guitar

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Poor venomous blog, be angry and dispatch.

Hello and good morning.

I think it’s Thursday, so I used my traditional Thursday opening here, but honestly, I had such a bad night’s sleep that I don’t feel confident in my reckoning of days.  I’ve been awake since shortly after midnight, and it’s not as though I fell asleep early.  Also, the internet was down locally for most of the night‒I figured that out pretty quickly once I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep‒so it’s not as though the internet was what kept me awake.

It’s the 4th of September, with only a few weeks until the autumnal equinox.  It’s interesting‒at least to me, though probably not to anyone else‒that though the seasons are opposite in the northern versus the southern hemisphere*, and the solstices are opposites, the equinoxes are all always the same for everybody.

After my blog post about songs and music yesterday, I did play a little guitar and sang.  I didn’t work on any new songs or any of my own old songs, but at least I did a little practicing.

Oh, I also recently watched someone reacting to the Pulse concert version of Wish You Were Here (the song, not the album) and I noted that David Gilmour played a nice, compact acoustic guitar with a somewhat narrow neck that looked like it would be good for me, since I find bigger acoustics too bulky (partly because I myself am too bulky, but that’s a separate issue).

I looked online to try to find which make and model guitar he was using, and I found at least some credible answers, though many of them discussed the 12-string he used on the album, which was definitely not what he used in the concert**.  After I determined the most likely correct candidate, I decided to look up that guitar online to see how much they cost.

The average price was about 5 grand, and many cost more.  So, yeah, I’m not going to be buying one of those any time soon, unless I win the lottery (which is even more unlikely for me than for many other people, since I don’t play it).  It would be wonderful, but if I were going to spend that much money on something, I would rather buy one of those big, CW “cleaning” laser systems, because…well, of course I would.  Talk about fun!

I definitely have even more destruction in my nature than creation.  I sometimes refer to myself with the reverse of Nebula’s kind words to Drax in the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie:  I wasn’t born to be a dad; I was born to be a destroyer***.

Not that I think it makes any real sense to say that anyone was “born to be” anything.  As far as we can tell, the concept of telos doesn’t actually apply to anything outside the human mind (or humanoid minds, as in my case).

Maybe I should really get back into a regular, daily practice of meditation.  I’ve done it before, sometimes for a long time, but though it does calm my tension somewhat and helps decrease my distraction, I’ve noticed that it tends to make me quite a bit more depressed, as though depression and anxiety are my yin and yang‒or my quantum mechanical position and momentum if you will‒and as one shrinks, the other must grow.

Perhaps I should just muscle on through and see if I can come out the other side in some sense.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that the other side is the sooey side (ha ha), but that’s not such a bad thing.  Still, worsening depression along the way is really horrible.  At least I don’t have anyone else around me to make miserable as a side-effect, unless you count coworkers.

I don’t know.  I’m just writing, sampling what comes out of my mind, which I guess means you lot are sampling what comes out of my mind, as well.  Admit it:  this is one sample that does not make you want to buy the product!  Am I right?

I strongly suspect that I am.  Certainly I’ve seen no evidence of interested shoppers.  Those who have actually “bought the product” have all ended up returning it eventually.  Who can blame them?

Okay, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a very good day.

TTFN

*I don’t know what tortured sophistry so-called flat-Earthers use to try to explain such facts, and honestly, I don’t really want to know.  If I had infinite time and patience, it might be worth exploring their notions, if only for the sake of better understanding human psychopathology, but unless and until I become an immortal being with unlimited bandwidth, I won’t waste my limited resources of time and mind.

**Because he plainly was using a 6-string.

***To be clear, Nebula said, “You weren’t born to be a destroyer.  You were born to be a dad.”  It was a beautiful moment.

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Progress and (good) regress reports

I’ll start with the good regress:  I’m feeling significantly closer to baseline pain levels today than I was the last few days‒at least so far, though the day has only just begun.  I suppose I could have just said that I feel “better” today, but I fear that could be construed as meaning that I feel “all better”, which is not true and hasn’t been true for many, many years.

Still, I would rather be at my current level of chronic pain than the pain I was in yesterday or the day before.  And it should probably go without saying that I would pick either state over the pain I had while my kidney stone was present (and the irritation from the ureteral stent over the subsequent two weeks was nearly as bad, largely because it persisted for those few weeks).

I didn’t get a lot of work done on Native Alien yesterday, though I did progress a little.  I also don’t have anything down regarding the new song-takeoff word “humility”.  I’m beginning to think that I should stick to a song every two weeks, because I just have too much else going on to be able to achieve a song a week.

I also think I may need to buy a new small keyboard (the piano kind, not the typing kind) to use at the office, because I really have a somewhat difficult time trying to work out chords for a tune when I’m trying to play the tune on the guitar and then to play the chords on the guitar and see how they sound together.  I can’t really do both at once on a guitar, but on a keyboard it’s a piece of piss (as Brits might say).  Also, singing while figuring out the chords is difficult because my pitch in singing can be influenced by the chord I’m playing, and I might mistakenly adjust the tune to the chords instead of the other way around, without realizing that I have done so.

So, we’ll see.  I may order a new, relatively small keyboard for the office.  It would need to be inexpensive, but that should be pretty doable*.

I have continued to do the Brilliant course on circuits, which remains quite basic.  It’s a far cry from when I started doing their course on linear algebra, which I had never formally studied.  Don’t get me wrong; that’s a very cool and good course, and it applies to things in which I’m very interested, such as General Relativity in particular, but I got distracted in the middle of it‒I think I should have started by reviewing the fundamentals first.

I am currently reading a book called Vector, which goes into the history and mathematical theory of vectors and tensors, via quaternions and so on, and that’s pretty cool.  I find that learning the history of science and mathematics really helps get the subjects into my head.

As for other matters, well, there’s not much else going on.  Today is payroll day at work, so it will be somewhat hectic, but there’s no holiday or anything to warp the schedule.  Hopefully that means everything will go pretty smoothly.  At least I won’t have to be in as much pain while doing it as I might be.

I’m trying very hard to get back into doing more regular exercise, but trying to avoid causing exacerbations to my chronic pain while doing so.  It’s a bit of a tightrope walk, so to speak.  If I screw up, while it doesn’t lead to me literally plummeting to my death, it can set me back and make me feel terribly discouraged.

I had intended to try to ride my bike to the train this morning, but starting yesterday afternoon it began to rain quite heavily all throughout the area, so I didn’t get a chance to pump up the tires and whatnot.  This morning it was not raining, but it is supposed to rain on and off throughout the day, so biking isn’t so attractive.  I guess I’ll just wait on that and do some extra walking if I can.

Sorry, I know this is probably really dull and uninspiring reading.  I don’t know what to say about that.  I just spew these blog posts out as they come, so I don’t claim much more responsibility for the quality of the content than you can claim while reading it.

I will keep you updated on progress on my song(s) and of course you will see my writing.  I suppose, if I should try to start writing fiction again, I’ll let you know about that, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.  There’s too much other stuff going on, and I’d need to stop doing this blog every day but Thursday.  I doubt that anyone would actually feel bereft if I stopped writing, but I flatter and delude myself that maybe it would be so.

I hope once more that you all have a very good day, and I reiterate that, no matter what, you will have the best day you could possibly have.  Don’t let that stop you from trying to ensure that this particular best day is really a very, very good one.  You might as well try.

*Addendum:  I looked on Amazon and there was a well-rated, small “beginners'” keyboard by Yamaha that can be delivered by tomorrow and was quite inexpensive, so…reader, I ordered it.

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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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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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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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‘Sblog, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?

pipe

Good morning!  Welcome to the last Thursday of March 2019.

Back in the day, I would have written an episode of “My Heroes Have Always Been Villains” on such a day, but for reasons inexplicable to me, those posts were never popular, and they’re unlikely ever to become a regular thing again.  This makes me sad, but there’s not much I can do about it.

For those of you who’ve been waiting for more “audio blog” entries on Iterations of Zero, don’t get discouraged, even though all I’ve posted there this week were two cheesy recordings of me playing guitar and singing Pink Floyd songs.  I’ll return to the audio blogs, probably by next week, but there are reasons for my diversion.

It all started (as the cliché goes) when I was playing guitar and singing Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” in my room at home, and for fun I decided to record it on my cell phone.  I was honestly surprised by the sound quality when I listened to it.  This set my wheels spinning, which can be a perilous thing.

I have a fair amount of experience using sound editing software because of the audio I’ve done of my own stories.  I decided to play around with it, and with the surprisingly good smartphone audio; I recorded and mixed the chords, then the vocals, for “Pigs on the Wing” (Part 1).  It came out rather well, I thought, despite my mediocre guitar playing.

Thus encouraged, I decided to do something slightly more complicated.  I recorded three separate parts for “Wish You Were Here,” which is a nice song to do because the guitar automatically sounds pretty, even though it’s not too difficult for a fumbling amateur.

The point of all this, really, was to practice recording before using the software and my two good electric guitars, to work on my own original creation.  As you may know, a while back I posted the lyrics of a song called “Schrodinger’s Head,” which I’d written on a whim after joking around with a coworker about possible band names and first albums.  Since then, I worked out the song’s melody and chord structure (this isn’t difficult, so don’t be impressed) during my regular goofing around on guitar.  Once I knew that I could make pretty darn good recordings using my very ordinary smartphone, and since I had audio software to clean up and mix those recordings…well, I realized that I could—with my cell phone, with a laptop and/or desktop computer, and with my guitar(s) and practice amps—do what would have required lots of expensive studio time and even more expensive equipment back when The Beatles and Pink Floyd were making their greatest works.  I can’t match their musical skills and genius, obviously, but I can, thanks to five decades’ worth of improved technology, do by my lonesome something that could never have been done in the past.

What I have done is to put together rhythm guitar tracks, an intro lead guitar riff, and main vocals for my song.  I’ll be adding other tracks, including more lead guitar, a possible “bass” line, maybe some backup vocals, and whatnot, and I’ll let you hear the result (on Iterations of Zero) when it’s finished.  A few select people—close friends and/or family—have heard what I have so far, and reviews have been encouraging.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to quit my day job.

I’m also not going to quit writing, and I have not slowed down on that.  My novella, which will ultimately lose the title Safety Valve, is coming along steadily, and it continues to surprise me with its weight.  I wrote a scene in it this week that drew from own few experiences of sleep paralysis, and that writing process evoked some of the terror I felt on those occasions, even though I was writing in a brightly lit office.  I hope that at least some of that feeling comes across for the reader in the final product.

Editing, unfortunately, has not been going as quickly as it ought to on either Unanimity or Free-Range Meat.  The latter isn’t such a huge problem, since it’s a truly short story, and should thus be relatively short work.  Unanimity, however, nearly meets the description from “Paperback Writer”:  “It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few.”  I really need to pick up the pace, or it’s going to be a looooong time before it’s ready to publish.

I wish I could devote more time to all this and not need to work to earn my living.  If anyone out there has a big chunk of money they don’t need, and that they’d like to give me so I can write and do other creative things full time, please get in touch.  In the meantime, the rest of you, do please let others know about my writing and my books, if you enjoy them.  And do please rate and review mine and other people’s works when you get the chance.  It really makes a difference.

With that, I think I’ve written enough here this week.  April, Come She Will—before the next time I post here—and I wish you a happy April Fool’s Day in advance.

TTFN