As you may or may not know, I have been without a computer for almost two months now.   Finally, two days ago there arrived my new Dell Latitude E6410 with 8gb RAM, a  500gb hard drive capacity, and an Intel 5 dual core 2.4ghz processor.   It’s a cute little computer with a 14 inch screen and DVD drive, very sturdy, with good speakers and internal microphone.  Perfect for my kind of work.  I’m running Windows 7 Professional, and I’ve successfully downloaded Finale 2014.5, Audacity, and Free Studio.

One of the first things I did was to open up the Finale file of the most recent piece I was working on before my last Dell Latitude had an unfortunate incident that led to its soon demise.  Be that as it may, I was honestly amazed at what I heard.  To be truthful, it surprised me how much I enjoyed what I was hearing.  It was as though the “feel” that is appropriate for this particular song, having been lost, was now regained.  For I remembered thinking that “Another Round of Fear” was hopeless, having no feel whatsoever.  The memory  of a former appreciation of the piece was dim and useless. Yet I knew that when I was first writing the song two years ago, I distinctly enjoyed its feel; and in fact I passed that same feel along to friends of mine who enjoyed it as well.  Thus a small but substantial audience had already verified for me that the song was worthwhile, and yet I was about to trash it, for I could no longer recall its feel.  So I dropped it, because I had come to hate it; and subsequently dropped the laptop itself hard upon the pavement, when I failed to zip up my backpack one day, and the laptop came flying right out of it as I swung round a corner at top speed — while walking, by the way.  Not even on my bicycle!

Only now have I been able to muster up a new laptop.  Thus, on the similar but noticeably improved new device, I have listened to the piece afresh.  Far from feeling empty or devoid of feel at all, it instantly conveyed a sense of honky-tonk frolic with a slight note of mockery, giving it an undue frivolity, and an almost gleeful irreverence.  That, I could rock with!  So I worked on it for three days incessantly.  Just last night, taking a walk in the midnight heat, I decided it was good enough to post on the Berkeley page of this website, since the notorious city of Berkeley, California, is the place where this all went down (no pun intended).  I’m going to forge forward to the next song in my 14-song project now, having been encouraged by this most promising start.

Oddly, I also received the bulk of the lyrics to this tune Friday night when I was merrily walking in the evening breeze.  I thought this odd because I had really hated the song.  Also, that was before the computer came, and before I had a chance to check out the file to find out, to my surprise, that I actually liked the song.  Somehow this is meaningful.