KRIS DONEGAN

Whoa. Seems like I’m averaging one entry every few months… This one is almost overdue.

I’ve been really, really busy, both musically and non-musically. Gig highlights recently: tracking with Aplha Rev and playing Stagecoach for the first time. I worked on two songs for a forthcoming Alpha Rev project, and it was really great. Casey is seriously talented. Stagecoach is officially the biggest crowd I’ve ever been in front of; 65,000 plus. My only regret is that I didn’t see Miranda Lambert, Sheryl Crow or The Jayhawks.

Non-musically, Heather is pregnant again. We’re all really excited, and the girls can’t wait to meet their new baby brother or sister; we don’t know which it will be just yet. We also built a huge chicken coop in the back yard, got a new dog (Iris unknowingly named him “Happy,” because that’s what it sounds like when she tries to say puppy) and got the garden up and running. We’ve already gotten tons of peas and strawberries. Things are good.

Gear-wise, I’m busy hotrodding a Tele I bought from a friend of mine. It’s a 50s reissue Esquire, and the first Tele I’ve owned that I’ve been pleased with. I’ve been through 4 already… this one will probably stay around for a while. So far I’ve given it an RS kit, a Lollar Special T and some CJ Tooling compensated saddles. I lost the switch tip, and I can’t decide what to replace it with. I’ll obsess over it for a while until I find what I want. The devil is in the details. I also think I might be compressor shopping, but I’m not sure. Maybe I should just have my old Dyna Comp repaired.

I went on a reading binge and plowed through lots of Tolstoy, Twain, Emerson, and Thoreau. I also squeezed the Hunger Games trilogy in there. That could explain the infrequency of my blogging. Now, all of the sudden, I’m back to not reading very much. I’m trying to manage 20 minutes a day, but it isn’t working. I’ll just make peace with that and dive in again when the time is right. No sense fretting over it. All in all, there’s a ton going on, but I don’t have much to say about it. Don’t give up on me, though. I’ll have some new music to post soon. Until then…

I like nice things.  I really, really, really like nice things.  When I buy anything, I pour over my options, weighing and re-weighing them until I pull the trigger.  Often, it’s the more expensive option.  Buy once, cry once.  The Red Wing boots I’m wearing aren’t likely to wear out any time soon.  The Benchmade knife in my pocket isn’t, either.  They’ll look well worn in a few years, but I’ll definitely get my money’s worth.  Buying one pair of 250 dollar boots that will outlast four pairs of 80 dollar boots makes sense.  Most of the time I do get my money’s worth.   The exceptions to the rule, so it seems, are my vices.

Coffee, whiskey, tobacco. These are a few of my favorite things.  I don’t count gear; I love the hunt and the chase and the kill, but it doesn’t count.  Coffee counts.  And whiskey.  And tobacco.  When it comes to coffee, I have roast, region and brew method preferences.  I can guess the proof of a whiskey by smelling it; I’m getting close to being able to ballpark the age.  I love small ring gauges and natural wrappers.  The most I ever spent on a single cigar was 50 bucks.  It was a Cuban Cohiba in Toronto, and it was worth every penny.  This is the way I’m wired.  I spend time and effort learning the ins and outs of whatever I get in to.  And then I totaled up what I spend on vices… ouch.

I had a big, old-fashioned revelation.  I can have money or I can have stuff.  I don’t have enough money to have both money and stuff.  I can have cigars and fine whiskey, and have them often, or I can have an emergency fund and a college fund for my girls.  If I want the turn of the century house on 5 acres (with a garden, and chickens and, a cow), and if I want to be debt-free and able to invest most of the money I make, I need to make some hard decisions now.  I needed to decide whether I want to be bathed in comforts now and broke later or vice versa. 

And, so, four or five months ago, I made the hard decisions.  It’s been ages since I bought a bottle of whiskey.  I still drink it, and do it as often as I can, but it’s usually at a gig… and on the promoter’s dime.  Heather bought me a bottle for Valentine’s day and I’ve been nursing it.  I haven’t had a cigar in a few months, and the last one I had was a promo from Crowned Heads.  A friend of mine brought me a four pack and they were really great.  I’m still drinking coffee, but I’ve cut back.  I’m drinking smaller cups and less of them every day.  I’m still having coffee meetings, but it comes out of my business budget.  It’s a business expense anyway, so that makes more accounting sense.  

The result?  We’ve put a lot of money in the savings account.  We’re paying extra on our debts.  Dollars are stretching further than they ever have.  I’m balancing the checkbook again, and in doing so I’ve gotten away from the “I just check my balance online” mentality.  The real number and the online number never match.  Turns out we always had less money than we thought we had.  

I don’t know if all of this translates in to anything meaningful creatively.  I don’t really care.  I don’t think my muse was ever in the whiskey or the cigar smoke.

This morning I nuked my Facebook page.  It’s going to be ok.  To the many bits of advice and admonition we musicians tend to give each other, I’d add this:

Don’t measure your musical life (or your social life, or your love life, or your overall happiness… etc.) against everyone else’s Facebook or Twitter profiles.

Everybody tells you when they’re working.  Everybody tweets when they’re traveling somewhere super awesome.  Everybody makes the extra artsy shot of them on the Tonight Show stage their profile picture.  It’s easy to sit and browse and think “Man… so and so sure works a lot,” or “That looks like a great vacation.  I need to take that kind of vacation.  Wish I could afford that kind of vacation.  Maybe if I worked all the time like so and so I could afford to take that vacation… but, if I worked all the time I’d never be able to find the time.  Ugh.”  I’m done with it.  I’d wager that we don’t actually know much about each other if we’re using social media as our means of maintaining our friendships.  Here’s why.

I gladly share funny things.  Stuff about my kids, funny situations, ironic statements… real “on-the-surface” stuff.  I’ll tweet if I’m traveling or working.  I’ll probably say something if I’m going on a date with my wife.  I’ll also write a ton of stuff that nobody cares about… what kind of coffee I’m drinking, where I am, what book I’m reading.  I won’t tweet when my bank account is bone dry.  I won’t tell you how I’m feeling when I haven’t worked for two weeks.  I’ll make light of a trying day with my kids, but I won’t tell you how bad I feel for losing my cool with them at the end of the day.  If my wife and I are fighting, you won’t know it.  If my family is hurting, you won’t know it.  The reality is, you’ll know where I had coffee and who I was with, but you’ll still know next to nothing about me.

I know every detail about my own life.  If I’m measuring my whole life against someone else’s perfectly polished and edited social media presentation, It’ll never hold up.  Depression.  Self-loathing.  Lots of lost time and couch-sitting, which leads right back to pouring over social media to see if anyone else’s life has taken such a terrible downturn.  And it hasn’t, because it’s social media.  Even if it had, they wouldn’t tell you.

In my life, Facebook became the epitome of this.  So, I carved it out.  I want to genuinely rejoice with my friends when something great happens, and honestly grieve when something terrible happens.  But I won’t do it on the internet in front of everyone else.  If I know your birthday, you’ll hear from me in person.  If I want to know what you’re up to I’ll write or call.  I hope you’ll do it, too.

And, hey, for what it’s worth, I’m still twittering.  I genuinely enjoy it.  When I don’t, I’ll stop.  Until then, you can find me quipping and being generally awesome here: @krisdonegan.

I’ve been reading a lot.  Two years ago, I wouldn’t have said that; I couldn’t have.  Twain, Emerson and Thoreau, specifically, and a good bit of it.  I’ve been through two books of Mark Twain’s short stories, Walden and Civil Disobedience and am currently reading and re-reading Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.”  I don’t dare sum it up, because I don’t quite think I could do it justice.  Instead, I’ll just post a few of my favorite passages and encourage you to sit with it on your own.  

The opening paragraph:

“I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

Some quotes from the body:

“The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.”

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

And that’s just the first half.  It’s really, really, REALLY worth the read.  

Here’s to a happy, healthy, creative and non-conforming 2012.

My holiday experience is easily summed up in one Eric Carle quote:

“On Saturday he ate through one piece of cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon.

That night he had a stomachache!”

I’m the guy that carries a flashlight.  And a Leatherman.  And a lot of other stuff.

The more I travel, the more I value preparedness.  I spend half of my year away from my home, working or on the road, so I decided to take what I think I might need with me.  I guess you could call it a possibles bag, but I don’t have survival stuff in it, and it isn’t designed to get me through 3 days of SHTF situations like a bug out bag.  It’s just the things I find myself needing on a regular, or semi-regular, basis.  Just this weekend I made a second guitar strap out of a length of 550 cord.  Rope!  You can always use a good length of rope, so I have a little in my bag.  And, it came in really handy.  The other stuff is useful on a dark stage, or when you flew in and your tools are still on the bus… etc.  So, for the curious, here’s (mostly) what’s in it right now.

1. Sigg water bottle

2. Cliff Bars

3. Whole almonds 

4. Tobacco Pipe

5. Pipe Tobacco

6. Matches

7. In-ears

8. Reading glasses

9. Phone charger

10. Spare keys

11. Ear plugs

12. Pens

13. Nail clippers/file

14. Passport

15. Flashlight

16. AA batteries

17. Cigar tin with sewing kit, 550 cord, extra matches, a lighter and a knife sharpener

18. Bandana

19. All Access passes

20. Change

21. Bottle opener

22. Wallet

23. Leatherman

24. Binder clip

25. Laptop sleeve

26. Toothbrush

27. Toothpaste

28. Band-aids

29. Neosporin

30. Advil

Carrying a bag was a bit of a pain at first, but now I couldn’t go back to pockets if I tried.  It’s too useful.