece of hardwood basically serving as a vertically integrated junk drawer. Even though I mitigated the mess a bit by storing most of the loose items in canvas cubes and by hiding the rest behind small paintings, I knew what was there.
OK, I didn't know exactly what was there, which was the problem. Anyway, I figured if I hadn't needed to go searching through the old bookcase for something over the past year, I probably didn't need it. So I dumped all this stuff in a pile in the middle of the floor.
I intended to come back to it later and sort through it deciding what to keep, what to donate to charity, what to throw out and what to hide in the garage (which I have decided will be my next anxiety-driven home improvement project)--but in a moment of clarity I just shoved it in a box and threw it away.
In reality, what I did was set the box on top of the recycling bin, with every intention of throwing it away. Then I wandered off and Karen threw it away for me, but not before picking through it and salvaging a magnifying glass, a promotional item from the BBC series "Broadchurch" that we agree might come in handy. (When the time comes, I'm planning to ceremoniously place it in the library to mark the end of the project.)
And once I moved the now-empty bookcase into the library, I saw no reason not to fill it up with the sports and poetry books I had been storing in the studio in stacked wooden crates that we used to warehouse our record albums in back in the days when we used to have more than a handful of record albums. Which left me with a lot of empty crates in the studio.
So I figured I would restock the crates with our collection of music books--popular, classical and jazz--which had been arranged on a tall bookcase that was tucked back in the corner of the studio.
But first I had to get to that tall bookcase tucked into the corner, which meant I had to move the keyboard and the rack of electric guitars that was partially blocking access to it. So I moved the electric guitar rack to the other side of the room where the fairly big bookcase had been, slid over a stand containing an embarrassing number of acoustic guitar cases, and pushed the keyboard and its stand back a couple of feet.
Not only did that allow me easy access to the tall bookcase, it seemed to really open up the room's energy. It started to get all feng shui up in here. Maybe there's something to this Chinese geomancy business.
Now, I was invigorated. I stripped the books off the tall bookcase and started arranging them in the crates. I dusted each one before slipping it into its new home. Then I decided to swap some of the crates with the electric guitar rack. Yeah, that's better.
Still no word on Michigan.
Now onto the tall bookcase, which probably also ought to be in the library except that it fits in its little cranny in the studio so perfectly it might be mistaken for a built-in custom piece. And now that it's stripped of books, I load up the top couple of shelves with the few Criterion Collection DVDs we still have in cases (most of our DVD collection is tightly packed in sleeves in plastic containers bound for the garage once I get that straightened out), and, well, I guess on the rest of the shelves I can space out some microphones, and the wooden box that holds all the capos, and maybe my camera bag.
On the bottom shelf, I'll just put a couple of empty (!) milk cartons that will someday come in handy.
Now, I'll tidy up the library--there are at least two too many office chairs in there--and ...
What the hell is taking Nevada so long?
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com