For The Love Of Music

Been a minute since I've posted something. Here are very short updates on everything else before I get to the topic of this post.

Marriage: Coming up on ten years next October. A struggle at times, as Grizzbabe and I are still fiercely independent and at times unyielding, but the true love is always there and will always shine through.

COVID: Unfortunately I caught COVID-19 and brought it home and gave it to my wife in June. My job forced me to keep coming into the office along with my other co-workers because our jobs being financial in nature caused us to be labeled "essential." I still believe we can do what we do from home, but our employers won't allow it for security reasons, so we're still going in, just masking up and staying as clean as we can. Thankfully, my wife and I did not suffer from coronavirus and we were both able to let it run its course without hospital visits.

Job: The one good thing about my job is that the parent company switched my data entry function to a pay system where I don't get an hourly set salary anymore. We're paid by the keystroke. I make several dollars more per hour as a result, and on a busy week, I can really rack up the numbers. It has allowed me to start taking some online classes and finally start the slow climb towards a bachelor's. It also allows me to travel with my wife and not be choked off by the expense of it all. My wife has begun a side career as a travel agent, so once the country starts finally turning things around and getting this COVID shit outta here, we'll be back island hopping. We're scheduled for an Alaskan cruise next May, fingers crossed.

Health: I started feeling very weird in July 2017, very tired, very thirsty, couldn't stop urinating. Completely peed myself on the way home from a baseball game one night. My sugar finally went over the top and I was diagnosed as diabetic. Then my wife went through a couple of scary episodes in 2018 that were diagnosed as possible mini-strokes. The scares made her sign us up for a gym, which I resisted because I didn't want to end up paying for a gym membership and not going. But we went regularly for a year and lost some weight. I lost about 30 pounds, in fact. But our habits and lazy lifestyle caught up, and we found all the weight we lost, and now because of COVID my wife doesn't want me going to the gym. So, yep, we're paying for a gym membership and not going. I'm trying to do some cardio videos at home, but it's very hard to motivate myself. When I make the effort to drive to the gym, I get in intense workouts because otherwise I'd feel like it would be a waste of time and gas to go there. But here at home it's much easier to go until I start getting tired and then just call it a day. I'm very ready to hit the weights again.

Podcast: "Jacob" and I are still doing our football podcast. We're in our eighth season and we're still having fun doing it. Check it out: blogtalkradio.com/inmuchlessdetail

Politics: Fuck Donald Trump.

Scorekeeping: Volunteered to be the point person for Memphis, meaning I was setting the schedule every month in exchange for an extra bonus at the end of the year. I had a sense of responsibility, I loved arranging the dates in a way that was fair to all the scorers, and I even enjoyed coming to the rescue and going to do a game myself when no one else was available. I was very proud of my work. But just before the pandemic in March, the stat company Baseball Info Solutions informed us in certain cities that they were no longer using on-site scorers if they had the technology to score the games remotely. Memphis has enough cameras to do that. Jackson, TN, an hour's drive away, does not, so if I ever score another game, it would be out there, but more than likely, I have scored my last game for BIS. Damn, I enjoyed that side hustle.

After all that, here's why I wanted to write today. If you love music like I do, you may enjoy the way I've been listening to music lately. You will have to swallow hard and take some risks, but I'm doing it, and it's been an emotional experience the last few years.

It starts with the football podcast. Like any good "morning zoo"-style show, I was looking for different sound drops to put on our board to use during the show. I had no experience pulling sound drops from websites, but eventually, I found some drops on Youtube and then I searched for how to get those drops from Youtube to the sound board. I found some websites that allowed me to take the URL of the Youtube clip and put it through their process that then turns the drop into an mp3 on your computer, and from there I can move the mp3 to the sound board. The risk is that these sites seem to be sketchy and unsecured, and some of them have tried to launch malware-type attacks on my computer that my anti-virus software has caught. If that scares you, I totally understand, but I trust my antivirus to protect my computer. Besides, there are many websites we visit every day that may pose similar threats. I then searched for ways to clean up some of this audio, because some of these clips had static or sound at the beginning or end that I wanted to get rid of, and that's how I found a program called Audacity. If you want to trust the makers of Audacity and take another risk, you can download it to your computer and it allows you to do all kinds of things to your mp3. You can clean up background noise, slow the sound down, speed it up, sweeten the bass or treble or tone it down, record your voice over the sound, and the list goes on.

Anyhow, it really didn't dawn on me that I could find a song I like on Youtube and turn it into an mp3 for my iPod until like a couple years after I was converting mp3s just for sound drops. This is another risk, maybe the riskiest, because I'm pretty sure it's illegal to take whole songs and convert them to mp3s on my computer instead of going to iTunes and buying them. It was illegal to do that with those sound drops too, I bargained to myself, so what the hell. Besides, I'm old and I like mostly 80s music, and some of it is obscure and not available to purchase, so if Youtube is the only way I can get it, so be it. Then I started feeding those mp3s into Audacity to juice up the bass on some of those funky disco hits, and it was like hearing the songs in a club. Then I started playing with the tempo and "pitch," which is how high or low you want the notes to sound. Ever since I was a child, I have always enjoyed certain songs at a higher pitch than what they sound like normally. I can't explain why they sound so great to me, but I know my uncle had a turntable that was equipped with pitch control, and it was intoxicating to hear records played a little faster than they're supposed to. I then had portable cassette players throughout my youth that played tapes a little faster, and then I bought a JVC cassette deck with pitch control when I was 19 that I still own today. Some dance songs are euphoric to me when played faster, and some slow songs sound heavenly to me when sped up, particularly angelic voices like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, and some jazz songs when the notes are juiced up sound even better to me.

The last part of this grand project of mine came about by happy accident. The two iPods I owned were relatively low in memory space, 2 GB and 8 GB. When my wife's mother died in 2014, my wife gave me an iPod her mother owned that had a whopping 32 GB on it. Out of some odd sense of not deserving it because I didn't buy it or it wasn't gifted to me by the owner herself, I kept that iPod in the spare bedroom and didn't use it. But a couple of summers ago, I lost the 8 GB iPod that I was using every day to listen to podcasts while I work, and it's very hard to do data entry every day without listening to something to block out the noises in my workplace, and I'd become a bit of a podcast addict, and the 2 GB iPod couldn't hold the podcasts I wanted to hear. So out of necessity, I started using my mother-in-law's iPod. (I found my 8 GB iPod in the closet months later.) Then it dawned on me: With Audacity, I can take these songs off Youtube and make them sound EXACTLY the way I want them to and then drag them onto this megasized iPod without worrying about filling it up. As a way of keeping track of how many songs I'm getting using this method, I put them in a playlist on the iPod called "It Came From Youtube." That playlist is now at 1,023 songs.

That wasn't a typo. Over one thousand songs from Youtube through a conversion to mp3, most of them then through Audacity so I can pump up the bass or turn up the tempo or smooth out the noise or all of the above, then onto the 32 GB iPod. And that iPod is still only about halfway full!

It has been an unbelievable experience. It's not just juicing up songs, although that part is fucking awesome. But it's finding songs that I never thought I would hear again. It's hearing new music from Spotify or Music Choice and running to Youtube and finding it and playing with it on Audacity and molding it into something almost of my own creation, like a remix of sorts. It's playing old cassettes of stuff off the radio from 1992 and catching the title and artist thanks to another awesome invention for music lovers, Shazam, and being skeptical that something that obscure would be on Youtube and being constantly surprised and delighted. I've been taken back to days when my mother was still alive, days when I was so young I can remember dancing in my walker, days in high school sitting in pep rallies, days when I was dating "Giselle," "Karen," Grizzbabe, days when I was dating no one and trying to find myself living alone on the lake in Chicago...I've had emotional reactions to a lot of these songs. I've had to wipe tears away while working a dozen times. Some songs bring back good memories that hit me a certain way. Some songs bring back awful times and remind me of some terrible decisions I've made in my personal life, but they're my memories, so I try not to run away from them. That's a different playlist on my iPod--"All In My Feelings."

But I want it all. I want to relive all the memories that have brought me here today. Music means that much to me. I can't tell you how exhilarating it is to put on my headphones for 2½ hours escaping in my Prince playlist. Or for three hours in my 90s R&B/Hip Hop playlist. Or six hours in my I Love The 80s playlist. Or chilling for four hours in my Smooth Jazz Brunch playlist. Or (mentally) hanging with the crew in my Club Dre playlist. Or rocking out in my two-hour Headbangers Ball playlist. I love it all. It's the music I love at its highest audio quality sped up and bassed up to exactly my desired levels. At this point, the feds could come knock on my door and lock me up for the thousand illegal songs in my possession and I'd be good. All the feels I've gone through the last couple years will have been worth it.