ALMOST INDEPENDENCE DAY...

While July 4 is the “generally accepted” day, it was actually some 13 months earlier that the burgesses in an obscure county in North Carolina voted to declare their independence from Great Britain, using a lot of the same language and phrases that ended up in the Declaration of Independence. July 4, 1776 is really an arbitrary anniversary people generally agreed on. We had to pick something.

I haven’t declared my independence yet—I’m still going through the same sort of agonizing about the future the Founding Fathers did. I’ve said before I really do not know what I want to do with my life, and I still don’t. I’ve been in a holding pattern these past 8 weeks, camping out in the Cascade Locks house, fixing squirrel damage while I wonder what to do.

So here are the options. I think there are still only three of them.

ONE is I get another job—probably another city-manager job, in another town, and do what I’ve been doing the last 15 years. Realistically, that could be a little hard: nearly everybody wants a college degree in city management these days, and I don’t have one (I’m a computer programmer). The economy’s tough, and jobs of any kind are hard to come by. The minimal dribble of unemployment insurance runs out the end of September.

TWO is I become a college student again—something I haven’t done for 37 years. I meet with the student advisor from Eastern Oregon University Monday—they’re the only college in Oregon that offers a bachelor’s in city management. I had to declare a minor, and that—obviously—will be music. I do not know yet where the money to pay for it—and to live while I’m studenting—will come from. I can work while I’m studenting, of course, but I have to have a job to do that.

THREE—the scariest but also the most attractive—is I pack everything in, cash in my retirement, and plan on making it in the music business. I’d have a year; the pittance I’ve saved up towards retirement wouldn’t last any longer than that, and then there’d be literally nothing. I have hoped for a number of years I’d get to this point, and now I’m here. But am I ready?

I tend to be conservative where money’s concerned, and averse to taking risks. My ideal outcome would be some combination of all three options above—a good job, college, and music—but I don’t know if I have that choice. As the (hopefully) immortal Mick Jagger said, “You can’t always get what you want.”

Declaring independence is a lot like jumping off a cliff, where you can see a stream at the bottom, but you don’t know if you can hit it—and you don’t know how deep it is. I bet the Founding Fathers had that problem, too.

UPDATES: I get to do a radio interview for Whitby Shores; I’ll be interviewing “Country Rose,” an Internet promoter of independent music and also a playwright. I’ve been in a couple of her radio plays; I played “Danny,” a pit bull with a very Scooby-Dooish persona, and it’s as Danny that I’ll be interviewing Rose. (First time ever, I think, that a dog has interviewed anybody on the radio. One small pawprint for dogs, and all that.)

NEW SONG: “Something’s Missing” was in response to another of those write-a-song-to-this-title challenges. I wanted the “something missing” to be kind of a surprise, and ended up “channeling” George Jones, the master of plot twists in country music. I can’t sing like George Jones, of course (nobody can), but like to think I captured his style. The fact that it got wrote pretty fast, and recorded in one take (which has kind of become normal, now), and actually got a little attention, is one of the things that makes me wonder whether I might be able to make a living doing music.

EXPANDING SERVICES: Latest song by Beth Williams (one of my favorite lyricists to work with) is about a deliberate homewrecker (very Gretchen Wilson material)—and I can’t help with it, because it needs a female vocal, and I don’t do female vocals (being a guy, and all). Prompts the question, though, “Why not?” I do have musicians I tap regularly to play parts on recordings that I can’t—Darrin Wayne on harmonica, Dan Doshier on mandolin, and so on. Why not a female vocalist? The voice, I’ve maintained repeatedly, is an instrument. And I just might know a couple of people who’d be interested…

Joe