Wanna know about the music I make? Here’s the info:

A performer for more than 35 years, Chuck Parker has filled many musical roles: heavy metal guitarist, singer/songwriter, jazz sideman, open mic host, filk circle regular, session player, and World’s Okayest Bassist™.

Chuck has been a regular on the con circuit for more than a decade, and he’s played ballrooms, biergartens and backyards all over the country, both as a solo performer and as the bassist for wizard rock icons The Blibbering Humdingers. He plays slice of life, confessional geek tunes that are often kind of funny, and his lyrics have been called “sensitive”, “literate”, and “hard to sing…”

He is also a published poet, avid cyclist, spouse, father, and a herder of cats, both figuratively and literally.

Tunes:

• Bandcamp: Songs/Albums for sale/download
• Spotify
• Apple Music
• YouTube Artist Channel
• …and very likely on your other favorite streaming service!
• The Blibbering Humdingers, the wizard rock/nerdmusik band I’ve played bass with for most of the last ten years
• Stuff I Made – live recordings, other people’s records I’ve appeared on, rare stuff, writing, etc…

Gigs

• Chuck’s Gigs Page

Thanks for checking in, and if you like, stick around to read two decades’ worth of blog posts!

Another couple of weeks down, because I’ve been all kinds of busy, depressed, tired, sore, occasionally celebratory, and outside touching grass.

Work is work, of course. I’m kind of just tired of all of it all, going through the motions and doing the thing, but not feeling particularly motivated to give the powers that be any more than the minimum expected effort. I’ve been leaving the office for lunch every day, finding a space that’s simply not there to exist away from it all for half-an-hour. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my immediate team members and leadership, I really, honestly do, though everyone above the level of my agency CIO, from the HQ front office all the way up to the grifter sitting at the Resolute Desk, clearly not have the our best interests in mind, and that doesn’t exactly inspire loyalty.

I might be a bit bitter, though I have been enjoying the ugly breakup currently happening in real time, even under the deluge of partisan memos dropped every Friday along with the rest of the trash.

But that’s all I’m going to say about that, because you’ve heard it all already, and I’m honestly tired of talking and thinking about it more than absolutely necessary.

More positively, I’ve been putting some effort into advancing a few of my other projects, which have been much better for my mental and physical health. Over the Memorial Day weekend, I added four more state parks to my Trail Quest list over a long Sunday in NW Virginia, bringing my total up to 30 and crossing the next milestone. Only ten more to go, and I’ve got three more lined up for a camping trip later this month.

The Capital Trail Summer Challenge is up and rolling, and I’ve been logging the miles most days after work. So far this week I’ve got 67 miles down, and am comfortably in the top half of the rankings for the “ten times the trail” category on my way to 517 by the end of the summer.

Those last two have me down seven pounds or so over the last two weeks, which I’m also not complaining about.

Apart from that, I’ve gotten some time in with friends, which has helped as well, sharing some fun concert stories with folks over a beverage or two at the local watering hole the other day, and spending a few hours at the pitch catching a Richmond Ivy FC match mid-week, with tentative plans to hit the Kickers match coming up this weekend. It’s a nice time tailgating and shouting along with the Vine Guard/Red Army hooligans.

So yeah, simply stepping away from all this crap: it’s helping. I have to watch the headlines, of course, but I try to get a few stories in there about Fantastic Four: First Steps along with the corruption, slash-and-burn, and ALLCAPS ranting rolling down I-95.

So…tunes. I downloaded a randomly generated playlist in Spotify last week to listen to at work while working magic with PowerBI and Excel (because my building is a Faraday cage and data connections are weak sauce), and it’s hitting a right proper mid-1980s vibe, and I’m okay with that:

1. “Do You Love Me” – KISS
2. “Coming of Age” – Damn Yankees
3. “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” – ZZ Top
4. “Whatcha Do to My Body” – Lee Aaron
5. “War Pigs” – Faith No More
6. “What Do You Know About Love” – Lita Ford
7. “Wild Flower” – The Cult
8. “Rhythm Of Love” – Scorpions
9. “Love’s A Bitch” – Quiet Riot
10. “Every 1’s A Winner” – Gun
11. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” – Spin Doctors
12. “Seventeen” – Winter

Short week and pretty decent long weekend (that provided a welcome distraction from other things) aside, I’m hitting a bit of a wall.

I actually started the week with a relatively positive attitude. I was ready to hit this special project I’m working hard and wrap things up so I can get back to my real job of building cool things. It was not to be. The universe simply kept throwing up roadblocks. Non-responsiveness (or worse, passive-aggressive deflection from certain quarters) to reasonable requests for information have kept me from ticking off milestones on the project schedule, and the project schedule itself has been difficult to get to, given that the office network has been just as unresponsive as the stakeholders; when it takes ten minutes for a simple SharePoint list to load and five minutes to launch Word thanks to everything being cloud-based now, not a whole lot’s getting done.

Watching the back-end guys having big “Oh Shit” meetings at the conference room down the hall to try and figure out what’s going on (not that any of that stuff is really managed locally anymore anyway) was not encouraging. When you’re reduced to re-writing work statements in basic text editors for later pasting into more feature-laden applications, you know things are not going well.

Add all this to the general sense of existential dread in the public sector (even with the five bullets thing finally going away), morale is low, and the three or four emails from the HR wellness folks (who are, surprisingly, still doing their thing) that came in overnight stressing the importance of mental health and the positive impact exercise has on it just had us wondering what the next thing coming down the pike would be.

That’s just what it’s like around the workspace these days.

This week-long rain isn’t helping either, as it’s keeping me off the bike and the trail. To maintain some sort of physical activity regimen, I made like a good senior citizen after work the other day and did a few laps around the mall along the route home from the office, though that place was just a different kind of sad, with it’s many closed storefronts and others filled with barely-functioning no-name t-shirt shops, fronts for local MLM representatives, and the saddest, most bored-looking retail workers you could imagine serving absolutely no one, because the only other people in the building were the half-a-dozen others doing the same thing I was.

That experience sparked a long-filed-away memory, so I did a quick search and found out that deadmalls dot com is still hanging on (or at least they’re still paying their hosting fees) from the early days of the internet in its late nineties glory, which is inspirational in its own sort of way.

So, I guess I’m going to do my best to try and take some solace in that little bit of positivity and stick-to-it-ness and do try to live up to that example, and see if it helps.

It has been a rough and emotional week. Things happened. Even some good things, but I don’t feel like talking about them. Maybe later.

I don’t really want to talk about them, because I’m largely completely occupied by the fact that on Thursday, I had to say goodbye to my friend Phoenix. She was only with me for six or seven years of her very long life (I don’t know exactly how old, really), and it’s been hard watching her age catch up with her this year; especially the last week or so. But she’s been my constant companion for that time, always right there with me while working from home, enjoying the outflow from my work computer’s fan, or just sitting with me while I was reading.

Or, you know, just looking at me silently while I was cooking, waiting for me to make the right decision and give her some.

I’m gonna miss her a lot.

No music today, just this picture of her in better times:

Another week mostly down. Work was work, headlines were headlines, and the back hurt. Also, My lovely spouse celebrated crossed a major, hard-earned milestone (and I am very, very proud), and I learned that a dear friend from my past is no longer with us, which is seriously a bummer. I spent some time with a few friends, I mowed some grass, but mostly? it rained.

it was a mixed bag, or would have been, had my elderly cat not woken me up on Thursday morning at 4:30 am by peeing on my head (she really hates the CPAP machine). I guess that experience does kind of shove it into the negative column overall.

It was what it was. I kind of just, well, existed, and dealt with things. All we can do. I honestly don’t have that much to share that I haven’t already. It was honestly, well, enough.

Well, except for the playlist my streaming service spit out this week. It sounded, end-to-end, like the perfect soundtrack to a low-to-mid budget 80s action film, most of which would be completely appropriate for an end-of-second-act montage. I dug it so much, I ended up making it into it’s own playlist to totally hit that mark, because why the heck not?:

1. “Crazy Nights” – Loudness
2. “Road of the Gypsy” – Adrenalin
3. “Waiting For The Big One” – Femme Fatale
4. “God Blessed Video” – Alcatrazz
5. “Carry On My Wayward Son” -Yngwie J. Malmsteen
6. “Fight” – No Vacancy
7. “It’s A Long Way To The Top” – Jake E. Lee
8. “Rock You Tonight” – C.J. Snare
9. “I Wish I Had A Girl Who Walked Like That” – Henry Lee Summer
10. “Sunset Strip” – Roger Waters
11. “Iron Eagle (Never Say Die)” – King Kobra
12. “So You Ran” – Orion The Hunter
13. “Swords and Tequila” – Riot

This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, with my pulse racing and an existential feeling of dread and anxiety. The clock radio alarm, went it went off, was playing “Hot Blooded” from Foreigner, which, I guess, was oddly appropriate. Seems I was having an anxiety-induced panic attack, and wasn’t immediately aware of why.

As I stood in the shower attempting to calm down, I started remembering fragmented images of what I was dreaming about before the exquisitely produced voice of Lou Gramm yanked me from my slumber:

Apparently I had been booked to play a musical set at a familiar place, a church I used to attend, which, of course, looked nothing like that place in real life, but you know how dreams are. Also on the bill were a bunch of my favorite people in my life, from all over; work, the con scene, friends I look forward to sharing a pint with, others I haven’t seen or spoken to in decades. Most of them aren’t performers in any sense of the word, but they were all on stage doing their sets. Weird stuff; interpretive dance, guided meditation, poetry readings, acrobatics, dramatic one-person monologues, martial arts form demonstrations, and yes, some music, but none of the musicians (I know a *lot* of musicians) were not doing music, and the non-performer types tended toward esoteric musical styles. I think Eurasian throat singing and didgeridoos were represented; it’s kind of vague.

As for me, I was basically set to do an hour or so of my usual acoustic singer-songwriter thing. The problem was, I had no idea when I was on the bill to perform, or even if I was performing that day, and the schedules I was able to get hold of were all out of sync with the time; the dates were wrong, the times didn’t make sense; and seemed like they were for entirely different events. On top of that, I also didn’t seem to have any kind of instrument on hand, and ended up slipping out to grab my gear, while also having to run my youngest child (who for some reason was a preschooler here) to another event across town that we were already a quarter-hour late for that involved mattresses, and was convinced that if I left, I’d miss my set and let everyone down.

My spouse was present at the event, but I wasn’t able to communicate with her for some reason. A dear friend from my musical community was supposedly the organizer (since she’s *always* the organizer IRL), but likewise, I was unable to get a straight answer from her as to when I was supposed to do my thing, but she, and others were inordinately happy I’d agreed to perform, and kept saying how much they were looking forward to it.

Also, every time I left the venue (which seemed to happen regularly, in spite of my feeling of dread about doing so), I always ended up in a different bathroom where I, for no discernible reason, always took a shower (because these dreams always involve nudity for some reason), and was always interrupted by strangers who needed to chat about something, leaving me unable to find my socks.

And finally, I was consistently worried that my set list (which I could swear got left with the gear I was worried about acquiring) had too many Beatles songs in it (I don’t typically do Beatles or Beatles-adjacent material)…

Seriously, the only thing that was missing from this weird subconscious mental conjuring was me being late for a final exam in a class I’d not attended all semester, or perhaps some kind of Freudian maternal weirdness.

Now, I’ve been under a *lot* of stress and anxiety due to occupational uncertainty, the political realities of the day, money, aging, and pharmaceutical weirdness. I often feel anxious, depressed, and unable to give proper attention to other people’s needs. This particularly lucid dream caught a lot of those feelings, and incorporated some mundane details that have cropped up recently in life…and ramped them up in ridiculously surreal circumstances.

I’m not sure what it all means, other than my subconscious trying to process and work through some stuff, but it kind of feels like I was saving all this up to deal with at once, and through the looking glass, so to speak.

Anyway, thanks for your attention to this personal exercise (or maybe I mean “exorcise”) of self-reflection and personal demons.

it’s not been a great week.

The return-to-office mandate is still unpleasant, loud, and demoralizing, with too few bathrooms, a broken ice machine, and barely functioning network services. It adds a good hour to my “working” time given the commute, traffic on the interstate, lines at the badge check at the gate, and “differently functional” PIV readers on the building doors. That hour does an excellent job of denying me time to dedicate to mental health management activities, so my depression and anxiety are a lot more acute than is normal.

I am aware that I am a creature of habit, and when my routines get disrupted, I get disrupted. I know that in time, the work location will become the new normal, and I’ll be better. However, it won’t do anything for the random bullshit spewing from Washington, and fatalistic gallows humor about the whole business in the break room can only go so far.

On top of all that, my middle-aged body decided to do me a solid after some weekend chores last Saturday, and I somehow messed up my back, leading to way-more-serious-than-usual pain and very unpleasant muscle spasms. Crying after work isn’t exactly atypical anymore, but it’s usually due to existential dread and not piercing pain as I try to drive the manual transmission home.

I’m supposed to ride the Cap2Cap this weekend, though fifty miles with the remnants of the conditions described in the previous paragraph is probably not a good idea right now. I’ll make a judgement call Friday evening, but I’m likely to delay my personal half-century a few weeks for my own good.

So yeah, that sucks. I’m kind of numb to everything (well, except the back pain) at the moment, with occasional saltiness thrown in. I paid off two really pretty big bills this week, freeing up quite a bit of money each month, and I can’t even get excited about it, and not just because the annual personal property tax bill came due this month and ate up the first month’s windfall, and I’ll be expecting a separate bill to cover the new ride in a little while. Long term? It’s a good deal, though right now it’s just one more turd for the sh*tpile.

So all that happened. Here’s a list of tunes. Loads and loads of blues-y hair metal:

1. “Neighbor” – Ugly Kid Joe
2. “Over My Head” – King’s X
3. “Black Cars” – Gino Vanelli
4. “Dirty Water” – Rock & Hyde
5. “Got No Shame” – Brother Cane
6. “Tweeter And The Monkey Man” – Headstones
7. “Wouldn’t You Like To Know Me” – Paul Stanley
8. “Bad Bad Boy” – Haywire
9. “Living In A Dream” – Arc Angels
10. “Don’t Call Us (We’ll Call You)” – Sugarloaf
11. “Run Runaway” – Slade
12. “High Road Easy” – Sass Jordan
13. “Lover” – Michael Stanley Band
14. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw” – Rose Tattoo
15. “New Age Girl” – Dead Eye Dick

Given the recent news in federal circles regarding potential benefit cuts in the latest budget, as well as the whole < gestures vaguely at everything > in my particular vocation since the end of January, it’s depressingly ironic that this week is recognized as Public Service Recognition Week.

Not that I’m really looking for recognition (I’d rather just sit there being quietly competent and getting the the job done without anyone really bothering me), though it is nice to be appreciated, even symbolically. Not that I feel particularly appreciated (beyond my immediate team, anyway) right now. None of us do.

Just wanted to get that out there is all.

That said, it seems I was recognized today, by being assigned a new project that’s come down from the head office that my boss described as “HOT HOT HOT” that I’ve now got to deal with. As the proverb goes, “the reward for good work is more work,” so I guess through some twisted logic, that’s recognition.

After more than five years of remote work, today I returned to the commuting office life. It was…fine. In the most general of terms, it’s not really *that* much of an inconvenience, though to be honest, it’s kind of a bummer, just because. I likely could have waited until Monday to come in, though I figured that coming in on a Friday, which is generally a pretty quiet day, to make sure my desk had all the stuff it needed, it wasn’t falling down, and ensure that the cube wasn’t full of bedbugs or rodents or whatever…

All told, the workspace was in reasonably good shape (as I learned, someone had been squatting in it, so it at least had the essentials, like a monitor/docking station), and while I still have an open ticket to get the eVOIP phone to register my number, I did get the software-based phone working (not that we don’t use Teams most of the time anyway).

The one thing I didn’t expect was how loud the place was going to be. While most folks haven’t actually come back to the office yet (that’ll happen over the next month or so), those that here truly don’t understand the concept of “inside voice,” and it’s really damned hard to concentrate. I suppose, however, that I’ll have to adapt. Until then, there’s noise-cancelling headphones.

At least the week’s over. The weekend is largely full of chores. As I have to spend most of the afternoon at home anyway waiting for the dishwasher repair guy, I figure I’ll mow the grass and clean my car inside and out, since my lovely spouse has a fancy new one to splash caramel iced coffee around in. That, when combined with dog, isn’t exactly the olfactory bouquet I’d prefer. I suspect we’ll get out to see Thunderbolts* at some point, because that’s what we do; otherwise, I just want some quiet after the office day.

Here are some tunes; metal, new wave, and a little bit of 80s pop. I’ll take it:

1. “Higher Ground” – RHCP
2. “Helter Skelter (live)” – U2
3. “Never Say Die” – Black Sabbath
4. “Used To Love Her” – Guns N’ Roses
5. “Money Changes Everything” – Cyndi Lauper
6. “Goody Two Shoes” – Adam Ant
7. “Round and Round” – Ratt
8. “Cold Hard Bitch” – Jet
9. “Boys Are Back In Town” – Busboys
10. “Running Free” – Iron Maiden
11. “Louie Louie” – Motörhead
12. “Bad Luck” – Social Distortion
13. “Cuts Like a Knife” – Bryan Adams

It’s coming folks.

77 million voters fucked around; now they’re going to find out. While the rumors of the Port of Seattle being completely empty this week were perhaps somewhat overblown, shipments of products from China and other Asian countries to the United States are slowing down rapidly thanks to those tariffs, and pretty soon (i.e. the next two or three weeks) the shelves at your local big box will be bereft of cheap plastic crap, and the little that’s left is going to cost a hell of a lot more. It’s likely going to stay that way through at least the rest of the year.

And the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. don’t care, because it’s not going to affect them at all.  Here’s the actual quote from TFG during yesterday’s Cabinet meeting:

“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”

That’s your “War on Christmas” right there.

Y’all asked for this; more than half of you, by voting for That Man, or not voting at all, brought this on. And whether it’s the OTR trucker getting laid off* (and people in that industry voted for the current administration by about 73%) and who is now also now mandated to speak English, or the billionaire TechBros who donated millions to the campaign, and are now finding their costs skyrocketing and are taking digs at the administration by line item to online shopping carts displaying the extra costs attributed of the policy. I keep getting update emails on the couple of Kickstarter projects I backed over the last six months or so referencing the impact on potential shipping and pricing changes (the tariffs are hitting the tabletop games industry particularly hard, especially so because of the thin profit margins and the wealth of small-business publishers), and the news is universally bad for business.

Personally, I’m very glad the car we took delivery of yesterday got in under the wire; it was assembled at Toyota’s Kentucky plant, though the vast majority of the parts were sourced from Japan, Mexico, and Canada.

Although so much of this administration’s efforts in the first 100 days has impacted me very personally (see so many of my previous posts regarding my status as a civil servant), I feel a certain frustration with talking about it (which, clearly, I’ve not let it stop me), because it hits on the whole “empathy” discussion that crops up in political coverage (and is particularly trendy academic circles right now); and I really struggle with the fact that this does affect me personally, by bitching about my personal difficulties with all this might make me appear that I lack empathy, given that it’s the general pattern that those of a conservative mindset only change ingrained opinions when things affect them personally, and that’s only after a bunch of prevaricating about whether things are tolerable based on how it hurts those they’ve decided are “the other.”

It’s all so “zero sum” for so many people, particularly That Guy in charge right now; there’s always got to be a winner and a loser; none of this “a rising tide lifts all boats” business; the idea that something can be good for all of us; that there’s no “loser” in a situation, is anathema to their thinking; Like LBJ said during his tenure during the time of the Civil Rights Act:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Convince someone they’re “gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning,” in other words, and  they’ll accept the lash willingly as long as that guy they don’t like gets one more stroke. As Twain may have said, “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

This is truly, in many ways, the worst timeline.

______________________

*- And that’s not even considering entrepreneurial amphetamine dealers or the “lot lizards” loitering outside Buc-ees offering their services to the trucking community…

…and that’s another one in the books.  This year’s Ravencon ended up being a good experience, largely due to the presence of some very good friends I don’t see often enough and a reasonably relaxed vibe when I wasn’t rushing to sit panels, play shows, running equally-busy offspring to off-site commitments, or working around inconveniently broken elevators.

After a really long day Friday, involving my mundane day job after being out for a later-than-usual-for-me Thursday dinner out with friends who arrived a day early, four back-to-back panel commitments all evening, and a late-night music circle where any sort of skill or competence ran off and hid (likely in the dank underground tunnels connecting the conference center buildings), Saturday went much better; especially the oddly timed morning show where at least I had a captive audience in the hotel restaurant finishing their hangover-cures at the breakfast buffet. I actually kind of nailed it, I guess, after getting every mistake out of my system the night before.  Similarly, my more subdued, unamplified set in the art show room later in the day seemed to contribute the atmosphere they were trying to create; no definitive plan, some less-common quieter songs, and some gentle finger-picking instrumental improvisation hit the desired mark.

I also got the chance to just sit, watch things go by, and catch up with lots of people I really like, which is it’s own special kind of thing, and I really appreciated it. It provided some very necessary mental refreshment, even if the physical sphere took a serious hit and made Monday morning a little more challenging than usual.

That said, I did get to sit down for an hour Sunday evening before retiring with a friend’s book and a glass of my homebrewed English Brown Ale that came out quite nicely, if I do say so myself.

As for the week ahead, I really need to start getting serious about conditioning if I’m going to pull off the Cap2Cap next weekend.  As it is, fifty miles is going to be more of a struggle than it normally is at this point in the year, but I’ll get it done, even if it takes me a bit longer than usual, given, well, everything else going on, because convincing myself I’m in above-average condition for my age and *not* falling apart is oddly important for me.

Also, because of this garbage and my organization finally getting everything sorted after the expected disorganization surrounding implementing these things without warning, I get to start working from the office again later this week, and as of Monday, am still waiting for confirmation of where my desk will be (since they’re in the process or organizing the knocking down the building I used to work in).  I am not really looking forward to this, in large part because my team is scattered around the country, and I’ll be driving fifteen miles on the interstate to sit on the phone all day instead of walking to the other end of the house to sit on the phone all day.  Joy.