About the labor charges:

You are purchasing an irreplaceable part of another person's life to perform a task you were unable or unwilling to do yourself.

Much of my job involves solving problems for peanuts. Some people obviously consider the tasks they bring us to be beneath them, while at the same time requiring skills they do not possess. These are the people who typically complain about how much our services cost. They have decided their lives are worth more than ours. Some of them might be surprised to hear it put that way. Some of them might acknowledge the fact and say that we are where we have put ourselves. But by rank-ordering people by their occupation we create a climate in which people on lower levels think only of getting above them at any cost. This does not translate into excellent job performance. Think instead of a camp full of prisoners of war trying every trick they can think of to tunnel out, go over the wall or sabotage the schemes of those who hold them. Not everyone who ends up on a lower rung "deserves" to be there.

Updating the technology

I'm writing this on a new-to-me iMac G5. My old notebook, the faithful HP ze5170 has been manifesting more and more ominous symptoms. I knew I wanted something that would do more tricks. When a Mac-savvy friend mentioned this unit she had been harboring I made the move to Apple.

I had been bilingual. The newspaper used Apple computers, and so does my wife. They really do have a knack for getting the software out of the way of creativity. My Mac-tech friend, who is also awesome musician Beverly Woods, fitted this thing out with a big honkin' hard drive and various graphics software. And I could lay the monitor flat and sleep on it. There's a lot of acreage here.

I picked it up earlier this week, but haven't had a chance to turn it on and load drivers for the resident peripherals until today.

I must now live up to it. My wife has a song project she wants illustrated.

After getting by on the netbook for so long it feels wonderfully roomy to have a full-size keyboard. I have to resume my dutiful attempts to learn touch typing.

I keep reaching for a touch pad that isn't there. But this is nice. Pretty darn nice.

Beginning summer with a chore for winter

Wood is not a heat source for the indolent. This summer I actually got motivated to make drying stacks from the unruly pile dumped from my firewood supplier's truck. What you see in the picture took nearly four hours. I have more to do, but I got tired. The job gets old long before it gets done.

Wood pellets have become fashionable, but pellets are a manufactured product. Their price and availability fluctuates radically. Pellets and wood chips also contribute to forest loss. They seem at first like a great way to use more of the tree, but the removal of slash and treetops from logged areas contributes to soil loss as more organic material is carted off and turned into carbon dioxide and soot in heating and energy systems instead of being left to rot.

Firewood won't work for everyone. If too many people used it, North America would become a desert in a matter of months. There are simply too many people. For now, it works for some of us. Other energy sources came to dominate for good reason. But there's no fuel like and old fuel, when it's right for the job.

The fan droned placidly

Members of the conservation commission attended the selectmen's meeting on Tuesday expecting to be criticized and possibly insulted for a decision they'd been forced to make based on inadequate information. We had not been summoned, but presented ourselves to report, as civil and rational colleagues, if the board had any questions or comments.

We are technically appointed by the select board. They could fire us and form a new commission if they chose. I do my best to help here, but if the town leaders decide that a less active and committed commission reflects the will of the citizens better, they have the power to take that controversial step. I can certainly find other ways to keep busy during the declining years of life on Earth.

We were not on the agenda. The board would only have received our decision that afternoon. We were there as a courtesy in case they wanted to address any of their concerns immediately.

Apparently they did not.

I had to leave before the end because of a previously scheduled personal commitment. Before I left I watched them govern for a while.

It's a strange little anti-government government. These people are paid with our tax dollars, which makes them kin to all in that position, but their caustic comments and eye rolls about the feds and state officials clearly showed that they do not sense it.

The chair of the board walks a convoluted tightrope above his constituency here in town. As referred to in an earlier post, the small population here holds the width of viewpoints held in the national population. We have tree-hugging socialists and gun-toting authority-haters. Interestingly, both these polar opposites get together to agree on the basics like road maintenance and other routine functions of the community before returning their customary scathing assessments of each other's mental competence.

The select board does not hold this place together so much as balance on top of the constant minor earthquake. The political speech is a caricature, the duplicity almost instantaneous, as people come forward who have very different positions. Politicians aren't lying, they're just trying to reflect the desires of whoever is in front of them at that moment. Sensitive to the entire audience, this board leans in an anti-government direction and praises property rights and jobs over environmental protection. The environmentalists are used to taking crap and being dismissed. Apparently we can take it and always will. The sad fact is, they're right. Short-sighted, selfish people who are willing to act out and destroy things always get attention over the small, the peaceful, and the hard to understand. If something is hard to understand, get angry at it and order it to become simple! And spout a catch phrase when you do it.

I don't say it's easy to govern, especially when you can face a room packed with angry neighbors. They also stop you in the grocery store, the post office and on the road. Not me, mind you. The board and commission on which I serve tend to function mostly ignored. But the selectmen are the headliners. They become the lightning rod. I've seen the chairman go from being a quiet but open person to someone not vastly, but noticeably, more guarded and angry.

Service to the people forces you to deal with everything about them. It either hardens you somewhat or it cuts you to pieces. That hardness does not have to be cold and cruel. It can simply be a measure of clinical detachment or prudent defensiveness. Or it can form a shell around a bitter center.

Local Control

Small town government is really depressing.

In the human race there's only a small pool of good leaders and another pool of leaders whose style falls more into the category of warlords and dictators. These two groups account for all the ideas the rest of us get recruited to support or oppose. People who possess fewer leadership qualities fill the management and labor positions. Some people try to stay out of social systems entirely.

So much for the general situation. Someone somewhere has compiled statistics on the actual proportions in the population. The idea that 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people springs to mind, but that's a tiny fraction of the story. Leaders pick the work.

In a small population the smaller percentage of good leaders represents a minuscule actual number. They seldom hear praise, but complaints are often delivered face to face in unconstructive terms. Leading in a small town can be like leading outlaws or pirates. As long as you can maintain control in the ranks you won't be deposed. You have to show them victories and plunder and prove that you are still tougher than they are.

In some towns the veneer of civility may be thicker than in others. In this one the division between people with what you might call a global perspective and those with an intensely self-centered one is sharp. At this point there appear to be no swing voters. It all comes down to apathy. The ones who would choose not to be governed do their best to ignore government and remain invisible to it. The ones who believe government can be conducted civilly and productively for long-term benefits keep plugging away. But there aren't enough of them to fill all the necessary slots.

The present supreme leadership of the town seems unduly susceptible to pressure from the faction with very short-term goals. Unfortunately, small towns get run by people with the time to devote to it. The alternatives who have offered themselves for the position have all been demonstrably worse.

Petty people in positions of power present a particular problem. Some people fear rules because petty leaders can use them as power tools. But petty leaders who try to circumvent the rules end up doing worse damage to the system we are supposed to operate for the good of all. Sometimes the authority figure hung up on procedure is not just doing it to swing a big stick. Sometimes it really has to do with respect for the institution that is supposed to operate on a time frame beyond a single human lifetime. The system is supposed to outlive each of us individually because it serves us collectively across generations. Therefore it may have needs that supersede our short-term desires.

The 1960s brought about a great many good and necessary things. Unfortunately it also fed a culture of self indulgence and impatience that finds expression in such disparate ways as huge cars, suburban mansions, swingers' clubs and doomsday religions. Party or worship like there's no tomorrow. There's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The good things from the 1960s were a willingness to question authority at all levels and a sense of individual worth that can lead to a very responsible respectful society if you recognize that every self has worth, no greater or less than your own. It's hard when those selves choose to do things that range from annoying to abhorrent. No one said life was easy. It just gets hard in different ways as we learn more and more about ourselves and our universe. For every physical hazard we have reduced, a new ethical dilemma arises. For every technology that makes life seem easier we have a new set of unintended consequences to discover and mitigate.

I didn't ask for this. If I didn't have to work for a living I would happily just sit for days at a time, watching the mountains erode under the ever-changing weather. I've never felt the need to be constantly busy. But someone has to do something about, or for, the people who do. I have to walk into the arena of the pissing contest, umbrella in hand, and speak in defense of reason.

Cartooning is fiddling in the world of art

The world of fiddling includes hot players with extensive classical training and highly regarded performers with little or no formalized training. Likewise the ranks of cartooning include many who attended or even finished art school. Others have acquired skills mostly on their own to bring their ideas to paper.

Ultimately, the result is what matters. The formally trained practitioner in either art or music may have a bigger toolbox or a deeper understanding of the few tools applied in a given circumstance. I won't argue against a proper education. But as one who has evaded a full formal education I have to hope for the outsider as well.

Fiddling is music of the people. Cartooning is art of the people. I'm sure the first cartoon was an unflattering depiction of the tribal chief that led directly to the first commandment forbidding graven images and the first cartoonist to get stoned. Before Art was invented, people just tried to get a point across with pictures. You need me to draw you a picture? As art has developed, certain artistic people have collected advanced techniques to help them make a picture they find more satisfactory. At the same time, scribbling miscreants all over the world are doing crude renderings and eliciting huge laughs from their audience. I remember a few times in school when my friends and I could not inhale because we were trying to control our laughter during a class when someone had made or found a scribbled cartoon.

One of the best art teachers I've met was a fellow student at the first and only Center for Cartoon Studies gag cartooning workshop in 2006. I hope I would feel the same way if I encountered him as an undergraduate properly enrolled in one of his classes. All I can say is that right now what he says resonates with me.

Jamie Smith posts items about his teaching and cartooning endeavors at his blog, Ink & Snow. Here is a link to his profile information. If you wonder how it's done and how you might do some yourself, scroll through his articles. If you just want to laugh at his cartoons you can find links to take you to a bunch of them.

He did not get a college art education. But he is hardly uneducated.

One thing unifies successful people: they identify their core interest and refuse to be dislodged from it. The same quality afflicts many unsuccessful people who for various reasons fail to make it, but you seldom find a successful person who got there without trying.

I am a fiddler by temperament. I never took well to formal education even though I remained institutionalized for 17 years. I did not have the drive and the need to break out when I could remain subsidized and still pay attention only to what interested me in my immediate vicinity. My major regret is that I did not take more advantage of what I could have sniffed out. I don't really regret any lack of attention in the actual classes for which I registered.

Live and learn, the saying goes. Of course it's easy to pick alternate choices looking back. It really doesn't get any easier looking forward. You can make more rational choices but you can't control what comes from outside. You can only continue to follow your interests in the style that suits you.

When I started cartooning in seventh grade, I did not study it exhaustively. I did not understand the difficulty of the drawing process. Words and ideas came easily. They still do. The drawing comes as hard to me as prying notes off a page and hammering them one at a time like nails into my skull so that I can twiddle through 45 seconds of music. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I can come up with a thousand words far more quickly than I can produce a professional quality drawing to depict them. After looking at some of the cartooning blogs on the glorious Interweb, I'm not sure I have ever produced a professional quality drawing, regardless of what has gotten published, even though I got paid for some of it. There is some serious damn' art out there.

I scribble on.

Sawing Down a Redwood Tree with a Nail File

My music teacher puts her adult students in her school recitals along with her other students. At least once a year we stand or sit before the assembled audience to perform what we've been practicing for a few months. Sometimes we only perform as part of a larger group made up mostly of children. At other events we have enough pieces of our own to rate a short section of the program in our own age group.

On Friday, May 21, we had two pieces supposedly ready, and then were scheduled to join the whole orchestra for a three-page finale number. It had a lot of eighth notes.

Your common eighth note doesn't look like much. One or two at a time they present only a quick hurdle to hop in the normal 4/4 world. But when they gang up on you it's a different story. And then there's cut time. Take your 4/4, chop it to 2/2 (that's two beats to a measure, half note has one beat), smear liberally with eighth notes, heat and serve.

One fellow striver in the adult group pointed out that you can cheat your way into it by counting it as a fast four, seeing as there weren't any half notes anyway. I do the same thing riding rollers to music. I'll subdivide a beat to find a cadence that keeps me in time to whatever is playing. It's a damn sight easier when you're strapped to pedals on fixed-length crank arms than when you're trying to find a series of unmarked targets with the fingers of your left hand while coordinating the movement of the bow held in your right.

Over the years I have avoided practicing when my teacher was at home because I did not want to subject her to student noises when she's off duty. Sometimes I can't help playing when she's home, because I have to get ready for one of these recitals. At other times she'll throw me a new exercise or book or show me a technique. Only recently did she actually tell me she prefers not to have to hear me struggle because she is so conditioned to respond. So now it seems more important to find other times and places to practice.

I don't like to be heard by anyone, really. The noises I make just aren't that good. It's supposed to be enjoyable, unless you're a really advanced modern composer for whom the academic exercise of a particular piece of music theory is more important than the listener's pleasure. Some of them seem actually hostile to the notion of listening pleasure. But that's a small group. I hardly qualify as an advanced musical theorist.

Now that the weather is mild I can practice in the garage. The mosquitoes can be a problem, but that may help with faster tempos. Also remember to stand between the hanging kayaks so you don't jam the tip of the bow into the bottom of a boat.

The recitals always seem to come a week or two sooner than I'm ready for them. This time I had put a lot of time into the long, difficult piece, which made the shorter pieces seem easier. If nothing else I figured our plucky group would knock those out of the park. On the longer one I had drilled the hard sections over and over, and tried to knit them together. Music in parts sounds weird when the parts are played separately.

Many of the parents in the audience know me from other activities. Others are strangers. Anyone who has a student in the program for a season or two finds out about the adult group, but not every child stays in it. Sometimes the audience includes nonplussed adults looking at the handful of people on stage who are their own age or older, but who sound like they're anywhere between 10 and 17 when they play. Who are we? Why do we put ourselves and our audience through this?

Some of the parents in the audience tried to learn with us. They understand the best.

When we finished this time I felt drained, and not in a good way. Every piece went off the rails at some point. We dragged it back every time, but I had let myself hope for better.

After every recital, our teacher tells us we did well. She listens for what went right and praises it. She always tells us to keep reading and find a place to jump back in when we fumble.

I look forward to a time when every performance isn't a continuous exercise in damage control. It's actually a mark of improving skill to know how to do damage control, but damage occurred nonetheless. If someone hadn't been playing the right stuff while those of us in the weeds were getting out of them, our detours would not have sounded anything like what the composer put on the page. Sure, the audience isn't looking at a score. Even if we're playing a scaled-down version of a popular classic, like the 1812 Overture, people might assume the part they've never heard is part of the rearrangement. But I know the difference. It wasn't supposed to be that way.

At one point in the 1812 on Friday, my teacher was playing my part along with me. I heard a mess start to my left. Suddenly the teacher was yanking on the downbeats. I didn't know if she was trying to get me to do something differently, so I hit turbulence. It turned out she was trying to get the cellist to hammer the downbeats. I don't know if the cellist got the message. The thing about these short versions is that they're over quickly. Right or wrong, finish together and look like you planned it that way.

Because my music teacher needs to put these events behind her as soon as they happen, I don't even have anyone to discuss my performance with until many days later when she might be willing to talk about it. I might want to groove on the fact that I found a note I could pedal on for a measure or two until I could jump back in, or that I worked out a shift to avoid having to work around my fat fingers crossing strings.

Musicians can suffer from a certain kind of jealousy or competitiveness, a hierarchical consciousness that makes them critical of concepts they themselves did not bring to the conversation. It's especially pronounced when a novice discovers a concept independently or learns it during independent research. Who am I, without a music license, to develop theories? A rare few seem to possess only a generous spirit, but maybe I simply have not seen them at their worst. Some have it really badly, others only display it under the right provocation. As with any insecurity, it rises and falls with the sufferer's general level of insecurity. I have to phrase questions carefully.

In the hierarchy of musicians, the known better musicians can expound with relative impunity, especially if they do so with charming humility. Even if they're arrogant jerks, if they have the chops to back it up they can be as snotty as they like. Musicians of nearly equal, completely equal or greater skill may engage to various degrees in the exchange of barbs, but the rest of you louts may only grunt along with whichever team you choose to support.

Free-range musicians can work on a personal style completely outside any of the established hierarchies and then break in as a discovery, if their music is good enough. And many of us just grind away as best we can. Anyone tramping through the musical forest who hears the sounds coming from my campfire will probably fade into the darkness and continue to search for real talent elsewhere.

"As long as you're enjoying it,..." my teacher says. Every teacher and most local musicians say the exact same thing. As long as you're enjoying it, keep doing it. Talking to Darol Anger after a Republic of Strings concert at Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine, a couple of weeks ago, I was joking around about my wretched skill level. "As long as you're enjoying it," he said.

It's a little hard to reconcile this "any number can play, DO try this at home" attitude with the supercilious response of some of the musical cognoscenti. It is important to know your place. So for the foreseeable future my place is the garage, and student recitals, local string band gatherings if I'm so inclined, and other corners and closets.

The violin is the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. Fretless stringed instruments played with a bow demand the absolute highest level of coordination and precision. I may not possess it. But small successes lure me on and the music so far is fairly straightforward to decipher, even when playing it completely eludes me. I don't have to grapple with massive piano chords or the intricacies of multifarious picking techniques. I know for a fact I won't settle for three chords and high amplification. So I keep sawing away.

The music teacher is off at work. I can play in the house today.