I was staying overnight at a house somewhere with a large group of people. There was one guy in particular that seemed to be in a bad mood. We all fell asleep and when I woke the next morning, a door to the outside was open and thru the door I could hear him cursing up a storm. He apparently owned a 70’s VW Beetle that he was working on while a kid was in the drivers seat trying to start it. The car wasn’t starting and he was really pissed off.
I suddenly found myself floating up a small river in an old wooden row boat with a cat on board. I had been floating for quite some time and to amuse myself, I had snugly wrapped my arm around and under the mechanism that would’ve held the oars in place had they been attached to the boat. We drifted toward the bank but before we actually reached it, the boat bumped into a large root system from a tree that had probably been dislodged further up the river during a storm months previously. As the boat settled against it, a snake that had already been on this large piece of wood sunning itself became perturbed that I’d disturbed it’s moment with the sun. What was worse was that my arms were still entangled with the oar holder and my hands happened to be positioned right where the snake was on the wood. The snake looked to be a corn snake so I wasn’t worried about death should I get bitten, but I was still not too interested in the prospect of being bitten over and over while trapped in this position with the boat. The first thing I did was to grab it behind the head with one of my hands, but because of my entangling predicament, I couldn’t grab it right where I wanted to and it was about ready to lurch and bit my grabbing hand, so… I distracted it with my other hand which was fa enough away from it that it looked at it as a threat. I continued wriggling my arms to free them and finally they let loose and I was able to throw the snake up onto the shore. With a sigh of relied I leaned back to thank whatever powers helped me to escape the snake’s bite when suddenly the cat jumped up on the shore to get the snake. I tried to stop it but before I could do a thing, it swallowed the snake up whole. I’m not even sure the snake could fit in this cat’s body, but the whole disappeared somehow. This caused me to wake from the dream.
I fell asleep and went back into the dream and I was back at the house. I had told this large group of people that I needed to show them something and it was important for me to show them something and persuaded them to follow me, especially including a female videographer. We walked along a dirt trail next to the river. There was a very old wooden fence; posts cut about 6×6, staggered every 8 feet or so with a couple of 4×4’s connecting them. Along the way were many shelves or boxes built into the fence. The videographer that I was having conversation with out of the blue mentioned that she was deathly afraid of snakes. I told her straight up that we were going to come across them but that she shouldn’t be worried, that I’d protect her. Sure enough, we came across snakes. Lots of them. They were all over the shelves and boxes, the further we walked up river. Then they were in the trees, on the rocks, on the shelves and boxes on the fence. There were corn snakes, gopher snakes, garter snakes, vipers, and what were either king snakes or coral snakes. I remember thinking to myself that I couldn’t recall the striping differences between the king and coral and was worried that I might have a big problem on my hands if someone was bitten. It was really amazing how many there were, must’ve been hundreds.
I reached a place on the trail where a few people were stopped and started to hold a ceremony. They had drums, herbs, and were dressed in ritual regalia. I commented that I could use a drum and beater because I was going to find out what sort of message the snakes had for us. A woman that was there handed me a beater and pointed out that I was already holding a drum. I looked at my hands and sure enough I was holding a drum that looked like an african talking drum with cowhide that was adorned with beads. I took the beater and the drum to a throne that sat in between two large rocks. I started beating on the drum asking for a message from the snakes. Immediately, I got this long sentence the explained some profound truth that bewildered me, partly from how sudden it came on and partly from the length of the message and it’s diabolical nature. I was so startled, I woke up again.
I was kind of flabbergasted that I’d received what appeared to be some important truth so I asked to go back into the dream again and get the message again. Shortly, I fell asleep again and immediately when I did, I got another message. Marc Andrew Dean.  I have no idea what that means or who that is.
You know the kind I’m talking about where you give money to organizations who go to the front line in Washington to push a political agenda, many times trying to maintain a political right or uphold legislation. Currently, I’m speaking about the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, legislation for marriage equality, the restrictions on abortion arising from the new health care reform, big oil, preserving our national parks, preventing wolf slaughter, stopping quasi-scientific whale slaughter and dolphin slaughter in Japan’s coastal waters, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Although it seems like its a necessity to counter your opposition to make change, I also find it an annoyance that humanity hasn’t evolved to a place where we can act with less selfishness and rather more compassion on a whole. When I look at today’s problems, it’s the same old thing that you can read about in world history, dating as far back as there is recorded history. But what’s really getting me going right now is the fact that North Americans spend millions of dollars thru donations to non-profit organizations to defend and establish the rights of fellows humans and animals in a country that’s rampant with greedy capitalists and religious zealots. This money could go toward helping out people in other countries that are starving, rendered shelterless by the scourge of warfare, and dying from disease that could be treated if the resources were available. The money could educate people about birth control and sanitation, help to establish medical clinics in impoverished nations. It could even go back into our own country to help and assist rather than be used for warfare. When I think about how much money from the public went to putting Obama in office, it makes me cringe. Money is not the root of any evil. It’s all about how it’s used.
I just need to rant for a moment because I get SO many emails asking for money to defend this, support that, fund the other. After a while, I just wanna gurge.
Week 3 is all about setting up your web site to build your email list and creating two-way communication between your fans and you as an artist or band. This is actually a really short chapter but is going to be the spring-board for a number of other chapters because it starts opening a can of invertebrates, which will become more apparent in the next couple of weeks. You see, I needed to jump ahead in the book because I’d already done a number of the things that the book requests, as I’ll note later, and I’ve known that there were things I needed to do like opening up this blog to really get things rolling on my site. This is also where most of my work has gone into.
Something that is of high importance for other web sites and yours is to maintain a similar look and feel, as well as maintaining similar content and messages. How does a potential fan draw the connection between you here and you there? This was easy for me because it had already been done. “Music for the heart, mind, and spirit” was already my moniker that was on MySpace, Twitter, FaceBook, ReverbNation and everywhere else I’ve created an account, and I’d created a background image for my website long ago that I also used on Twitter and MySpace. I set up a couple quick colour schemes and added other items like photos that exist across all my web presences to make it all cohesive.
Next, I was to make sure my site loaded quickly and had no Flash intro. Well, that was also done years ago. Luckily, I have years of experience working on the internet and I know what works and what doesn’t. I wrote all the code for my initial web site in 2001 (gasp) and it does need an overhaul to bring it up to web standards admittedly, but it was built for performance and ease of use.
Lastly, the part I actually had to put some work into. Ariel wants you to offer a free download to a song as an incentive to sign up on your mailing list. Since I host my own mailing list created by Active Campaign, I had to build this into my site. I decided to offer “Be the Change”, a song that’s on my latest CD, “Between the Lines”, and currently the only song that I have a video for from the new CD. There’s another coming REALLY soon, but more on that later. And so as not to be unfair, if you’re already on my mailing list and don’t have a copy of the CD or that song, email me and I’ll make sure you get a copy.
I was outside somewhere with a large group of people. We were having fun and I think it had something to do with music. At some point, I looked down and noticed that my forearms were really red and I commented that I’d gotten sunburned. The people closest to me told me that I hadn’t actually gotten sunburned and that I shouldn’t worry about it.
I was having a conversation with Dallas. He was very alive and very healthy. I knew some time had gone by since he’d been out of the military and in the back of my mind, I wanted to know why he wasn’t dead but I felt it wasn’t appropriate to ask him. He seemed so happy and full of life. We conversed about music and about life in general and it was so good to just be talking with him.
That sounds like a band name but it’s not. I recall being in Zimbabwe. I was in a village and I was looking for the place that I was to compose music. The people I was with were trying to get me to follow them. I was preoccupied with where I was and investigating the area and observing the people. Someone from the village talked me into following him. He led me by this area where there were mbiras that had been taken apart or in disrepair and no one knew how to fix them. It was kinda sad because I wanted to go look at them but I was being led along.
Suddenly, I was in some sort of giant open flea market, standing at a wall with a young African man. He was asking me what a phrase meant that was carved on a wall. I was telling him that it meant that you always have a choice to do something or not. That choice makes us who we are. Someone walked up too me and told me to come with them. I did. We walked downhill and to the right thru a large causeway and another guy with long blonde hair told me that Jason Mawl wanted to see me. I asked who he was and what he wanted and they told me it was a great opportunity and that I should just go see him. I was led to a room and when I walked into it, I saw a very shiny microphone and a man, tall, heavy set, and bald.
Two different houses from dreamland co-mingled. The first house was the one that sits on the boulevard but has the enormous acreage in back that looks over rolling hills, creek and the divided up lots with fruit trees. The other was the haunted house with the really creepy second floor. Both of the houses are white, but in the dream, I was talking with a girl about painting a room in another place, and remarking that I had let over purple and magenta paint from another house I’d painted and I knew exactly where it was stored. What I remembered was that at the front of the haunted house was a large closet where I’d stored the paint. But I wasn’t thinking that the house was haunted when I was thinking about the paint. I only made the connection when I woke up.
Then, I was in the boulevard house, in the upper room to the back left, upstairs. There’s a rounding staircase that goes up 3 floors with an atrium ascending up thru the middle. Someone was holding Kevin M. by the ankles, upside down over the atrium.
I was driving my dad’s old Cadillac El Dorado down the street, looking for an address. I knew I didn’t nee to be at this destination for quite a while but I figured I would like for parking early because I was expecting a lot of people. The address was a large building where two street intersected, that resembled a live-in work environment with a large parking lot for tenants. I pulled into the parking lot but couldn’t find guest parking spaces so I drove out. I noticed that there was a building sitting directly on the corner. It was a single apartment with large windows, and open on all four sides. You could see the people that lived there thru the windows and I was thinking that it looked like a fish bowl, living like that. I drove around the block and found a parking space.
Suddenly, I was in a car with Eric R. and someone else. They were driving me past the fishbowl apartment and to a club. They wanted me to hear the music that had on their stereo. When we got to the club, Erik O. was there from work. He was arranging tables or something and there was a huge group of people there. They were doing some sort of karaoke to original songs. This guy got up and started singing this song that I’d never heard. At first I couldn’t decide whether he was any good, but when he hit the chorus, the song really opened up and so did his voice. He was singing something about being skinned and a cross. I remembered the melody and the sound of the chord progression when I woke and recorded it. I couldn’t remember the lyrics tho.
