So today it's been a day for dozing with the dogs on the sofa, and having my very own Buffy The Vampire Slayer marathon. It's cloudy and cold here in Seattle, and even though we actually had our One Weekend Of Winter over the past couple of days, it's been beautiful.

Walking the dogs this afternoon, I came upon a sobering scene taking place in a parking lot across from my building. There was a ruckus with a group of birds - lots of harsh calls and fluttering wings, and a small group took flight in what can only be described as a panic. Two birds remained on the ground, and as I approached, I realized that one of them was screaming, and the second was the cause - his beak was clamped around the neck of the first bird, and it didn't look like he planned to let go anytime soon. Two crows, looking hungry, landed next to the first two birds, as the doomed one continued to shriek. It was horrifying, and I actually took a few steps toward them, hoping to scare them away. The crows did take off, and the Agressor Bird did, too - but he still had Victim Bird clamped in his beak, as he did so. VB kept right on screaming as they flew off. It was a pretty stunning sight. Another reminder of the cold brutal reality that is Nature.

I have to say that overall I didn't miss playing live one bit over the last two years. I suppose that may surprise some folks out there - but I have never really enjoyed the whole playing in front of an audience thing. I remember some of my first shows with Funhouse back in 1990, I would get so nervous that my knees would literally be knocking together for most of the first set. When I did my big stint of playing in Top 40 cover bands from 1997-1998, I pretty much got over the typical stage fright - I mean, I was playing nearly every night of the week back then. And of course, that was all cover tunes, so other than making sure I played my parts right, I didn't have much of a personal stake in those performances. If people didn't dig the songs so much, that certainly wasn't my fault. I didn't write that stuff.

And so then there was the big show opening for the Mike Keneally Band on New Year's Eve 2002 that required me to put a band together in a month. That was the first incarnation of the current band, called together out of necessity - you can't have a performance of rock band music with no band mates. I realize now that when I played that show, I did so in the middle of a full-on anxiety attack, which my account (scroll down to February 9) of what happened makes pretty clear, in retrospect. I think the anxiety, so much more powerful than anything I'd ever felt before, was borne out of an awful lot of old demons that needed to be confronted, demons that had accrued over twenty years, maybe even longer. I view the fact that I survived that experience as a small victory now, even if at the time I felt I was an utter failure.

That original band played a few shows before Chris G moved to California for two years, and then I met Pete and Lizzy. They've now been in the band for nearly three years. They both love playing live, and so in that sense they are very much more "real musicians" than I am. My love for music is more in the writing and studio sculpting end of things - I'd be happy to make recordings forever, and never venture out onto a stage. I guess that makes me a composer. Those two really like to play, though, and isn't that what bands are supposed to do? Play? For people?

Make no mistake - I actually get quite a thrill getting into a room and playing with real, live musicians. I always have a fun time in rehearsal, even when we're playing songs we've played a million gajillion times in a row. I love the happy accidents that can occur, I love the weird tangential dead ends we can run aground on. We can do that in rehearsal because we don't have to worry about pleasing anyone other than ourselves. We laugh a lot in rehearsal. We "jam." It's really fun, something I would miss if I didn't have access to it.

It's when you tie in that whole "audience" thing where I start to not have so much fun.

It's not as if any of these thoughts are exactly secrets between Pete and Lizzy and I. Which is why they were apparently surprised when, a few months back, I brought up the idea of putting a set list together for some unbooked future gig that we might play someday. I wanted to rehearse transitions, instrument switches, and focus on as much new material as we could while still throwing a bone (as it were) to the folks (hi, Hodgy!) that would want to hear some of the older tunes. And then the aforementioned Hodgy emailed me and invited us to play his birthday party gig at The Central last week. At that point, we'd been rehearsing the set for a couple of months, barring the Christmas Interruption. We were ready to go. How could I say no?

I can't pretend I didn't dread the gig before it happened. I did. Monday nights at The Central are billed as "Monday Metal Madness", and we aren't metal in any way, shape or form. At least, not what passes for metal in 2006 (now, if we played a song like "You Fell" in 1982, we would have been called metal by some). In fact, the first incarnation of Half Zaftig played a MMM show in early 2003, and the crowd that night, while not being exactly hostile, treated us instead with grumpy indifference - we didn't belong at their party. So, I was worried about something like that happening again.

I just want to stop here a moment and say that there's an awful lot of metal music that I absolutely love - I just don't happen to write metal songs, or play them in my band. I've got nothing against the genre or the people who are into it. I understand, I'm into it, too.

I fought nerves most of the day Monday, but surprisingly, I felt a lot better about the gig the day of than I thought I might feel. And then, something happened when we actually arrived at The Central last Monday night. I relaxed. Our buddy Hodgy was there, it was his birthday, he was thrilled that we were there to play his party. He was gonna come up and sit in with us on Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl." Even though I barely knew anyone there, the atmosphere was one of having fun with friends, celebrating Hodgy's birthday. And then we played what might have been the best Half Zaftig show ever.

Oh, it wasn't mistake-free. One of the new songs is still so new that I forgot almost all of the words, and ended up scatting nonsense gibberish in place of the real lyrics. Darin Di Pietro was there, and he said that was the one song where the vocals were really up front, and so it was pretty much impossible to miss the fact that I was just making up gobbledy-gook. We opened with "Lois", with the "Tom Sawyer/YYZ" ending, and people dug it. We sounded strong, tight. My guitar sounded great to me. It was loud. I had one of the best vocal nights of my life. We managed to get through "Sublimeinal" (a new, very difficult and convoluted song) in one piece. Nope, we weren't metal, but there was a decent crowd response. I had several people ask for and receive copies of the Retrograde promo. A booker for the room told me we were "awesome" and that he wanted us to come back. He said, "Are you interested in playing more shows now, or are you gonna wait two more years?"

I guess we're interested.

Heh.

I've long been a believer that filmed entertainment made for television is inherently inferior to that created for feature films. The fact that TV programming is censored (FOR THE CHILDREN!) in ways that feature films aren't has been a big reason for that belief. Like many, I've embraced a lot of the HBO original series that have come along in the wake of the success of The Sopranos - these shows have all the profanity, sex, and violence that feature films have always had, and they had acting and writing that was just as good as great features. So something about typical, sanitized regular-network TV shows had always carried the whiff of the inferior to me - because they were censored, they couldn't be as real. Or something. I don't know. I'm now starting to think that it wasn't so much the content of these shows that gave me that impression, as much as the presentation (i.e., the content was surrounded and interrupted by the hateful barrage of advertising).

Because I'm here to tell ya - watching seasons of TV shows on DVD has been nothing less than revelatory for me lately. Finally, I can now watch whole seasons of TV commercial-free. And I don't have to wait weeks to find out what happens after some particularly good cliff-hanger - I can just fire up the next episode right away. I've been killing whole weekends doing this.

You'll recall me recently detailing my Freaks And Geeks obsession. Lately, I've been immersed in the world of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I never got completely on board with it when it was on, though I did catch a few episodes that I liked. Now on DVD, I started at the beginning with Season 1, and currently I'm in the middle of Season 4 (and starting to see episodes that I actually remember watching on TV). I can see now why, back when I would just catch a random episode from time to time, that while I'd find the experience enjoyable, I'd never fully get into it. It's because this show was built as one long continuum from the first season through the last (Season 7). Characters are referenced in conversations from past episodes, even past seasons all the time - something that I can see might be bewildering, even off-putting, to a newbie to the show. But if you start from the very beginning, the foundations that are laid, the characters that are created, the relationships you develop with the characters over time - man, it gets so good. In fact, from a creative standpoint, I can see how for writers of a show like this, it's probably way better than writing for features, because of how well you can develop the characters - you can get into detail that you could never do in a 2-hour film. My fave Buffy character, Willow, has a story arc that gradually builds over six years, and even though I'm in Season 4, I know enough about the show's history and plot that I know what happens to her in Season 6 - and it has just been delicious watching the writers lay the groundwork for her story, and see the milestones come, and the hints get dropped. It's truly terrific work, and I think this show deserves all the credit it got over the years.

I'm even gonna Netflix Angel now, that's how good Buffy is. Hoo boy.

"An idea takes over our brain and gets that person to devote his life to the furtherance of that idea, even at the cost of their own genetics. People forgo having kids, risk their lives, devote their whole lives to the furtherance of an idea, rather than doing what every other species on the planet does -- make more children and grandchildren.

The capacity of human beings to devote their energy, time, safety and health to the stewardship of an idea is itself a biological phenomenon. That's what distinguishes us from all the other species. We're the only species that can set aside our genetic imperatives and say, "That's not that important, I've got more important things in mind." That uniquely human perspective, unknown by any other species, is a gift of cultural selection."

As Keanu might say: Whoa.