Oh damn, still in this dream.

About to go to pay Christmas visit to Glamorous  Ex  (who's back in the country for the holiday).
Glam Ex's Mama is getting on a bit, but still working as actor in long-running soap (and quite frankly, is the stand out performer in aforementioned serial), and understandably needs folk to help deal with day to day stuff, as her workload is pretty punishing. When Glam Ex is in the country, she takes over lots of this stuff, to ease the burden. (See what I mean about a 'good sort'.)

Ah well, no duties until this evening when I have to go and see Steve K, his Missus, and two daughters.
Have books for my godchildren.
Oxford Companion to Classical Literature - Harvey
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Collins Biographical Dictionary of English Literature
Should help 'em with school work, at the least, and also broaden minds and horizons, which is more important.
Will have to replace them in my library, but will do so when I find them, rather than search over the web.

I now need to find myself a job, work, paying occupation, whatever.
I reckon I need about £800 pcm minimum, which is not a lot, but I have few overheads in comparison to others (no mortgage or rent, just bills). I could earn almost double that stacking shelves, but somehow feel I'm not exactly suited to the rigorous demands of the job.
This is the problem when you leave school at seventeen to follow some rock 'n' roll dream. When you hit forty and you aren't a graduate you become effectively unemployable in the real world. The difference between ones person and ones academic accomplishments is such that interviews become something of a minefield.
Ones musical CV doesn't count for much in the world of wage-slavery, neither does ones published work in music, prose, or poetry. And having applied for a shelf-filling position, when it comes to interview, they don't expect someone like me (though the Latin must give 'em a bit of an indication).
The other problem is I'm blessed (or cursed, more like) with an accent that can only be described as Patrician. My musician chums have gotten used to it, & most of my schoolfriends and other old chums sound similar, but ordinary folk tend to look askance the minute I open my gob.
I did work in computers in the early 90's, but doubt I could pick up the threads of the thing now.
I could teach guitar privately (as I have done on and off for more than twenty years).
I could beg some sinecure from a chum (which has been offered without me even asking, but I'm a proud man and I'd rather starve or eat my own shoes).
Or I could bite the bullet and retrain, but as what?

45 yr old man with compulsive reading disorder needs work. Can do almost nothing very well, but showed a remarkable aptitude at an early age, especially when it came to tying shoelaces. Has spent too long in the music business and acquired all sorts of bad habits, and is insubordinate to boot, especially when instructed by morons. Worse, he's worked with folk of whom you've heard and bought the albums; has had a string of beautiful girlfriends, most of whom he's still chums with; and hobnobs with the upper classes despite extreme left wing history, since repudiated. Once owned a record company that went bust due to inattention and bad business decisions. Published as a critic and poet, but very rarely. Voice sounds too posh to live and is a positive invitation to revolution and the guillotine.

Can't see it drawing in the employers somehow.

Perhaps it is time to do like Petronius, but being cowardly, I'll put it off for the time being. I shall tape two bits of paper to a coin. On one side will be written 'Day-gig' and on the other side 'suicide'.
Heads
Heads
Heads
Hades...
I jest of course, a real job's far worse than killing yourself.

Sunday.

Oh well...
Life is, as we all know, a transient thing. What Camille Paglia termed as 'The Outrage of Incarnation' ends in the tragedy of the loss of incarnation, and the death of persona/personae.
I've started getting over the outrage part, but only at the expense of appreciating the tragedy. Damn, I miss my angry and uncaring youth.
I still, however, find no excuse for the warble in the Opera Singer's voice.
It's even worse when they attempt Bach with a modern vibrato. Whatever happened to the note, pure and unadorned, in the right place with the right inflection?
I also have to face other facts: I am no longer the musician who took such pleasure in the bratty outrage of rock 'n' roll. I have replaced an encyclopedic knowledge of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and The Stones et al, with a love (but less of an understanding) of 'Classical' music, and this process has been ongoing for more than twenty-five years.
In my pretentious, angry, and uncaring youth, I attempted to transcribe bits of Bartok's 3rd string quartet for electric guitar.  (Bob Fripp nicked the Pizzicato movement of Bartok 4 for his 'Larks Tongues in Aspic pt II'; so there was precedent.) Thereafter I had a love/hate relationship with the extreme modernists, and perversely, Bach; which ran alongside a love of American influenced vernacular music.
But the past ten years, of choice, all I've listened to is BBC Radio 3. I've made the excuses; that I was setting up my harmonic vocabulary for the day: if I were to be arranging or writing parts I'd often find I'd recycle ideas I'd been listening to on Radio 3 during the drive into the studio - often combining something obvious and tuneful with post-Stravinsky dissonance or even atonality.
But in fact I listen to pop and rock music to dissect it; in terms of sounds, arrangements, and production. Most of it doesn't do it for me, anymore.
Sibelius, though, is a different matter. As is Beethoven.
I play in studios, I play in function bands; occasionally I teach, when I can be bothered, and only if the pupil can convince me he/she is serious and prepared to do the work - but I no longer love it. It is no more my east and west, and its breadth seems as narrow as the horizons of a teenage mind - which as we know, centres on girls (if you're that way inclined), money, and getting off one's face, to employ an argot of recent past. Or there's Kurt, godblesshispoorsoul, and his ilk, with whom I have much sympathy, and to whom I can still listen (just about).
But after the sound of the Dual Rectifier (Mesa's Metal Head), there hasn't been anything new.
We've just lived through the songwriting equivalent of the Elizabethan age of Dramatists. After Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, it all went downhill for some time. The irony of the fact is that just as we achieve the ability to record and store information on a vast scale, all the great great creative genii are doing something else - probably computer games.
I know, because I'm part of it - I'm good at what I do (when I can be bothered), but I can't say I'm a genius - but actually, when I look at all the people around me - all of whom are educated and talented - I still don't see genius.
Remember: Genius is the enemy (or overlord) of even the very good indeed.
There is no obvious Goethe, no Schiller, no Eliot: and this is because learning isn't valued for its own sake, merely for its application or relevance. Even the Dandyish Bohemian intellectual is a stereotype so long past its sell by date it is almost antediluvian.
Vespasian joked upon his death that he must be turning into a god.
I feel I'm alive, but slowly becoming fossilised.

Funeral Wednesday.
Will finish short speech tomorrow, & rehearse it exactly twice.
Will probably have to amend it when Mike gets here anyway.