I’m here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and just a few hours ago, the University of Michigan Symphony Band performed “Redline Tango” as the closing piece on their concert. It was a pretty great evening, topping off a fantastic 10 days. The first few days were spent at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up. The band there was awesome, and I feel like I made some new friends on that trip. Then it was up to UMich (the OSU rival, I might add) for the residency here. The past week has seen two great performances of Redline Tango, a fantastic concert including TWO of Steve Bryant’s pieces at Bowling Green, dinners talking shop with composers like Michael Daugherty and Michael Colgrass, the scariest but most fun composition forum I’ve ever given (thanks for being so gracious, gang), and a tasty beer or two.

I’ll debrief more fully — hopefully with photos as well — when I return to LA, but for now, I have to say thanks to Michael Haithcock and the Michigan band for a great concert here, and Russ Mikkelson and the wind ensemble at OSU for their kick-ass concert in Columbus just a week ago. It’s weeks like this that make me pinch myself and think I’m just about the luckiest guy there is. I mean, this is my job?!

AEJ and I did some browsing at Twentieth yesterday. This is, without a doubt, the coolest furniture store ever. Unfortunately, this stuff ain’t cheap. Boy howdy, though, it’s amazing stuff.

As much as I love my lounge chair, I found a new one to covet. It’s like the big, crazy, steroid-addicted cousin of my chair. Wow, wow, wow. Just bad ass and shiny. You have to see this huge thing in person to appreciate how hulking it is. Sadly, it’s $13,000, putting it far out of the world of finance where I reside.

No, this entry isn’t about that brilliant piece of film work starring Steve Guttenberg — the movie that may have officially killed disco. No, the title of this entry refers to the fact that the caffeine from Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies is combining with endless loops of my new piece in my head, preventing me from sleeping.

It’s 2am now, and I finally acknowledged to myself as I tossed and turned in bed an hour ago that I wasn’t going to fall asleep anytime soon. So, I got up, and now I sit here at the computer, and the cat on my lap is thrilled that I’ve given him a lap to sleep on at this odd hour. I’m probably going to head back to bed in a minute, and I can only hope that the same four bars of the new piece don’t keep looping in my head. It starts to make me kind of crazy. It’s like that recent episode of Medium where Allison couldn’t get that song out of her head, and it was so loud she could barely hear what was happening around her. This is kind of like that, except in my case, fortunately, the looping music isn’t some awful Gloria Gaynor song. (At least I hope it’s not. Wouldn’t that be weird, and a little embarrassing, if the piece I was writing turned out to be a disco hit from the 70s?)

This is usually a good sign. If a piece is going well enough to keep me up at night listening to it in my head, then the material probably works, at least to me. I have a good feeling about this piece — or maybe that’s just the lingering effect of having all of those delicious cookies before bed. Mmm… cookies…

Yeah, it’s definitely time for bed. Once the web browsing leads you to a site like this one, it’s time to call it a night…