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"Idaho ain't no small potatoes!

I just played my first live concert in a little while in Boise, Idaho, and I gotta say that the people here have been awesome! A friend of mine, Michael Coleman, recommended I come out here to play, because he said the people are so great. And they are! Everyone who has hosted me here has been so supportive and friendly, and I want to pay tribute to the people here in Boise for being to welcoming to me!

I will be playing in Chicago, Florida and Toronto coming up in the next few weeks and months, and now I’m really stoked about it because my experience here has been so great. I always have some butterflies about playing live, and about being in a new place and being around new people. Everyone here has been so great! Thank you Idaho!
"

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"Hear the truth

It’s funny when you tell someone something new. If they’ve never heard anything like it before, it’s like they almost can’t even believe that it is possible. If they have heard something like it, they relate what you’re saying to what they know, which may or may not actually have anything to do at all with what you’re saying!

I find the concept of communication to be endlessly compelling. As an actor and musician, what I do is communicate. It is really the overall area of my expertise, since the process of art is a communication (in fact, I think we are always communicating something, all the time.) So if we want to be able to communicate and do it effectively, it’s good to look at how we listen!

I’m realizing that I listen for certain things more than others. I like to hear good things, while bad things sometimes I don’t like to hear. The point is, we aren’t just going around hearing everything for what it is. We are hearing things, and then relating them to our other experiences, and cobbling together a mixture of all that into “knowing.”

So it’s a funny things when we are uncomfortable when we don’t know about something, since in a way, we already know most of what we hear already!
"

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"Musicians

I love to meet musicians! I met a wonderful girl today named Nat Jay for breakfast, and we had a great conversation about lots of stuff, but mostly about music and I love to talk to musicians! Next time you get the chance, sit down with a musician and see how they see the world. There’s a musicality to everything they do, in some way! I notice the way musicians talk has a certain cadence, a certain unconscious appreciation for melody and tone. Talking to musicians is an amazing experience because they have this sense of how to convey a thought, convey an idea in a succinct and often very entertaining way. It’s a real treat.

Mark."

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"Details

There is so much to how people communicate. It’s funny that we get hung up on a word or a phrase, an intonation or a gesture, when we feel we can’t understand. It’s funny how we will boil an entire interaction down to a single point upon which we stick ourselves, a single idea we gathered, and reduce the many millions of bits of information we receive from any human interaction down to the few we choose to focus on.

Have you ever had an argument and honestly not been able to see how someone could POSSIBLY think the way they were thinking? You know when someone is saying something to you and it just could not make LESS sense? This person seems crazy to think the way they do! A wonderful person I know turned me on to the idea that, when we don’t understand something, it is OUR limitation, not the limitation of reality.

Measurably, we communicate SO MUCH through our interactions, our words, our tone, our movement. Less measurably, we might communicate also through “vibe,” or interaction of energy. It would make sense that we pass energy amongst us, since we are matter and matter has energy fields (I’m not a scientist, please add if you have any relevant data!) There is so much going on between us all the time, and yet we somehow still manage to boil everything we see down to an amount we can “handle.”

What if what we see, hear, and feel has more to do with what we choose NOT to see? Is it possible that we are filtering out most of the stuff that could really help us, because on an either conscious or unconscious level we are deleting details communicated because we are either unable or unwilling to look at them?

Like when someone you love tells you to do the dishes, and you really don’t hear them at all?"

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"People not giving me what I want!

I’m noticing how much I react when people don’t give me what I want. When I can’t get what I want, I have had a habit of doing a whole bunch of whiny crap to get it. This is a problem. I’m thinking that, if you need to whine about what you want, it probably means that you don’t really need it. Or that you can’t actually get it from someone else. Here’s why:

Whining implies that I’m emotionally vested in getting what I want in some way (this would be true if I was afraid, angry, frustrated, annoyed, or any other kind of emotion, really.) That means that I’m feeling bad, which is my choice. I’m thinking that, in all honesty, most of us are trying ultimately to get people change our state of BEING, not just to get them to be different. It’s as if, if you give me what I want, THEN I’ll feel okay!

Of course, this is nonsense. I can choose to feel whatever I want to in any situation, and the fact that I’m whining shows not that I should get what I want, but that I should look at WHY I want what I want and then re-evaluate!

Turns out, I didn’t need the thing anyway in order to be happy. And now I’m cool either way.

M."

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