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Belltown/Seattle, Washington, United States
I'm a guy who used to write lots and lots of music. My lack of success became a little troubling, so now I write about Belltown and photograph squirrels. You got a problem with that?

Project 300: 4/19/07-3/6/08

It's done. It almost drove me completely nuts, but it doesn't matter now. In 323 days, I managed to write 301 pieces whose total running time clocks in somewhere between 12 and 13 hours. I'm very pleased with some of the results (see: The Best) and disappointed and embarrassed by others (see: The Worst), but I'm overjoyed that even at my darkest hour, I didn't give up. Sure, I thought about it lots of times, but there was something that always urged me to keep going. Besides, what else was I going to do? I mean, I'm just this impoverished, unemployed guy who lives in the scummiest part of Belltown and hopes that he can someday make a living writing music. There wasn't anything else for me to do but write music in this drafty, cluttered apartment. Although being a professional composer might not come to pass, it's comforting to know that I have the chops to do it, should the opportunity present itself.

It's been a few days since I finished #300, and as sick as I was of the project, I'm anxious to embark on something new. I don't know what that might be. I think I might "stay small" and write some daily piano pieces - not 300 of them, but enough to total a few hours worth of music. I'll have time to decide that in the coming weeks. I'll be taking off soon to drive across the country. Hopefully, by the time I return, I will once again be hearing that dull roar between my ears that will eventually become my next set of pieces.

I realize that nobody reads this blog or listens to my pieces, but that doesn't diminish the joy I feel at having concluded this massive venture.

The Best

I originally wanted to list this project's "top 10%," but thinking back on all these pieces, I think there will be a lot more than 30, so I'll just pick however many I want. I mean, there's a lot of good music here. And even the pieces that aren't listed below have their moments. Here goes:

#7 - I've said it many times before: this piece started it all. After I finished it, everything changed.
#8 - Simple in form, effective in delivery and very nice to listen to.
#12 - This piece came from nowhere and ended up being one of the project's best.
#15 - I don't know what compelled me to write this driving galop, but I'm glad I did.
#18 - This is a sunny, groovy and short little odd-meter piece that always cheers me up when I'm feeling creatively bankrupt.
#19 - How are you supposed to write a funky march without percussion? Like this!
#31 - My first proper march; it paves the way for many fine efforts in the future.
#33 - A faux-Balkan romp, complete with a nasty-sounding trumpet and crazy alternating meters.
#40 - Although the trombone part is totally impractical, this is a really nice little odd-meter doo-wop evocation.
#41 - Another very fine march. This one is in minor key.
#44 - How do you make 4/4 sound weird? Subdivide it and make a piece out of it.
#46 - It's my accidental Herb Alpert creation!
#48 - Here's a nice massive dirge-like piece.
#61 - This tune just happened, and in a very good way.
#64 - Here's a fun little polka that kind of rocks.
#74 - This march might well be the best piece of the project. I won't declare it the winner, but it's a serious contender.
#77 - A proto-jazz cakewalk that packs a lot of charm.
#79 - The first try for this piece (#78) was something of a disaster. This version is most improved reworking that I've done.
#82 - A trombone-centric galop that totally stomps.
#87 - This may also be the best tune of the project so far: it's just your regular weird, tonally-unstable surf tune.
#99 - I channel Prokofiev in this march. I worked so hard on it that it's no wonder that #100 sucks so bad.
#102 - This piece is very tense and occasionally lyrical. It also kicks ass in a very slow way.
#109 - On the surface, this piece seems quite ordinary, but I've grown very fond of it.
#118 - Another example of what happens when you don't have any workable ideas and just start writing. Sometimes amazing things happen. This is one of those pieces.
#122 - A lovely trombone-lead tune that highlights both major and minor sevenths.
#123 - A cool ska tune with the trombone once again in the lead.
#131 - This is a real pleasing jazz waltz that almost sounds like it has real changes.
#133 - Although the main theme of these variations (#132) is kind of a bust, this is one of the best pieces I've written in a long time. It builds until we hear three separate lines going on at the same time. I was as surprised as anyone that they work so well together.
#139 - This is the best of my Gabrieli-like pieces. The others are #116, #117 and #145. They're not as good.
#150 - This is a slick, alternate-harmony march that celebrates the project's halfway point.
#156 - I didn't write enough wild polkas, but I made up for it by making the few that I wrote very wild.
#162 - I wanted to write something that sounded like the soundtrack to a reasonably good adventure movie and here it is. This also ranks among my very, very best pieces.
#165 - One more piece that came from nowhere and manages to sound really good.
#178 - I wrote this as a requiem for a goldfish named Leon. I still miss that little guy.
#190 - My marches are getting weirder and I really like it.
#195 - Yeah, those marches are getting so weird that they barely resemble marches.
#196 - A very humane approach to 12-tone music.
#202 - Small-band semi-minimalism that works really well.
#207 - The best jig I've ever written. It's also the only jig I've ever written. Still, it kicks serious ass.
#214 - If you write lots of grace notes, expect great things to happen.
#228 - Here's a a pretty intense canon that, unlike many other canons and fugues that I've written, manages to hold its shit together for the duration.
#231 - This is a reall swell tune that has a melody in 4 and an accompaniment in 5.
#242 - The best galop in the bunch. This piece seriously wails.
#247 - This is one of the weird pieces I've written - a sort of hoe-down/neo-romantic Slavic dance combination. Somehow, it ends up sounding pretty super-fine.
#254 - Once again, it's not a march, but it's definitely not a polka. It does, however, sound pretty crazy.
#264 - This effort represents the best of all those musical palindromes of the late-250s and early-260s.
#274 - All echoes, all the time; very trippy stuff.
#284 - Big, glacial music.
#288 - One last swipe at the march. This is among the best. How did that happen??
#289 - At last, a successful neo-renaissance piece! Hallelujah!
#294 - Although this is based on #285, this is a far better example of big-band minimalism than its source material.

The Worst

Well, I wish that each of these pieces was an instant classic, but there are a few prominent dogs among these 300 - actually 301 - tunes. Here they are and why:

#2 - Big and pointless. I was still a little iffy as to what I should do with all that brass.
#17 - This was my first attempt to write something big and ugly - and it shows. Later attempts were far more skilled.
#93 - I knew this was bad when I wrote it, but was helpless to improve it. This tune was detemined to stink, so who am I to deny its destiny?
#100 - This was supposed to be the spirited, minor-key fanfare for the next 100 pieces and beyond, but it turned out to be probably the worst piece of this entire project. That's all!
#132 - After writing just a few of the 11 sets of variations, I realized that this main theme isn't very good. Fortunately, I was able to derive some very good variations from it, despite its lack of quality.
#257 - This is a really unsuccessful tango.
#286 - After writing a lot of good stuff for a long time, everything that has guided me through this project so far suddenly went on vacation. This piece took me two whole days to finish and it lacks even the rudiments of skill and charm.

One Day Wonder #300

For 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba and timpani.

Here we are at the end of the line - #300, which is really a revamped version of #1. And yes, I realize that this is the 301st piece in my projected series of 300. OK, so this treatment isn’t two minutes long. Big deal! It’s a great improvement over the original. For one thing, I shrink the size of the band by three. Gone are the bass trumpet, 4th horn and 3rd trombone. I didn’t need those guys the first time around but was too dumb and inexperienced to know. I still wanted to keep the timpani. I haven’t used a non-brass instrument since then, so it seemed appropriate to have it at the conclusion of the project. Since the main motif (you can’t really call it a melody) is this full-bore blast of A minor, I figured I’d build into it with something out front. This worked out well. I also extended the main motif by a few bars and let the trumpets loose every so often and reworked the ending a bit. This also works out well. See, back when I started the project, I was just thinking that I’d write big fanfares that would serve a purpose at some later date. In other words, they didn’t necessarily have to be good, they just had to have possibilities. That attitude quickly changed because writing one big fanfare after the other seemed kind of limited and dull. In addition, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with all these instruments. So soon after beginning, I went small with #3 and started moving away from the fanfare at #7. Here’s a curious fact: #1 is the largest ensemble pieces (14 parts) in this body of work. Only #284, at 13 parts, comes close. Bigger is not always better. I quickly found that out. I also quickly discovered how versatile and subtle brass instruments can be. Sometimes, raw power isn’t the answer, but sometimes it is. And once again, I reaffirmed my belief that once you’re completely out of ideas, that’s when the real music begins.

One Day Wonder #299

For 4 trumpets, 4 trombones and tuba.

This is the new version of #2. It’s been months and months since I listened to the original, and let me just say, wow, anything would be an improvement. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I wrote it. OK, sure, it was written during a phase when I was just throwing all assorted stuff against a wall to see what would stick. This piece not only didn’t stick, it ricocheted off the wall and rolled under the couch. Although it starts off nicely enough, it simply doesn’t go anywhere for its entire minute-plus duration. All I can recall about its creation is that I was rather confused about how to handle the disposition of forces. Sure, I’d written for brass before and I’d done a good job, but now I had all these instruments and what, oh, what, was I going to do with them?? Where did they belong and where should they go once I figured out where they belonged? That accounts for a lot of things not happening in this piece. The new version is better, but it’s strange that when I encounter these old tunes, I instantly recall my frame of mind and sometimes even the vast experience I’ve gained from all the previous pieces isn’t much use. I’m still the confused-yet-grimly-determined guy throwing things against the wall. What I did here was to write up an intro that is completely at odds with the rest of the piece, run the main part of the fanfare-like tune more or less as-is, scrap the entire second half of the original (the trumpets ascend into the ionosphere, because I felt that there was nowhere else for them to go) and present a series of adventures and less dense textures as a contrast. Yeah, this is a much better way to present it, but I’m still not completely satisfied with it. But hey, I’m one piece away from being finished, so it’s not that I don’t care, but rather that I can only care a limited amount. And prying beauty and power out of this piece’s very humble origins exceeds that limited amount.

One Day Wonder #298

For 1 horn, 1 trumpet, 1 trombone and tuba.

Today’s reconstitution efforts focus on #3. The original is a nice little fanfare-esque interchange between trumpet and horn. Yeah, it’s nice, but it needed something extra. I figured I could get more mileage out of it if I brought in a trombone and tuba. This changes everything. The feel becomes less fanfare and more oom-pah, which is what I wanted. I’m always interested in altering any given feel while preserving the original tune. I added a B theme in the horn, which doesn’t have much feel at all and then repeated previous material with additional different feels. Even though much of the music is the same, this really is a completely different piece. That’s about the best I can describe it, which is wholly insufficient. You know, I’ll be glad to finish this project for a variety of reason, most prominent of which is that I don’t have to write any more descriptions of my music. I often fail to capture my frame of mind or my prevailing environmental conditions when I’m writing this music. For instance, I lot of the time, people are screaming at each other under my window or all kinds of fire trucks pull up to attend to my crazy (yeah, they’re all nuts) or sometimes Belltown smells funny; today it smelled like a wet dog for no apparent reason. All these things are fun to write about – and let’s face it, blogs are for stuff like frame of mind and environment – but it’s difficult to write about music. Critiquing a performance is much easier, but when considering just music, it’s much, much tougher. I generally don’t write about a piece on the day it was written because I might spend the next few days adding or subtracting things. But I often find that those few days are time enough for me to forget just about every process that went into the piece, so I can only be vague about what goes on. I actually have written about a piece on the day I wrote it, but even then I can’t discuss details. I guess that must be because the thinking that I use in creating a piece is completely divorced from how I would describe it. It’s not easy to describe what goes on in music with words. And that’s all I have to say about it. So please enjoy this update of a very early One Day Wonder.

One Day Wonder #297

For 3 trumpets.

Here we take on #4, the shortest of all pieces at just 26 seconds. The most recent all-trumpet piece of mine is #283, which is drastically different from this one. What I wanted here was to hold true (for the most part) with my original conception of close harmony counterpoint with allusions to fanfare. Back in the day, everything was supposed to be a fanfare. That’s just what happens here. At some points, the harmony does get a little crunchy, but it’s nothing in comparison to #283, which is all crunch. Other than that, there isn’t a whole lot to say about what goes on, other than this expansion worked a lot better than #296. And that’s a fact.

One Day Wonder #296

For 1 horn, 1 trumpet and 3 trombones.

This is the updated version of #5. The original is around 45 seconds long. Out of the first six pieces, this is the one that least required updating. Sure, it’s only 45 seconds, but it does a good job in expressing a complete musical thought in a short amount of time. OK, the trumpet goes into the stratosphere for a few notes; the highest being a B. This is because I wasn’t particularly attuned to practical aspects of any given instrument at the time. For me, this project was just a series of exercises that I thought that I would abandon after a few dozen attempts. Yeah, I was kind of wrong. So I turn back to #5 with more practical considerations in mind. Try as I may, I couldn’t eliminate that high B. It sounds good, so I kept it. To expand the piece, I added an intro and a middle part, which allowed me to repeat sections and bring the tune about to exactly two minutes. There really wasn’t that much I could do for it. And honestly, I don’t think I’ve improved it. I’ve just made it longer and more unfocused. Well, that’s the risk I’m taking with all these pieces. But I’m happy to say that the remaining six pieces need fixing much more than this one.

One Day Wonder #295

For 4 trombones and tuba.

Here’s the first in a series that I call “coasting to the finish line.” Honestly, I never thought that the project would get this far, so I began it with some pretty lax standards. In order not to make things seem too daunting, I originally intended to write only 300 short fanfares. I didn’t especially care how long they were or how they were structured or whatnot. All I wanted for them to do was to make a musical statement and end. That’s why many of the pieces before around #30 are so short. Actually, my attitude towards the fanfare-thing changed abruptly at #7 (after that, I wanted to write in all kinds of styles), but I still wanted to keep the pressure off until I proved to myself that I could write at least two minutes of quality music a day. That took a while longer, but eventually it became pretty clear that I could do that in all sorts of varieties. And then I was home free; I established some very rough guidelines (pieces should be at least two minutes long, express a coherent musical thought, and take on as many styles as possible) and hammered away for months upon months.

So this is a reworking of #6. I believe that I described the original as sounding like the theme music to a 1970s BBC version of King Lear. Yeah, that’s a good description. For this version, I had to scavenge what I could from where I could. There wasn’t a lot of source material, since it’s so short. I figured that an intro (with punctuation from the bass trombone) would be nice to set the mood. Following that, I’d lengthen the A theme, add a B theme, keep the C theme, because it rolls nicely back into the repeat of the A. Since that wasn’t quite enough to bring it up to two minutes, I tacked on a brief outro to mirror the beginning. I’d say that it works out OK, but I was definitely feeling a little claustrophobic. Scoring for four trombones and tuba doesn’t give you a lot of room to maneuver, since writing lots of high notes for your players will sound ridiculous, but lots of low notes will sound mushy. The A theme of the original #6 is very nice, but in order to extend it into a real melody, I had to do a few strange things that I’m not completely sold on, but I’m sure I’ll get used to. As for the B theme (which is just a variant on the A theme), I’m fine with that and the C theme is as-is from the original, only it’s repeated twice, which is fine, because it’s kind of cool. Overall, this is a good way to begin the coast to the line.

One Day Wonder #294

For 4 horns, 4 trumpets and 4 trombones.

This will be the last of my original pieces, and even this one isn’t that original. I was so intrigued as to why #285 worked that I listened to it again and again trying to figure out what was happening where. I was a little disappointed that the climactic section wasn’t that climactic. For this piece, I wanted to lift that section and straighten it out to how it should be. How should it have been? Well, instead of being a component of the entire scheme, it stands out in an awkward way. It’s one of the pitfalls of writing minimalism; you have to walk the line between being too repetitive and dull and moving too fast, thus exposing the piece for its lack of melody. That latter thing is what happens in #285. Otherwise, I think the tune is tremendous – big-band minimalism with a good amount of punch. This version of it uses the same instrumentation, time signature (at least initially) and some deconstructed parts of #285. The biggest problem here was getting things started. I think that #285’s beginning is a lot stronger, but once the time changes from 6/8 to 9/8, the piece comes into its own. I’m especially fond of the smudgy horn parts. All of this is a prelude to the part that I wanted to fix. Instead of having the trumpet line descend in a sequence, I kept it pretty much in place, and I eliminated that weird shift to minor key. It was a little too jarring. Once that section plays itself out, I have everyone crescendo, briefly give the horn line to the trumpets and finish with another crescendo. And there you have it. Despite the somewhat weaker beginning, this piece is better than its predecessor. It sounds bigger and more refined. One way of approaching minimalism is to tell yourself that you’re building a machine that has to function in a certain way. This is a good analogy since minimalism sounds pretty mechanical. OK, so you’re building not just one machine, but several – ideally three: beginning, middle and end. These three machines have to have some kind of unity, but can’t be too similar, nor can they be too different. There’s the challenge. This piece responds well to it. As I’ve said before, I’m a little beyond liking or disliking these pieces, but if I was still in “like/dislike” territory, I would like this piece very much. From here on out, folks, I’ll be reworking the first six pieces of the project in reverse order. If I still understood the basic concept of fun, I would think that it would be fun.

One Day Wonder #293

For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 1 trombone and tuba.

Here’s a slick little jazz-thing with a nice concept behind it. See, the band is divided into two parts: 2nd horn/trombone/tuba and 1st horn/trumpet. Every section of the piece until the shout chorus repeats twice, only the first time through any given section is the first for one part or another. Confused yet? OK, in other words, what you hear initially in the 2nd horn/trombone/tuba playing their first section, then the 1st horn/trumpet come in eight bars later with their first time through the section. After those first 16 bars, the 2nd horn/trombone/tuba combo plays something else while the 1st horn/trumpet play the same thing they did over the previous eight bars. After they’ve played for 16 bars, they switch to something else while their counterparts repeat the previous eight bars. The whole thing is modular. Because I didn’t want them to spend all day in this building loop, I stuck in that little block-harmony shout chorus in there and reprised the beginning with the parts mostly switched. It works out nicely from a conceptual standpoint, but as with most of the jazz stuff I’ve written for this project, it barely qualifies as such because it doesn’t have any changes to speak up; only melodic lines that work to achieve their own goals. Maybe one the few exceptions is #178, my little requiem for a goldfish, and those changes are largely diatonic. Yeah, I guess my jazz skills have degenerated from non-use. Hey, I used to speak Russian like a champ, and nowadays I can barely understand Vladimir Putin. Oh well, such is the way of things.

Just so you know, I’ve devised an exit strategy for myself. Here it is: since this project didn’t really begin in earnest until wonderful #7, I am going to revamp the first six pieces (in reverse order) as my last six pieces. I’ll start with #6 for #295, #5 for #296 and so on until I reach #300, which still looks like it’s going to happen on March 6th. My goal is to expand these pieces until they’re all around two minutes apiece. Back when I started, I was just happy to get notes down on paper, so I paid no attention to duration. All of them are less than a minute long, with the shortest at just 26 seconds. So yes, I’ll have to do quite a bit of writing, but hopefully I’ve learned enough tricks along the way to write additional material that compliments the original stuff. If it doesn’t, then I apologize in advance.

One Day Wonder #292

For 3 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba.

Well, I had such a good time writing #284 that I decided to do something similar. And by “similar,” I mean that it will unfold slowly and contain lots of held notes. I also wanted to use a slightly smaller ensemble. At first, I only had three trumpets, but once I found myself borrowing a trombone to thicken up the treble textures, I brought in a fourth. Instead of building from the low brass to the horns to the trumpets, it’s the trumpets that set the mood and the horns with the main voice. And yes, once again, the trombones and tuba are there for atmosphere, but their participation is much more limited. The piece works well, I guess. And that’s about all I can say about it. But I’ve noticed this: back when I began the project and I wanted to write something on the slow side, I’d write a brass chorale. In fact, the chorale was always my “safe house” in case whatever I was trying didn’t work out or if I was pressed for time and such. Starting at #102, my slow stuff started to acquire all this restless tension. I like to call that my “Liebestod phase,” even though those pieces don’t resemble Wagner in the least. I tried to recreate that magic several times. Later on, I managed to merge the two things into the oddball elegy in the #170s. Since then, there was no significant evolution until I beefed up the ensemble and started writing lots of whole notes – or dotted whole notes for this piece. So here we have the next step. Once again, I’m pretty surprised that I’m showing any kind a development, since I’m so thoroughly sick of this project, but there’s your proof. Yes, I’m sure that I’ll continue to evolve if I’m foolish or stupid enough to continue the project past 300, but it has to end sometime and that sometime might as well be 300 (which will actually feature 301 pieces, but who’s counting?). Otherwise, I’ll probably go completely nuts. I mean, I’ve stranded myself in ugly, crazy Belltown for most of the last year to get this done. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped playing the saxophone and let my apartment descend into squalor. It’s not that a lot of these pieces took a long time to write (most took less than four hours), but it was the drain of mental energy. Once I was done with any given piece, I was generally ready to do nothing else for the rest of the day, except maybe read or watch a movie or whatnot. When I started this project, I had visions of writing these pieces during the day and writing some very large work in the evening. That didn’t come to pass, but it would have been one hell of an achievement. So although I’ve been industrious, I’ve haven’t worked as hard as I’d wanted to. But funny thing, it didn’t really matter. If I’d worked harder or finished faster, I’d be right where I am today – in ugly, crazy Belltown, driving a 40-year-old car and wondering when things are going to get right. And that’s just what I’m doing now. But the good news is that I’m taking a road trip once I’m done. I’m thinking that the great, liberating day will be March 6th. After that, I’ll spend a week cleaning my apartment (I’ve been neglecting it for far more than a year), fly down to San Jose and hit the road, heading east. That’s the plan. So naturally, my head’s elsewhere, but I hope I can muster a few more good pieces before I hit 300.

One Day Wonder #291

For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba.

Well, I was able to put aside all the bad thoughts that brought about #290, so I’m back to the age-old chase for something to write. In the past, I’ve tried to use divergent motion in a few pieces (most of them are pre-#100) and none of them worked out very well. This was basically because instruments that diverge will reach the top or bottom of their range fairly quickly. I didn’t know how to work with that factor. In addition, the further the instruments get from each other, the weaker the harmony is between them. All of those pre-#100 experiments became an exercise in damage control to a certain degree because of those and other variables. This piece wouldn’t be like those. And it’s not. Once the notes are high or low enough, they re-converge and I’m not working with a very strong harmonic scheme. I’m also not too adamant about having unique formal elements, so what you’re getting in intro-AABACDBA. There’s nothing particularly new about that framework. And this is what you get. It may sound like it could have been written 100 or 200 pieces ago, but I have to disagree. I never really figured out what went wrong with those other tunes, but straight from the beginning, I figured out how things would have to go in order for it to work. Do I like it? At this point, does it matter? OK, maybe I’m still under the cloud that generated #290, but if I can move past it. I’ve lived with uncertainty and doubt for so long now that they’re familiar companions. It’s just that some days (and weeks) they get the best of me. This might be one of them. In any case, I’ve decided to finish the project, come what may.

One Day Wonder #290

For 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba.

Well, the last few days have gone very nicely. In fact, except for #286 and its ensuing crisis, the whole week has been just dandy. But despite that, I woke up in a terribly black mood. I don’t know whether it’s because I recently quit smoking or because of some genuine feelings of despair, but I was feeling like whole project has been a waste of time, because I have no tangible results to offer. The same was the case with Mackris v. O’Reilly. The lack of results continues to this day. Since mid-April 2007, I’ve written what will turn out to be between 12 and 13 hours of music in less than a year and I feel that it has been a profound failure. I mean, I never begin a project with failure in mind (who does??), but that’s how they all seem to end. That was pretty much my frame of mind at the time I started this piece. It all seemed so hopeless. Nobody reads this blog, not even my own girlfriend, so no wonder I feel like giving up. I decided to put my feelings into words, convert my words into Morse Code and use those rhythms in a piece. That’s just what I did. There is no tonal or harmonic system going on here; it only concerns itself with the rhythm. You’ll notice that every section (or instrument combination) has its “dot-and-dash” arrangement. This tune has no form; it just says what it has to say and ends. Yes, a lot of words overlap or are played slightly out of order, but they’re all in the piece. In case you’re interested, here’s the text: “I hate to say it, but I am totally sick of this project. Some of the results from it have been pleasant and surprising, but overall, it has been pure folly. I should stop now to avoid further embarrassment. Well, that would seem even more foolish. I will continue. Then it will be over and I will be free.” I know what you’re thinking: free to do what? My guess is that I’ll be free to go on to my next ambitious-yet-unsuccessful project. Anyhow, my mood improved as the day progressed, but I’m still pretty distressed with how things are at the moment.