Music

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Chords in music and in time

It’s Monday again, the start of another work week‒that is, if your work week begins on Monday.  In the modern world‒and indeed, perhaps always‒there are many people whose work weeks start on days other than Monday.  I suspect, though, that the majority of people still work their week starting on Monday, at least in the West, though it may not be a large majority.  If anyone out there has easy access to any rigorous statistics on the matter, I would be interested to learn.  On the other hand, I’m not going to seek the information on my own, so it’s not a tragedy if no readers have it.  I like trivia, but this is definitely quite trivial, at least from my point of view.

I hope you all had a good weekend.  My own was not very interesting, and I felt tired, but then again, I did have a cold starting in the middle of last week, so I guess I was still recovering.  I feel as though that particular infirmity is reasonably well on its way.

I worked a little on the chords of last week’s song, Native Alien, though not very much.  At least at the house I have my keyboard, so I can play melody and chords at once to confirm which chords sound best to me.  Interestingly, it seems that the chord to start the song (at least the melody) will be a C major chord, which is the V chord of the key of F major (though if the song could be considered to be in D minor, it would be the VII chord).  This is not unusual, of course, nor particularly noteworthy.  It’s just interesting for me to recognize specific facts to which I didn’t pay attention when I wrote earlier songs, because I’ve thought more about music theory since then, probably because of the guitar.  It’s a curiosity for me.

Speaking of songs, today I plan to do another round of flipping coins to pick a basic topic, or subject, or trigger‒whatever might be the better term‒for another song (lyrics) for this week.  Of course, last week’s word, Earth, didn’t really become the subject of the song, just a takeoff point, but that’s fine.  The idea was just to give me some way to give myself a start.

In other news, I had a weird thought last night after watching one of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest videos.  I wrote an email to myself about the thought so I wouldn’t forget it, and I’ll include that text here, so you‒yes, you‒can see what you think (I have edited this text for clarity and to correct typos):

“If the overall arrow of time is caused by the tendency toward increase in entropy from a lower to a higher entropy state (“Big Bang” to heat death, at the cosmic level), that could behave analogously to a current (like in the ocean, not a wire).  Meanwhile, locally*, we know that the laws of physics don’t appear to have any directionality time-wise.  So perhaps locally, matter and wave interferences in the sense of quantum wavefunctions can happen not just in space but in time itself and the future can feedback on the past, just not in such a large way that it would overwhelm the overall tendency (though maybe even that is not impossible).  The effect of such a temporally retrograde wave wouldn’t flow backwards so fast that it would override the current itself (probably).  However, that wave could still affect its predecessor, creating standing interference patterns in time and things along those lines that might be the source of so-called super determinism.  Think about this a little bit.”

That last injunction was intended for me, but if any of you want to think about it, you’re welcome to do so (it’s not as though I could stop you even if I wished to stop you, which I don’t).  Of course, if I’m going to really explore this notion, I’m going to need to bone up on my mathematical physics in a serious way, and it’s always hard to find the time.  That’s always been a bit of a weakness of mine:  I get very interested in something and develop skills in it because of my interest, then something else catches my attention, and soon all my energy goes there.  I don’t tend to forget the things I learned previously, at least, and sometimes when I return to them, I even find that I’m better than I was before (e.g., after not playing guitar for quite a while, when I picked it up again, certain songs or chords with which I had trouble before had become much easier).

Also, of course, the fact that I have to work for a living is another distraction.  I really do need some ultra-wealthy patron out there to provide me with living and intellectual resources so that I can devote my time to my wonderful pursuits without having to earn my living.  I also want world peace, world freedom…and a unicorn.

I guess in the meantime I should probably go back to using Brilliant dot org to spruce myself up in terms of mathematics and physics (and computer science in the meantime, why not?).  I have an annual subscription (supporting Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I mentioned earlier), so I might as well use it.  It’s a better use for my spare time than diddling around on social media.

Okay, well, I hope you all have a very good day, and that it is the beginning of a very good week for you.

*I’m using the colloquial meaning of “locally” her not the strict physics definition of locality.

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Songs from a life less interesting*****

In case it wasn’t obvious, I did not go to work yesterday.  I have a head cold of some variety that seemed to begin in the afternoon on Wednesday‒maybe it started sooner than that, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I stayed at the house yesterday, trying to rest.  But I was pretty stuffed up, which I still am, and now my mouth is dry from (apparent) mouth-breathing when I slept.

Sorry, I know this is really dull material.  Such is life, I guess.  Or, at least, such is my life.  I suppose a dull life is better than many of the lives that would make for more interesting reading.  This was a point I first recall encountering in The Hobbit, when Bilbo remarked that his time in Rivendell would make boring reading, though it was wonderful to experience.

I think it is possible to have an exciting or at least interesting life that does not fall prey to the curse of “may you live in interesting times”.  I think it is possible to have a life that most people would find fascinating to hear about, and which is also quite fulfilling to experience.  But it does seem that this is a relatively small subset of available lives.

For the most part, humans seem to prefer stories about harrowing, horrific things.  This is not restricted to fiction, but is also part of why news media tend to focus on the more dire and terrifying news stories.

Of course, there are probably good, sound biological reasons for this.  As a matter of survival, it’s crucial to attend to danger and threat much more so than to pleasant, routine, comfortable things, because those creatures that don’t become extra alert and energetic when danger is present are less likely to leave offspring than are those that respond with arousal*.  So the fact that many of our favorite stories describe horrible things may be analogous to why so many of our snacks are very sweet and/or very salty:  a supranormal stimulus increases engagement powerfully, and can easily become habit-forming.

How in the world did I get on that subject?  I’m not sure.  I guess I could go back and reread this to find out, but I’ll be doing that when I edit it, anyway, so I’m not going to waste my time now.

In other news, I wrote a second verse for my “weekly” song on Wednesday afternoon, and even took a little notebook with me with the song paper in it, so I can continue the process wherever I might be.  Unfortunately, I did not work on it at all yesterday, but then again, I didn’t really work on anything yesterday.  I’ll try to write a chorus and then a third verse today.

I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to produce something superb, even assuming I could do that on command.  I’m just trying to produce something**.  So if it feels a little inane and contrived to me, well, that’s okay.  It’s just got to be some “song”.

I use quotes there because I am really starting with the poem, the lyrics, which is “usually” how I do things.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do lyrics and music within one week on the same song.  At least so far, that pace doesn’t seem to be in the process of being achieved, though I suppose I might finish the song and come up with a melody over the weekend.  Or maybe what I can do is make songs in a kind of assembly-line style:  lyrics this week, then next week, while coming up with lyrics for another song, do the melody for the first song.

I have heard that most songwriters tend to do melodies first and then come up with lyrics.  That may be a true statistical statement, but I know it’s not the way everyone does it, because at least two of my favorites do otherwise.

We know, of course, that Elton John writes the music after Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics, by their own description of their songwriting process.  And, of course, many operas and musicals start with the libretto***, and the music is written afterward.  And Roger Waters, one of the best lyricists ever****, implies in The Wall that he writes his lyrics as poems, e.g., “I’ve got a little black book with my poems in…”, and also e.g., the scene in the movie where young Pink has his poem book, which contains the lyrics for the song Money, discovered by the oppressive teacher.

So, writing lyrics and then making a melody afterward wouldn’t put me in bad company (though I don’t know how the band Bad Company actually wrote their songs).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Batman knows if I was even coherent.  I suppose the editing will make that somewhat clearer, but my mind might be fuzzy enough that I cannot even tell in the immediate editing period.  But you will know.  So, please, have patience with me.

And have a good day and a good weekend, also, if you’re able.

*There’s nothing sexy in this use of the word, just to be clear.  I’m not referring to creatures that get “turned on” by danger and threat; those types of creatures seem less likely to survive than their compatriots, ceteris paribus.

**Not the Beatles song.  I already did a cover of that, anyway.

***Italian for “little book”, in case that wasn’t obvious.

****As evidence:  He wrote almost all of the lyrics for Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall.

*****I feel like this could be a good album title.

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The pointless but occasionally enjoyable music of this sphere.

Well, it’s Tuesday now, as you will know if you’re reading this on the day of its release.  You might not be sure if you read it later.  As far as I know, it’s not possible for you to read this earlier than I write it, but if you have that capacity, presumably you don’t need me to tell you what day and time it is when I’m writing it.  Presumably, you have quite a handle on times that things happen if you have that kind of ability—though I suppose that if you travel through time a lot, you might eventually have a hard time keeping track of what the local labels are on dates and times.

Sorry, that’s a bit of frivolous nonsense, which I hope doesn’t offend any non-time-travelers out there.  I’m here again, writing a blog post on my way to work and wondering what the point is to anything.  Not that I honestly suspect that there is a point to anything, really.  As far as I can see, there is no point to anything, and there is also no point to everything.  Everything just happens, and there’s no more to any of it than that, as far as I can see, and as far as anyone knows.

There are people who will tell you otherwise.  Lots of people claim to have found or been taught the meaning of life or of existence and whatnot, but either they are trying to manipulate you and/or sell you something, or they are sincere but mistaken.  In any case, they are not correct.  They do not know the meaning of life.  If they were to know it (not merely believe it), it could be conveyed in a way that, presumably, would be convincing to pretty much any listener.  Certainly they should be able to muster arguments, and perhaps evidence, that would convince a highly intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial.

Enough philosophy for now.

Looking back to yesterday, I mentioned my idea about setting myself a goal of writing a song a week or maybe every two weeks.  Well, I didn’t do any song writing yesterday, but I did go to the Shakespeare AZ quotes site and flip coins repeatedly to pick the topic of a first song, and what I got was:  Earth.

That’s a bit unusual as a song topic, but I guess it’s doable.  I wouldn’t want to try to do some “We are the world” kind of thing, because that’s not what I really think of when I think of the Earth.  I think of the planet, the physical things, including all the animals and plants and fungi and bacteria and archaea and all that, but also including the geology and the geography and the chemistry and physics and everything else.

Despite the saying, man is not the measure of all things.  Man is barely even the measure of man, so to speak.  Humans by and large are relatively impressive animals, but they tend to think far more highly of themselves than is merited, in almost every case.

There are probably exceptions, but none of them come immediately to mind.

So, I’ll come up first with some lyrics (AKA a poem) about the planet Earth, or at least taking off from there, so to speak.  I have to remind myself that it doesn’t have to be very long, indeed that it should not be very long—I tend to get carried away when writing things, as you probably know.

I also need to decide what structure the song should be, like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus or what have you.  Then, after that, I’ll think of an appropriate melody to go with the words.  It will probably all be quite mediocre, but the point of the exercise is not to worry about trying to be brilliant, but just to get something done.  We’ll see how that goes.

In other news—related, at least distantly—I just discovered that my former college roommate, who is also the best guitarist I’ve known, has begun producing and releasing more new music, on YouTube and on some other site.  His YouTube channel is bluetonegtr, which is a fun name because his name is Tony and of course, he plays guitar, and the blues is a big part of any really good guitarist’s repertoire (not mine).  I highly recommend checking his stuff out; he’s really good.  I’ll embed his latest song below, for your ease of access.

As for everything else, well—the world is still shit, though it certainly doesn’t have to be.  It just tends that way, or at least the human world does.  Maybe I could make that part of my song idea.  Or maybe I could deal with the fact that even life overall is pretty crappy, I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see.  Maybe I’ll just address the issue of absurd flat-Earth notions.  Maybe I could make it a comical song.

I don’t know.  This is all probably a stupid waste of time, anyway.  But time is a waste in any case, I guess, so I might as well use it stupidly.  Everyone else seems to do so.

I hope you at least enjoy at least part of your own wasted day today.

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Musings on moving and putting muses to work

It’s the start of another work week, which I guess is good from a certain point of view.  It’s a sign of…I don’t know, economic activity or some such.  I mean, it is good for people to be productive in that sense, though it’s also nice for people to have time and space to rest and to enjoy life.  After all, what’s the point of working to sustain existence if that existence is mainly dominated by discomfort and fear?

The world is complicated, of course, and many things are happening in nearly any place at nearly any time, but ultimately, for each individual, there is merely moment to moment experience.  And if that experience is negative in general, none of the other crap really matters very much.  Or so it seems to me.

You may recall—though it’s unlikely—that my workplace recently changed to a different office location.  It wasn’t a big change; we’re still in the same zip code.  But the new location is more pleasant, and the office is more pleasant as well, though smaller.  Also, in addition to there being a goodly number of apartments right across the road, there is also even a “high-end” trailer park nearby (yes, such a thing does exist).  I haven’t been to the latter, but I can see the former, and they look pretty decent.

My coworker and my boss suggested to me that I should think about moving and renting one of those apartments or—apparently these are nicer—one of the trailers.  When they suggested this, I basically gave a standard reply, with the main thing being that I hate to move.  By which I mean, I hate to change the place where I live, not that I prefer to remain stationary and frozen in person.

I hate the process of moving, I hate the necessary upheavals, the new connections to new landlords and services and so on, all of it.  I also don’t want other people touching and getting into my stuff to move it for me, and I’m not going to be able to do it myself.  Dealing with “paperwork” is another significant headache.

Ultimately, though, as I thought about it after our conversation, I realized that really a big part of the reason I don’t want to move is that I have no desire to go forward, nothing toward which to proceed, so there’s no point to the effort.  There is nothing fulfilling in my life, and I have no hope for improvement, so it seems ridiculous to spin my wheels.

I started my current living situation under the delusion that I would continue to write stories indefinitely, and then that I would make music too, and that I might reunite in a real and meaningful way with those who matter most to me.  A lot of that was a pipe dream, though I have at least made more of a connection with my youngest child.  We’ve actually been in each other’s presence twice since May, which is twice more than any other time since 2013.  That’s very good.

But otherwise, what I’m basically doing right now is waiting to die, just killing time until time kills me.  It’s being a bit of a slacker, I have to say.  I suspect that I’m going to need to take a personal hand in things—if one wants to have something done “right” one should just do it oneself, that sort of cliché.

But that runs afoul of various societal mores (and possibly morays, for all I know).  Not that I’m good at following or even grasping social mores.  I mean, the ones that make sense I have no trouble remembering, but a lot of them are irrational, and I have difficulty even desiring to internalize those.  Eventually, I’ll probably break down and say “to hell with it” and take matters into my own hands, unless something else does it for me, or unless I find some internal or external motivation that changes my status.  I don’t particularly know if I want to hope for that; everything seems to be more work than it’s worth.

In other news—either parallel or orthogonal to the above, I’m not sure which metaphor works better—I was thinking about songwriting, which I think I discussed briefly last week.  I know that at many times, bands (like the Beatles and so on) are tasked with preparing a new album, and will sit down and write songs in quite short order for such an album.

That seems intimidating, but it occurred to me that it’s probably analogous to what Stephen King does, and what Ray Bradbury described doing:  you just sit down and produce something every day.  Worry about making it better in the rewrite/editing stage, but just get something down.  It won’t all be genius—in most cases, anyway—but it will be something.

I thought, you know what, that’s probably a lot like what people like the Beatles (specifically Lennon and McCartney) did.  They knew they had to write songs for their next albums, so they just sat down and produced something, and then worked things out, rejecting some, improving others, and so on.

I thought about trying to do something like that, just out of curiosity, as an exercise, but I always have trouble thinking of topics or subjects for a song (or a poem, as the case may be), and so the poems and songs I’ve written have tended to be highly intermittent and often rather peculiar.

But I nevertheless thought that, maybe, I could set myself the task of writing songs more rapidly, just the way for a long while I wrote fiction every day.  I couldn’t write a song a day, of course.  I thought about trying to maybe write a song a week*, but even that felt intimidating.  But when I thought about writing a song a month, that seemed too slow, somehow.

So maybe I would be able to achieve something in between, maybe a song every two weeks.  But who knows, if I don’t expect myself to produce and record the songs one a week, I might be able to crank out something once a week.

And it occurred to me, also, that for subject matter I could turn to a source that I use (AZ quotes) when I can’t think of a pertinent Shakespearean quote for the title of my Thursday blog posts.  I could flip a coin to narrow it down by halves to pick my subject from among the long list of such subjects for quotes on that page.  It’s probably better than trying to find a subject by picking a random word by flipping through the pages of a book with my eyes closed.

So, who knows, maybe I’ll do that.  Maybe I’ll try to write a new “song” every one to two weeks, at least the words and basic melody.  Who knows, maybe if I’m pleased with any of them, I might do more with them and actually “release” them.  Though I currently have two songs that I wrote and haven’t yet released already:  Mercury Lamp and Come Back Again.

This is getting way too long for a single blog post, isn’t it?  Sorry to keep you, if there is anyone out there who has actually read this entire thing through to the end.  Hey, if you have, and if you feel like doing so, why not leave a comment below on WordPress so I know.  I would ask perhaps for you to leave the first line of Mercury Lamp to prove you’d read that far (and listened) but it seems unfair to ask you to do two things during a busy day.  So maybe just try to write something that makes it clear that you’ve read here.

Now, I let you go, with apologies for being so long-winded.

*I’m not talking about completing a song a week, as in getting all the parts prepared and recording and mixing and all that; that would be utterly unreasonable by myself, even if I weren’t working full-time.  But words and basic melody could be done.

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“Friday night arrives without a suitcase”

I’m writing this today on my smartphone, but this time it’s happened more or less deliberately.  I had several things to bring back to the house last night, and they made my backpack significantly heavier than usual.  Though more than capable of carrying it, I decided there was neither need nor benefit in doing so, so I left the mini laptop computer at the office.

I don’t know about what topic to write today.  I have, of course, not started jotting down potential subjects for blog posts, as I mentioned yesterday (I think).  Or perhaps I have started, but I simply didn’t think of any such topics or subjects yesterday, and so I didn’t write any down.  Such ideas almost never occur to me ahead of time, anyway.  Maybe if I were keyed into that process, it would become more common.

I did write down a potential story idea (or really a story’s beginning) yesterday.  I still do that from time to time, even though I don’t have any expectation of writing any of them.  Here, I’ll show you what I wrote based on something I saw along the route back to the house that I hadn’t noticed before:

“Story idea:  a person who lives in a thoroughly flat area is on a walk and sees a partly obscured path or road that seems to go up a slope that shouldn’t lead anywhere.  He assumes it must just be a ramp that leads to a parking structure or building that’s obscured by vegetation, and he decides to head up and see where it leads.  There’s no signage or barriers to stop him, which seems a bit odd.  He goes up, but as far as he can tell, it continues to be a road, slightly winding, through woods, up a hill that cannot be there, and soon it becomes clear that it must be very big.  What is it?  Where does it go?”

There it is, a typical trigger for a story, of the sort that happens to me occasionally.  I doubt I’ll ever write it, or indeed any fiction ever again, but it still arouses intriguing thoughts and possibilities.  If any readers find that it triggers your own ideas for a story, feel free to use it.  I give you my blessing or permission or whatever it might be.  Even if we both (or all, if there were more than one of you) were to write stories based on that trigger, they would probably all be wildly different stories.  Indeed, it seems like the sort of exercise that might be done in some “creative writing” course, with everyone writing stories based on the same prompt.

I sometimes wish I would have such notions about songs to write (or poems, which is more or less equivalent for me…unlike a lot of songwriters, apparently, I come up with the words first, because I am a wordy kind of guy).  I sometimes wonder how songs are written by very productive songwriters or songwriting teams.

I have read quite a few books and so on about or by people such as the Beatles in general and Paul McCartney specifically, and Radiohead (they are my two favorite song creating groups, though there are, of course, many others including Billy Joel, Don Henley/Glen Frey/Eagles, Roger Waters/Pink Floyd, etc.).

But nothing I have read seems to resonate with me about how to write a song.  For one thing, the primary songwriters in neither the Beatles nor Radiohead actually “read music” as they say, whereas I was “classically trained”* on both piano and cello.  So it’s quite hard for me to separate the idea of songwriting from that background, even if I were to want to do so, which I don’t.

I also really don’t tend to come up with chord progressions until after I’ve come up with a melody, but that’s probably because the cello has been my main instrument in the past (and voice even more so than that).  One rarely plays chords on a cello and almost never can one sing chords**.

Okay, well, in case anyone was interested, that was a little bit of spontaneously written “under the hood” description of some of my creative “processes”, though it seems pretentious and even misleading to talk of such a thing as a process in my case.  I suppose, if I were doing such writing full-time, I would need to have, or would just develop automatically, a more rigorous creative process, especially if it were how I made my living.

Alas, that seems unlikely to be my situation at any point in my future, though it would be nice if it happened.  We’ll see how that goes, but I can’t in good faith recommend that anyone bet on it, let alone that they hold their breath waiting.

I hope you all have a very nice weekend, or that you all have very nice weekends, which are two different ways of giving the same well-wishing that have a slightly different feel, but which empirically must mean the same thing.  In any case, please be well.

*That sounds much more high-falutin’ than it really is.  It just means that I took piano lessons and I played in orchestras at school, in which we were taught formally about musical notation and timing and‒to some degree‒music theory.

**Unless one is doing overdubs with one’s own voice, singing harmony parts.  I’ve done that on “all” of my songs, and it can be quite fun and very neat.  It was also really fun to reproduce the Beatles’ harmonies on my covers of Something and You Never Give Me Your Money.  On my songs, the harmony tends to be improvised; I certainly don’t consciously plan it ahead of time.  Some things, like the whistling in the bridge of Like and Share, just happen spontaneously.  I don’t write songs often enough for me to explore how such things happen.

 

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Viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue, would shut the blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “usual” weekly Thursday blog post.  Aren’t you lucky?

I was a bit surprised that yesterday’s post seemed to be rather successful, at least in that people commented on it, here and on social media (where I share it).  I don’t know if anyone else shared it—I encourage anyone who enjoys any of my posts to share it to your own social media, and of course, I encourage you to “like” it if you like it, though I’m falling afoul of my own cautionary song Like and Share by encouraging such activities.

Still, it would be nice if people could share my stuff or comment on it.  I’ll say again:  comments on social media aren’t as useful to me as comments here, on my main page.  Here is where all* the readers come together (over me, so to speak).  So, if one person makes a comment, it might be something that another person finds interesting or insightful, and they might comment back and even get a conversation going.

I don’t know.  I’m probably being unreasonable.  I usually am.  I just have a bit of a hard time sustaining conversation, myself, so I’m always hoping that other people will do so in response to the prompts of my random thoughts, like the ones from yesterday.

Here I’m using a rather constrained version of the term “random”; my thoughts are not random in any true, nondeterministic, quantum mechanical kind of way.  They’re just stochastic, as well as being occasionally sarcastic**, as in my third sentence above.  So, while in practice they are unpredictable, in principle, each follows directly from some individual cause or set of causes.

Of course, nowadays, many people creating “content” on the various social media ask for “likes” or “thumbs up” or whatever the specific equivalent on their site is, as well as sharing and subscribing when that applies.  They also often have things like Patreon accounts, or Ko-fi accounts or whatever (those latter ones allow people to send them small amounts—the price of a cup of coffee, for instance—to help support them), so that some of them can make an actual living by making their “content”.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by making content, i.e., by these blog posts.  I suppose one can also write posts on Substack nowadays; they are set up to allow people to give paid subscriptions in addition to free subscriptions.

Actually, I think WordPress has instituted something along those lines as well; I’ve gotten notifications of some such things at some point, but I haven’t paid that much attention to them.  All the social media and search engine companies and streaming services are all changing things far too often, so I don’t even try to keep up.

This constant updating gives one (this one, anyway) the impression that the companies really don’t know what they’re doing, and that they haven’t made a good product before they put it out to the public, so they have to keep tweaking it.

I suspect, though, that it’s more that they think they have to keep changing things to keep up with all the competition.  It’s a bit as if seals and sea lions tried to grow tentacles because they saw that squid and octopuses have a fair amount of success using them.

It might be worth it to remind them (the software companies and the pinnipeds) that, while all improvement is change, not all change is improvement.  In fact, most potential change is at best neutral, and more often detrimental, especially in situations in which something is working at least reasonably well.

This is the root of the admission in the Declaration of Independence that prudence dictates that established governments should not be changed due to light or transient causes (something like that, anyway).  It’s also part of why I hate when organizations or people call for “change” without being more specific.  I have more patience with the label “progressive”, because at least it gives tacit recognition to the notion that progress (by whatever definition) is what we want, not mere random change.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection happens with random mutations and non-random survival, and that over time, progress can be made that way, but it is a grim, ungainly, blundering, low, ghastly, ominous, wasteful, and horribly cruel process (here I’m combining words from Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Darwin).  It’s better to use engineering principles rather than random trial and error if one wants to head more swiftly and surely in better directions***.

Anyway, I don’t have any direct way to monetize this blog, though there are probably ways it can be done.  And so, I keep going to work every day, as I am doing now.  If people want to support me, of course, giving “likes” and commenting and (if such a thing ever happens) sharing the link to the posts is also very nice.

Of course, if anyone wants to support me monetarily, they can certainly do so—in principle—by buying my published books and talking about them to other people (and rating and reviewing them on Amazon, for instance).  And, of course, they can play/stream my music on Spotify and YouTube Music and iTunes and so on.  Some of my songs are even available to use as background music for reels on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

But I am more or less certain that I’ve made a staggering**** net loss on my music.  That’s okay.  People have listened to my songs, and some people have said that they really like them.  I even had one work friend who was a former professional musician/singer/songwriter say that he thought if my song Breaking Me Down had been released (in a professionally produced version shortened for radio) in the seventies, it would have been a hit.

So, if you so desire, please do listen to my music, share my posts, buy and read my books, all that stuff.  I would be grateful.  And hey, if any of you out there think I ought to try to monetize this blog, please let me know.

It seems unlikely that anyone actually reads far enough even to let me know their response, but if that’s the case, well, I guess I don’t mind being a voice crying out in the wilderness—I’ve always felt that way no matter what.

TTFN

*Though it may be a bit much to use the word “all”, considering that I don’t exactly have that many regular readers—a few dozen at most, most days.

**Oh, noooo, I would never be sarcastic.  Batman forbid!

***Of course, there are many possible ways to think of something as “better”, so making that judgment should also be an important part of the process if one wants actually to make things improve in a way upon which most, if not all, can agree.

****As a matter of percentage in versus percentage out.  The actual amounts are not great in either direction.

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Uttering such dulcet and harmonious blogs, that the rude sea grew civil at her song

Goodo and hell morning.

I’m pretty sure I’ve used that pseudo spoonerism before in a Thursday blog post opening, but I guess that’s okay.  I would be the only one to complain about such copying (and perhaps some imaginary, truly obsessive reader) and I’m okay with it as long as I am also the copier.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, because I had a very bad pain day yesterday*, and even the small extra weight of the mini laptop computer was something I wanted to avoid‒probably purely for psychological reasons, since I doubt it affected the level of my pain directly.

Anyway, I’m not in as much pain today so far, though it’s early doors, of course.  Still, I can’t change my mind and conjure the laptop computer at this point; if I could do that sort of thing, why would I bother going to the office?

Well, today I have one reason other than exerting effort necessary to maintain my job**:  my black Strat is back.  I asked my boss to bring it back, since it was just sitting in his garage, and yesterday he did so.  I even took a bit of time near the end of lunch to change to low E string, though I had brought my electronic tuner back to the house, so I had to tune the guitar afterward by ear***.  I’m pretty good at that, though.  Tuning a cello is much trickier, and I’ve done that a lot in my time.

I diddled around a little bit on it during a brief lull in the afternoon, and it was definitely nice.  I could still play Wish You Were Here and The Man Who Sold the World and Nothing Compares 2U, but I’m embarrassed to say that I had to look up the 5th (or was it 6th?) chord in Fake Plastic Trees****.  Once I got that chord back, though, it was as if I had never forgotten it.

My boss said that he thought my desk area looked better now with the guitar back in place.  Or maybe he asked me if I thought that was so.  Either way, the general message was the same, and I agreed with his assessment (or just answered his question in the affirmative).

I’ll probably do a bit of strumming and plucking this morning before work (and of course I will sing along).  One of these days, maybe I’ll do one of my videos of me playing and singing one of those songs above, or maybe One Headlight, or something like that.  I wonder how the acoustics in the new office would measure up when recording music.

We’ll have to see if I can still sing okay‒though, really, I do sing occasionally at the house when the housemates are out, and as far as I can tell my voice is still tolerable.  I don’t think I sing as well as I used to, but then again back in the day I used to sing more or less constantly during every daily commute, so I got a lot of practice.  I’d play and sing along with the Beatles or Elton John or Billy Joel or the soundtrack from Les Mis or (my favorite) The Phantom of the Opera.  Then later, when I had really long commutes after my divorce, I’d sing along with Tori Amos and Pink Floyd and Radiohead in addition to the previously mentioned artists.

Is it weird that, talking about how (or whether) I can sing, I cannot help but think of the old Simpsons  episode in which Troy McClure stars in the Broadway show Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off?  Specifically, I remember when the famous “Take your stinking paws off me…” line leads into a song in which the surrounding apes repeat, “He can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk…” and Troy belts out, “I can siiiiiiiiiing!”

I haven’t watched much of The Simpsons since Phil Hartman was murdered.  He was never a main character, but he was always awesome.  I once read that he claimed, “I can do a thousand voices…and they all sound like Phil Hartman.”

Well, I suppose that’s enough gobbledegook for today.  For those of you who prefer talk of music to talk of mathematics and physics and their relationships to prosaic, daily matters:  You’re welcome*****.

I hope you have a good day today‒though as you should know by now, it will inevitably be the best possible day you can have, so don’t fret too much.  Reality is what it is.  And as John Mellencamp might have said (though he did not, as far as I know):  “When I fight reality, reality always wins.”

That’s one of the ways we know that it’s reality.

TTFN

I like this picture because David Gilmour’s Strat here looks JUST LIKE mine.

*Unless you prefer to say that, because of how much pain I was in, it was a good day for pain but a bad day for a person who would rather not be in chronic pain.  Raise your hand if that describes you.

**This is a bit peculiar, but without intending to do so, I initially wrote, “…exerting effort to stay alive” (emphasis added).  That hadn’t been the conscious idea or intention in my head as I was writing.  I wonder what a Freudian would say about that off slip of the typing thumbs.

***No, this is not going to be a stupid “by ear” related dad joke.  I just wanted to point out that I did use a video on YouTube where the proper guitar notes were played, just to get the sound for my low E.  After that, the rest of the tuning is pretty easy.

****It was a Dsus2, if memory serves at the moment.  [Checks the chords]  Yes.  Yes, it was a Dsus2.  And it was the 5th chord in the song, if you count the little Asus4 temporary life as a chord that’s separate from the A major chord from which it arises and to which it returns.

*****It’s not “your welcome”, which would seem to refer to a welcome that belongs specifically to you‒it’s “you’re welcome”, with the contracted form of “you are”, meaning, yes, you are welcome to the boon I have provided in the form of not writing about physics and mathematics today******.

******And though I’ve never seen it written so, it’s also not “yore welcome”, which would seem to be some reference to the way people used to be welcomed in the old days.

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Six songs to try to express a little bit of how I am doing

I don’t have the energy or will or “spoons” to write much today.  I’m just about ready to tap out.  My “executive function” is so low that I think the only thing I’m capable of executing is myself, and even that is difficult.  I certainly don’t have the capacity to act to save myself.  I keep trying to express just how fucking horrible I am doing, but I don’t think it’s coming across.  I guess it doesn’t matter much.

Anyway, today I figure I’ll embed some songs I’ve recorded myself performing that do something to convey my difficulties.  Some are originals, some are covers.  I don’t know if they will work, either.

It doesn’t really matter.  I don’t have the will to take any action about anything.  I can only do what I do every day, automatically, and I am getting closer and closer to being unable to do even that.  I think I’m pretty nearly completely out of gas, and I am basically only a burden to the world.  It doesn’t help that we’re moving offices this month, which I hate, but that’s just a little insult to add to the injuries that are leading to the end of things.

Anyway, here are the songs.

It’s not a perfect expression or set of expressions, but it’s about all I’m capable of, even after a weekend “off”.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve basically given up.  I’m so tired already and it’s just Monday morning.

I hope you each have a great day, individually, and that you all have a great day, collectively.

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Curse us and crush us, my Precious

It’s Friday, and even though I brought my mini laptop computer back to the house with me yesterday, I’m writing this on my smartphone.  This is partly just because I don’t feel like getting the computer out, and partly because I feel no one really likes my longer posts, which are more likely to happen when I write using a real keyboard.  I also get the feeling that people, weirdly enough, don’t seem to like it when I write non-introverted things about external, real-world matters and ideas like I did yesterday.

I may be misinterpreting things, of course.  Goodness knows that my readership is a small enough sample size that drawing any kind of overall conclusions is fraught with danger (epistemologically sparking).  A regional storm that draws a few people’s attention away from reading blogs might well be enough to cut my usual number of readers in half.

I wish I could find the energy to read more science, like I used to do.  I’ve been saying that I would like to bone up on the latest neuroscience and to learn more about neural networks and deep learning programs.  I suppose I could learn more about quantum computing, but though it is largely the brainchild of one of my favorite minds (David Deutsch) it just doesn’t seem like as much of a big deal as it might be.  I get the concepts, broadly speaking, but it seems like a cumbersome and very fiddly kind of thing‒maintaining states of quantum superposition long enough to carry out a quantum algorithm is difficult even for only a few qubits at a time.

I also haven’t done any kind of music in quite a while.  This is partly because of my still-lingering respiratory illness, which makes it hard to sing, and I don’t enjoy playing guitar without singing*. 

Maybe I could work on playing guitar without singing and it would make me a better guitar player.  But even when I’m practicing the lead guitar part for Knives Out (the song by Radiohead, not the fun and funny murder mystery movie that was named after it) I like to sing along.  I don’t know how many of you have ever tried, but it can be very hard to play lead and sing simultaneously; I’m no Mark Knopfler.  As for piano, I don’t know how people like Elton John and Billy Joel do it, but I’ve never really tried.

Ha ha, I was just mentioning Billy Joel and his song The Longest Time came on the radio.  Of course, ironically, that song is almost completely a cappella, with no accompaniment by either guitar or piano.

I don’t know what to do, about anything.  I have no goal, no expectations of anything good happening in my life, nor of any future achievements.  Also, of course, even if I do something and create something, like a new song or a new book/story, it’s pretty much spitting in a high wind to try to water a flower bed that’s somewhere behind me.  I’m not likely to have any effect on anyone or even to be noticed.

Maybe I should send some of my songs or stories to some of the people currently screwing up the world’s economies and politics and environment.  Then, perhaps, some of them will really like my work, and that will then lead them to personal catastrophes and illnesses and death, as seems to happen to people who like my stuff (other than actual family members, though there is some precedent for that).

It would be wild to have a power like that, wouldn’t it?  It might make a good, weird story:  someone finds that the things he loves to do most, creatively, always end up causing harm to those who enjoy them, and so, despite himself, he decides to start using his gifts in a sort of Death Note kind of way, to eliminate dangerous people from the world.  He could almost be a very strange kind of superhero, perhaps called The Bard or The Minstrel.  He would do good, but he would also be chronically sad that he can’t just play music (or sing or write or whatever) and have people safely enjoy it.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world, which contains what I think is one of the funniest (but most underrated) lines ever:  Terry Jones as a TV reporter, standing outside the house where the deadly joke was written, opens with something along the lines of “Comedy struck this quiet, suburban neighborhood this morning…sudden, violent comedy.”

With that, I’ll draw this, my own pointless escapade, to a close, probably for the week.  I hope all of you have a good day and a good weekend and a good whatever comes after.  At least, I hope they are all as good as they can possibly be.  Which they will be, since everything cannot but be what it is once it is, quantum mechanics notwithstanding.

Bye.

*I can play piano without feeling the urge to sing, but I have no keyboard at the office‒I gave my cheapish one to a former coworker who used to be a serious professional musician, but he subsequently died of a heart attack, which is the sort of thing that happens to people to whom I try to give support, or to people who really like my singing/music.  I appear to be some type of curse.

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“…the only thing that’s real.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone instead of the laptop computer.  There’s no important rationale for this choice, it’s just the way it turned out.  There are causes for everything that happens, but there aren’t necessarily reasons.

I was terribly stressed out yesterday, though arguably nothing too Earth-shattering happened.  Just quite a few unexpected and frustrating but relatively little things occurred that led me to want to hurt myself, and I wanted just to give away my black Strat at the office as well as a very cool piece of hiking equipment that I have that my boss really admires*.  I just wanted to divest myself of everything and go off and, I don’t know, try to swim to Morocco or something**.

I don’t feel much better this morning, but at least it’s been going reasonably “according to plan”.  I’m still in stupid amounts of pain, since right when I woke up.  Nevertheless, I did my morning exercises and got ready for work, though I feel almost as though my upper body and my lower body are hanging by a thread from each other.  Only nerves seem to connect the two sometimes; otherwise it feels as though my upper half is merely balanced atop my lower half, and as I sit, stand, lie down, walk, and so on, it wants to fall off its perch, and that process hurts.

I haven’t actually played guitar in weeks.  I’ve “wanted” to, intellectually.  I even got the red Strat out at the house, putting away the SG, because the Strat is my second favorite***.  However, that hasn’t led to me playing it, though I came close at least once over the weekend.

I of course also haven’t played piano/keyboards, partly because my keyboard is covered with superfluous clothes and other things that just need a place to be.  It’s shameful, I know, but I have little room for storage.

I also haven’t written any fiction or done any drawing, and I don’t even have any modeling clay, though the discussion of my pain made me think of when I used to play with clay every day (hey hey!).  Occasionally, one would get a single hair mixed in with the clay by accident, and then if you were splitting the clay, the two bits would sometimes be held together only by that hair; that’s how my back feels a lot of the time.

When I shift a little, at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, it feels as though my upper and lower halves want to separate, but they’re held together by the collected nerve fibers that carry all that lovely pain and spasm and electrical sensation back and forth to and from my brain.

I won’t say I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone‒there are quite a few people in the world who merit such pain and much, much more, and yet they live with impunity.  Many of them have been doing their dirty deeds for quite a long time, and even if they were to die violent deaths tomorrow, they would already have gotten away with nearly a lifetime of successful villainy and will suffer no more than most people are near the end of their lives.  Indeed, these people will probably have better, more attentive health care in their final moments than most people who have done no willing harm to anyone.

Lovely universe you’ve got here.  (It wouldn’t) be a shame if something happened to it.

Also, you can’t threaten such people with stupid points like “history will judge you”, because such people don’t tend to give a shit about that kind of thing.  Many of them probably secretly believe themselves to be immortal; they certainly don’t care about what the milling masses think of them after they’re dead.  And any concept they may have of an afterlife is clearly not worrisome to them, or not enough so to deter their foul deeds.

And here I am, feeling like I am slipping very painfully off my lower half even as I write this, despite aspirin and naproxen and Tylenol and heating pads and Icy Hot and Voltaren cream and CBD and Delta-9 gummies and all that.

It’s too much.  If I cannot get this to improve soon, I may move up the deadline of my plan, because I am tired of being not only depressed and anxious and autistic (with all that that entails) but also just in chronic fucking pain every fucking second of every fucking day for more than 20 fucking years!!!  There is no sign of it abating.

Have a good day if you can, and thank you for reading.

*It’s a machete; I don’t know why I’m being coy.  It’s a beautifully designed and made machete, no cheap throw-away crap.  This is the sort of tool one could see being handed down with pride from generation to generation.  I bought it because of the aesthetics; I rarely need a machete for practical purposes.

**I would not succeed.  I am not that good of a swimmer, but even if I were, I don’t think any human or humanoid swimmer ever could swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

***My favorite is my Les Paul (see above), which was also, like my red Strat, made by my former housemate.  That guitar has such a beautiful sound, but it is very heavy.  It’s what I used for all the guitar parts, including the little arpeggios and whatnot, on Like and Share, and also for my cover of Something, with no pedals and only a little delay.  I used the red Strat almost entirely for Schrodinger’s Head and for much of Catechism, including the solos.  I used the black Strat for the solo in the middle of Breaking Me Down.  I have not recorded anything using the SG.  That’s no criticism of it; the timing was just wrong.