escape velocity [recorded].

Well, finally, just the idea of it. Hammered away on the Bechstein, then back to the keyboard (still need an interface and a pair of mics to record the piano for real) to lay it out. Know exactly what I want to say but unable yet to really say it. Julian came by wondering what I was up to, so I showed him around Logic a bit – creating objects, sends and effects. Editing a few mis-played notes. Adjusting levels and so on. He looked at me and said when I get everything together it is going to be awesome. I guess I am on the right track.

The more I listen to the playback and play it myself (different still every time as I have yet to really nail down how exactly it goes) and the more I read about the Apollo missions and the Voyager missions I get this enormous sense of optimism that cannot be contained and I want to find a way to put that into lyrics for music that is huge and larger than almost anything I have ever written trying to make the analogy to our ever-so-short-lived quest – triumphs and tragedies and all – to reach the stars. The idea of hope beckons with this image in my mind of an enormous Saturn V rocket – a triumph of the humankind – lifting off and in an instant out of sight, hurtling away from Earth and everything we know out into a vastness we cannot comprehend, but with so much promise and mystery.

I have tried in the past (feebly at best) to describe places here on Earth through which I have traveled and become a part of if even short-lived, but it is that much more difficult I am finding to write about experiences I cannot imagine – of looking back at this tiny world on which we find ourselves for now from an unimaginable distance in some attempt to understand our fragility, our isolation and loneliness, our dependence on one another, our need to respect all that we have. It is quite simple to say, on one hand, how this fascination of mine with the stars and my zealousness to study them and the sciences to which they relate has given me this notion that we can indeed overcome our odds and prove our potential to all those generations before us and all those yet to come. Impossible on the other to find a way to say how.

Maybe I should just leave it at that for now. Try to get some sleep. Think about it some more. Maybe one day I will be able to write what I want to say.