“…Well, with all that talk of changing the infrastructure and the punctuation conventions and things like that, it just sounds like a lot of bike-shedding going on there,” he said casually, grabbing a would-be escapee anchovy with his fork.
“Bike-shedding?” I was sure I’d heard wrong.
“Oh, you haven’t heard that one?,” he said between bites of pizza. “Well, the idea is ‘hey, we’re building the world’s best bike shed’…meanwhile the bicycle is out rusting in the rain, which means that even a tarp thrown over it would be better than waiting for the very innovative shed.”
“So kind of like ‘best is the enemy of better’?”
“More or less.”
I got in around 8pm and was up until 4:30am last night. What was I doing all that time? I can’t say that I remember, actually. All I know is it was mostly stuff on my to-do list, and most of the stuff on my to-do list tends to be an intermediate step toward a bigger goal. The main things I remember doing were sending emails, refining my goal-setting documents, and writing a comedy script…don’t give me that look, now…yes, I was writing a comedy script! And yes, I had a reason for doing it.
I still don’t have ProTools set up. I’m hoping to get that done this afternoon, but realistically there is no guarantee it’s going to happen. The folks at tech support are doing their best but so far something just hasn’t quite worked…and even when I’m set up with CBR, it’ll take time to learn to use it. I don’t like the idea of opting out of this year’s RPM Challenge though, so I’m considering that if nothing else I could either take baby steps into using ProTools or firing up the multitracker for one more month…in either case my novelty album concept would be a way to participate without making myself crazy. It occurred to me that it would be great to have some spoken-word pieces in between songs to sort of flesh out the character who’s at the center of the musical concept…so I’ve been writing a script.
Oddly enough, I still go to bed at night feeling that I haven’t accomplished much for my music. It occurred to me that it’s because even if I spend two hours writing a comedy script and it’s part of a recording project and it goes really well and I really enjoy it…I’m still not making music. In fact what I’m doing is…
- writing a script, so I can…
- record a fake conversation with a fictional character, so I can…
- get a better sense of what some of the song concepts I haven’t yet settled on will be, so I can…
- write a bunch of novelty songs, so I can…
- record a bunch of novelty songs, so I can…
- be in RPM challenge and be doing something focused and musical, so I can…
- keep my fire on until I’m ready to do something “serious.”
I’m not saying I’ve decided this is bike-shedding…there’s a good chance I’ll go ahead and do it because it is fun and I’ve long wanted to give myself permission to take some time and do some things that are just plain silly…but it seems like an awfully long detour to take just to work around my problems with CBR and my need for creative motivation. And I have to decide whether by doing this now I would be taking a pleasant little romp in the field of parodies, or detracting attention that I need to give to my “mainstream” efforts.
