Does Everything Fit Together?

Does everything fit together? No. No it doesn’t. I have been trying to be a couple of things, a couple of people. OK, maybe a half dozen people. At least in my mind’s eye. Now I have to live with the fact that life is many faceted. I am many people and I am likely going to be interacting with many people and I am going to have to take that seriously. This is what I’m doing right now. Coming to grips with all that.

I am Daniel Austin Sperry, a man in a maximum number of decades of life, but not the maximum number, living in Ashland, Oregon. I am a composer. I am a cellist. I make little movies. Some are very, very short. And I am on a quest, of sorts, of which I will talk more later. But for now I need to introduce you to where you are, where you are on the web, if you have found this place.

This site is intended to serve as the central nerve center of my public life. A fair bit of my personal life is and will be on here as well, but that is of necessity. For I intend to be an example of a many-faceted life, a person who is making the most of both the many advantages and opportunities that he has, whatever skills he possesses, but also making the most of the many disadvantages, mistakes, misfortunes, troubles, that have been given to him and rolling all that up into a many faceted effort to thrive, to be a force, to be heard, known, recognized, perhaps even sought after! I don’t want to get too far out over my skis, but I have some motivation, and you will find that here. 

I’m not going to, quite yet, get into the long ass story of what brought me here. But I do intend to bring you up to date to the current state of affairs of my life, in a fairly thorough way, in the following blog posts. And that will continue to be the format. You will see some photos. You will get some links. It is unlikely that I will post videos here, but I’m not ruling it out. 

To begin, I won’t make a list, but I will give you the quickest and most honest overview of my situation as a public and somewhat private person. Here that is:

I am trying to make a new life inside an old life. For the last 11 years in a row, most of my income has come to me from tips put in my cello case as I played in a beautiful park in a beautiful town in a very, very lovely part of the USA, the area of the Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon. 

This life has become complicated by two important facts. 

One is that my hands have come to be habitually sore from playing cello. This manifests itself in a struggle to play without some amount of trembling or shakiness both in the bow and in the left hand. Most people do not notice this, either in the sounds I make, or as an actual artifact of my playing, but of course I do. I am aware of every molecule and millisecond of my playing and it appears that my timespan for making good sounds is coming closer and closer to a close. This is unknown, of course. I desire to play for twenty more years. In 2025, I will be seventy. But it could well be that that number is two years. I have an absolutely pervasive feeling of mortality in me these days. It is here with me in many ways and part of this blog will be dealing with all of those nods towards death. I’m not doing it to be melodramatic. I am doing it because it is as real as anything else in my life. 

That is the first fact or set of facts. I’m slowly losing my most important skill, the ability to perform with my cello. In an undefined way, a sort of foreboding way. 

The second fact is a fact of failure on my part, which is that I have not prepared myself to make all the money I would very much like to have. That may sound weird to you but if you think about it most people you know have some kind of relationship to money like this. Mine is just a bit more extreme than most. I am not in the “middle class’, whatever that is. Money is always a struggle, but that has to be folded in with the truth that I have not been incredibly serious - since I became an artist ( and I’ll share the backstory on that as we go on)  - about doing anything but to survive. And somehow, even so, I have been incredibly fortunate and the life I live is incredibly charmed and even miraculous sometimes. These are the many facets. 

I live in a very nice home which I share with a very, very fine woman named L, and we have been together for more than ten years and we are true allies and friends, and fun-havers and as if married, even though we are technically simply engaged and expect that to continue.  I have purchased some nice clothes, some custom tailored blazers, some nice fedoras, fine wingtips and so forth. I have an actual cold plunge made from a freezer, with a filtering system and an ozone generator that I keep at 42 degrees. I mean, that wasn’t nothing to put together. 

But having said all that, I have so little to show for all the work I’ve done, other than the actual output of the work I’ve done which can be seen and heard, here, and here. 

And so, it is out of those two facts that this story, which is unfolding, spins out. I am trying to make a life I have never made before with considerable headwinds, almost from a dead stop. 

My plans for how I will do this will be seen in the fog lights up ahead. But I want to tell you. It is for the ride that I’m doing this. I want you here for the ride. The ride is unquestionably going to be interesting. And I am finally ready to take along some passengers. I hope you will be among them. I don’t expect it to be easy. I do believe there will be danger. But I’m determined to make it a good journey. And I welcome you.