Today was a successful day.  I donated blood with OneBlood and it was brought to my attention that I reached a milestone gallon with them.  It was my 52nd lifetime unit which is a significant number because that’s how many cards are in a deck of playing cards!  Also last night and today, I uninstalled every music program, plug-in and related driver on my computer.  Then I reinstalled newly downloaded files.  It was a massive task which took me months to work up the courage to start.  Several DAW company support lines and an unresponsive keyboard/software company, led me to finally leap off the cliff on what I actually had little hope of solving my woes with the problems I was facing.  Still after getting things back in order and taking detailed notes along the way, it looks like the problem is solved for now.  I have several songs in the works including Secret Jim Beam Bubble Bath, I Can’t Win, There Are So Many Things To Love About You, Pride Hear, Not the Same and hopefully Stella.  A few others like a new one called Stormy Weather and several others from the notebook pages that were kept out of the poetry book are cued next to get tracks laid down.  I have written some other grooves and starts to songs for a different project than the follow-up to Stint of Devotion.  Some are rock tunes and there is a new one with no title yet that begins like this:

Who’s gonna love me when older
When my attitude’s grown colder, bitter
Who’s gonna love me in my hospital bed
When my family is dead
Stranger from my blood donations’ blessings then

It gets even more grim with events past my own death, however with a sense of humor.

A working title for our next work is actually Russian words- Улица Правды. Meaning Truth Street which is where I lived on in St. Petersburg, Russia when I taught ESL there in 2012, it symbolizes remembering simple things in our past that can sometimes be too fragile to share for many years. This is a mockup of the cover with another fragrance bottle artwork by Elena Barenbaum aka Eve Farb.

I have also listened to a couple more albums. The latest Foo Fighters didn’t really sweep me off my feet. Your Favorite Toy sounds like a crowd pleaser and sounds like some responses to stuff I touched on myself, so I guess we are in similar places in life in some ways. Not sure if that is flattering or frustrating. I’m relistening again right now to see how I feel post blood donation and I still like the first tracks repetitiveness and the high hat sound on If You Only Knew. The other thing is that I wish I hadn’t seen their music videos first. Overall better so far the second time. Another one I checked out at work on break of all places was by Blackpink entitled Deadline. They tried to reinvent the EP as a mini album. However it is lacking some depth. It’s their powerful formula which is letting us know their back. I guess we can tell the individual voices even better now since they all had hit songs with their solo albums and that is where we can feel the character, still it illustrates the tragedy of having a boy or girl group after all. Now I just miss Rosé’s solo career. Also why did they feel the need to brand their name on several of the tracks over and over? I kind of felt sorry for them until I remembered they have way too much going for them to ever be that way for them for the rest of my life.