I recently put out a solo piano cd that is available on CD Baby:

My First Piano on CD Baby

The reason it's called My First Piano is because there's a picture of me around 2 years old sitting down at a toy piano, my first piano.  Couldn't think of anything else to call it :)

The music is all original and spans probably 25 years of composing.  It's relaxing, evocative, easy to listen to, but isn't white washed.  There's some meat to the music, both harmonically and melodically, and I'm happy to have it out there. 

It's exciting to put a "real" CD out after all these years of performing and composing and recording stuff on stage or whatnot.

I can't wait to get the next one out which is going to be full of more originals however they are going to be exciting, energetic, and mostly latin sounding.  We'll see how it goes!

I'm not the kind of person to disclaim my writing, or my words, or my actions, however it's always nice to introduce a story with something completely irrelevant.

Birk is a young man with a different perspective on reality. Our world to him is but a shell for the real universe.

Birks Works

Part 1

Birk came up with the perfect response three days late. A day earlier than usual. He found himself happy smiling because he was getting better, much better. He looked forward to the future when he would know how to respond in but a few hours.

He closed his eyes, wishing he'd never opened them. The gray light of the day swept through the shades he had forgotten to shut the night before and reminded him of the unfiltered light in a gas station restroom.

It wasn't that he didn't like restrooms in gas stations. Birk often compared gas station restrooms to great oases in the scorpion filled deserts of modern transportation. He reflected that it was unfortunate how often he died in his imaginary desert and with a shudder imagined scorpions smiling as they danced on the dried out husk of his corpse.

Birk stumbled out of bed and made the decision to open his eyes.

Oh, he wouldn't fall on the rusty spikes just yet, he would make sure his underwear had no holes that were not supposed to be there. He always listened to his mother. "If you go to the hospital and need professional medical attention, be it from a car accident, an incident involving pizza that was too hot, random panther attack, or even falling on the rusty yet unnaturally sharp spikes in your bedroom, a well-to-do woman doctor just might be the one fixing the broken and twisted wreckage of your mangled body. In fact, she just may take a liking to you while she was at it. Well, Birk darling, it wouldn't do to be wearing old underwear full of holes and unsightly stains."

Birk always remembered things. Things like brushing his teeth at night and sometimes in the morning if he wasn't in too much of a hurry. Also things like it was good to have both of his socks either right side in or inside out, but not mixed. Birk remembered a lot of things, even the mean length of the little metal whiskets that happened to fall off street cleaners when they brushed up too close to the curb. No one seemed to care about the little metal whiskets, but Birk knew them well. Birk collected them and had many uses for them.

Birk looked around for a couple of socks that were the same color and not inside out.

After Birk dressed and managed to escape piercing himself on the rusty spikes, he picked up the three cactus plants he'd been growing since the week before and moved them to the other side of his room. Next to the rusty spikes, the plants looked much more at home, and almost like they had found a brown inanimate friend to laugh at. Birk would have to chat with them about that later.

He did morning things and then left the house with only a slight wave good-bye. The special pink morning rock in the rock garden seemed to be smiling at him and Birk stopped for a moment.

"Hello rock. Today I'll speak to the evening rock, but not the afternoon rock. I have a special meeting this afternoon. I'll need good luck in my meeting, so I'm wishing you good morning. Since I like good luck, as you well know, I wish you good morning every morning, but today is special. I'll give you the good morning greeting with double power since I'm not going to give a good afternoon to the afternoon rock. I hope it understands that it's nothing personal." Birk waited, but the rock said nothing. Birk actually didn't expect it to say anything. It wasn't even seven in the morning yet.

Part 2

Birk thought about the afternoon rock as he walked to the bus stop. He never really liked the afternoon rock, but what could he do? He'd been pretending for several years, and it would be awkward to suddenly tell the afternoon rock after all this time, "Believe me, it's nothing that you did. It's what I've done. I simply don't deserve a rock like you. I'm not worth it. It has to end now, for us both, before it lands us on rocky shores... no pun intended."

On the bus Birk sat next to an elderly woman who didn't like the way Birk smelled. "You should blow your nose young man and you'd be able to breathe better."

Birk didn't believe in blowing his nose. After he was dead, his nostril tissues would have plenty of time to be destroyed by more natural causes than blowing. And he wasn't very good at it. Sometimes he would miss.

The elderly woman knew none of this, and Birk opted not to tell her. She was annoyed at Birk's unresponsiveness. "You should answer when your elders speak to you, young man." Birk said, "I think you have something in your nose."

When Birk left the bus he was happy.

He stood on the concrete of a cracked and dusty sidewalk bordering the sand of an ocean beach. It was not a very big beach, but it was big enough. Birk glanced.

He strode with a purpose through the parking lot and walked carefully down some faded beach logs to the shore. He found a sand magnet and picked his way among the spit of boulders that made it up. He waved to a stray piece of kelp, then crossed to the other side and jumped off.

Birk glanced again, this time in joyous rapture. In a state of pure contentment, he caressed the softly rounded beach rocks he found all about him.

Weathered by the elements over uncountable years, these rocks were free. All bright and smoothly rounded, they wandered where they pleased and then sat with measured determination in their own spots next to other rocks just as free, creating a wonderfully uniform pattern of smooth roundness. These rocks were refined. Their neighbors were refined. These were clearly high class rocks, all different yet the same. Birk always enjoyed this part of the beach.

He felt mildly guilty about flirting with strangers, but he didn't think the morning rock would be hurt if it never found out.

"My smoothly shaped beach rocks!", Birk said with a lung full of air. "How I enjoy your eternal presence! The gracious granite, the nefarious gneiss, brooding basalt, lecherous limestone, and the little pink ones! Oh is it not enough to just bask in your eternal strength and fundamentally sound molecular structures? No! No, I say! It is NOT enough! "

Birk went on for bit, to himself, in his head, knowing all along that the E.S.P. enabled rocks nearby would pick up on his thoughts and transmit them to the other less gifted but nonetheless wondererous rocks also nearby.

Part 3

After Birk left the beach, saddened that he would not be able to return until the next day but happy in the fact that he had enjoyed himself in a harmless manner for nearly an hour, he considered for a moment and then agreed with himself that he would find a bus to continue his journey for the day.

He later reflected that it was his love of corn dogs that ultimately became his undoing.

Those tender morsels, oh so carefully wrapped in a deep fried golden brown batter mixture, always different yet lightly crisped with a delightful and delicate corn flavor. Really, who would have known the little stick would be rooted so deeply in the dog section?

In his bliss of peeling off the outer pastry layer, he never anticipated the stick becoming a problem if he ever ate the dog section at some point in time. And on this day he had not eaten breakfast.

So with much worry and apprehension he bit into the dog section and in the moment it takes an eye to blink, in the brief span of time between when the turn signal is on and when it is off, in the micro-moment when it is just right and when it is too late to go to the bus stop, Birk knew he had mistaken.

The stick would not go down.

Longwise it would stick in his throat, sideways proved equally awkward, and the nose option never even crossed his mind. Even if it did, he wouldn't have acknowledged the thought due to his strong position on natural nostril habitat and exploration.

Birk had always been close to his nostrils. During his childhood he had frequently explored their inner depths. He came to think of himself as an amateur nostril spelunker, or nolunker for those in the nose (a favorite inside nolunker joke of Birk's). Birk watched in fascination the professional nolunkers as they would mine the rich depths of their nostrils in search of the precious emerald treasures that were always found within. Birk really never came out of the closet with his nolunking, though, which prevented him from competing at a professional level. Society still looked upon nolunkers with a certain degree of disgust, and Birk could ill afford to be looked upon with disgust since he had so much trouble with society anyway.

Birk put the corn dog stick in his inside jacket pocket to deal with later, and then missed the bus.

The corn dog incident took away forever the three minutes and fifteen seconds he had needed to be present in the bus stop area when his bus came. Birk watched it recede in the distance as it followed the road past three green lights and finally turned right until it was lost to view forever in a hazy mixture of drooping power lines and old brown sedans.

The road in front of Birk had the same characteristics of any road. Some cars went up, and some cars went down. On each side of the road followed an aged sidewalk with brown sidewalk grass poking out of dirty sidewalk cracks. Birk sighed. He knew that someday it would come to this. However, the act of attempting levitation gave him a headache, so he gave up. Birk knew without even trying that clicking his heels wouldn't work either. He forgot his red shoes. So he started walking. Down the street.

Subconsciously Birk knew that walking down the street would be easier than walking up the street, just as walking south would be easier than walking north because north is always uphill. Birk didn't know where he was going, but he picked up a small rock for good luck and started on his way.

Right at that moment, Birk felt as free as the small pink beach rock he just put in his pocket.

Part 4

As the sun dipped low and began the great escape from the night, and the night began the great hunt for the sun, Birk also hunted. He had found another beach, but could not find the sort of rocks he knew so well. He had found a beach crowded with unsmooth and oddly shaped rocks that were not at all rounded the way proper beach rocks should be. Birk was not used to harsh, rough stones such as these. He was not surprised to encounter aliens, though, being so far away from.

In the darkness, Birk couldn't discern if these new rocks were of familiar colors, and that fact would be important when deciding if these were good rocks or bad. Their shapes alone suggested them to be different in more ways than he had ever foreseen. The smooth round pink rock, now in Birk's hand, also seemed colorless and bland in the dim starlight, but Birk knew the rock from memory. A refined and well-educated rock with an intellect polished by the infinite wisdom of forever sand.

All around him the crude and primitive rocks on this beach were of a different sort, inferior, and their asymmetrical unevenness gave Birk the willies. Birk climbed into a nearby beach tree for safety and fell asleep.

In the morning Birk felt hungry. He experimented with the corn dog stick, but without proper study there could be no way of dealing with it. And perched in a beach tree was no place to conduct a thorough examination of something as important as that, not before noon at least.

Birk climbed out of the tree and saw the sun return after successfully evading the hungry night. The night had given up and gone away, and Birk smiled. The sun would never be outfoxed. Birk privately felt the sun had created the night just for thrill of the chase, and enjoyed the unending hunt.

A very bright day, Birk decided, with the sun gleaming and sparkling and blinding in all directions. He pondered a moment and tried to recall the last time he saw the sun gleaming and sparkling. Usually it simply made shadows and melted crayons. Then Birk saw.

The beach sparkled and gleamed and played with the sunlight like a cosmic ball of yarn, and each of the dull outlines the night before were now transformed into crystalline masses exploding with light.

Fiery colors flickered and raced back and forth along the beach and Birk knew without a doubt that he died sometime during the night and had gone to the Good Place.

People who knew him thought Birk strange, perhaps different in odd harmless ways, but no one, except maybe for the old woman on the bus, would call Birk stupid. Once again he proved his unseen observers correct. He turned around to make sure of his existence and unhappily saw old brown sedans going up and down the aged beach front road, birthing small brown dust devils in their wake.

Birk apologized to the rocks. He apologized for his xenophobia the night before, he apologized for his thoughts of superiority, and he apologized for not searching hard enough for a standard restroom.

The rocks said nothing in response, and Birk broke down. and took a deep breath.

"In all that people who know about such things believe is holy, forgive me!"

His shout echoed across the parking lot behind him and startled a few birds who went off to ruin someone else's day. But the rocks remained silent. Birk couldn't think up any good adjectives to describe quartz and calcite, so left the beach sobbing and distraught.

The little pink beach rock, so bland and ordinary, lay forgotten in his pocket.

Part 5

Birk rode the buses for most of the day. He enjoyed the brief moments when a sudden left turn would take him by surprise and he'd fall sprawling out of his seat while laughing and crying at the same time. Otherwise he brooded, his time spent pondering rocks, corn dogs, and things his mother said, and yet he found nothing to explain what had transpired. And when the elderly woman asked him if he had learned his manners yet, Birk could only say, "They wouldn't forgive me because I thought they were terrible once. And now the little round pink ones aren't as special anymore."

This confirmed the elderly woman's belief that Birk was truly stark raving mad.

Late in the afternoon Birk was forced to leave the bus. After pushing Birk out, the bus driver said, "This is your stop buddy, like it or not." Birk turned to the man but he had already closed the door, and the bus was accelerating down the street, flowing past two green lights and then stopping briefly at a red before taking a free right turn to pass from Birk's life for the rest of the day.

Birk stopped in front of his rock garden, shaded and cool, on the way to the front door. He took out the little round pink rock from his pocket squatted down to place it next to the morning rock, also pink. "I brought you a friend."

The afternoon rock looked forlorn, somehow sad. Birk said, "I can't bring everyone friends. You know that." As usual the afternoon rock remained silent and closed and all Birk could think to say was, "How am I supposed to know what's wrong if you don't tell me?" He went inside, making a mental note to say hello twice to the evening rock once the sun left on its merry chase.

Birk turned on the television, then turned it off. He did that for nearly an hour, creating and destroying random pictures that meant nothing, snickering with glee and inner turmoils all his own. And another hour of nearly harmless entertainment passed on.

It was not yet time for the evening rock, because the sun hadn't fully escaped, as if it were waiting for Birk while peeking over the fence of the horizon to see what he would do.

Birk sharpened his rusty bedroom spikes, scolded the cactus plants about being nice, and spent some time carefully not falling on anything sharp on his way down the stairs. The sun had finally gone about the business of hiding.

Night had taken over the game now and the stars laughed at its futility, or at Birk. Birk hadn't yet made any decisions about that.

In the dim starlight he scrutinized. His rock garden seemed dark and absent of color and form. Of course, night had that effect on things. The small pink rock, the morning rock, and the afternoon rock, they could have all been conglomerate masses of glacial spankings, embedded in the ground before him as dark lumps of homogeneous non-interest. Birk playfully tugged at some extra long hairs poking from his nose, and glanced as his mind slowly began the process of pondering.

Birk stepped back and glanced again, and the process sped up slightly, the gears and machinations of his mind smoothing out, and then every rock in the rock garden looked the same. Birk stepped back, a few paces, and realized that every rock in every rock garden would look the same. He forgot about nose hairs.

At a few paces back again, ever rock in every rock garden and beach and mountain trail would look the same, and then in the morning their full glory would shine and it would shine because of how different they all really were. And the sun, triumphant once again in the game, would smile upon each one as it has throughout time, regardless of shape, form and color.

Birk lost his balance and fell into the rocks, and this was okay because in Birk's rock garden there was nothing sharp to fall on.

Birk stood up after a few moments and wondered if he should brush himself off or brush off the rocks he had been lying on. Normally when confused in this manner Birk would go to sleep. So he said goodnight to the afternoon rock, said it twice to the evening rock, then carefully avoided the spikes on his way to bed.

Birk dreamed while the offspring of the sun laughed and sparkled in the darkness above and the night gave up the chase for just a little while to spend a moment pondering the proper method of eating a giant, cosmic, corn dog.

The End

Copyright © 1996 by Scot Ranney

Day 1 of the Pemberton Music Festival had it's ups and downs.

Getting there: that's a downer.  I drove myself and several other people up from Whistler to Pemberton and it took at least 2 1/2 hours to go around, oh, 18 miles.  Methinks that a big giant music festival could do better by having several main routes into the area instead of one.  Well, you could come from the north, but only about three people live up there.

Once you get into Pemberton from Whistler you park literally miles away and are bussed into the festival.  Tens of thousands of people getting bussed into the festival, and then trying to leave all at once at night.  Yes, it's just as bad as it sounds.

Ok, traffic and related stuff aside, the festival itself is a lot of fun.  The music is exciting (Nine Inch Nails put on a hell of a show, I even almost started dancing and I didn't even have a drop to drink) and everyone looks like they are having a great time.  Lot's of eye candy, food, and hippie merchandise for those who need it.

The biggest downfall is the dust!  I need to score a bandana today because my nose was full of black mud when I took a shower last night.  Ick.

I'm looking forward to Tom Petty and Tragically Hip this evening, and the other three tents always have something going on (tons of DJs and "local" bands from the looks of it).

I don't get into the music as much as a lot of the people, perhaps it's because I'm a musician and look at it differently or it's not completely my style of music.  I'm not losing myself in it, but I'm enjoying it all the same.

Today I bring my chair and a handful of home made pita sandwiches. There's only so much festival foot a body can take before things start being rejected, although that Squirell Tail Fry Bread might make a nice dessert at some point in time.

After a long time thinking about it and procrastinating, I finally published my jazz piano book of exercises and etudes.  It's called, "Scot Ranney's Jazz Piano Notebook, Volume 1". 

The plan is to make 11 more volumes within the next couple of years, try to ween my finances from the computer world back into the music world.

People seem to like the book, if you want to take a look:

Scot Ranney's Jazz Piano Notebook, Volume 1

Lulu.com is a great place if you want to publish a book of any kind.  The only problem I had is that I wanted 9x12 and they don't do that (or they didn't at the time, not sure now).  Lulu.com seems to be pretty fair, too.  They only take 20% of the profits (after printing costs) and I don't know of any publishing company or related situation (software selling on other sites, etc) that takes only 20%.  Some of the places I work with for software take nearly 40%, and I think Amazon takes something like 70%, but I could be wrong about that.

Back to the book, though, it's very cool to have finished something like that, I feel pretty accomplished because it's something I've been meaning to do for a while.  Now we'll see what happens with the rest of the books and maybe even a piano CD I've been spending some time working on.

Agh, so what do you do when a wasp pumps in ten gallons of venom about a quarter inch to the lower left of your left thumbnail?

Yelling, "Bloody hell, I can't believe it got me on the thumb!" is what first came to my mind, so that's what I did.

Then I ransacked my house for the baking soda, ah yes, in the fridge for it's wonderous odor killing properties.  Make a paste, put it on the sting, then go online and see what is up.

I popped some Apis Mell, a great homeopathic for bites, STINGS, and swells, of which I seem to have a bit of all.  Then I saw that garlic was good for bee stings, onions good for wasp stings, and a lot of evidence posted by people who tried these things.  This was after about fifteen or twenty minutes of ice with the baking soda thing.

So now, a couple hours later, I have a slice of onion taped to my thumb.  The sting kind of stings but the swelling has gone down drastically.  I thought my thumb was going to pop- I couldn't bend it, I couldn't even close my hand.  A scary thought for a piano player, you know?

I do have some swelling in the thumb and immediate area of teh hand, and it hurts, but I can bend the thumb without screaming in pain now and though the swelling has pretty much made it down to the wrist, I think soaking my  hand in ice water might help.

The four ibuprofin I popped might also be helping the swelling, not sure, if they are, I'd hate to see what it would look like without them!

Last year I had a wasp get me on the top of my right wrist, right where it bends, right in the middle, in that little soft spot.  My hand grew twice the size and there were red streaks going up my arm. That's what happens when a wasp gets you right in the nerve or the vein or something. 

Why can't I get stung somewhere normal?  The arm, leg, back, eyeball, anywhere by the hands.  Luckily I have a little bit of a break from gigs and by the time the next one comes up I should be good to go.

Although I have a suspicion that my thumbnail might not be enjoying this... however, if it falls off, I can then follow one of my life goals which is to have a tatoo right under the thumbnail.

Once in college I smashed a finger so the nail was almost coming off. After a while when it was just this loose white thing on my fingertip, I could slip a piece of paper with a picture under it and it was visible. That's why I figure a tatoo under the nail would be visible too.  Something simple like a gonzo fist or a smiley face.  If it comes down to it, I have a feeling it's going to hurt, but the price is worth it.

How many people you know with tatoos under a finger or thumb nail?  That's right.