Woah! Something Is Terribly Wrong!
What the heck is going on with my computer?! It should be running like new, right? Wrong. I'm hoping its some kind of software glitch and not a hardware problem. Software I can fix, for the most part. Hardware has to be sent out. The symptoms are this : I can't use the right click function after I've visited E-bay. It isn't my mouse, because I can right click on every file I have as long as I'm not on the internet. I don't use the right click function much, but I do use it to read and edit my own stuff. It's aggravating not to be able to use it. I hope it's not something we've picked up from E-bay. If anyone else is having this problem maybe somebody should do something about it. ( If it's a virus it's not showing up on either of my top of the line virus scanners. )
Anyway. So, what have I been doing the last few days, besides running diagnostic programs on my computer. Well, for one I've written about thirty pages of novel. I really am going to get it done this year. I get between five and ten pages finished per day. I figure it'll have about 200 pages more or less when its all said and done. So, I should definitely be done by my birthday in early December. I've promised myself that I'll just print it out, box it up and send it to the places where you send such things and wait. It's sort of a speculative fiction thing, an inspired little tome that I started working on -- hold on to your socks -- in 2001. It's been through a couple of incarnations, its been down a few side roads, but I've finally settled on how I want the thing to end and I'll have it finished this year and be done with it. ( Except for signing autographs and doing book tours and such things. Heh, heh, heh. Ehem.)
So, you see I have been writing. I've also been listening to music. Yesterday, in fact, I listened to the new Neil Diamond album "Twelve Songs" in its entirety. I had been avoiding it for some time. I had heard a few of the songs and just didn't like the sound of them. I still don't think any of them take advantage of his true sound, but yesterday I listened really well, to the sound and the lyrics and I have to say, it's pretty good. I love his writing and his voice and a few of the cuts really show both to good advantage. I don't love the album, but it grows on you and I can live with it. I'm hoping for better from the next album. I want to love everything he does, not just live with it. (To tell you the truth, I enjoyed "Stages" but didn't love it either. It was too . . . I don't know, something. I can never really put my finger on something I don't like about his albums especially since I've been listening to them and loving them since I was five and memorized the lyrics to "Shiloh" and "Cherry, Cherry". When you love everything about something it's hard to explain why you occasionally can't even like something.)
My mother wonders why I'm so "in" to Neil Diamond music, since I'm from a generation that normally didn't listen to him. ( I'm in what I think of as the half generation before X. Basically those who grew up in the empty eighties and got stuck with the music of the early nineties. ) I listened though. I always listened. I destroyed a brand new eight-track of Hot August Night by listening to it over and over again. (There's a secret to that show that just basically makes it magical or maybe mystical. ) I was maybe four or five. There was a whole period of time in the late '70s and/or early '80s when I couldn't listen to the radio half the time. ( I despised 'Heartlight'. It just didn't click with me at all. Then there was 'September Morn'. I wept every time I heard it. I had a different connotation to that song than just about anybody I guess. ) Then there was 'The Jazz Singer', an adorable movie with a perfect soundtrack. Seriously, look up the word perfect in the dictionary and it says see 1980 (or '81 --- I can never remember ) soundtrack to 'The Jazz Singer'. Perfect voice, perfect style. I was going through a special kind of hell in my life at that time and I destroyed that record a while later, listening to it non-stop on my old stereo. [Oh yes, a long while later, like six years later.]
Well, I can't explain much about how my life has turned out to this point, but I know that I got through the worst part of the early twenty-first century by listening to the best of Neil Diamond. In mid 2001 I bought three brand new albums. I bought 'The Classics', the brand new CD set of 'Hot August Night' (which I had not heard in its entirety since 1973 or '74 ) and 'Three Chord Opera'. I was inspired by these albums and I was knocked out by his appearance on A&E. It reminded me just how incredible he was and is.
Why this Neil Diamond love fest, you may ask. I've been going through my CD collection lately and my old tapes and some records that I bought last year for my new record turntable. Most of it is Neil and I just thought I might listen to it and write out my impressions. I have a little spot on my regular site called 'Small Music' but I use that for impressions about any music that I hear. I've decided to start a new section about just Neil. There are kids out there who've never even heard of him (even 'kids' my age). There are others who swear they'd never listen to Neil Diamond or don't like him because they think his style is too over the top or whatever. I want the people that I know that don't care for him or the music ---and they know who they are --- to see what I see and hear what I hear. If anybody else out there in Cyberland ever reads this stuff then maybe it can change their minds, too. So, the new section will start sometime around the weekend or the first of the week. [Or next week, being the second week in February, 2009!]
O.K.. That was a wrist breaker. I haven't written so much in weeks (except on the novel.) I think I'm caught up for the day, now and I'll try and get back tomorrow. (If the heavens are willing and the creek don't rise.)
