3-31-85 Sunday. While composing journal entries this morning, I listened to two eight-track tapes that I had recorded back in 1978 or 1979, when I still lived in Vassar. Both of them contained original compositions as well as music recorded from the radio. I was impressed! One song (“The Essence”), in particular, surprised me. I don’t recall being that good on the acoustic guitar. But evidently I was. The song is well constructed. It has at least three discrete parts, has slow and fast parts, and ties the parts together well. In fact, I feel that the song is good enough to be copyrighted and sold. Who knows, some jazz musician could pick it up and make a hit out of it, and I’d be awash in royalties. But alas, I’m dreaming. I’m just glad that I had the foresight to record the song (and many others) for posterity. I may never again be proficient on the guitar, given my lack of playing time.
I had a restful and pleasant day. In the morning I worked at the computer, while in the afternoon I sat by the swimming pool reading about properties, actualism, set theory, and existentialism for John Pollock’s course [Introduction to Nonstandard Logic]. Our midterm exam is scheduled for Tuesday, and I’m not yet confident that I’ve mastered the material. But at least the atmosphere was fine for reading. People wandered into and out of the pool area as I read, and some of them went into the pool to cool off or exercise. That reminded me that I had never yet been in the pool. Finally, I got so hot and sweaty that I jumped in. The water was nice and warm. I swam back and forth, practiced floating and diving to the bottom, and then spent several minutes exercising my arms and legs. Water provides a natural form of resistance to muscles, thus helping to build them up. I resolved to swim often in the pool this summer. Half an hour after I jumped in, I was back in my chair reading.
The jazz this evening is better than usual. I’ve heard songs by The Pat Metheny Group, Andreas Vollenweider, Gil Scott-Heron, and Joe Jackson, all of whom move me. It sure would be nice to have jazz music available at all hours of the day, as I did in Madison Heights and Pontiac; but that’s not the case here in Tucson. I guess I’ll have to live with this once-a-week format until I can buy jazz tapes of my own. Jazz, by the way, is definitely a “hot” style of music, just as Hermann Hesse said of it in his book Steppenwolf. The best thing about jazz is that it doesn’t disrupt my thinking. Rock and roll music inevitably steals away my attention. Nonetheless, I still classify myself as a “rock and roller.”