Welcome To My New(er) Personal Blog

Hi Friends,

It looks like I am no longer able to update my old personal Blogspot blog, so I am starting fresh with this one. 

I wanted to continue my story with a post for all my friends from over the years who may not have been provided the perspective of where I come from and how I got to where I am today. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

Now that I am over 60, I have recently spent a lot of time thinking about my life: What I did,why I did it, and what lessons I could teach others. I thought about writing a full book of my memoirs, but the sentiment nagging me about that is that a lot of the things I found amusing or poignant could very well border on irrelevance. So this will be an attempt to distill at least a part of it down to essentials.

I have been privileged to get to know many fine people in my life and to reconnect with some of them lately through social media. There are gaps in my life’s timeline about the hows and whys of what I’ve done. I have a lot of regrets and I would like to muse on those. It’s a bit embarrassing but facing it will help me heal a lot of old wounds, many self-caused.

First, some notes about my upbringing. My birth coincides with my father’s sobriety. I come from a line of folks who liked to drink, and my dad was one of them. Family legend has it (and dad has corroborated) that he went on his last bender when I was born. So every time I had a birthday, dad also celebrated an anniversary. Now at the outset of this event there was only AA and no Al-Anon yet, so the damage that my father’s drinking caused my mother was not able to be addressed on her part. This has had damning repercussions to our family up to the present.

It was clear that dad worshipped my mother. She was beautiful, smart, spirited, and talented. There is also no question that dad felt guilty about the pain his drinking caused her. That had the effect of creating a codependent dynamic in our family, where mom projected her immense pain and insecurity onto others through fear, guilt, and psychological manipulation; and dad, through his own shame, was her enabler. It was absolutely horrifying, every moment of every day when I was growing up, to the point of psychological and emotional paralysis.

I seem to have been one of mom’s favorite targets, receiving physical and psychological abuse pretty much on a daily basis. As a result, learning anything about social development or intergender relationships was done strictly on a trial by error basis. I certainly wasn’t about to use my parents as role models in that regard, but it was the only reference I had. I hurt some people I never should have, and that haunts me to this day. I will never be able to apologize enough. Should I try anyway? You tell me.

About the only way I could deal with this was through music. It became my escape, my refuge – pretty much the only thing I could do to cope with my own pain that didn’t further promulgate it. And even then, sometimes that was a target: “You like that noise? What the hell is wrong with you?”

But I did have access to a practice room in our school’s music department, and I discovered that I had an aptitude for instrumental performing. This was kind of ironic, because I sucked at sports. Go figure. But I had a couple great high school music teachers who were most encouraging, and I am forever in their debt.

Despite my growing facility with musical instruments, I never had a strong desire to either further my performing career or teach it to others. I was fascinated with recording and what we now call audio engineering. Still am. My mother did not understand this at all, and dad was too powerless to assist in redirecting her perspective. So when it came time to leave high school, I had to decide how to approach choosing a career. South Dakota certainly wasn’t a hotbed of information concerning that. Our small school didn’t have proper guidance counselors or reference materials for a variety of careers like they do today. A classmate wanted to go Brown in Minneapolis to become a DJ and mentioned that they had a program for audio engineering at that school as well. Also about that time my dad informed me that the states of Minnesota and South Dakota had formed a tuition reciprocity agreement and that I could more affordably attend the U of M if I wished. When I finally found the courage to express to mom that I was interested in that, she put the kabosh on it immediately. She knew once I got to the Twin Cities, she would never see me again. She instead said “Just go to music school at SDSU.” Knowing that I would receive zero-to-negative family support for anything else, coupled with my immense immaturity and lack of self confidence, I acquiesced.

I did have support in Brookings, though. The faculty in the SDSU music department as well as my student peers did help me feel valuable and wanted. Their contributions to my sense of worth and musical development is something that I could never repay. It is with the utmost embarrassment that I admit that I did not take my education nearly as seriously as I should have. I did enough just to get by and that is about it. I also developed and nurtured a considerable chemical dependency problem. That one took a long time to manage down; I’ll leave the discussion on that for another time.

I hung in Brookings for as long as I could maintain my façade, then I crawled out of town. Going back to my parents’ home town was the very last option I wanted to exercise, so before I left I visited the local army recruiter about playing in one of Uncle Sam’s bands.  The travel aspect of this option was by far its greatest appeal. He lined me up with a guaranteed assignment in Europe. That was far enough away for me.

So that’s my South Dakota story in a nutshell. To my home state peers and teachers, I say this: Knowing, studying, and performing with you has been one of my greatest privileges. I am sorry that I did not possess your character, integrity, and ambition. I made many mistakes and ask your forgiveness.Thank you for allowing me into your lives. I will always be grateful and try to remain humble.