One Day Wonder #288

Gosh, it’s slightly hard to believe that I came so close to quitting this project just a few days ago. Back at the beginning, I discovered that the best way to shake the feeling of having written a bad piece was to write a march. That worked very nicely through the first hundred tunes, culminating with the wacky #99. Heck, what might possibly be the best piece of the whole shebang, #74, is a march. I only wrote that to distract myself from an unsuccessful attempt at a march from the previous day. But over the last, say 188 efforts, the march has kind of fallen by the wayside. The last one I wrote was #254, and that’s kind of a march-polka hybrid. I’ve set my marching aspirations aside mainly due to the struggle I’ve been having with form. I could very well have written things in ABACA (with corresponding intros, transitions and outros) form and not bothered to tinker with what works. I mean, marches and polkas work very nicely in that framework, but it’s more fun to monkey with things to see if your modified march still sounds like a march. A lot of times it doesn’t, and that’s why I’ve gotten away from it. This time, I’m not overly worried about form. I’m writing my 288th piece and the end is near. Why not write a peppy little thing in 6/8? I tell you, it’s been ages since a wrote a 6/8 march. I’ve only written two - #54 and #73. Trust me, #54 is the horse to bet on among those two. This one may actually be the grand champion of 6/8 marches. It manages to do a lot of things in a little time. It’s got drive, harmonic weirdness, formal weirdness and variety. I could explain every last detail of it, but it would probably be best for you to listen to it. That way, I have less of a chance of sounding like a moron.

In other news – and I’m sure you’re very interested in this – Belltown smells like burning plastic today. At least most of 2nd Avenue does. Yeah, it’s pretty unpleasant. A few weeks ago, it smelled like vinegar – the whole neighborhood. No idea why, it just did. Last summer, it smelled like hot dogs, day in, day out for weeks. That one is a little easier to explain, as Shorty’s (a pinball and hot dog place) is just down the block. It was hot, my windows were open – you get the idea. I’ll try to keep track of Belltown’s various smells for future entries. It might make the music a bit more vivid or my life seem either more or less pathetic, depending on the smell. But for the record, the usual “scent of Belltown” is a mixture of cigarettes, stale beer and craziness. Yes, craziness has an aroma all of its own when it’s as concentrated as it is around here.