So I have these musical instruments in my house. Quite nice ones.

They fall into two types: concertinas and ukuleles. But they both represent the same thing: a dream deferred.

Before I discovered improv, I was a pretty serious amateur musician. Not really good, but enthusiastic.

The concertina is an antiquated, accordion-like instrument. It was developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone in England in the Victorian Era. It started out as an instrument used for chamber music. But these days it’s largely used in folk music… especially for playing Irish traditional music.

I literally stumbled across the concertina in a drunken haze one night. I was at Opal Divine’s, a pub on 6th street, when I happened to see an Irish music session going on. There was a concertina player, and I was enchanted. Not too long thereafter, I purchased one for myself… the cheapest one I could find.

That led to me playing/learning for a while on the tops of parking garages at  IBM. I lived in an apartment at the time and was paranoid that the noise would anger my neighbors. So it’d be the dead of night, and I’d be playing my little heart out, trying to figure out the basics of this arcane instrument.

But here’s the thing. The concertina has a perplexing layout of notes. And they’re different notes depending on if the bellows are going in or going out. It’s a hard instrument to play.

So I looked around and took a week-long workshop with Noel Hill, arguably the best concertina player in the world. He’s really incredible. I learned a lot, but still sucked.

I went on to take two more week long intensives with him, including one trip to Ireland where we lived in little thatched cottages and lived and breathed music.

I did better, slowly but surely. I also commissioned a concertina of my own from Wally Carroll. He’d just started making them, and I got #9. It was designed to recreate the magic of old Wheatstone concertinas. It is a thing of beauty, and my most prized possession.

After a while, I got frustrated with the concertina. It’s hard to play, and I’d kind of hit a wall with it. I don’t remember why, but I decided to learn the ukulele, since it’s supposed to be easy to play.  I figured I’d play the uke whenever the concertina frustrated me too much.

I took to the uke right away, and made up a song within a week of owning it. It’s called “When You’re Dead”, and it’s still the 2nd best song I’ve written.

When You’re Dead – Roy Janik

I shopped around for someone to teach me, and set my sights almost immediately on local legend Pops Bayless. He was in the Asylum Street Spankers, he’s really good, and he lives in Austin.

I went and saw him play with his band Shorty Long, and afterwards asked if he taught lessons. He said “That’s what I do.”

Awesome. I started going to weekly lessons at his house, where he mentored me in the mysteries of the ukulele. He taught me technique, told me why stuff worked, and in general filtered life, the universe and everything through his cantankerous world-view. I brought whiskey. It was wonderful.

Then I got swept up into improv and it transformed my life. It started creeping into all my spare time, and then into my time that wasn’t spare. It gave me friends, it gave me a creative outlet, it gave me a girlfriend (now my wife), and so on and so forth.

So yeah, I slacked off on the uke… and slacked off even more on the concertina. Pops eventually cut me loose. He said it was because he wasn’t good at teaching the advanced stuff and that I’d made enough progress… and maybe he even felt that way. But really it was because I’d plateaued out. My passion had moved on, and I wasn’t putting in the amount of work needed to make progress.

So now I’ve got these instruments in my house. I’ve got a custom built concertina, and I’ve got a really nice koa wood ukulele.

And the thing is, I still love them.

I still yearn to play them. And now mixed up with all that is this sense of guilt and regret. How good could I be at both instruments if I’d just stuck with them for the past, ummm… 7 years? The answer is pretty good.

And now when my eyes fall on the concertina or uke, I get this weird sense of failure, or loss, or something like that. That sucks, because they’ve been such a source of joy in my life. There’s no need for that.

But on the other hand, I’ve built a life for myself with improv. I’ve found my life’s work, or at the very least, a very significant part of my life’s work. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve been a part of something that has changed other peoples’ lives for the better.

So there’s no regrets. Or, there shouldn’t be, anyways.  It’s been non-stop. It’s been all-hands-on-deck for a while now.

And what’s life but choices? For everything you do, there’s something you’re not doing. I attended a lecture by The Fatman (another legend, this time in video game sound design), and he said something like “There’s no one right thing to do. There’s a million right things.” That’s stuck with me.

But still… I often feel like I’ve let it go too long. That I missed my opportunity to do these other things.

But hey. I think that slowly I’m getting a grip on things. I’m getting more focused, more organized.

And I think that maybe I can start picking up the uke again… playing a few hornpipes on the concertina again.

There’s no time for regrets. You can’t let regret for the past destroy your future.

Just gotta move forward.

I just had an idea for an improv show, and I want to write it down while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Actually, I’ve had the title for this show for a while. While PGraph was in Toronto, Mikaela (the lady Kaci and I stayed with) let us pick out buttons she had made from old comic book pages. The one I picked wasn’t of a super hero or anything like that. It just says “The Fall is Endless.”

I liked that so much that I decided an improv show should be called that, but until today I had no idea what it would be.

A rather morose idea came to me  while driving home.

The Fall is Endless

John, a young theatre director is in crisis when his fiance’ Miranda is found dead in her apartment from an apparent overdose of prescription medication. Unable to move on, he drags himself and his reluctant but supportive group of performers through the events of her life, both real and imagined. Using improvisation as a weapon and a magnifying glass, he tries to make sense of a seemingly senseless act.

Every evening explores different possibilities surrounding her death and examines different aspects of her character. But will any answers come of these sessions? Are they helpful or simply a destructive way of dwelling in the past? Can being caught up in a scene become so real that  John can meet Miranda again?

——-

So that’s the idea. Obviously not a comedy show. And maybe too morose to stage effectively. But at least for the moment I’m a little bit in love with it.

So I was forcibly reminded today of my former life as an IBMer in the most unexpected way.

My improv troupe, Parallelogramophonograph, has had a bank account with Chase since 2007. Not that we keep much in it. But it’s been a convenient way to accept money from theaters, festivals, and the like, in the rare instances that we’re paid to do something. We then cover expenses from the account, and occasionally pay the four of us in the troupe whatever money is left over.

So in a given month there can be anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to 15 cents in the account. Normally the latter. Just a couple of months ago, Chase started charging 15 dollars a month for the privilege of having an account. Unacceptable!

So today I went  to the Amplify Credit Union, which is two doors down from The Hideout, to open up a new account.

When they put my social security number in the system, they said “Hey, wait a minute. You’re already in the system. You must have had an account here before.”

It turns out that I DID have an account there before… back when it was called the IBM Credit Union.

I CANNOT ESCAPE IBM.

So how has life post-IBM been? The answer has to be mixed.

I am certainly much much happier on a day-to-day basis than I was at IBM. I am working on more interesting projects, setting my own hours, and learning new skills (web programming, yay!). Plus, if I need to take off on an improv trip, or do theatre work during the day, I can! And that’s exciting.

My biggest problem, though, is that I don’t work enough. I think I could get the work if I really wanted. But what I *really* want to do is work on the theater more, and so that’s what I do. And that’s fine. As I say elsewhere on this website, I want to pursue my passions, and also program computers, and do it my way.

But hand in hand with all that is the fact that I am making less money than before. I have more debt than before. My health insurance just expired.

And meanwhile the theater continues to do better. Classes are filling. Shows are filling. And I have high hopes that the theater will begin paying me more in the way of profits. Despite all that goodness, the day when I can live off the theater is a long way off.

So it’s a challenge. I feel like I’m reaching a crossroads. I’m going to have to buckle down and work more regularly. I have to manage my time better, and make the most of my time.

I really hope I can figure out a way to keep freelancing. It suits my life so much more than the corporate life. And going back to that would feel like a step backwards at this point.

I’ll keep you posted!

I just got finished writing the content for the page on this site called Why Danger?, and in it, I talk about how I want to live the life that I want to, and not a life shaped by inertia.

What’s a life shaped by inertia like?

The most visceral, tangible example from my own life lied in my house. Over the years I had managed to acquire all this STUFF… old doodles from highschool, VHS tapes I recorded off the TV in 1995, a bottle of Jolt Cola that says “We Support the Troops in Operation Desert Storm” on it… that sort of thing. The house itself had funky shelves installed by a former roommate, and a paper Chinese dragon hung by a different former roommate.

In short, the house, and all the stuff in it, hadn’t been shaped by any real force of will, but just by the random movements of time and laziness. The things in the house weren’t bad (in fact, some of there were AWESOME), and the house itself had charm. But I was just sort of along for the ride, accepting whatever life threw my way as the way things were.

About a week and a half ago, my wife and I decided  to try and declutter and redecorate the house. We’ve decided to do that before, but this time it stuck. Down came the paper dragon, down came the shelves. Up went new storage spaces, wiring concealers, bread boxes, and so forth.

And now the more we do, the more we can breathe. The more it feels like the house I’ve always wanted it to be.

And you know, strangely enough, it’s the same way with the theater.

I’ve been one of the owners of The Hideout Theatre for about a year and a half now. From the very beginning we said that we wouldn’t do anything because that was the way it’s always been done before… that we would look at every part of the business and make it work the way we felt it should. But it takes time.

We’ve been working hard at expanding the variety of the types of shows we do, while at the same time maintaining quality. We’ve expanded our advertising, pushing into the markets that makes sense to us (The Alamo Drafthouse guides, The Onion, Facebook, etc…). We’ve expanded our class offerings from 3 to 5 so that we can get more in depth into the performance side of improv.

In short, we’re doing our best to make purposeful decisions, rather than riding the wave of the theater’s 11 year history without considering where the wave is heading.

And you know what? It’s paying off. Ticket sales are up. Class attendance is up. Awareness of the the theater is up. And now that we’ve taken the day-to-day operations in hand, and it’s been organized, we can focus on next level stuff… like increasing the performance, socializing, and learning opportunities for students and graduates of the improv school… and pursuing deeper, more ambitious shows and projects.

In my freelancing work, I’ve also had the pleasure recently of using Subversion for the first time. Subversion is a version control system, which means it’s something that programmers check their source code, their HTML files, their whatevers into, so that it’s all properly stored, backed up and controlled. If something goes wrong, you can restore an earlier version and save the day.

Without a good source control system like Subversion, you wind up making ad-hoc backups. You do stuff like making a copy of a file called index.html, and calling the copy index.roy.backup.

That’s fine, but eventually you wind up with like 5 different versions of the same file from different times. And if you’re coding with someone else, they might have an entirely different naming scheme.

In short, the files and the code get cluttered and build up, not because of any great plan, but through random decisions and thoughts.

What all this boils down to is that to live the life I want to live, and to translate my actions into the greatest possible successes, I need to make deliberate decisions, clean out the clutter, and move with purpose.

It’s proving true for my theater, my programming endeavors, and my personal life.

What do you do to declutter your life?