Music

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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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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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Same as the oldphemism

It’s Tuesday, the 4th of February, in case you didn’t know or if you are reading this some time in the future.  I think it’s pretty unlikely that future generations will care what I’ve written, but who knows?

I am writing this on my smartphone today.  Yesterday I wrote using my small laptop computer, which is surely part of why it was a longer post than usual.  I just type so much more easily on a real keyboard.  Indeed, I can type faster than I can coherently speak in most cases, and almost as fast as I can think.  This is one of the reasons I am fated to reach out through my writing rather than by making videos or “reels”.

Of course, recently, since I started trying to use Instagram (which is relatively entertaining, at least) I’ve reshared there some videos of me playing music.  I don’t know if they really get heard by many people, but certainly more people seem to interact already with the videos than has happened on YouTube since I first put them up.  Almost all of my “views” on YouTube come from me, listening to my own stuff as part of playlists I’ve made.  I put my stuff among selections from various musicians I like, with the vague notion that it may increase their association in “the algorithm” with such famous musical acts.  This is a very vague notion; I don’t really know if the algorithm works that way at all.  In any case, the strategy hasn’t seemed to increase my exposure.

Sometimes I will also listen to my own music to help me get to sleep, which for some reason it seems to do.  Although, to be fair, getting to sleep is not my main problem.  Staying asleep is my problem, and last night was no better than usual.

I don’t have any serious, large-scale topic today, unlike yesterday, and that’s probably just as well.  I’m sure most people didn’t find it particularly fun to read that post, but I think it’s a serious matter to consider.

Today, probably the most momentous thing I have to report is that for roughly the last five days I’ve restarted taking my antidepressant (Saint John’s Wort, in this case).  I don’t really expect it to change anything significant for me, but I’m hoping it will give me a bit more energy.  Who knows, maybe I’ll become part of that cohort of people who start taking antidepressants* and gain just enough energy and proactivity finally to kill themselves.  I wouldn’t mind.

Oh, wait, sorry, I guess I should have said “unalive themselves”, not “kill themselves”.  That’s one of those stupid newphemisms that social media have led many “content creators” to use to avoid their videos being blocked.  I think this was mainly a Tik Tok based thing, though perhaps there has been some tendency for it on other social media.

In any case, it’s idiotic.  Replacing taboo words with new euphemisms just eventually leads to the newphemisms becoming taboo in turn, and newer, temporarily safe terms being chosen which will become taboo also, and then things shuffle back and forth going nowhere fast, like the linguistic undead**.  This all seems to arise because of the unwholesome tendency of humans to think that words can have magical powers.  They need to stop that.  Words have their own “magic” that is far more powerful and real than any imagined invocation of the devil that might lead to him appearing.

Anyway, that’s just about it.  I think, in closing, I’ll try to see if I can share one of those videos here as it appears on Instagram.  Maybe I’ll do more than one.  Anyway, I guess you guys will know if it worked.

*Not for the first time, of course.

**Would that be “ununalive” in Newspeak?

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Writing (and other things) report on Friday 4-26-2024

Well, I went a bit more nuts than usual this morning, and between 5 and 7 am I wrote 2230 words on Extra Body*.  It goes to show that severe insomnia at least can be useful in some ways, though it remains horribly miserable and miserably horrible.  Still, at least I’ve made up some ground from being so under the weather physically over the last week.

The story is already — of course — longer than I would have expected it to be, as tends to happen with my stories.  I’ll try to pare it down a lot during the edit, but hopefully people who read it will appreciate that it’s not just a quick and dirty tale, so to speak.  It’s not as though I’m wasting a lot of time in unnecessary details; at least I don’t think I am.

I even got out the guitar and strummed and sang a bit this morning.  Singing is weird, though, because when I sing even banal songs, I often find myself tearing up and fighting not to cry.  It’s weird, and a little disquieting.  It’s not as though I can express my emotions at any other time, and it’s not as though the song necessarily matches the feeling.

Oh, well.  I’m a freak, anyway.  What can you do?

I apologize for the length and oddness of yesterday’s post.  It doesn’t seem to have garnered very many readers, or at least not very many “likes”**.  I can’t really blame anyone; I went a bit nuts with that, as well.

I expect to work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (as is, of course, always the case with everything), so I’ll probably get some more writing done then, though perhaps not as much as today.  I don’t know about guitar; the bases of my thumbs are still giving me a lot of trouble, and it makes playing rather painful.  Perhaps they feel left out, since so many other joints and skeletal and connective tissue structures act up on me.

Have a good day if you are able.

*I’m thinking I might change the name of the story before I publish it.

**Incidentally, I was surprised to realize recently that my song Like and Share has almost twice as many plays as any of my other songs.  I guess it’s the song that’s most pertinent to the modern age of social media.  It’s still only a bit over 500 plays — I have no idea what the stats are on Spotify or iTunes or TikTok or any other venue — which is NOTHING compared to normal commercial songs or even the songs of serious but amateur musicians, but it’s an interesting statistic to me.

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Monday morning…looking up?

It’s Monday morning again, as tends to happen around this time of week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.

I’m starting this blog post at the house, where I’m waiting to see if the Uber prices come down a bit before deciding to take one.  If they don’t, I may decide to walk to the train; it’s relatively cool out, and I feel physically rather energetic.  I may even take the bus, though that’s a circuitous and irritating path.  I’ll keep you posted about what happens.

…

Okay, well, the price dropped an acceptable amount, so I booked an Uber, but the estimated wait is 15 minutes, which is unusually long for this time of day.  That further cements my plan to try to make sure to walk back from the train on the way “home” this evening.  Yes, it will take longer even than waiting for an Uber, but it will cost less, it will have a lower carbon footprint‒though I will make many more actual footprints‒and it will also get me some good exercise.  I hope you can all help keep me honest and maybe even spare some words of encouragement.

I have some good news to share with you today.  It’s not momentous, but it means a lot to me.  I did not start on HELIOS, but I’m happy to report that I’ve started something else.  The prospect of beginning a new novel, even a “light novel” sci-fi story, was a bit intimidating, so on the other spiral-bound notebook, the one on which my cousin recommended I write a zombie story, I thought maybe I would write a short story.  I didn’t intend to write a zombie story (sorry, Lance) since I don’t even really enjoy reading or watching such stories, but it’s still a good basic idea.

I opened up my old collection of story ideas, from which came more than one of my existing works, and scrolled down.  Most of the ideas weren’t that gripping for the moment, but quite a way down the list I found an idea whose time, it turns out, had come.

I won’t tell you much about the story idea here, partly because I don’t have the full thing sketched out, but mostly because I don’t want to diminish my drive to write it.  It’s called Extra Body, and no, it’s not a horror story.  If anything, it’s a sort of lighthearted sci-fi short story, but set in the ordinary, modern world.

I wrote one page of it at work on Friday, and then yesterday‒yes, Sunday‒I wrote another page and a half.  It’s almost, but not quite, unheard of for me to write fiction on a Sunday, simply because I habitually mandate that as a mental break day from writing fiction.  However, since I’ve been on quite a prolonged mental break from writing fiction anyway, I decided to get in an extra day.

Also, instead of setting my usual daily goal of 3 to 4 pages of writing, I just set my goal to at least 1 page.  That takes a lot longer when I’m writing “by hand” than it does when typing‒I can type a full 400 to 500 word page in a very short period of time‒but that’s okay.  I’m hoping this pressure will keep me more concise than I often tend to be.

I must say, it’s good that I’m keeping the target low when writing by hand, because my hand muscles are deconditioned for writing much on pen and paper.  Of course, my writing is also terribly messy, but that is nothing new.  As I rediscovered yesterday, I can always read my own handwriting at least.

This shouldn’t be too long a short story, especially not for me.  It’s not going to be terribly deep or thought provoking, just a bit of fun.  Then, maybe, once I’m done with that, if I’m still around, I can start HELIOS.

Another thing, in closing for the day:  I did in fact look up the chords and tabs for All Apologies only to find that, though it was originally played in a form of the “drop D tuning”, it’s just a 3-chord song (not counting sus-2 and 7th chords, which one usually does not).  I decided to learn it using standard tuning, because I don’t like having to twiddle with the tuning of my guitar so much.  This meant I had to figure out the main riff for myself, since the tabs are not really any help, being all in the original tuning.  That wasn’t much work, though.  It’s a nice sounding riff, but it’s actually quite simple.

So, since I had the guitar out anyway, I decided to look up the chords to Close to You, in preparation for possibly recording my parody, Antichrist.  This song has slightly more chords than the other one, but unless you count the “truck driver” key change in the middle, it’s also really a pretty simple song.

I guess most popular songs are not all that complex.  One can get spoiled when playing around with Radiohead and the Beatles, let alone with having played Bach on the piano (and cello), or having been in pit orchestras playing West Side Story and the like.

Anyway, as may be obvious, I’ve gotten a slight boost in my overall energy, partly from better allergy control, I think, so that’s good.  I hope it continues.  We shall see, I guess.  For now, at least I’m being slightly productive.  I hope all of you are feeling at least as well as I, and that you have a good week.

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“Find my nest of salt”

It’s Friday, in case you didn’t already know, and since I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, it’s actually the last day of the workweek for me.  Oh frabjous day*.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, because I was out sick.  I think that some dip that I used had been in the fridge longer than I had remembered and had gone bad or summat, though it tasted okay.  Anyway, it certainly didn’t want to stay down after a while, so that was unpleasant.  I was worried that I might have caught some upper GI virus, but it was too self-limited an illness for that.

I feel as though I get sick on Thursdays more often than on other days, and especially on ones after a week in which I worked on Saturday.  I’m not sure if this is true pattern recognition on my part or some form of selection bias, but it feels as though it’s at least a slight trend.  I would suspect‒if it’s something real‒that it’s related to me getting worn down mentally (and physically) and becoming vulnerable to random physical insults after having had a longer week and no real recharge time.

This didn’t happen to me in the past, but then again, I was younger then**, and my reserves were deeper.  Also, I had a family to come home to, and a safe environment, and friends, and books that I wanted to read.  It was also reasonably quiet both at home and at school or work, and what noise there was‒even when it was quite chaotic‒was related to what was happening, what was being done, what the work entailed.

Things now are much different, and I need to find a way to recharge myself more rapidly and reliably, at least if I want to avoid total system collapse.  I’m not sure that I do want to avoid that, though.  Some part of me occasionally thinks that, at least if I completely fell apart, people would have to notice, and maybe someone would help me.

I doubt it.  The world is not set up well for doing very beneficial things, especially to and for people who are odd.  And I certainly don’t seem to be the sort of person people like to keep around for very long at a time, not in close personal contact, anyway.  They’ll happily‒or willingly, anyway‒keep themselves surrounded by shallow, lazy, manipulative users, as long as they wear at least a façade of warmth and cheerfulness.  But if someone approaches things differently, and is too mentally fatigued and fed up to bother trying to pretend otherwise or to force smiles all the time, they withdraw, even if that person works hard and tries hard, and is creative and smart and would never willingly betray them.

This is all hypothetical of course, but it does highlight why I think people‒indeed, the world‒are probably not worth keeping around.  Or it’s not worth keeping myself around to be among them.

Case in point:  for at least two days now (and it may have happened yesterday, too, for all I know) the Tri-Rail trains going north and south from my station boarded (with last-minute announcements) on opposite sides of the track from the ones they usually arrive on.  Now, it can make sense for one of the trains to board on its opposite side from usual; track maintenance needs to be done from time to time.  But having the trains switch sides smacks of someone just having screwed up, and then having done so again.  It’s not reassuring for passengers, that’s for certain.

Of course, my own reliability is not impressive lately.  I haven’t yet started work on HELIOS, though I have the blank notebook in my backpack (and another one remaining at the office).  I think, oddly enough, that if I were able to find a way to work on that during the day, I might recharge a bit just from that.  Then again, maybe I’m wrong.  I’ve only ever really successfully written fiction consistently early in the morning in near-silence.

Well, I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’m not optimistic.  I guess I’ll let you all know if I succeed in starting.

I also feel like I want to get the tabs to the Nirvana song All Apologies and learn it, and maybe do a recording of it, but I doubt that’s going to happen.  My guitars are just sitting unused.  Despite this, they give me no reproach‒guitars are very nonjudgmental that way.  They merely sit there, fallow, waiting and gathering dust, as is my keyboard (the musical one) and my cello.  It’s a shame, I know.  But, as the song’s lyrics say, “I’ll proceed from shame.”***

For now, though, I won’t proceed any further than this final paragraph.  I hope you who read this all have a good day and a good Saturday and a good Sunday if you’re at all able to do so.  As for everyone else, well, who cares about them?  They’re not like us, right?  We don’t need them.  They are our enemies, and we are theirs.  JK…OAI.

*Was anyone else really, really bothered when, in Tim Burton’s movie version of Alice in Wonderland, they referred to Christopher Lee’s character as if its name were “Jabberwocky” when that was just the title of the poem from which it was drawn.  The creature’s name, or title, is the Jabberwock.  It says so right in the second stanza of the poem:  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”  Yeah, I figured nobody else probably cared.

**Almost by definition.

***I don’t believe that the line is “aqua seafoam shame”, as so many people seem to think.  That’s merely a classic mondegreen.  I think this largely because the mondegreen version is a weird, abstract, bizarre bit of imagery that doesn’t resemble anything else in the words or tone of the song, whereas “I’ll proceed from shame,” follows quite logically from the preceding “I’ll take all the blame”.  Cobain’s lyrics could be cryptic and quasi-nonsensical sometimes, but their tone is more consistent than the whole aqua seafoam thing would be.  End rant.

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This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is: