Archive for January, 2025


One Night in Colorado Springs

Filed under: brewery, Communications, craft brewery, Food, Music, Songwriting, travel, writing — Leave a comment
January 24, 2025

By Dan Roark

The tour began on a Friday in August at Oskar Blues Grill and Brew in Colorado Springs. A guy from a group of people at a table between me and the bar began to drift around the empty space in the middle of the tables, dancing to my songs like someone on acid at Woodstock.

If you’ve heard my music, you wouldn’t immediately think that it was danceable music. But it happened for the first time that year in July at Townhouse Sports Grill in Manitou Springs. A couple was dancing to my song, Poet and the Lady.  Which I could kind of see. Particularly slow dancing.

But the guy at Oskar’s was dancing to everything. I was amused, and flattered in a way. It certainly made it interesting. Another guy came up and asked if I could play a song. He showed it to me on his phone and it was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. That’s out of my style.

Then a woman who was apparently the significant other of the birthday boy came up and ask if I could say Happy Birthday to him on the mic. I was just happy she didn’t ask me to sing Happy Birthday. Then she asked if I knew Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. Well, no. Then – get this – she asked me if I knew anything by Journey. Hell, I could have faked Ring of Fire. But Journey? Are you freaking kidding me?

I kept talking about my new CD at the time. How would that suggest to you that I take requests? But the crowd over all was very receptive and appreciative. It was a good, albeit interesting, evening. But some people are oblivious to anything outside their own head. They just want to hear the song in their head, regardless of the style of music being played on the stage.

Keep writing the songs that are in your heart.

Peace be with you.

Paypal.me/danroark

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It’s Just The Way You Do It

Filed under: Communications, Current events, Food, writing — Leave a comment
January 23, 2025

by Dan Roark

When you’ve been doing something the same way for years, chances are it would be difficult to get you to change. It’s hard for anyone who’s been doing something for a number of years to learn “new tricks.” Not just “old dogs.”  Take folding t-shirts, for example. I’ve been folding shirts the same way for years. I can’t tell you why I fold them the way I do – see picture (not my best work). My mother is the only one who folded my shirts before I did and I don’t think I fold them the way she did.

I think Cyndy folds t-shirts the way my Mom did. I don’t know how my daughter by my first wife, Jennifer, folded her t-shirts, even if she did, before she passed away. And I have no earthly idea how her mother folds t-shirts – to my recollection, she didn’t. Mostly because she didn’t wear t-shirts. But her sons by the husband after me I’m sure wore t-shirts. But I don’t know how she folded them.

Of Cyndy’s and my three boys, Cameron folds his shirts like my Mom, I think. He wishes his wife, Julia, would fold t-shirts like he does. As the three boys were growing up, to my recollection, folding wasn’t required. As far as I remember, the boys just shoved their shirts into a dresser drawer.

The point is, none of us will ever change the way we fold shirts. And, among other things, we all grill differently, too. We grill the same meats, just our methods and spices differ. Even Cyndy and I grill differently although we aim for the same basic results. However, we’ve been using the grill my parents gave us years ago that was old at the time. It is just a basic charcoal grill.

Now we have Cameron’s grill/smoker because he got a more advanced smoker he could operate with his phone. But we haven’t been able to use it because, for one thing, the weather has sucked. That, and J.D. lived here until he moves completely into his new apartment, so his grill/smoker is also in the back yard. He grilled more than we did while he was here.

Our oldest son, Conner, lives in Des Moines, Iowa, so grilling isn’t really a thing for him. But if he did grill, it would be different from the rest of us. Cameron and J.D. don’t eat each other’s barbeque. Cyndy and I will gladly eat barbeque from any of our sons, but, like them, we prefer our own.

There are any number of other things that we all either learn, or just do, differently that it will be tough to get us to change, whether it would be more efficient to change or not. But chances are that we’ll never change.

What do you do, in your own way, every time you do it (and have been doing it for years)?

_____________________________________

Keep writing the songs that are in your heart.

Peace be with you.

Paypal.me/danroark

 

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Daily Triple Threat

Filed under: Communications, Current events, writing — Leave a comment
January 19, 2025

By Dan Roark

It is a daily occurrence. In the picture, the mouse, the Fire Stick controller, and my cell phone are neatly placed. That was for the picture. They get moved quite a bit. With the exception of the mouse, I never put them back in the same place after using them. The mouse does, however, get moved on occasion, but it basically stays on the mouse pad. However, it’s a big mouse pad and the remote will fit there as well. So I am constantly grabbing the wrong thing for what I want to do.

I want to change shows for background noise and find I’m trying to do it with the mouse. Then I go to do something on the computer screen and grab the Fire Stick remote. Or the phone rings and it takes me a minute to figure out what to reach for.

I’m usually lost in my thoughts so I get confused easily with sudden reality. Like suddenly realizing I’m trying to use the mouse to change the channel. Or trying to click on something on my laptop with the remote.

I move each of them to different places on the desk. But that doesn’t freaking help. It just pisses me off more when I still grab the wrong one. It’s acerbated by the fact that I change the channel less frequently. Followed by my phone which I only check when getting certain notifications or a call from someone I want to talk to enough to answer it – I get some notifications on my watch, but I check them on the phone.

So far I lack any viable solution. I’m not sure at this point that there is one. But it illustrates that multi-tasking is a fallacy. You can only truly do one task at a time. If you try to alternate between several tasks, you never do any of them as well as you can one at a time. And it takes longer to complete each task.

Most importantly, it makes my damn head hurt changing from task to task. I can think about a few things at the same time, yet I can only act on one at a time. That still doesn’t keep me from thinking about a task I’m not working on – making me switch again. Which is why it makes my head hurt. At that point, calming down and thinking of nothing is an impossibility.

So I simply grab my mouse and try to change channels.

_____________________________________

Keep writing the songs that are in your heart.

Peace be with you.

Paypal.me/danroark

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The Phantom? Horse

Filed under: Communications, Current events, live, Music, travel, writing — Leave a comment
January 2, 2025

By Dan Roark

I was coming back from my show at The Barrel House in Winnsboro last Wednesday night – the night of the torrential rains. When I left, there was a misleading pause in the rain. It was not long before it came back with a steady, vicious, vengeance.

The weather people were not wrong about the flash floods. The rain was freaking relentless. Which rendered the GPS as useless as the empty cracker wrapper that ended up in the floorboard. I found myself in the middle of nowhere East Texas on two lane roads that weren’t really safe on a good day, much less after near continuous rain for hours on end.

I’m not quite sure exactly how it happened. Suddenly, I was careening off the road to the right. It would have helped if the tires were actually connecting with the ground. I turned the wheel and was headed to the left side. I think the van may have actually made a 360 degree turn. I remember praying that it wouldn’t end up on it’s side. When the tires caught the dirt and the van finally stopped, I was facing to the right. As I tapped the gas to make sure the van was still running, I was staring at a fence I was very happy was not closer. (The happiness was masked at the time by shear fear mixed with absolute confusion.)

With no other cars on the road, I took time to breath and a motion caught my eye. A brown horse was running from my right to my left. There was enough light to know it was brown. She was running like she was frightened, or at the least agitated, with mane flying. She looked and acted like a mare to me. The constant rain with occasional lightning and thunder had probably gotten on her nerves and the noise of the van skidding certainly didn’t help.

But it was a few seconds suspended in time. Just me and the mare. She looked like a phantom horse, with every thing else a seeming shadow. It seemed as if every move she made was directed at me.

I had no idea where I was. Actually, that’s only partly true. I knew where all the relatively bigger towns in East Texas are located. On a sunny day, with the light combined with my sense of direction, I could have gotten home with considerably less problem. But it was pitch black with hard rain. My sense of direction was on vacation.

When I finally came to the conclusion that I had to completely abandon GPS, I stopped at a 24 hour gas station/convenience store that seemed to be the outermost corner of a street that resembled more civilization than I had seen since leaving Winnsboro . The couple operating the store was friendly, helpful, and East Texas to the core. The man had a moustache and a beard down to his chest. He had a high voice and her voice was lower. She even unlocked the bathroom to let me use it. That’s how friendly they were.

As it turns out, I wasn’t so far off after all, even though most of my sense of direction had washed away in the constant rain assaulting the windshield after my frightening carnival ride on a rain soaked section of East Texas backroad. A stop sign and a stop light and I was on Hwy 80 headed to Dallas. It wasn’t much longer before I was home, drinking beer with the drive back running through my head on repeat. Not too long after that my nervous system calmed down enough to let me go to bed, comfortable in the knowledge that I was still alive and the van was still running like it should. I was also remembering a good show. So naturally, I dreamed about the horse.

Keep writing the songs that are in your heart.

Peace be with you.

Paypal.me/danroark

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