My Band Name For Today

• Elongated Penny Machine
• America's Most Stolen Vehicles
• Meeting Wil Wheaton
  
• Somewhat Frayed
• Scrabulous

Just got back from a camping trip. The state park had several pre-WWII cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps., one of the few New Deal programs to yield concrete results, (that's a pun, folks).

The CCC program was an adjunct of the Army, and was run as such. Yet many of the artifacts of this effort are profoundly pleasing from an aesthetic sense. I slept in a cabin with a stone fireplace that was a work of art, stylistically arranged and organized.

As a fireplace, it was woefully under-engineered, with a too-shallow firebox and no internal damper arrangement. Years of soot had stained the outside, a testament to the chimney's lack of drawing power. I would hate to rely on that fireplace in the winter.

But I could appreciate it very much as a work of art. Maybe there is a lesson there about the role of government or some such. As for me, I just enjoy thinking of the men of the CCC, setting the stones in cement. Maybe occasionally thinking that what they were building might last 50 or 100 years.

I make a lot of things that get released to vast audiences who will never know my name or see my face. For my occasional failures, my fireplaces that smoke, I offer my apologies. I'll try to do better next time.

And for my occasional artistic successes, whenever you see a pleasant design or hear a tastefully orchestrated music cue that just fits perfectly, folks like me are the modern CCC. I'd like to think we are building for the future, sometimes alone and unrecognized, but always with the profound sense that we are making something better, building something bigger, a pixel and a semitone at a time.

And no one can take that sense of accomplishment away.

P.S. Ask me about "Somewhat Frayed" sometime.