Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so you know the drill:  it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I don’t know what I’m going to write about today.  I don’t have much to say, or if I do, I don’t know what it might be.  I’ve gotten out of practice writing about nothing—or beginning to write about nothing and waiting to see what happens—since I stopped writing near-daily blog posts.  Right now I just feel blank and empty…and nonspecifically angry.

Of course, I’ve been editing Extra Body, and I’m doing a decent job of trimming it down.  I feel that I’m getting more ruthless about removing passages of digression about tangential things in my descriptions and expositions.  Having written the story on the laptop computer, it was only too easy for me to write and write and write a lot, very fast, of whatever came into my mind.

I guess that’s okay, as long as one is careful then to pare away the extraneous after one is done.  It’s analogous to sculpture, I suppose.  One can start with a huge, bulbous lump of clay and make the general shape however involved as one wants, but to get down to final form, one needs to remove the stuff that doesn’t match the vision, even if that vision isn’t necessarily very clear when one begins.

Not that I’m a sculptor.  I did love to play with modeling clay when I was young, though.  I used to get multicolored packs of it and almost immediately mix the colors together, because I knew it was going to happen anyway.  I never had any desire to make something out of clay that had different hues in different parts.

It was interesting to meld and squeeze various different colors together, seeing them form ribbons of shades that got finer and more interdigitated as I folded and  refolded the clay, the fat stripes of various colors turning to thinner, more finely and multi-layered stripes, eventually turning into a sort of purply-gray-brown uniformity.

I thus learned an intuitive notion of the second law of thermodynamics early in life.  There was never any inkling of the possibility of unmixing the colors of modeling clay.  After two colors came into even momentary significant contact, it wasn’t possibly to separate them completely.  And after one interfolding, there was no point to try to keep anything separate.

That never bothered me.  I liked the shade it became, and I liked not having to worry about trying to separate colors.  The shape and feel of the clay, and the squeezing and molding it into various shapes, was enjoyable.

It would probably be useful to let students of topology play with modeling clay, or perhaps with Silly Putty™, just to give them a proprioceptive insight into the deformation of shapes and surfaces and the nature of holes and the like.  You can really get why a donut and a coffee mug are the same shape topologically if you literally start with one and mold it into the other without making any new holes or eliminating preexisting ones.

Maybe it wouldn’t be very useful.  Still, Einstein (so I’ve read) enjoyed playing with blocks when he was young.  He apparently thought that experience influenced his physical intuition; and there have been few physicists with better or more fruitful intuitions about how physics will tend to behave.

That’s enough of that tangent.

Again, I’m about midway through my third edit of Extra Body, and I’m definitely finding that it improves with less digression.  I don’t know if anyone else will agree, but it’s not as though I have some huge audience to whom to cater; audience capture is not my problem, and I’m not sure if it ever would be.  Maybe I should start a political and social and scientific commentary thing on Substack.  And maybe I should make beans into peas*.

I’ve been diddling around on the guitar on and off on most work mornings, but I can’t really play when I’m back at the house, because I’m not really alone there, so I feel too self-conscious.  At the office, early in the morning, I can play and sing and not have to worry about anyone listening or responding.  I’m my own harshest critic, but at least when I’m alone I can express myself.

It’s a weird conundrum, because on the one hand, on the rare occasions when people have enjoyed my singing or playing or writing or academic work or anything else in my life, it’s been tremendously moving and gratifying; even the thought of someone accidentally hearing me playing and saying they think it’s really nice can bring tears to my eyes.  But I don’t really think anything I do is worthy of praise.  I can’t feel proud of something unless it’s literally perfect.

It’s pretty remarkable that I released the songs I did over recent years, given that they are not perfect, since they were produced in very inauspicious circumstances**.  But I think a lot of that was just me seeing, for my own sake, if I could actually do it.  Then I did, and I was, like, “Okay.  I can do that.  That’s that done.”

It’s like in medical school, when I got honors in my first two classes and then I was kind of, “Okay, I can do that, I guess; point proven to myself.”  And after that I didn’t feel motivated to get the top marks in the class or anything, so I didn’t (except on epidemiology and statistics, which felt too gripping and too important not to squeeze as much as I could out of it).

I suppose if I had stumbled upon a significant number of people who really liked my music/my songs and said so, I might’ve felt more impetus to do more, and to do better versions, but who knows?  Anyway, that’s not how such things tend to happen.

I also recently got briefly captivated by Facebook reels related to drawing and painting, and I bought several kinds of pencils and pens and stuff, hoping or imagining that I would start drawing again, but apart from a little doodle or two, it’s not really going anywhere.

I decided to try to play the Radiohead song Reckoner after I rewatched the “from the basement” video and realized that the guitar in that song was entirely played by Thom Yorke (while singing) and everyone else pretty much did various rhythm parts.  I turned to the song chords in my Radiohead guitar chord book and realized that they were straightforward chords (C, E minor, D, A, that sort of thing) but played high up the neck in unusual locations, finger-picked***.

However, I discovered that my low E-string is apparently getting long in the tooth, and the note on the 12^th fret—which ought to be an E one octave higher than the open string—is very different than it should be.  It sounded horrible!  So, I ended up just playing and singing the song using more ordinary, “first position” chords, but it wasn’t as satisfying.  Still, it’s good falsetto practice.  I suppose I could just change the E-string, but that involves more “executive function” than I have to spare, especially on a Strat****.

That’s about all that I have to talk about.  I’ll close by noting that the Tri-rail is running late this morning.  Almost every day it runs late at least at some point.  The announcements say, “Train blah-blah is running late however many minutes…stand by for more information”, but there never is any more information.

The whole thing should probably be burned down and started over—as should the entire world.  Actually, maybe leave off the “started over” part.  Just burn everything and let the ashes cool into the microwave background that will eventually become the long radio wave background.  It’s not as though there’s any point to anything.

This blog post has also gone on too long.  Heck, the blog itself has gone on too long.  Everything about me has gone on too long.  So I’ll let you go for today.

TTFN

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*That’s a reference from the movie Time Bandits.

**That fact may have given me an escape clause from the rule of perfection.

***On a lovely Gibson SG in his case.

****You have to take the back panel off and such, and it’s a pain.