The Irvania Blog

I was going to write a piece about all the lists I keep, and how much of my life is documented on one Excel spreadsheet or another, but I’m just not feeling it. Truthfully, I haven’t been in a blogging mood lately.

Oh, rest assured that the creative juices are flowing. I’ve been doing a lot of work on a new novel idea (a workplace comedy code-named Long Run) and on the second novel of the Generic Legions series and tinkering with several game designs, one of which I’ll be presenting at a big convention in Gettysburg this November. And rest assured that I’ve had lots of ideas for blog entries and have witnessed a good number of blog-worthy moments lately. It’s just that I haven’t felt like blogging.

The problem, blog-entry-or-lack-thereof-wise, is that life has been too good for me lately. My wife Hanna and our four dogs and I live in a nice little place in the middle of the woods, with hardly any neighbors within mortar range. We don’t have a lot, but we have each other. We have a lot of great books and a lot of great music CD’s and a hammock and enough bad movies (between a complete collection of MST3K episodes and those 50 Movie Pack sci fi DVD collections) to keep us busy for a long long time. I have a job that makes my feet hurt, but it’s a job, and these days that’s important.

We’ve been enjoying life. That’s all. We’ve been watching the hummingbirds and listening to the thrushes and sitting under the canopy in the rain and nibbling on the wild raspberries that grow in the woods and smelling all those plants I can’t remember the names of.

Typing in a blog entry just doesn’t seem very important when we have all that living to do. Sorry.

We were chatting with friends the other week and the subject of the latest storm-ravaged portion of the world came up. Monsoon damage in Kansas or something like that, I don’t remember exactly. Hanna replied that she hadn’t heard anything about it and I explained that we don’t watch the news anymore, so we’re almost completely out of touch with current events.

“What do you guys do at home?” one of our friends asked.

“We listen to music a lot,” I said.  We usually have some form of music playing, either satellite radio or CDs. Every corner of our house has either a TV wired up to the satellite system or a music player of some sort. I even have a 26-year-old cassette player on my workbench for listening to tunes in the garage.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt enriched that Hanna and I have so much music in our lives. I remembered vague mutterings from people in the 1980’s who complained too many people had their TVs or stereos on all the time, as if they were trying to drown out the silence, as if they were afraid of the silence.

I don’t think that’s the case with Hanna and me. We sit outside for hours, listening to the birds and the squirrels and the sounds of the creek across the road. Even in the house we’ll have hours of silence, then Hanna will put on her favorite easy listening station or I’ll put some classical music in the CD player.

I don’t know if I can explain just how, or how much, the music enhances our lives. If you don’t like music, you wouldn’t understand anyway, and if you do like music you already know what I’m talking about.

Tell you what: load up Pat Metheny’s album Secret Story and go to the twelfth track, The Truth Will Always Be. (There’s a video of the song here on YouTube.)

If that doesn’t knock your socks off, I’ll just say that Hanna and I really like music, and leave it at that.