What's Going On

I haven't been posting a lot this month but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy. One of my new projects has been converting the cassette tapes I have from when I was a community volunteer at WMUL (Marshall University's radio station) where I did a ska and reggae show called Ska Beat (from 1997-1999) to mp3 format. I only have about twenty or so tapes plus a few from when I filled in at other spots but it is time consuming mainly because I have to listen to them to write down the bands and songs. Once upon a time I kept my playlists but now I have no idea where they are or if indeed I still have them. As far as editing I decided to leave everything in, all of the Public Service Announcements, all of the Marshall stuff and even all of the weather announcements. I loathe editing that kind of stuff and besides, it's a testament of where I was and what I was doing at that moment of my life. The only thing I have been editing is the beginning of the recording, when the tape was turned over (not always timely) and at the end. That's pretty much it. I've decided to upload these file to the Internet Archive instead of putting them up through Podomatic as a podcast. That will start as soon as I write a few paragraphs about the history of the show.

Another new project is also music related but in a much different way. I've talked with Tommy and his son Chris about doing a spoken word/music project with them. There is no name for it as of yet but honestly it was something I thought about doing in the mid-nineties when people like Maggie Estep made it seem possible and Henry Rollins was all over the place doing spoken word. Somehow it never happened for me even as a personal, local thing and I buried it away in the back of my mind piled over by a ton of other ideas that I always wanted to start on. I finally realized that if it's going to happen I have to make it happen and since Chris and Tommy's bands are kind of on hiatus it only makes sense to do something creative together. Writing lyrics has been fun and personally rewarding for me but sometimes in my head I hear things differently than in the regular lyrics format so I want to see where this can go. It's going to be a learning process for me so we'll see how it ends up.

I have been writing but most of it has seemed incomplete or partially written to me so I've been reluctant to put much of it online. If it's a first draft and sure to change that's not a problem to me but I don't even feel that most of the new stuff is at that point yet. I need more hours in the day to work on it. Or to have money so that I don't have to work. Yeah, that'd work. It's not gonna happen but it's a nice pipe dream. Writing words for my new project is a very different process. Instead of presenting ideas in a concise manner now I get to indulge myself and get wordy. Problem is most of the time stuff comes to me I'm nowhere close to paper and pen or a recorder or it's not a situation where I can use any of those things. Case in point, while in the stage of half sleep this morning I had music and words come to me but by the time I was awake enough to try and write them down it was all starting to fade. Then the cat jumped in my lap wanting attention and my cellphone started ringing intermittently so I only got some of it down. Hopefully I can look at it later and have something else present itself.

That's about it, everything I've been working on besides doing things with the family and working a fulltime job. It's a lot but as I said earlier, if I want it to happen then I've got to make it happen. I have to start it because nobody else is gonna knock on my door and say they're there to help me do what I want to do. Resistance will always present itself in many forms to block you. Go read Stephen Pressfield and he'll tell you all about it. As for me, I have to get back to work, in one form or another.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

The Art Of Cowardly Fighting

Recently while in Sunday School I had a memory of a kid I knew when I was young. It's been over twenty-five years since I've seen him and as a result I no longer remember his name. For the sake of the story let's just call him Greg. Greg didn't live in my apartment building but did live on the same block as me in the projects. We were friendly off and on over a period of a few years but not exactly friends if that makes sense. As a matter of fact, the last memory I have of him was a fight between me and his younger brother and subsequently me and him but that's another story entirely.

On this particular day when we were about ten years old during a period of friendship we happened to be standing outside on the block talking. Greg had this bad habit of running his mouth to other people but unfortunately for him he had absolutely no ability to defend himself. For whatever reason there was he would start calling another kid names, saying bad things about his family and what he would do to the kid. Since he couldn't back any of his smack talk up whenever it came to physical violence (which with boys at that age it invariably will do) Greg usually wound up taking a beating. I recall on one occasion a boy we'll call Mike (can't remember his name either) came running up to Greg and started punching him out of the blue. It seems Greg had been mouthy with Mike in school where Mike couldn't do anything about it but now out in the open he had found his opportunity for revenge.

Greg immediately dropped into a fetal position and covered up as best he could while Mike pounded away on him. Eventually Mike tired of this and figuring that his need for revenge was sated he stopped pummeling Greg and told him he'd gotten what he deserved. Mike let him up and told him in great detail what he would do to him the next time he dared to talk to him the way he had before. Greg kept his head down and started to walk away sniffling but when he had gone about thirty to forty feet he started a vicious, nasty, verbal assault on Mike the likes of which I had never heard before. Greg took off running with Mike in hot pursuit but he only got a short distance before Mike caught him and the whole scene repeated itself.

Once more Mike let Greg up and once more he walked away before starting another verbal assault. Mike chased him down again and bashed him as best he could, given Greg's fetal position. This scene repeated itself several more times before Greg finally made it to the safety of his home (or Mike just tired of using him as a human punching bag) whichever came first. Greg had suffered a very public beating but had never stopped running his mouth once he had gained some sort of relative safety. Mike had shown that he could dominate Greg but could not stop him from running his mouth, no matter how many times he beat him down. It's hard to say whose will was more indomitable.

What's could all of this possibly have to do with Church you say? Our lesson was about a leader who refused to make an oath that he would war no more even though he and his men were trapped and could not win. They faced complete destruction and still he would not give in. Greg was very much like that leader. He put himself in a bad situation of his own making and talked about what he would do but ultimately would not fight back and defend himself. Behind his verbal smokescreen he was a coward and could not face his own demons. Not once did he stand up for himself, not once did he attempt to throw a single punch. Instead he chose to transfer those demons to others in what I can only surmise was an effort to deflect the pain he felt inside. As a result he ended up having pain on the outside fighting a war he could never win.

Greg could not bring himself to capitulate nor could he learn from his mistakes. At the very least he should have realized that the smart thing to do was get a little more distance between Mike and himself before opening his mouth again, but he could not even do that. I don't know if it was pride, stupidity or good old fashioned craziness which drove him. At the time I didn't know whether I should admire or pity him and even now I still can't say for sure how I feel. His behavior puzzled me then as it does now. If you won't defend yourself then perhaps it's better to just keep your mouth shut. If he never learned from his mistakes and dealt with those demons he might still be stuck in the same revolving door pattern he developed all those years ago. For his sake I really hope that's not the case. It would be rather sad at his age to still be living a life as a cowardly fighter.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

My (Lack) Of Vision

Somewhere around the age of eight or nine years old was the time when the terrible news was handed down to me. My vision had deteriorated to the point that I now needed glasses. My mother was raising three children with no help from our father, back then a person could seemingly disappear and never have to worry about being made to actually contribute to the raising of his children. Apparently my father did this with more than one woman too (see my earlier story about my father for all of the details). Since my mother was raising us on the salary of a secretary she had to have some assistance and soon we were living in the projects of Ironton and on food stamps. I personally viewed the food stamps as a shameful thing which came back on me at a much later date.

Another program (state, county, federal?) that we were eligible for was one that through which I could get my glasses for free. The only catch was that there were only three styles of frames to choose from. The first was ugly and was sure to get you insulted and ridiculed by your friends. The second was uglier and was sure to get you insulted, ridiculed and possibly beaten up by strangers. The third was the ugliest and was sure to get you insulted, ridiculed and beaten up by everybody. Guess which ones I would invariably choose? Back then before the many technological advances that we have today my lenses were very thick, attesting to how poor my eyesight actually was, and very large which meant that the frames had to be sturdy enough to hold the lenses in place properly.

Here I am as a cute, normal kid before glasses

And here I am a few years later looking nerdly with glasses

Nowadays even though my vision is far worse the lenses are much thinner and I can wear wireframes if I so desire. Not so back then. So there I was at a young lad at a tender age with poor self confidence and a bad self image and I had to wear these ugly frames with huge lenses that dwarfed my face and that would certainly not mix well at all later when puberty set in. The shy sensitive person that I was now became an instant nerd in the publics opinion simply with the addition of glasses. Life was never the same in more ways than one.

The best time for me was the brief period that I was able to wear contact lenses while in college. For the first time since I was a young child I could actually see out of my whole eyes clearly without the curse of my vision being limited by the outline of the frames. No, it was total freedom, until dust blew into my eyes that is. Still, it was very liberating. Later in life my eyes would change and now they dry out very easily so contacts are pretty much not an option anymore for me. As I said earlier though technology did bring me lighter and better glasses that don't take up my whole face so I've got that going for me.

Unfortunately I don't know if I've ever felt like a single pair of glasses that I've had ever really suited me or just looked good on me. It's probably just all in my head, which can be a dangerous place to be. The thing I want to know is, after a lifetime of watching Star Trek and other sci-fi shows, where's the technology that can simply and quickly fix your vision? And the flying cars, where are the flying cars we were promised? That never came to be. Sure there's expensive laser treatment that might be able to fix your vision but that's just not the same. Come on scientists, work on this. Invent something like Bones used and let's get this vision thing licked once and for all. And get me that flying car, stat.

Written and Published by Don Leach.May not be used without permission from the author.