Author: Robert Elessar

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The aged man that coffers up his gold is blogged with cramps and gouts and painful fits

Hello, all.  Good morning and welcome to Thursday again.  It’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

Of course, the major news in the human world—such as it is—is the ongoing international tour de force of the COVID-19 virus.  I’ve expressed (elsewhere) my frustration with the irrationality with which people are responding to this pandemic*, including the hoarding of toilet paper, which makes little to no sense, and believing sub-moronic videos that say, for instance, that you can cure the virus or prevent its spread by aiming a hot blow-dryer into your nose and mouth.  These are such things as make me wish—only semi-facetiously—that people needed a license to reproduce.  Don’t even get me started on the various absurd prophecies and conspiracy theories many embrace and share about this and other global events.  It’s bizarre that people can simultaneously think so highly and so poorly of human nature, in such unjustifiable ways.

Behaviors such as these tend to exacerbate my baseline melancholy, and have in the past led me to, among other things, write a song about depression.  The song, in this case, was Breaking Me Down, of which I shared the “final release” earlier this week on Iterations of Zero and on YouTube.  When I originally wrote it, I wasn’t thinking explicitly about depression, but I was going through a pretty bad exacerbation, so when I wrote a poem/song about my thoughts and feelings, that was what came out.

I have recorded and released earlier versions of the song, but they suffered partly from my inexperience with mixing and production, and from initially being too low (the final product is up two full steps from how I initially wrote it), and too slow.  The original vocals were not so great, either, both in recording/mixing quality and in the singing.  However, as with most things, practice makes better, though it’s unlikely that it ever makes “perfect”**.  So, now, the song is in a higher key and at a quicker tempo, such that I playfully refer to it as a song about depression that you can dance to if you feel like it.  I think that’s a pretty cool accomplishment, though you may or may not agree that I’ve succeeded.

After fixing this song up, I realized that if I remaster my first, sort of jokey song, Schrodinger’s Head, I’ll have enough for about half an album(!).  That’s five original songs, running a total of roughly twenty-five minutes.  Of course, being the lunatic that I am, that thought immediately led me to go back and start tweaking Schrodinger’s Head, including re-recording vocals and doing some harmony.  That’s not so hard—the good thing about singing is, one always has one’s instrument.  And the actual remixing/remastering process, though time-consuming, is weirdly entertaining and satisfying.

The real issue is that once this is done, I will no doubt feel the urge, or the drive, or the compulsion, to make more songs for the other side of an album***.  I do have here and there the beginnings of other songs, and even have a longer portion of something I mean to write about a manga character, but I just know that this is going to consume a lot of time.  Of course, if I were in one of those industries that’s been forced to take a hiatus in response to COVID-19, writing and recording songs might be a good use of my extra hours.  Unfortunately—well, fortunately, really…let’s be fair and positive, if that’s possible for me—my job is going strong, and I continue to be in the office five to six days a week.  Thus, this little musical hobby tends to eat into my real work, which is writing.

That being said, though, Unanimity is coming along well.  I’m nearly done with the latest run-through, and it’s getting closer and closer to publishable form.  It certainly is a long story, but at least I don’t find it boring.  Whether anyone else will share my assessment only time can tell, but at least liking it myself is a good starting point.

That’s pretty nearly it for this week.  I hope you all do your best to stay well…but don’t do crazy and stupid things, okay? For my part, I’ve always frequently washed my hands and coughed and sneezed into the hollow of my elbow, but then, I am an MD.  As for social distancing, well, that’s something I haven’t ever had to think about much.  It seems to be a task at which I’m particularly gifted, and I’ve only gotten better, if that’s the correct term, over the years.  Remember what I said about practice?

Ironically enough, I—someone very far from being attached to existence—am relatively protected compared to all the many people who want so desperately to cling to their lives.  I wouldn’t call it cosmic irony—that would probably have to involve quasars, galaxies, black holes, dark energy, and the like—but it is certainly irony at a high level.

TTFN

*I know the root words are different, but I can’t help imagining that the word “pandemic” should somehow mean “bread for the people,” or maybe “bread made out of people,” such as Jack and the Beanstalk’s giant might enjoy.

**In most cases, the term “perfect” isn’t defined, and is probably undefinable.  Unless one has a clearly delineated set of criteria by which to judge something, declaring perfection is mere wordplay.  I’m a fan of wordplay, of course, but in this case, people seem to think they mean something, formally, when they use the term.  It leads to much confusion.  It also leads many people to drive themselves to distraction, often to despair, and occasionally to destruction in the dreadful pursuit of “perfection”, a hallucinatory goal that never comes nearer than the horizon.  By all means, strive always to improve yourself.  But sincerely trying to achieve perfection can lead to a life of frustration and self-loathing.

***Don’t ask me what I mean to do with such a collection once I make it, assuming that I do.  It’s not as though I have any experience in making or releasing albums.  I would, however, almost certainly call it “Iterations of Zero”.  Consistency is good.

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My long sickness of health and living now begins to mend, and nothing blogs me all things.

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday edition of my blog post.  Enter freely and of your own will.

I considered donning my metaphorical doctor’s hat* today and discussing the coronavirus that’s currently causing mass panic and near-panic, but I think there’s an abundance of such discussions out there now by people who get paid to talk about it—and, alas, by people who have no business talking about it.  I’ll just say this much:  while care and concern are warranted, and significant resources and planning are appropriate and necessary to address this problem, panic is not useful.  It rarely is.  Pay attention to qualified, sober sources, follow sensible recommendations about handwashing (which ought to be your habit, anyway), practice so-called social distancing**, minimize and avoid public gatherings, work from home if you can, and for gosh sakes, if you cough or sneeze, do it into your elbow, not your hand.  If you do it into your hand by mistake, wash your hands right away, please.  Ewwwww.

And, of course, if this disease frightens you—which is not entirely unreasonable—then use that fact to motivate you to take other, far more common and similarly dangerous diseases such as influenza seriously in the future.  Familiarity should not breed apathy.

Likewise, pay attention to non-infectious but dangerous behaviors: use your turn signals (every time!), get regular exercise, don’t smoke, all that stuff.  And it should go without saying that if you text and drive (or otherwise allow your cellphones to make you into a needless hazard for the innumerable innocents with whom you share the road), then you should be given painful electric shocks to your tongue and genitals, lasting one second for the first offense, two for the second offense, four for the third offense, eight for the fourth offense, sixteen for the fifth, and so on.

I myself have been rather sick over the last weekend and well into this week so far.  It’s nothing as dramatic as COVID, just some “stomach” trouble, minor fevers and chills (for a short time), and then just generally feeling miserable and blah since late last week.  Nevertheless, work continues on Unanimity, though I’m nearing the end of the book again, and I’m about to reread a particularly sad and tragic episode in it.  Of course, it’s a “pseudo-sci-fi” horror novel, so such sad and tragic episodes abound, but this one feels particularly harsh to me…and I’m the one who wrote it, so there’s no one else to blame.

I’ve also been doing some musical tinkering here and there, despite being queasy and slightly febrile.  I figured out some of the reasons I wasn’t satisfied with my song Breaking Me Down—beyond my comparatively poor production skills when I made it—and I’ve been working on correcting those problems and producing a better version.  I posted a partially improved one here and on Iterations of Zero recently, but those are far from the finished product, though I didn’t know it at the time.  Once I get the song into a form that I like, I’ll probably remove earlier versions at least from my YouTube channel, though I’ll likely leave them here and on IoZ for posterity and archaeology.

That’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Archaeologists of the future may spend much of their careers scraping and sifting through the electronic remnants at the bottom of the crumbling ruins of our current, archaic version of cyberspace, where information may indeed remain forever, but in which it will continue to be almost hopelessly mired in what is surely one of the most lopsided signal-to-noise imbalances that life has ever seen***.  Presumably their search engines will be better even than ours, but just imagine future civilizations trying to piece together an accurate picture of early twenty-first century life by going through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit.  God help them if they stumble upon “reality TV”!

Hopefully, they’ll know enough just to come to WordPress.

With that, I think I’ll call it done for this week.  I hope you’re all as well as you can be, and continue to be as well as you can be, in this best of all currently available worlds.

TTFN

*The hat is metaphorical.  The doctor part is literal.

**I do that naturally, whether I wish it or not.  How lucky for me.

***If you need to ask which side predominates that ratio, I’m not sure what to say other than to ask if this is your first time ever getting online.

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O, let my blogs be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another of my weekly blog posts.  As usual when these appear, it’s Thursday.  Also, we’ve started a new month: March (in case you weren’t aware).

It’s very exciting, I know.

I’ve been mildly active/busy since last week’s rather grumpy blog post.  Earlier this week, while riding in to work, I began reciting The Second Coming, by Yeats, out loud to myself, I don’t know why.  It’s a cool poem, and it’s short, and it contains some of the most quotable lines ever written.  Then, after that, because I had plenty of commute left, I decided to see if I could recall the entirety of The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe.  That’s not a short poem, of course, but it’s at least as quotable as TSC.  I remembered all but one verse of it (and I at least remembered that I didn’t fully remember that one, if you take my meaning).

Anyway, I decided it would be fun to record a recitation of the poems, so I did.  Then I used the same sound program (by which I mean, “program that allows one to manipulate sound”, not “program that is solid, well-made, and stable”, though it is the latter) that I use for audio blogs and for mixing songs, to add a little background noise.  I say “noise” because, though the background for Second Coming is certainly an actual piece of music, it’s heavily manipulated and distorted, and the background for The Raven is just a series of weird, otherworldly* sounds of a purely electronic nature.

I released the recordings on Iterations of Zero, and got such a quick, good response that I decided to do a few more of my favorites yesterday morning.  I did the poem Alone, also by Poe—which I’ve always felt could have been written just for me—in two takes, because I felt the first time through didn’t quite capture what I wanted to express.  Then I thought, “Hey, since this poem is about feeling different from everyone else—feeling alien, if you will—what if I made it sound like something alien?”  So, I laid down both the audio tracks in one file, adjusted the many inconsistent spacings between words and sounds so that they lined up (as well as I could), then doubled each track and moved the duplicates either a little forward or a little backward.  Basically, it’s four tracks, not quite in sync, made from two recordings that had slight differences in inflection and emphasis.

For a bit of background noise, I quickly sang “Ahhh,” into my cell phone in three different pitches (Separately.  I’m an okay singer, but I can’t sing three notes at once!) in a slightly discordant chord, then I lined them all up, stretched the combo out, reduced the pitch, doubled it and reversed the double and combined them again, to make a creepy-creepy sound.

Then, I decided not to use that.  Instead I took a well-known piece of music, slowed it, stretched it, reversed it, and changed the pitch, to make what I hope is an equally creepy background track.  I’m not sure I made the right decision.

I’ve read a couple of other poems, including Ozymandius, by Shelley, which I’ve already released.  I did that one over a background of desert wind noise, because it just seemed so appropriate, if rather obvious.  There are still two more Edgar Allan Poe recordings that I’ve yet to release, and I’m sure I can use my weird impromptu sound effect for one or the other of them.

So, that was a lot of fun!

Of course, unfortunately, this all ate into a bit of the time I reserve for editing, so Unanimity experienced a temporary slowdown this week, but it’s very temporary indeed.  After all, there are only a few poems that I enjoy enough, and have enjoyed enough for most of my life, to want to make a recorded recitation of them.  And I don’t have any songs anything close to ready to begin composing and arranging and recording and performing, etc.**, so the space before me is free and clear for continued editing.  This is good, because I really want to get through that book and get it out, so that I can get to work on other writing projects.  Had I but world and time***, I might be able to do all of these things, but unless I become independently wealthy—or my books, etc. sell well enough for me to do this sort of thing full time—I’m afraid I’m going to have to work it into the early morning hours, as I’ve done for some time.

That’s not such a bad arrangement for me.  I’m a morning person by nature, in that I tend to wake up early and be prepared to do a lot of work when I do, though I am not sociable until well after ten o’clock.  Ask anyone who’s tried to engage me in pleasant morning conversations****.  Ask my ex-wife!  I don’t do social stuff very well at the best of times, and morning is far from the best of times for such things.  That’s my opinion, anyway.

Nevertheless, I do enjoy writing to and hearing from any or all of you.  I’d be delighted to know what you think of my renditions of the above-mentioned poems.  I’d be even more delighted if some of you who have never read these particular poems just go and have a listen.  They’re worth your time, I’m sure of that.

TTFN

*I hope

**Unless you count that Joker song I mentioned a few weeks ago.  But that’s not urgent.

***No, I don’t think I’ll be doing a recording of To His Coy Mistress, though it is very good…the medieval equivalent of Billy Joel’s Only the Good Die Young.

****Of course, part of my grumpiness in dealing with such morning matters is the usual inanity of the interactions.  People ask, “How are you?” or some variant thereof, but they don’t want an honest answer.  Frankly, I’d rather they just commented about the weather, or said “Good morning, nice to see you,” or something along those lines.  I’ve occasionally taken to replying to “How are you?” by saying, “I am that I am,” and wondering if anyone will recognize the quote.  So far, no luck.

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Some Thing or Other There Is That Doesn’t Like A Covered Wall

 

This isn’t MINE, obviously, but it IS me performing.  Though the drums are electronic, since I don’t have a set to use.

I’d love to know what you think.

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Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the blogs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad…

Okay, well, it’s Thursday, so it’s time for another of my weekly blogs.

Huzzah.

I wrote and posted something on both of my blogs last night—a sort of incoherent, stream-of-consciousness thing that one couldn’t exactly call a rant.  It was more of an…eruption, maybe? No, that sounds too violent and primal and impressive.  Perhaps an excretion?  No, that’s perhaps both a little too gross, and also a little misleading in that it implies the getting rid of waste matter in a way that’s beneficial to the organism.  What I did was nothing quite so positive or so negative.  Maybe one could think of it as a sort of cloudburst, in a sense reminiscent of the Pink Floyd song, Brain Damage:

“And when the cloudbursts thunder in your ear,
you shout and no one seems to hear,
and when the band you’re in starts playing different tunes,
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”

Sort of along those lines.  Maybe.  It’s still probably not quite what I mean, but I’m having a hard time getting at that.

I could of course just direct you to the posting here or on Iterations of Zero, but I woke up in the middle of the night and took it down in both places.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe I feel that though it said things I yearn to say and to have heard, in the end I think it will be worse than useless; it will be counterproductive, drawing exactly the sort of response I don’t want, and which will be ever more maddening…whatever that might be.

I’m honestly both conflicted and confused about it.  I wrote what I wrote and posted it because I was feeling at my wit’s end—which is never a long journey for me, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.  And honestly, I was just as much at my wit’s end when I unpublished it, so it’s not as though I thought better of the decision.  I just thought differently.  I didn’t delete it, though, and I may repost it at some later time.  (I can, after all, hardly now choose to repost it at an earlier time.)

I’ve decided, at least for right now, to stop putting pictures at the head of these blog posts.  I’ve been adding them with the rather pathetic intention to try to garner more interest and draw in more readers by having some interesting image accompany my writing, as if that really made much sense.

It’s one thing when pictures are there for a reason, as when a news story is accompanied by photos of the scene that provide context and clarification, or when illustrative figures are included in a scientific discussion.  But if a picture is just something to appeal to the preschooler in all potential readers, to draw them in with a form of click-bait, well…I can do without that.  This is a written blog (except when I’m sharing songs or similar), and writing is what I do on it.  I draw at times in my personal life, but I’ve not shared any of my drawings here, and it’s not what I hope to do, nor is it my primary skill or calling.

Honestly, if people don’t have the patience to read printed words without accompanying pictures, however unnecessary or irrelevant, then I have no use for the world, let alone for such readers.

I may change my mind.

As for other things, well, Unanimity continues at a steady pace.  It’s shrinking and tightening slowly as I edit it, and I think it’s improving thereby.  Whether or not you would agree would depend upon your standards for what constitutes improvement, but since I’m the author, my standards are the ones that apply.  Anyone who doesn’t like it certainly doesn’t have to read it.

I think that’s it for this week.  Not much else is going on.

TTFN

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Lovers and madmen have such seething blogs…that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.

I'm not in the street you fairy

 

Okay, so…hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m not flagrantly ill*, so that must mean that it’s time for another blog post.  Huzzah!

It’s hard to think of much that’s new with me since last Thursday.  I did get one very nice comment on this blog about my song, Like and Share, and of course, family and friends on Facebook and elsewhere had some very kind words about it.  Since then, regarding music: I’ve been practicing regularly, and I’m working on two projects, neither of which is as “serious” as Like and Share was.  First, I’m working on recording a “bad cover” of the Beatles song, Something, which I’ve been practicing/learning for the guitar for a while now**.  I’m hoping to make something that’s not too embarrassing to have other people hear.

I’ve also been finally arranging a tune I made up a loooong time ago for the Joker’s song from the graphic novel The Killing Joke, written by the justly legendary Alan Moore and illustrated by the absolutely brilliant Brian Bolland.  The melody just came to me when I read the story from early on, but I never wrote it down or anything; like so many of these things, it’s just been bouncing around in my head ever since.  Well, now I have written it, and I’ve worked out the chord structure and everything—for the piano mainly.  If I get to the point where I can play my own frigging composition at speed without missing notes all over the place, I may record it.

I know they made an animated film version of the story in recent years, and apparently someone must have written their own version of the tune for the Joker’s song, but I’ve neither seen nor listened to it, nor will I before I finish putting my own together.  I don’t want to taint my own thoughts, nor get too depressed about the movie version being either better or worse than my version.

Those are just frivolous little playthings, though… “fairy toys”, as Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream might say.  Not that everything isn’t frivolous from the right perspective, but these are frivolous even from my own point of view***.  My most important work, to me, is my writing, and most particularly my fiction, but for some time now, and still for a bit of time to go, that work has been and will be comprised solely of the editing/tweaking of Unanimity, since it’s such a long story (I still like it a lot, though; don’t get me wrong).

Quite some time ago—but not nearly long ago enough—I decided that I wouldn’t begin any new story until I finished the previous one.  This is because one of the main things that derailed me from finishing many (or any) books earlier in life was my tendency to become distracted and start some new project before ever having finished previous ones.  And so, many things were begun but few were finished…and enterprises of great pith and moment with this disrespect their courses turned awry and lost the name of action.

It’s a common enough lament, I suppose, but it’s terribly annoying for me to look back and realize how many balls I dropped because I kept trying to juggle instead of giving just one of them at a time a good, solid fling into the distance.  Such is the metaphorical nature of regret.

On a lighter note, I just realized that it’s 02/20/2020 today, or in the European form, 20/02/2020.  That’s not as cool as 02/02/2020 was, but it’s still fun for numberphiles like me.  Of course, all dates and dating systems are arbitrary (though the length of a day and of a year do refer to real, physical cycles).  Even most serious Christian scholars (including former pope Benedict, aka Darth Ratzinger) estimate that Jesus was probably born sometime between what we would call 6 B.C. and 4 B.C.  None put his birth at year zero…for there is no year zero in that dating system!  (And almost no one really believes that Jesus was born three or four days after the winter solstice in whatever year.)  The counts of years and of months and of days are just arbitrary.  But the numbers can still be fun.

That’s about that, I guess.  Not much more to talk about.  Or, to put it another way, there’s way too much stuff to talk about (or, rather, “about which to talk”) to get started on it here in my weekly blog post.  Perhaps I’ll try, yet again, to touch upon it in audio posts or to write about it, either on Iterations of Zero, or here.  More likely, I’ll just keep having the conversation with myself in my head—and sometimes out loud—until I can finally shut the stupid soliloquy up for good.

TTFN

*Physically, anyway.  By which I mean outside the brain…though that’s certainly a physical organ.  But I’ll try not to split hairs.

**Not as long as I’ve been working on mastering the lead guitar part from Knives Out, by Radiohead, but that’s difficult mainly because it’s just got a lot going on and has no real slow spots.  It reminds me of some of Bach’s Two-part Inventions, which is part of why I like it.

***Actually, to be fair, pretty much everything is frivolous from my point of view, since I’m fairly unconvinced even of the possibility of any external, intrinsic meaning to anything at all.

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Discuss unto me: art thou blogger, or art thou base, common, and popular?

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Hello and good morning!  Welcome to another Thursday and—almost, but not quite, by definition—another episode of my (usually) weekly blog post.

First, let me apologize for missing last week without a word.  I ate something that really didn’t agree with me* early in the week, and for most of the rest of the week I was quite ill.  I considered getting online last Thursday to jot out a quick message to the effect of, “Hey, I’m sick, so I’m not making a formal blog post this week,” but I didn’t even have the gumption for that.

Again, I apologize.

I haven’t been completely idle over the last few weeks, however.  In fact, I’ve been rather absorbed with creating/producing/performing my latest—and probably best so far, at least in production quality—song.  It’s called “Like and Share”, and I’ve posted it here on this blog, and as a video** on Iterations of Zero, and on YouTube here.  As the name no doubt suggests, it’s a song that deals with social media, and as my nature no doubt suggests, it deals with the dark side of such media.

Sorry; I am who I am.

Though I always say words to this effect, this time I really, really, REALLY would like to know what you think about the song, so if you have a moment, please take a listen.  It doesn’t sound dark or anything, in case you’re worried.  Apparently, it’s got something of a sixties feel.  My sister—to whom I owe a tremendous debt for listening to various drafts and letting me know about balance issues and clarity issues and whatnot—said that if George Harrison and Pink Floyd had made a song together, this would be it.

Now…she’s my doting older sister, so she’s going to tend to be generous; I don’t want you to get your hopes up unreasonably based on her statement***.  Still, I do think it’s pretty good as far as it goes.  But I am needy, in my own weird little way, so if any (or all?) of you could take four minutes and thirty-seven seconds’ to listen, and then a moment or two more to make a comment either on my blog(s) or on YouTube or on Facebook (it’s also posted there), I’d be deeply grateful.

Seriously.  I’m begging.

As is usual when I’m in the final throes of making one of my songs, I’ve missed about two or three days’ worth of editing on Unanimity, but I’m back to it now with a vengeance.  It’s coming along and tightening up nicely.  I’m not yet getting bored of it, and most importantly (to me) I still like my main characters a lot.

It’s very hard to enjoy a story, even a good one, if one dislikes the characters, especially the protagonist(s).  I think the closest thing I know to an exception to that rule is The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  Though I find Thomas Covenant at least somewhat sympathetic (some of the time) and almost always interesting, I am by no means surprised when some people say they absolutely loathe him.  However, essentially all the other characters in the books are so moving and inspiring—especially Mhoram**** and Foamfollower—that even if you passionately hate Thomas Covenant, you can still really enjoy the books.  Also, the villain of the series, Lord Foul, is probably my single favorite bad guy of all time.  It doesn’t hurt that he speaks so eloquently that you might think him to be channeling Shakespeare himself.

It doesn’t hurt that he actually speaks, come to think of it.  The one serious dissatisfaction I’ve always had with The Lord of the Rings is that Sauron isn’t really a character.  I know, I know, that makes him all the more menacing—like a force of nature, rather like Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones.  Just imagine if we were able to read a conversation with Cthulhu!  Probably his voice alone would drive an interlocutor mad.

And indeed, in LotR, when Pippin interacts with Sauron via the palantír, we’re told that his laughter is like daggers, and I don’t think it’s meant metaphorically.  Still, Lord Foul achieves the unquestionable status of absolute worst guy in his universe, and a definite force of pure evil, even though we meet him as a character—a person—very early in the books.  Just take this, one of my favorite quotes from the end of his initial interaction with Thomas Covenant:

“Do not forget whom to fear at the last.  I have had to be content with killing and torment, but now my plans are laid, and I have begun.  I shall not rest until I have eradicated hope from the earth.  Think on that and be dismayed.”

Yes, a character can use the proper objective form of a commonly misused pronoun and still be fundamentally evil.  Actually, there are probably those who think that anyone who uses that form is evil, but who would entertain such nonsense?

Anyway, before I go off on too many tangents, I think I’ll wrap things up for today.  Thank you for reading, apologies for last week, and I do hope that you’ll take a bit of time to listen to and comment on my new song…and even, if you’re so inclined, to “Like” and “Share” it.  This is not straightforwardly ironic, perhaps, but given the rather negative attitude the song conveys toward some aspects of social media, perhaps it really would be ironic to do so.

I think that if you can achieve real irony in any given day, then surely that day hasn’t been wasted.

TTFN

*It thought, for instance, that Shakespeare was a mediocre writer and that mathematics and science are boring.

**As usual, the “video” portion is just a static image of the IoZ logo (see below), so don’t get your hopes up…or, alternatively, don’t be afraid; you won’t have to watch me singing.

***I personally get a sort of Simon and Garfunkel vibe from it, but that’s mostly because of the harmonization.

****I quote Thomas Covenant himself here: “You’re making a big mistake if you ever assume that Mhoram is helpless.”

 

ioz

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“Like and Share” – a song

© 2020 by Robert Elessar All rights reserved

 

Words and music by Robert Elessar

Performed by Robert Elessar

Produced by Robert Elessar

 

Can you be what I can be?

Could you be as cool as me?

Commonness is misery.

Like and Share if you agree.

 

Do you think you’re special, too?

Am I as unique as you?

Every other point of view

Seems to be the same.  Could that be true?

 

Look at all my pretty pictures.

Don’t you wish that you were me?

You don’t know the half of it.

You don’t know what you can’t see.

 

Do you believe what you can see?

Pictures of a life so free,

Edited for quality,

Empty of reality.

 

You can’t feel what you don’t know;

You see only what I show.

Just that superficial glow,

Not the darkness that lies below.

 

Look how perfect my world must seem.

Don’t you wish that this was you?

Don’t you wish your life was so fine?

God know, God knows, God knows

I do too.

 

You can’t like what you can’t see.

You can’t see the actual me.

This is all illusory,

Even if you don’t agree.

 

Do I see what you can see?

Are you dead inside like me?

Every flaw is agony.

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Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; blogs rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

ulysses

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.  I didn’t sleep well last night—even by my standards—so if I say something even more bizarre or incoherent than usual, I can only apologize and beg you to bear with me.

It’s been a moderately interesting week.  I can honestly say I think I’m finally starting to see some effects of my new depression treatment regimen (not “regime”).  This can’t mean as much to all of you as it does to me, but nonetheless it’s probably a welcome thought for those committed to following this blog.  At least it means—if I’m correct in my assessment—that I’ll be less likely to write quite such dreary things as sometimes drip from my computer when I’m wallowing in the dumps.

I posted an audio smidgen—only about seven minutes long, if memory serves—on Iterations of Zero yesterday, though it was recorded a week ago. People don’t seem to be responding much to those, so I may relegate them to history’s anonymous junk heap and go back to trying to find time to write about such topics instead of simply moaning and groaning aloud about them.  That’s fine, though.  Written language is more efficient.  It’s also the lifeblood of civilization, besides being the love of my life.

I did, though, on a whim whose source I can’t really credit, decide yesterday to start doing audio for my second latest short story Penal Colony.  I had no specific plans for how much to do, but before I’d finished for the day, I’d recorded about forty-seven minutes of unedited audio, getting more than thirty percent through the story (based on Kindle’s reckoning).  I’d forgotten how much I enjoy reading my stories aloud.  I may go back to it in something like earnest (but not like Frank, I don’t like that guy), doing audio for Free Range Meat, and then resuming the audio for The Chasm and the Collision, for which I think I stopped after chapter nine.  Then, who knows, maybe my other books and stories will follow.

It’s gonna be some time before I get to doing audio for Unanimity, though.  Just thinking about it is daunting.

As further evidence of my gradual but hopeful improvement of chronic mood disorder, I sent out copies of the latest version of Unanimity and my partially complete novella with the working title Safety Valve to my sister and to a dear friend from my youth (both of whom share my love of reading), just in case, as I think I put it, something happens to me.  This may seem morbid and not at all non-depressed at first glance, but it’s a departure.  When I’m deeply in the throes of depression, I become almost completely nihilistic at numerous levels, such that I think that if I die, I really don’t care what happens to my writing, no matter how much work has gone into it…and there has been a LOT of work.  Needless to say, if I were to die, I would not then care what happened to my writing, but the me now can care—or not—about things that the nonexistent future me will be unable to choose to care about or not…if that makes any sense.

Anyway, the fact that I did it shows at least some improvement.  It’s still possible that I might do something successfully self-destructive*, but at least I’m acting to prophylax against such occurrences.

As for other things…I’m studiously avoiding following the process of the presidential trial in the Senate.  I already feel a thoroughgoing contempt for pretty much everyone involved in the government—and by extension many of the people who keep electing them—and in my currently improving but still-fragile mood, I just don’t need the exposure to all the stupidity, vanity, ignorance with wings, hubris, manipulation (successful and otherwise), and petty monkey-poop throwing by a collection of supposed public servants who actually serve no one but themselves, and don’t even do that very well.  It’s spectacles such as these that lead me to the calm, resigned feeling that, hey, it’s not such a big loss if humanity, and even the whole planet Earth, just withers and dies.  It’s gonna happen someday anyway; it might as well be sooner rather than later.

I can do without reinforcing that feeling.  It’s already hard enough to argue against it logically; I’d like to curb the emotion.  Otherwise, I might start working on a doomsday machine of my own to see if I can hasten the end.

Don’t worry, don’t worry.  At least as of now, I’m not doing any such thing.

Humanity doesn’t really need my help, do they?

TTFN

*Of course, there are always external dangers to life and limb for us all, and sooner or later they do catch up to us, but I tend to be by far the greatest threat to my own continued existence.