Exhausted

Wow, I’m beat. I can still do more at this point, it’s a nice low level hypomania driving me in that way (along with a low dose of prednisone) but I’m done for a while. The Lost City Music Festival of Madison has come to a close and it was a great experience. I’ve done more recordings for it than ever before and they’ll all be featured on the Lost City site which gets over a thousand hits a day. But I still have mastering to do. 9 bands from yesterday and 2 bands to remaster since I screwed up the sound by using cheaper headphones and doing it while tired. That’s about another 12 hours of work ahead of me today and tomorrow. So my work is not done.

But to give you an idea of how much has been done, out of 70 bands, I ran 26 of them, averaging over 8 bands a night. A typical night is 2-3 bands, 4 gets rough, 9 is unholy. And I’ve done 60 hour work weeks as a bike mechanic. Days filled with shipping, manual labor, sales, and random things that need to be done. I’ll take a 12 hour day of that over even an 8 hour day of engineering. It’s so absurd that I’m actually getting a callus on my thumb where I manipulate the sound board.

It’s done though, I might have a touring gig out of it. And I also found that I am hyper sensitive to pot smoke. Last night some jackass decided to light up a joint in the middle of the room as the music was ending. If you don’t know, Madison has banned cigarettes in all buildings. And since pot is illegal, one would think that if a cigarette is not allowed, then a joint, being one step above cigarettes in illegality, would also be banned and the proprietor of the establishment would be pissed to hell that someone lit up. This logic did not seem to get through to the hipster douchebag. I was so close to just punching him when he was giving me guff. People clapped though, no one wants to come home from a show smelling like cheap pot. But the smoke still lingered as I was cleaning up the place and about 20 minutes in, I started feeling paranoid and what I can only assume is the beginning of a psychotic episode.

Which is all the more reason that I always stress to everyone to take crucial medications with them everywhere. I went over to my bag, pulled out my nightly olanzapine, and took it early. An hour later I felt much better. Taking it three hours early meant that I could still have a nice night out and see some of my friends rather than possibly boarding up the windows again. One can never plan for these things to happen and it’s literally a 5 minute thing to set up. I also carry my nightly medications when working late so that while I’m still awake, I can remember to take them and then just crash when I get home. It’s a simple measure and unlike what antipsychiatry movements might try to tell us, we need our medication.

But that’s enough of me. Right now I have some streaming going on at my site. You can check it out at jwilliamsound.bandcamp.com. It’s a budget recording service so that bands can get live and new material recorded and mastered for a reasonable rate (right now it’s just donation based). I’m hoping to get better sound equipment in the next year and go fully pro while still capturing the sense of live sound. If you feel like donating, I do take credit card at my tumblr site which is just jwilliamsound.tumblr.com. Everything goes straight back into helping local music thrive and develop. Also, keep an eye out. I’m also instigating a new online local music blog/magazine to cover the music scene.

I think next time I’ll talk about my plan of attack on this hypomania that I’m going through and what steps I’m taking. I’ve learned what I’ve done wrong in the past and how some of it worked out to my benefit but now I’m trying to get it so that I never have to worry about the eventual crash.

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