your everyday horn-ery pal

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

The Virgin of The Apocalypse with Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara, The Cloisters

The Cloisters Collection, 1957 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Medium: Wool warp; wool wefts

Adapt, adapt, adapt; never choose a fixed method of accomplishing a goal. Having a foundation for the theory of cause and effect for each tactic is essential, so when countered/blocked by one’s opponent/obstacle, stubborn resistance either leads to entrapment or wasted energy that could be better spent searching for alternate openings instead.

Abandon the ego; just as fixed methods are self sabotaging, a fixed conception of oneself and one’s fighting style is deleterious as well. Only by abandoning the ego can one begin to understand and accurately predict the logic, rhythm, and patterns of one’s opponent, absent of preconceptions that do nothing but serve as distractions. Moreover, overestimating one’s ability will only lead to defeat.

Failure is imminent; calmly accept a missed opportunity or countered attack, understanding that this is a natural risk of engagement. Study why/how the failure occurred, in order to better meet such an opportunity again. Agonizing over such failures serves no other purpose than to ensure that it occurs again, perhaps even catastrophically.

Always take the initiative; there is a greater probability of success from attacking first than from doing nothing. Better to attack first and improvise a counter attack than to constantly be on the defensive, which only reduces one’s opportunities of success. By taking the initiative and setting the tone, one is in control of the fight, and one’s opponent must dance to one’s rhythm instead.

Practice simplicity; theatrics are no indication of skill and lead only to wasted energy and decreased endurance and stamina. Simplicity, accuracy, and precision are far more effective.

His daughter Imogen recalled, “He hated incomplete performances of The Planets, though on several occasions he had to agree to conduct three or four movements at Queen’s Hall concerts. He particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a ‘happy ending’, for, as he himself said, ‘in the real world the end is not happy at all’”.