Hope.Nope.

A challenging day, at work. Kids were fine, there were many smiles and delightful laughs.

Adults... well, there were challenges, let's just say. Frayed tempers and exhaustion (theirs) didn't help matters; "it'll grow back" as my college band director used to say in such situations. But it was one of those conditions where "fault." where it existed--and I'm not sure a lot of it does--was distributed in a rather diffuse cloud. W. Edwards Deming would have called it a "system failure." But people who don't deal in a system or system-analysis world don't relate to the idea of "it's nobody's 'fault'--in those terms." (Note to skeptics: Yeah, sometimes booboos are "somebody's fault," but when the system itself has flaws, it's hardly surprising that the system doesn't produce things error-free; it's not the gears "fault" if they produce no power when their cogs are intact and correctly machined, but they are not engaged correctly.)

The point of which is, I arrived home demoralized and exhausted, I lay down on the bed for an hour or two, even by my "I'm never hungry any more" standards I didn't feel like eating anything, pretended to eat something, then sat down to work on a musical composition.

I'm not... that... happy with it, right now. Yeah, I know, you can't command the muse to serve you, sometimes you just gotta hack at things for a while until they start to flow, but...

My herbalist said, "Here, we never give up hope."

And looking at my composition, I'm pretty much ready to give up hope. And it. That's not good; neither of those are good.

I'm going to press "pause" for tonight. Not "eject." Intellectually, I know that some things need to be written, then thrown away, and then written again (the second time, the right way), that's sometimes the natural order of things. That's not a cause to give up, certainly... at least, I know that. Intellectually.

Intellectually, I know that I'm not supposed to give up hope. I can certainly pretend to be keeping hope alive--if there's anything I'm good at, it's denial.

But, to be honest with you, I think I have given up hope. Not just on this piece. Hope for a lot of things, many of which have to do with music, both composition and performance.

Let's hope (that word's inescapable, isn't it?) that my acupuncturing tomorrow will reconnect my soul to itself and to the universe. Again, to be honest with you, even though it has done so before... I don't have much hope for that, either.

Not a good day, for hope.