Sometimes you just need to put headphones in and drum along with music you like. I did it for two hours yesterday. It is very rare for me to do. Usually I do things like repeat something forever to see where it evolves to or use some sort of randomness generator to make patterns.

Out of the blue yesterday I decided to just play along with stuff. I wasn't trying to play all the things perfectly. I wasn't trying to learn someone's style. It was more like punk music loving me before I knew how to play drums checking to see what level I am at now. Out of all the stuff yesterday, I really enjoyed playing Buzzcocks.

I am not anti playing along to other people's music for fun, by the way. If I do learn someone else's drumming, it is usually a measure or two I find interesting.

My current obsession is learning the drum beat at the beginning of Dave Brubeck Take Five. It is fascinating to me that a song in 5/4 was a hit. I am guessing but 99.9% of all hits are in 4/4. So I am trying to get my head around why this beat is pleasing to people's even loving ears yet it is an odd number.

We went to the mountains this weekend in Nagano to visit a friend's French restaurant/bar, soak in some hot springs, and go to the top of a mountain to do a cloud ocean watch. On the trip home, we had time to kill before our last train back to Tokyo. We decided to go check out Zenkoji Temple even though it was pouring rain. It is where the first image of the Buddha to arrive in Japan is stored back in 642 AD. It got me thinking that I am surrounded by Buddhist temples here all the time. There is one next to our apartment called Takezuka-jinja from 983 AD.

It made me think that I should really listen to an audiobook about Japanese Buddhism while I work this week. I like podcasts and music, of course, but my book listening is a little sparse. I did a quick search and found that *Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind* by Shunryu Suzuki seems to be recommended. I started in on it yesterday but I am only halfway through it.

At first listen, there is a lot of talk about the importance of practicing and how there is no finish line with practicing. That resonates with me because I like practicing a simple pattern over and over. I take for granted that playing a beat slightly harder than my ability slowly over and over makes it hard for other random thoughts to pop in my brain.

I also liked the parts about striving to remain a beginner. It reminded me that I need to start thinking of the next drum thing to learn in 2026. Past things I studied were linear drumming, swing drumming, brushes, etc. The top candidate right now is drum beats from the Benin/Togo region of Africa. It could change though so don't hold me to it.

The other random thing that popped out was this quote from Shunryu Suzuki...

When my teacher was seventy, he said, 'When I was young, I was like a tiger, but now I am like a cat!' He was very pleased to be like a cat.

I did a little bow to that one. m( ^ _ − )m

Did a three day 1000s of Cats tour of Kyushu last weekend. I had two ways to get a blog post up and four ways to get thoughts out of my mind. I didn't use any of them barely at all. I was so in the moment doing the shows and looking around that documenting didn't cross my mind. Besides the work tasks I had to do, I didn't do most of my daily routine things. Stuff like morning writing and the like.

I got back at it once I got home but kind of interesting everything went out the window for a couple days. I thought I would get a lot of writing done on the Shinkansen but I was traveling with someone. Too much looking out the window and talking about the upcoming adventures.

We have another tour like this one coming up in November so I am trying to come up with a strategy. My mind keeps arriving at dictating micro thoughts with the watch and then combining them at the end of the day if I don't have morning writing time. At least it is something rather than a three day streak gap.

It also makes me curious if I should make the medium I use for morning writing randomized. The choices would be paper (then scanned), watch (voice dictation), phone (typing on small keyboard), iPad (writing with apple pencil), and laptop (typical keyboard). Probably a good idea to keep my skills up with all of them at a steady pace.

Gonna go set that up and see how it goes.

There is an app called Apple Music for Artists that I like to open up from time to time. There are a bunch of other ones, but I chose the one just to get a quick outside view of the band. Things like which songs are getting played more than others. I use that for setlist making. It is also fun seeing the list of places where we are getting played for me. It makes you feel like you are part of the globe.

Over the weekend, I opened it up while on a little trip to the ocean in Chiba Prefecture. I noticed a Top Radio Spins area this time. It shows which songs of ours are being played on different radio stations. I didn't know radio was even playing us, actually.

I've had my head so buried in the sending merch troubles with the US tariffs that I lost focus on all the other things. Seeing that radio is playing our release reset my brain and gave me new energy.

I went to the post office in Tokyo yesterday with two packages to mail. Our new release came out lately. The orders are coming in, and they need to be shipped. This is the life of a drummer in a two-piece punk band.

JP Post has an app where you fill out the shipping and customs info. You receive a QR Code and use it to make a label in the lobby of the post office. Once I got a system set up, this process is fast and easy.

I got the labels ready for the package to the US and brought my two packages to the counter. The post office worker had an "oh no...here we go" look on their face.

They proceeded to tell me that the post office has suspended all commercial package shipping to the US for the time being due to current US policies. They handed me back the first package with apologies. I hadn't read the official news yet, which left me in a position of not knowing what to respond.

The second package was going to West Tokyo. They were relieved they could get that one sent out for me.

Now I am in a spot of trying to figure out how to get orders for our cassettes to my home country. There are other delivery services, but we would need to raise the cost of shipping a lot. Contrary to what the current US President thinks, we aren't going to pay the extra shipping costs. That extra cost gets added to the bill of the person in the US that ordered it.

In a fun "battle" with the service that distributes music to music stores like Apple Music or Spotify right now. The band I am in has songs that are about 75% Japanese and 25% English on our new release. When I submitted the release, I needed to choose a language for the release. 75 is more than 25, so I selected Japanese. Then, with each song, I set the language to what language it is in. I clicked send and waited to hear from them.

I got a form email saying due to some issue, one of the stores can't accept it. I wrote back asking what the issue is and got a response saying due to some language issue, they couldn't submit it.

As a test, I resubmitted the album and set the release language to English and set the tracks to their language. I am waiting to see if English is okay for whatever store is blocking submission.

I don’t really get why I need to set the language at all for our music though.

Just got the proofs back from the factory for our new cassette. Everything seems okay, so they can start making them. Hopefully, we'll have them for our shows coming up in Ibaraki and Nagano.

Excited to see them when they are done and excited to get this album out into the world. It is a lot more raw and live-sounding than previous releases. We wanted to bash it out quickly and in as few takes as possible.

We left a bunch of little glitches in the recording because so much old punk music I love has glitches too. They make the recordings sound human, which is a valuable thing lately.

It has been a while since I posted anything here. It was an intense two weeks, and some areas got put on the back burner to simmer.

My friend's band, Flavor Crystals, had a short tour booked and needed a temporary drummer. I haven't been back to the US in five years, so it was a nice way to get me to travel back. I have made that trip so many times, but I needed a push to go this time.

Their real drummer, John Menke, is so good, so it made learning the songs and getting the shows a breeze. It was good times focusing in on just the drum parts on their songs. I'd put on headphones, take an urban hike, and sort out the vibe of each drum part.

My plan wasn't to copy each song note for note but to get the feel down. I figured that for the other members, if it felt right, then they could not worry about me so much. It seemed to work.

I went to a punk show last weekend. During a song, a cymbal stand collapsed. Someone ran on stage and fixed it, and no one blinked an eye. The person got a few glass raises in their direction.

Each type of music has its things that make the genre a genre. Someone from the audience going on stage to fix the drum kit is one of punk’s things.

The albums that I can remember what they sound like by just reading the title from last week. I really need to go back and relisten to that Jon Appleton album. It was interesting listening to all the snippets of sound back then.

• Jon Appleton Appleton Syntonic Menagerie #electronic
• Jo Ann Campbell I'm Nobody's Baby #rock
• Bennie Maupin The Jewel In the Lotus #jazz
• Booker Little Booker Little 4 & Max Roach #jazz

Other big news is I am thinking about changing the font for the blog. I really want to get the font sizes dialed in and I want it to feel more like a book. Research time.