Dissonance

Stop. Stop. Stop!

Dr John "Doc" Milak ran his fingers through his thick hair and waited for the band to quit.

You guys sound terrible today. Truly awful. It's the worst you've sounded all semester. The woodwind section alone sounds like a flock of geese that just got blown out of the sky. But you're not the worst. The brass and percussion sections make a train derailing in a nitro-glycerin industry yard sound appealing.

Dr John "Doc" Milak had been teaching high school band for over twenty years. A stand-in for Jerry Garcia, with his shoulder length wavy brown hair, beady eyes behind coke bottle glasses, and his signature tweed jacket with leather patches, everyone at that school knew Milak was the band guy.

Doc ran his hand through his hair a second time and shook his head. Then he smiled.

"Let me tell you something about sounding this bad. It's actually good. A band sounds its worse when it's ever so slightly out of tune. That's called dissonance, and the discordant tension rises as you get closer to playing in tune. I'm smiling because this is the first time I've heard you sound this bad. So take heart. Until today, you guys sucked. Badly. Now it's only a matter of small adjustments until we've got something groovy."

--//--

Lately, it seems my life is something like a high school concert band that is going through a rough patch. While I could talk about my slow hip recovery, and work related stresses, I'm going to focus on the effort that Katherine and I have been putting forward to get our house ready to sell.

For the better part of 2015, we've put a lot of work into our house. We've checked off several big ticket items, including kitchen and bathroom refreshes, installing new windows, rebuilding a deck, and repairing our roof. We've also dressed up our house by re-surfacing the wooden floors, and adding a fresh coat of paint in and out.

Still, after all of this, there is seemingly never-ending list of minutia to go through before we actually get the house on the market. It's frustrating and tiresome, mostly because it seems that we're so close to finishing this project.

It's this feeling of being almost there that reminded me of Doc Milak's band being ever so slightly out of tune. Hopefully, it's just a matter of attending these final details and we'll have something groovy, too.

Happy Friday. Thanks for reading.