Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: dailyprompt

May 8, 2024

Live from the Comfort of My Couch

Daily writing prompt
What was the last live performance you saw?
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I’m a bit ashamed to say that it’s been a good long minute since I’ve seen a live performance. Granted, now that I think about it, I did work the local farmer’s market last year, and there was a random Saturday in which a busker played some lovely flamenco styled melodies.

But in terms of concerts that I actually paid to go see, then it’s definitely been a long while since I’ve done any of that. Probably college. I know there were a few orchestras that I went to because my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, was the main stage manager for the small theatre our college had. So I hung out in control booth with her, mostly making out in between her various responsibilities. But I was physically there at the performance, so I’ll count it.

Then there were all the plays that I saw while in college, again due to the fact that my girlfriend was a stage manager for a majority of them. All of this was well over a decade ago now. So, yeah, like I said, unfortunately I haven’t been to too many live performances in quite some time.

Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t have wanted to. There are plenty of performances that I’ve wanted to see live over past decade. I guess the reasons why I haven’t outweighed any motivation to actually go to a live performance. Either the tickets were too expensive, it was too late at night, or there were going to be a crowd of people there and I don’t like big crowds because they make feel incredibly uncomfortable.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized I don’t like being in large open spaces where there are a lot of people, nor do I like doing much of anything that disrupts, or majorly disrupts, my daily routine. In a way, I guess one could say I’ve become a curmudgeon in my mid-thirties.

Actually, through this exercise of thinking about live performances that I’ve been to, I did remember that I did go to a small concert about six or seven years ago. I went to a Smile Empty Souls concert at a small bar in rural Georgia. The band sounds as dramatic as you would think, but they happened to be my brother-in-law’s favorite band from when he was a teenager, and we didn’t know how long they would be still touring. Or maybe it was because they didn’t tour all that much in the south, and so we figured we would go and see them on the off chance that the band didn’t come back any time soon.

After a quick Google search, I did confirm that Smile Empty Soul is still around and still touring. I’m not a huge fan of their music. It’s mostly depressing emo rock where the lyrics all read like they were written by a sad teenager wrote because their parents got a divorce when they were seven and they never processed it psychologically. But on occasion, I do find myself still listening to Smile Empty Soul for nostalgic reasons. Mostly due to the fact that they were my brother-in-law’s favorite band, and unfortunately he’s no longer with us. So, my wife and I will find ourselves on the anniversary of his death, loading up Spotify and playing a few of their songs in our own private mourning concert to remember him by.

If I had to choose what sort of live performance I’d like to go to next, I think right now in my life I’m at a point where the venue would need to be super small, kinda intimate, and the music would need to be jazz. And probably none of that electric new age sort of jazz, but that jazz that sounds raw and sentimental at the same time. Something like Coltrane or Davis or Monk. But unfortunately there aren’t really any jazz musicians that come through where I live, so I’ll probably just stick to listening to them in the privacy of my home and car by myself.

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May 7, 2024

Commune with the Community

Daily writing prompt
What do you do to be involved in the community?
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This question seems intentionally vague and a bit misleading. I assume it’s suggesting what one does in the capacity of a volunteer in the community, but I suppose I’d have to ask what community? This being a globalized, post-industrial, age-of-the-internet sort of world we live in, community could certainly mean quite a few things.

In terms of my local community, not much. I don’t really volunteer all that much. Though I will occasionally give blood. In a non-volunteer capacity, I interact and am involved in my local community on a daily basis. Unless one has agoraphobia, I imagine it would be fairly difficult to not be involved with one’s local community in some capacity. I go to local farmer’s markets, dine at local restaurants, maintain a nice relationship with my neighbors, and, I suppose most importantly of all, I pay my local taxes. Sales tax, state tax, property tax. There are probably a few others. But I do feel like those count as involvement with one’s community in some capacity.

Though perhaps I’m just trying to make excuses for myself for my lack of involvement as a volunteer for my community.

In terms of an internet community, the only social media I have is WordPress, and that involvement mostly revolves around reading others’ posts. Commenting, liking, giving others small serotonin boosts with tacit forms of approval. Which isn’t to say I’m trying to denigrate such a practice. I think finding your people, even when it’s on a digital platform, is always an important part of life.

I suppose, now that I think of it, I do interact and have involvement with other internet communities. Mostly when it comes to coffee. There’s the Roaster’s Guild community that I interact with, either by contributing data and information about my own experience roasting, or going to the yearly Roasting Retreat that the guild hosts all over the country. And then there’s the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), that I’ve been involved with for quite some time. I’ve garnered quite a few certifications by attending various courses to learn more about the field.

There are certain communities I do wish I was more involved with. There’s the writing community, though I suppose that community is kinda spread out and difficult to fully define. In fact, one might even say that participating and being involved on WordPress is a form of involvement with a certain segment, a rather large segment, of the writing community. So, yeah, maybe I am as involved as I need to be with regards to the writing community.

There are probably a few other communities and social activities that I’m involved in that I haven’t really thought about. There was a time when I considered myself misanthropic and antisocial. In fact, as a teenager I was even diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. But that was also at a time in which I romanticized Dostoevsky’s and Hemingway’s respective mental illnesses. I also listened to a lot of punk rock back then, too. In fact, I still do. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to make the Tipper Gore argument that the music made me antisocial. With time and perspective, and quite a few grey hairs, like more grey hairs than I thought I would have in my mid-thirties, I realize that I felt out of place. I didn’t have much of a community.

Nowadays, given some thought, I would say I have quite a few different communities. Some of which I interact with minimally. But most of which I have some form of involvement pretty frequently. I’m also kinda looking forward to the future communities that I more than likely will be a part of. Like the old man community, where I get to complain about my hip while drinking prune juice all the time. And maybe I’ll join a few communities that I don’t even realize I wanted to be part of but I just sort of fell into them. Who knows. There’s a lot of people out there. So I wouldn’t put it past coming across one or two of them at some point.

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May 6, 2024

Keep on Trucking//Job for a Day

Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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I feel like it would be interesting to work as a long-haul truck driver. I certainly don’t think I could do truck driving for a long period of time, because the monotony of driving on the interstate would drive me insane, but I do think it would be interesting to experience the dimension of logistics that transports goods from one location to the next in a massive vehicle that towers over other cars on the road.

I also interact with truck drivers and trucking companies on a daily basis, so I feel like being a truck driver for a day would be nice to have their perspective on shipping, since as an end recipient of goods I feel it’s easy to forget the difficulty of maneuvering an 18-wheel monstrosity through urban landscapes to ensure the wheels of the economy keep spinning efficiently.

Obviously, it’s not really one of those jobs that you can really do for just one day, since it takes quite a while to learn. At least in the States, it’s required to have a CDL license. Plus, from what I’ve read about the trucking industry, there also seems to be other barriers of entry, such as leasing the truck from various logistics companies, dealing with outdated regulations on how much/long a driver can drive before having to take a break that often times don’t depend on common sense or any sound reasoning, among other numerous issues that I’m not aware of.

I also feel as if being a long-haul truck driver would be incredibly lonely. I know some couples do it, and even some truckers bring their pets along with them. But my wife gets horrible motion sickness when we drive in the city for more than 30 minutes, so I’m certain that eliminates any possibility of us having an on-the-road-trucking-sort of marriage. And, like I mentioned previously, I feel like to drive for hundreds of miles would get repetitive and boring after a while. Especially since the States are so sprawling, and most cities kinda look the same. Same brands, same types of people, same billboards. Sure, there are small regional differences here and there, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I feel like traveling through most cities in the States wouldn’t be absolutely boring after the first couple of weeks. I’m not really an open-road sort of person.

The other issue I would probably have with being a truck driver would be the wait times of loading and unloading that aren’t paid. From my understanding, and I admit I could definitely be wrong about this, but most truck drivers are paid by the mile, so when they’re waiting for their chassis to be loaded at the port or unloaded at its destination, they’re not getting paid. It’s bad enough having a salaried job in which I’m paid the same amount whether I work 40 hours or if I work 60 hours, but the sheer amount of time that truckers spend in limbo between jobs of not being paid would suck.

Another job I would find interesting to do for a day would be an engineer, but mostly because the definition of an engineer is so broad that I could do almost anything and technically be referred to as an ‘engineer’. Kinda like entrepreneur, it seems like an engineer is a catchall job title that would provide me the liberty to do anything at all and have the title.

Though, in terms of jobs I wish I was qualified to do for more than just one day, I would have to say astrophysicist. I think that would be a really interesting field to be in, since technology is constantly changing and new parts of the universe are being discovered at breakneck speed. But alas, I did not study physics in college. Hell, I didn’t even study any sciences at college, other than a really basic core science class that seemed to be modeled after a 9th grade biology class in elementary the information was, which made sense considering that it was a science class for a bunch of liberal arts students that studied soft majors, like theatre, literature, and music.

This discussion reminds me that I was definitely not qualified at 18 to make any decisions about what my career path would look like, nor the types of things I would study. When I got to college, I was basically told to study something that I enjoyed, and at the time the thing I enjoyed the most was reading, which is still true, but the types of things and topics I enjoy reading has expanded over time. And reading about physics and biology, especially octopuses, are the types of topics that I find myself reading about most of the time. I still read fiction and poetry, and such, but in terms of career choices, if I had a conversation with my younger teenage self, I would try to convince me that going into the sciences would have been the better long-term bet.

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