Terrible Ideas by Dan Jewett - Issue #2

Hello Friends,

If the stories my parents told me are true, this morning at sometime around 2 AM EST, I completed sixty years on planet earth. My folks told me I was born in White Plains, New York. I believe them to be generally truthful people and so I will accept their word on that.

I thought maybe I would write about this milestone in terms of “taking stock.” A general assessment of what’s been achieved or some sort of chronology that would help, if not others, at least me, locate myself in the universe. As if marking a spot on the time-space continuum where there was a person named Daniel Rickard Jewett who did some stuff would equate to significance.

But telling the story of a life by listing the wins and losses doesn’t necessarily make it significant, and it doesn’t seem as important to me to make a list of benchmarks as it does to remember the quality of experiences I’ve had. Particularly the experience of love and the experience of music.

I think for me the two are inextricably intertwined and though some might say they are a different order of type from each other, for me the difference doesn’t seem particularly important.

I wish I could say when it comes to love, that I learned to give it at the same pace I received it, but alas the giving took me longer to master and still needs work. Fortunately for me, I was often in the company of those much more adept than myself. I received a bounty.

I’ve also been blessed to be involved, more than once, in groups that ran on love and passion. You Sky Ryders know what I mean, and so do you oarsmen and women. You learn the answer to the question, “What are you working so hard for?” is “Because you are.”

And music. There can never be too much. When I get to the end of my life and I’m trying to be brave and celebrate rather than mourn the leaving, I hope it doesn’t slip out that what I’m going to miss the most is hearing Art Pepper burn through Straight Life one more time. Oops.

OK, this isn’t sounding all that cheerful. It’s a birthday, not a death sentence. Gee whiz!

I’m looking forward to hearing a lot more music and writing about it here among all of the other seemingly important bits of brain effluvium I seem compelled to share.

I hope you will be in touch. Reply to this email, or visit Terrible Ideas and leave a comment, or message me. Tell me what’s on your mind. I’d like to know!

All the best!

Dan J.

There’s plenty of fresh content on Terrible Ideas since the last newsletter.

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Terrible Ideas uses a pretty traditional blog setup. There is content I create myself and there are links to content on other sites. I use a set of tags to categorize what I post, and you can see that list in the sidebar section called “Disarray.” There is an old-school blogroll as well. Point me to your own website so I can add you to the list of people I follow.

If you have no recollection of who Dan Jewett is, or why you’re hearing from him, you can visit the “About” page.

“Moments” is an experiment with posting short snips of my daily experience in a sort of Twitter feed format. Lots of music selections in there.

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