Rejected for SSHRC grant, so it goes. Too many unknowns to ever know the true picture behind the rejection business. Applied to three teaching positions in recent weeks, two teaching music and one was teaching creativity. I suspect I’m the set up for a joke. A student played a song in class, the lyrics of which were improvised. He shared his pleasure of not knowing where the song was headed, just enabling it. When I try that, soon come brick walls, an inability to allow anything unexplained to live, but in the days following I wrote two, his levity inspired me. One started out about worry over how many things need to be fixed and adjusting to their states of disrepair and ended in an old friend whose confidence was both mysterious and inspiring. I liked how it resolved without ever being planned. I’m not sure the meaning of the other song, it is about Tami Tyrell, David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks. Happened after I found myself, last week, in a marathon of Youtube and Spotify research. They each had tragic endings that brought me down because they were so powerful and at different times naive. I wonder if they too could be philosophical about the rejection business or if maybe that’s what did them in.