The Frog Bog

My name is Karl Mueller. I’m a recent transplant to Northern New Jersey from San Francisco. I am a music teacher. My life in bulletpoints: Okay, I can’t figure out how to do bulletpoints, which is frustrating, because you think there would be a way to make them that made sense to normal people and gave them access to cool extras like that that take their websites to the next level, as it were, instead of having to go to that “Wingdings” font, which no one ever uses except when it’s 3am and they’re feeling tired and they decide to try to recreate something in the “Doorway to the Mines of Moria” style instead of just going to bed like they should, but, of course, no software person anywhere can take the ten minutes to make a little bullet key for the keyboard in place of some unnecessary key, like the exclamation point key, the use of which should be regulated, because when you’re looking for a review of the new Celene Dion album and one positive review has six exclamation points and the next negative one has seven, what are you supposed to think? On balance, is the album one exclamation point to the bad? That is why the exclamation point, which is supposed to be an attention-grabber, becomes meaningless, like car horns in Manhattan. Trust me. I just drove in Manhattan on Saturday, and you become so accustomed to car horns that eventually they blend in with the background ambience and pretty soon you’re immune to the horn of the out-of-control bus behind you, and the next thing you know, you’re waiting for that big WALK signal in the sky. So, like I had secretly been planning all along, here is my life in NUMBERS:

1. I was born on March 11, 1970. It was a cold day in Mount Clemens, Michigan, a suburb just north of Detroit. The wind whipped across Lake Michigan with a foreboding, um, blow, that forecast a Piscean life of angst and brilliance, or something. Since I was born in the recently crowned second most dangerous city in the nation, that gives me tons upon tons of street cred.

2. Began studying piano at age 9, cello at age 10, trumpet at age 12 and guitar at age 15, though I’ve forgotten almost everything about trumpet and cello by now.

3. Sometime in September 1983, while playing for The Hurricanes in the West Windsor-Plainsboro (suburban New Jersey- near Princeton) Recreational Soccer League, I scored the only goal of my soccer career- 1 of just 2 goals scored that year against The Teamen, eventual league champions.

4. Graduated from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School in 1988.

5. Had my first date with Elizabeth Cummins, who was later to become my wife, on November 18, 1989.

6. Began giving guitar and piano lessons in 1991 while attending Rutgers University.

7. Graduated from RU with a BA in Music in 1993.

8. Released a CD of original music, Tea Leaves, in 1996. Kind of Phishy/Deady.

9. Moved to San Francisco in 1997 and managed to procure a job trading stock options on the floor of The Pacific Exchange. I got good at it, and made over $800,000 for my firm in the first half of 2000, and since I was to split my profits with them equally, I was having a very good year. Then the company went bankrupt and I didn’t get paid.

10. Tied the knot with Beth on September 25, 1999, much to the surprise of our by then resigned families.

11. Wrote the instructional method Beginning Piano for Adults, published by Workshop Arts, a subsidiary of Alfred Publishing Company, in fall 2003. You can buy it on Amazon.

12. Was asked to write the liner notes for Patch Kit, an album by Noah Baerman featuring jazz legends Ron Carter and Ben Riley. You can buy it here.

13. Took a road trip around the continent in a Volkswagon Eurovan with my wife Beth and our dog Plato from June 2003 to March 2004.

14. Decided to go back into music education, and had a great time teaching some wonderful people.

15. In August of 2006, my wife’s firm shut down and we followed her career back to the East Coast.