Christian Newman, the plumpest humorist of our time, sent me the photo of a t-shirt that states If life gives you demons, make demonade, or somesuch. It simply reminded me of a time during my first year of University. I was in Austin at the University of Texas and spending more time programming drum machines and playing Risk than “studying”. Black students were often seen wearing t-shirts that had variations of the slogan Black by Popular Demand parading upon their fronts in colossal, static letters. So, probably given to my mood and my seething hatred of anything pervasively popular, I had an artist I knew by the name of Amy Young create a t-shirt for me that paraded in colossal static letters upon its frontmatter the slogan Plaid by Popular Demand. Looking back, I’m surprised I wasn’t beaten up.

The aforementioned artist made me a number of t-shirts, actually, including a Hawkwind one based on the cover of Acid Daze II. I wish I still had that, though it surely wouldn’t fit now. She also created a few Sir Alfred IV shirts, most notably the three scoops of ice cream one with the Sir Alfred ship sailing upon the upper scoop. What happened to these t-shirts? They are lost in time.

I made a fantastic Medical Medium dinner. I baked small “cubes” of yam, cooked black beans with cumin from the dried nuggets that they were, and created red lentil “tortillas” along with various garnishes like koriandr, červená cibule and avokado. I arranged it all in an aesthetic manner in time for Ivanečka to come over and enjoy it all.

She went home by nine it time to have her lesson cancelled and I returned to Peiločja, who made sure to leap up to my side at one in the morning because in her small but potent mind she surely knew that I was leaving for Berlin in the morning.

Over the course of my music making “career”, I have explored different avenues of actually creating music. Or, rather than avenues, a more concise word is methods. I began simply - with an electric guitar and enough pedals to wall off seven European elk for half of the majority of eternity. Synthesizers came next. I bought a few Doepfer semi modular thurks and used them mostly for lead lines though were I to return to that period, I’d spend more time working on low end textural ideas. Too late now, however, as they were sold epochs ago.

Still, these two methods involved actually playing most of the notes that arrived into Ardour and comprised whatever piece I was working on at the time. Ok - that’s not strictly true. I actually wrote Lilypond scripts that spit out midi files that I played the semi modulars with. So there was a bit of sequencing going on občas. I ended up expanding into an actual modular set up and subsequently procured hardware sequencers.

So the second method was sequencing.

I then got into Supercollider for a few years (though I never really came close to mastering it). So, programming the “sound design” (synths) and sequencing and whatnot came next. That was the third method, and I eventually abandoned it completely (I think the last album I used it on was Pagan Park) as I felt I lost much of the immediacy I craved in music making. One might argue that Lilypond would be much the same, but one would be incorrect. I never had the immediacy loss sensation whilst using Lilypond. Why? Sometimes there is no why.

The point is that I kept trying new things and I’m actually, at this point in my career, not sure if it was or is currently a good thing to diversify so much in this manner. In fact, I feel like I have stifled my progress over the last year and a half or so because of this and because of another reason that I shall detail in a bit.

I decided sometime in the not too distant past to learn Renoise because I’ve always been particularly fascinated by the concept of Trackers and using them for composition. I’d never taken the plunge into the theoretical pool of molten lead. Now I have. And I am certainly of two forebrains about it. I took a very simple ambient improvisation through a fixed sequence of chords and fed it into Renoise with intent to add to it with the synths therein, creating repeating, hypnotic patterns that would cause even the most infidel of humans to turn back to a life under the Buddha’s tutelage.

I must admit that it is fun and I like what I have done so far, but the overreaching result is that the entire process has taken me away from actually sitting down with my guitar and writing and recording music. Yes - I know that were I to dedicate a chunk of time every day to Renoise and were I to be disciplined into maintaining a similar chunk every day, I’d eventually get to the point where I’d be proficient enough to quickly sketch ideas and then expand on them without fumbling about like I do now. And even thinking about the prospect gets the bile pumping through my lungs - at least a little. But, bohužel, I feel the crushing weight of time upon the crown of my head too often these days. I need to follow my own advice and narrow the methods in which I make music to a few and be as creative as possible with them. There can be always room for different compositional or improvisational methodologies, but I feel I am just being stalled by seeking new ways to “get the notes from my head into the machine”.

Reading back on this blog entry, I am complaining quite a bit, so I shall augment that with another complaint! I curse my need to work on many albums at the same time. Yes - I am old school and I work towards chunks of music that are analogs of albums from all those epochs ago when artists or bands released vinyl platters or even compact discs. Bohužel, these usually comprise of groups of pieces that are thematically bound and can’t be separated out, though I’m changing that idea up a bit on something I’m devising at present, as the pieces of music are really not related at all. Thus, it will be lump after lump of music that could be listened to in discreet lumps or even in sequence or shuffled or reversed or spindled, garbled and played through a widening, interstellar funnel. That being stated, working on too many albums at the same time prevents me from actually finishing one of them so it can be released. What does being released mean? I’ll leave that to the imagination of whomever is reading this.

There are many albums in process:

• Dobbs revisited - the closest to being done.
• Dissolving pool - all the pieces need to be revised, but I believe the composition part itself is done.
• Sir Alfred IV revisited - I’ve done demos of three pieces. This one’ll be another lump after lump of music that could be…, as well, but I don’t know when I’ll get back to it.
• Lee’s album - two demos are done. Since Christian has to sing on basically everything here, it probably won’t be released until 2637 or so.
• The new lumpy one. I’m on the third piece. They are simpler, compositionally, excepting the piece I wrote for Ivanečka, but that one is done. I’ll just work on this album incrementally until I have enough that makes me feel as if release is imminent.

In other news, I’m rewriting my static blog and website rendering software from scratch in Rust. In fact, this will be the first blog entry that is not processed by the engine (I laughably call it an engine) I wrote in Elixir (and revised multitudinous times) epochs and epochs ago.

I began perhaps four days ago and have six Rust Crates that together take care of

• My poems
• Spontaneous ideas that I throw to my personal nostr server
• The legacy blog posts
• All the mostly static content that is translated from markdown by my own special method and placed within various templates

Rust is amazing, I must say. I’m still learning, but improving every day. Soon I’ll be a Rust wizard! Imagine that! I’ll instantly oxidize anything I come into proximity with.

Oh - I just made a bad pun. Puns are the lowest form of humor. I shall be punished.

I woke up and created my fifth Looptober abomination. It was enjoyable but took much longer than I thought it would. I did spend some time with Peiločja, but the plan was for Ivanečka to pick me up at 9.21.03 so we could be off to Berlin. However, she called me at some earlier point informing me that she was already in the car, though to go to Luki’s situated place to take Luki his forgotten keys. Then she was to proceed to my place.

The trip to Berlin was riddled with zacpy and took in whole about seven hours instead of the usual four and a half (I believe that in a traffic-less day, that would be the duration). We stopped three times to čurat (was it three? I believe so). I navigated us along “back roads” through myriad German villages until we finally arrived at the park and ride at about four.

U-bahn 6 took us to Stadtmitte and Ubahn-2 took us to Potsdammer Platz. Our hotel, where I sit now, is close to the latter. We had a few hours to walk around the surrounding area and during our wandering found a Cos. Ivanečka browsed for a winter coat and a shirt. She ended up buying nothing. I ended up with a shirt for myself a bit later, however.

Suzanne Vega began a bit after eight. We arrived at the Philhormonie about ten till eight. The concert was brilliant. She began with Marlene on the Wall and ended with Galway from the new album. I managed to kiss Ivanečka between most every song. All in all the concert was highly enjoyable and I was impressed especially by the guitarist, who used looping to layer parts for several songs. He also had a “drum” pedal, or perhaps prerecorded drum parts in a looper. A cellist also joined them. They could have played another hour and I would have still been transfixed.

We were back at the hotel by 10.30 or even before. We made brilliant love and fell asleep until the late hour of seven. It’s a little after seven now. I write whilst Ivanečka prepares herself for another walk around the Berlin environs.

I just walked home from Ivanečka’s place to my filthy domicile with the “cat” stowed “safely” in the backpack I use to transport her. It is supposedly especially made for transporting such creatures though I am uncertain that she likes the experience very much. Being “uncertain that she likes the experience” is actually greatly understating the rage she feels when she is placed in said backpack. She seethes! Or at least she does during the first seconds of being placed within its narrow confines. After we are moving, or, rather, after I am ambulatory, she seems to quieten, to calm, to seethe in silence. When finally the journey ends and she is released from the suffocating womb, she is, once again, jolly ol Peiločja.

V každém připadě, I just walked home from Ivanečka’s place to my filthy domicile. During the walk through Folimanka, which undulates at a glacial pace, across the small community “under the bridge”, under another bridge, then up countless steps, I listened to my most recent version of Protivný Pták Nad Bouřícím Oceanem. One of the greatest joys I have in life is the point at which I am working on a piece of music and, during a listening session, I am struck by the reality that both I created this thing and that this thing is becoming something that I shall soon regard as exceedingly fantastic. In fact, in part, it is already fantastic, even if all of the parts are not yet in place and even if all of the parts that are in place are not yet “perfectly” played. This joyous moment is when the piece of music begins to cast the shadow of the fantastic thing that it will become.

I had myriad ideas for additions (and even subtractions!), of course, but I have gotten out of the habit of stopping a walk every thirty seconds to jot something down about the piece. This is certainly a habit I should reattain. However, the main conclusion I came to dealt with melody and voice leading during the last portion of the piece. I wonder to myself, and now to the Martenblog in which I now write, whether I should write a simple part with fantastic voice leading (because I already hear a portion of it in my head) for Christian to sing or whether I should just go ahead and make it a vocal-like synth line. My original idea was to give him a clump of the chords and let him do some la la la over it and use whatever he came up with, but the voice leading possibilities are too amazing to not take advantage of.

I also have reached an ideal configuration on my pedal board with its two marvelous audio pathways that entwine within Herr Scarlett to paint wide swaths of primary colors and then jagged, geometric figures in rambling, fluorescent combinations upon the aural canvas of my filthy flat. This means that Drone Day approaches and I should begin creating the “material” which will spew from https://drone.thurk.org/stream when the, as they say, “time” comes.

That time is soon.

Yesterday, I asked Christián for his opinion of the percussion in a short piece I’d written for Dani’s short film. At one point, he asked me, What are you trying to accomplish? I made up some bullshit about a statue of the Buddha with a pistol on a beach on the Baltic Sea, waves lapping at its base. A module in my collective mind reacted before my more mature modules could stop it. It feared that without an initial #narrative to back the piece of music up, the whole process was meaningless. Even after other #modules caught up, I didn’t back up and correct myself. Only later in the evening did I write something pertaining to my more mature thoughts on the subject.

From far back in my cultural education, I was progressively etched. If there is no compelling narrative as the impetus for a piece of #music, then it has no substance. Why? Why can’t a piece of art stand on its own without a story to back it? I respect Abstract Expressionists in this regard. And, in fact, for myriad works I have completed and are in the process of completion, no underlying narrative exists.

Many of my modules carry this cultural etching. The ones that do not, or on which the etchings are fading, become more and more dominant.

I think it is inevitable that for music humans bother to delve into, narratives are created, sourced from personal experiences and from emotions that surface during immersion. These pieces of art do not require an initial narrative, though. No #meaning is necessary. They can be personal sounding boards. They can be spaces where reverberations create unique narratives.

The dark form of the world is hollowed out by each of our beliefs and it is dissonance between such worlds which brings conflict. Multiple worlds. Perhaps only those who lack imagination can perceive without distortion.

I believe I typed this into Eira approximately a year ago. It was inspired by a paragraph from a novel by Cormac McCarthy. His point was that how we perceive the world - our personal beliefs - carve out the substance of existence just as wind or rain.

Reading my quote again, it seems obvious. After all, I was scolded today for stating the obvious. I say fuck criticizing myself, however, because it bludgeons down my will to write. That takes my mind quickly back to so many conversations with Christian about negativity and Energy Vampires and how our lives were better with out either. But that is another story (most likely already told elsewhere).

The idea of the quote does seem obvious. Of course dissonance between humans results from differing sets of beliefs. The views we hold do carve out our perception of reality. This perception directly leads to our expectations of how events should unfold. The dissonance results from these expectations not being met. All this leads to the obvious conclusion that humans with similar belief sets will basically get along better than those with differently shaped carvings.

I disagree with what I said about imagination, however. I believe it takes a large dollop of imagination and creativity, but most of all, sheer intellect, to carve a belief system out of the substance of reality which allows one to accept other belief systems on the surface and in their individual volumes. I’m thinking of a meta-carving. A space which accommodates different carvings and perhaps modifies itself in the process. A learning space. If the stuff of reality is three dimensional, then my meta-space is four dimensional.

Those who lack imagination will, like Roland, be single minded, have a static space carved from reality, frozen long before. Advantages to this mentality abound, and the immediately obvious disadvantage (at least to other humans) is that such a carving is obstinate to an extreme. Plodding onwards, this hollow will swallow none but perfect matches. Others are rudely thrust aside.

I could easily be drawn into thoughts of the brief exchange I had today with Miss Sunshine about proselytizing and continue. It is a natural continuation…

What is the best manner in which to motivate myself in the morning? I once had a book that I bearly got into entitled The Artist’s Way. It suggested the concept of morning pages. I suppose that is exactly what this is since it is thirty-one minutes past nine in the morning. The writing should be free flowing, almost stream of consciousness. Or, rather exactly stream of consciousness. I get to an initial point.

I feel particularly demotivated. I believe it is lack of stimulation, in general. I do my best with programming challenges, but they days rush by and I find I’ve little to be greatful for in the late evenings. I used to make lists of goals, but they rarely came to anything, so I’ll just mention here a few things I should do everyday without fail.

Though I am demotivated about my guitar playing and feel my course is in retrograde, it is a tool to creativity I should pick up and pluck every day without fail. Without fail, you fuck. I’ll go ahead and call this a morning page and can write every day. It’s not difficult. Just put aside time, you cowardly cunt.

More generally, don’t interrupt yourself with menial tasks during creative or thoughtful periods. DO NOT come whenever Marisa calls. DO NOT be daunted. Openly say, I am in the middle of something at the moment. Give me time. Multitudinous articles point to concentration dissociation killing the creative brain.

I am fighting against the inevitable. Age and my years of alcoholism has atrophied my abilities to gush creative associations. I know this ability can be rebuilt, but the only means I am sure of is proper concentration. Do not let petty interruptions deter you, vole! Marisa lives in a world of constant distraction. She rushes from one task to another in a state of perpetual multitasking. Let in be known that multitasking is a detriment to anything resembling mental progress.

My original idea for this martenblog entry was a stream of consciousness ramble about Shambal Brambel. I was deterred by a stupidity: The hangouts app in my phone will not allow me to search through my conversation with Christián. Whilst I was waiting on the female medical persona that some may dub a doctor a few weeks back (sitting on the cold tile floor of the hallway outside her closed office), I wrote a few lines to Christián that could have made a jolly introduction to a short Shambal saga. I shall attempt once again to find them now. Note: This is not a distraction, but rather a furthering of my current endevour.

Shambal stood atop the hill. He was sihlouetted in the strange double moonlight. He surveyed his vast crew, their work now complete, their faces upturned and expectant.

~ You are the egalitarion goats ~ he smirked down at them.

~ I am your shaman. I say your job is done. So it is done.

~ Now die.

The spell that he cast was a simple one - one of words. They were not kind words. However, instead of rage, the crowd expressed slow bafflement. During those moments, they were all grannies on the drip. Unexpected words can be soporific. They woo the mind into foggy oblivion. The crowd knew not what it was. As well as ceasing to be individuals, they finally ceased to be Shambal’s flock at all. They became the mute sheep of another pasture.

His command die mayhap could not be taken completely literally, for any flock without a shepherd will wander away to unkept fields. The flock will gradually scatter and scattering means, like with any corporal being, disintegration. They were never individuals in the first place. They only became a proper entity in a clump. Cells die alone.

Shambal ambled back to his one room hut. The door hung open and he didn’t bother to close it after he went inside. The raw earth floor oozed a mossy odour. The sod walls and densly leafed roof accentuated humidity. He sweated freely. On the solitary table against the back wall was a book. He walked two meters to have a closer look, as he did every day after dismissing a flock. It was the only copy left on his world that he knew of. He had written it in another age for another age, in a time where pressing matters let individual sheep or cells survive longer outside of nurturing mobs.

He turned back the cover. It rose with a gooey sound like mucousy lips parting after slumber. A page came partly with it, then fell away silenty as it settled to the table. He saw what he saw every morning, less and less discontentedly every morning. Where paragraph upon paragraph once stared boldly back at him were only congealed smudges. His words had joined their own flock long ago.

I went to lunch yesterday with Hynek. We had sparse contact for years and are just recently becoming close again. Close is a rather extreme word in this matter, but I use it because I don’t really think that anyone is actually close to Hynek in the normal sense of the word. What I mean is this: Becoming emotionally close to Hynek is simply like becoming close to my shittypie. Hynek is an emotionless machine who responds similarly as I’d imagine one with a high level of artificial intelligence might.

I may add that Acy, over the last few years, has struck me as such, as well.

Hynek actually stated during our conversation that he has no emotions. He (and his girlfriend Nina) have learned from observation to mimic emotions of those around them sufficiently to satisfy those with whom they interact, but have no real deep feelings at all.

I conclude that this will be the race of the future. No, not the humans of the future, but the race of the future. This race will consist of thinking machines which, during the times they have to interact with the remaining humans, they will be able to imitate emotions plausibly enough to satisfy, but they will have no understanding of emotion on a fundamental level.

I also conclude that emotions are chemical and the wiring of this future race will not be able to mimic the biological electricity which cause emotions.

This is also the reason beings like Acy and Hynek only comprehend mechanized techno music and its ilk. The arts humans hold dear - those which appeal deeply to the emotions - will vanish.

1) Who is the biggest dumbass you know?

George W. Bush Jr. (Also Acy’s answer, but I can’t think of anyone who is a bigger dumbass.)

2) What is your favorite kind of cheese?

Brie.

3) What county were you born in?

Tarrant.

4) Automatic or Manual?

Manual.

5) Does tequila make your clothes fall off?

I don’t wear clothes.

6) What is the biggest piece of furniture you own?

A sofa.

7) Have you ever licked the cheese off a Dorito & not eaten it?

Absolutely not.

8) What song would you like to be listening to right now?

Архистратиг.

9) Innie or outie?

Depends on the day.

13) Are you a tactful person?

It depends on who I am with at the time. With strangers/lesser known people, yes, usually. With friends, nope.

14) Have you ever told someone they didn’t look bad when they asked when they actually did look bad?

Of course.

15) Do you question the norm?

I question conformity (just like the Aceman, again).

16) Do you like to pop other peoples zits?

Only with wire cutters.

17) Are you guilty of handing out unsolicited advice?

Yes.

18) Do you prefer to give or receive presents?

Give!

19) Have you ever ridden a horse?

Yes.

20) Do you own a deep fat fryer (like a fry-daddy)?

I do it in a big pot. Plus - the only two things I deep fry are Felafel and Stray Pets.

21) Do you like the smell of Ketchup?

Ne!

22) Have you ever regifted anyone?

I am unaware of what regifted means.

23) Have you ever smoked Pot?

Not this week, baby.

24) Are you an impulsive person?

Yes.

25) Have you ever committed a Random Act Of Kindness?

Yes.

26) How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Four, counting house slippers and sandals.

27) Do you read shampoo bottle & ect. in the shower or bathtub?

I don’t wash myself.

28) Does it bother you that someone you know, other than your family members, feel free to just walk in your house without knocking?

Nope.

29) Do you know anyone who has the uncanny ability to be able to (accurately) finish your sentences?

Nope.

30) Give me another word for penis?

Klobasa, úd, pyj, pero.

31) Give me another word for vagina?

Kunda, píča, el coño.

32) If you could own your own company or business, what kind would it be?

Cafe or pub.

33) How many pets do you have?

Three if you count my flatmate.

34) Have you ever had a “Fling”?

Yes.

35) Nachos or Pretzels (stadium kind)?

Nachos.

36) Do you think Brad & Angelina will last?

I have no clue who Brad and Angelina are.

37) Do you care?

Not at all.

38) Who makes you laugh the most?

Chris Bender.

39) Do you consider yourself a beautiful person on the inside?

I consider myself a rodent on the inside.

40) Do think Michael Jackson is a freak or just misunderstood?

I have no opinion.

41) If you could be on any reality show, which one would it be?

Sex with Sheep and Goats in the Czech Republic.

42) Do you like lightening bugs?

Insects are for the weak.

43) Have you ever had sex on a trampoline?

Yup.

44) Have you ever had to have an enema?

Yup.

45) Have you ever gotten an autograph from a professional athlete?

Nope.

46) Who is the biggest slut you know (male or female)?

Daša Čermaková.

47) When I say the word ASSWIPE, who comes to mind?

Charles Burnside.

48) Have you ever let someone have something that was very special to you because they needed it more?

Yes.

49) Can you sing well?

Only if I concentrate very hard.

50) How many time a day do you poop?

Once.

51) What is your favorite website?

http://www.google.com

52) Do you consider yourself an addict of any kind?

Yes, though Lucía strongly disagrees.

53) If your closest friend’s companion came on to you would you tell your friend?

Yup.

54) What is your favorite song to make fun of?

Anything by Divokej Bill.

55) Do you laugh alot?

No.

56) Do you cry alot?

No.

57) Have you ever saved anyone’s life?

Not directly.

58) What is your favorite thing to do to relax?

Go to the Zoo.

59) Do you ever count sheep?

No, but I shag them.

60) Did you enjoy this survey?

Sure.

Today I had lunch with Bender-boy and Anne, his wife. We ate at an establishment in Andrews that exhibits properties of an excellent tex-mex restaurant, though it could be a brothel in Kazakhstan for all I know. My general perception of the world around me is coloured my delusions of being in another place - ANY OTHER PLACE.

Though, interestingly enough, Bender-boy and I emanated from this area of the world. Perhaps we even defined it. I can’t say that it defined us, as there is an alien psychology in any other “human” I meet from these parts. At least there has been recently - meaning within the past few epochs.

Today I had lunch with Bender-boy. I hadn’t seen him for 22 years, give or take a month. The cliché holds that our communication was quite like it was back then, as if no time had passed. Of course, we have communicated via electro trans-pacific means during the meantime, so the cliché doesn’t have the same weight as it might were we to have had no communication at all.

Sudden memories rose in my mind of time we defined together, and we did define time itself, as time itself was frozen within those memories. They are photographs and static. They are photographs - a far better medium than video.

In a way, we are ageless as our memory between us is, indeed, static. It is, indeed, a series of photographs. We pass through incremental stages of concrete recollections bordered on each side by hazier half-scenes from possible pasts. It occurs to me that unless I specifically created a concrete mental signpost for one reason or another, my recollections shared with others are the most vivid and significant.

Anne mentioned a death. At first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but finally it occurred to me that Bender-boy had mentioned the dead friend from the past at some moment or another. And perhaps at multiple moments. Lee, of course. So it has been decided that we’ll take a road trip to Pecos and to the grave. We’ll buy a pack of Marlboro Reds on the way.

Amusingly, Bender-boy gets monthly or bi-monthly messages from West Texas oil fields about work opportunities. Best would be he work a rig, lose a few limbs and, much later, after the fourth accident, live in a vegetative state for the rest of his existence - an existence of a mere seven further epochs.

It occurs to me that I only have a superficial overview of the myriad stories Bender-boy has told me about his working life, though from what I know, him toiling at the zenith of a rig amid the dizzy heights in the baking petrol suffused heat isn’t all that far-fetched. After all, he did work at the zeniths of many smokestacks testing the toxicity of their emissions whilst inhaling the fumes and managing not to tumble to his death. He worked at a nicotine “factory” in North Carolina where he absorbed the drug from the atmosphere whilst adding to its potency by smoking.

Did I mention that we are going to buy a box of Marlboro Reds on the way to the grave?

A few days ago, I began the journey of migrating flavigula.net to static-generated. So one could say that now my blog, music meanderings, poetry abominations and various other diddlings are now generated directly from the primal static of the universe. The primary file of code that accomplishes this feat is here. The generation “engine” (I laughingly call it an “engine”) is pretty specific to my personal needs. It could be generalised, but I’d have to have a pretty large dollop of impetus to follow through.

(here)

Besides taking the blog entries from MongoDb and spitting them out using Elixir’s EEx templating library, my primary aim was to follow my Gemini site as closely as possible, mirroring it, más o menos. This involved parsing the Gemini files and attending to several peculiarities. One of those peculiarities that I’m particularly fond of is taking footnoted links and placing them within the html document.

A practise from bygone epochs was to place links at the bottom of a page of content. The bygone epoch I refer to is circa 1993 or 4 when I starting writing text-only web pages. I only had a DUMB terminal in my apartment. Nope - no computer for me! I just used the DUMB terminal to dial up to Neosoft (a Houston ISP) and use my shell account there and at Texas A&M University Statistics Department (via telnet, perhaps - did we already have openssl in that bygone epoch?). I had a guest account at said Statistics Department and, curiously enough, said guest account didn’t vanish from the rostro of the internet until December 1999. In any case, I had a DUMB terminal. I connected to Neosoft, then to TAMU, and wrote text-based web apparati. Fun times.

A practise from the initial throes of the web was instead of placing all links inline, to place the ones that would be obtrusive at the bottom of a page of content. I do exactly this on my Gemini pages. The challenge was to suck up all those links and relate them to their references within the page content. An example:

On the main music page of flavigula.net and also on gemini://thurk.org/flavigula/index.gmi, the following line appears:

Secondly, the thurk.org funkwhale[f] is brimming with both current and antique Flavigula. These include Omnivorous Expanse[g] (also on Bandcamp[h]), a project with Tim Rowe, and Bricked-up Cupboard[i], a collection of tunes that may or not be refined for future “release”.

At the bottom of the page are the following footnote links:

=> https://funkwhale.thurk.org f. Thurk.Org Funkwhale
=> https://funkwhale.thurk.org/library/albums/14/ g. Omnivorous Expanse on Funkwhale
=> https://timroweflavigula.bandcamp.com/releases h. Omnivorous Expanse on Bandcamp
=> https://funkwhale.thurk.org/library/albums/7/ i. Bricked Up Cupboard

As the page is scanned, a map is built with the letters f-i referring to their line in an array (it’s not actually an array, but that’s not important). These lines are modified when matching footnotes are found. I played around with various configurations of text and link and finally found that since there was no easy way to place the anchor around the text the link referred to, I’d just place all the links unobtrusively at the end of each paragraph. I like the way it came out.

Main Flavigula Music Page

(Main Flavigula Music...)

I’m certain there are oddities and errors in my static-generated implementation, but I feel I reached my objective. Well, since my objective was a very fuzzy target, and I gave up on being a perfectionist long ago, I’m ecstatic. Oouh, baby.

Another change from my vue-powered ex-site was ditching Bootstrap. Why? There is no why. I trundled through a few micro css frameworks and finally happened upon Chota. I am very pleased with Chota. I encourage everyone reading this, and also everyone not reading this, to leap from the Bootstrap, Foundation, Bulma or Ichthyosaur wagon and begin rolling anew with Chota.

(Chota)

Yes sir ee.

The bed comforts my sore buttocks. I have been tortured once again by having to rise from my solace and go into the world. The day was balmy and quiet in the interior, but outside, sleeting. In my youth, the sleet never bothered me. It was another sensation for my skin to relish. Now that and other sensations are far in the past. In fact, the concept of feeling now is only going through the motions. I can pretend an emotion at the touch of a certain element, but it is entirely fabricated.

My buttocks need the bed more than I do. They have grown to enormous proportion. Time and again, I believe I am turning into Shambal. I curse my fate, but know I had many opportunities to turn from it. I let each pass me by and these days I curse every moment away from my bed as a torture. I am sure, for several decades now, he has not risen at all. The system that flushes his bowels provides constant vigilance. Perpetual consumption coupled with perpetual excretion is the norm for beings such as Shambal.

Tales tell of a different being. He was deft on his feet, they say. I doubt if his lower appendages do anything but take up space now. But once upon a time, he stood on a hill during each mid-morning and made the serfs cry with pain and wonder. How did he accomplish this? In the past, the peasants did not labour as machines, but had a smattering of emotions that only a strumpet like Shambal could set afire. He’d get them romping and dancing with a few claps of his pudgy paws. His booming voice, now only a distant croak, scribed as in ink on their minds phrases their grandchildren repeat to this day. I laugh at myself a little at these words, since these grandchildren are little more than infant minds in bodies of able-bodied grunts.

(some minutes later after talking to Marisa about the themes of my writing)

I had to go out into the falling ice because of a broken socket. Sockets are to many, things of a less automated past, things never to be thought or worried about. Two hundred or so years prior, they were common to connect onself, or the machine that was the comforter for onself to either a source of power, or a signal of communication. Even further back, they were strangely less used. All electromagnetic radiation was banned, or, rather, all creature-made electromagnetic radiation was forbidden. Before that, thrust forth from communication sockets were devices that showered an area with myriad radiations filled with streams of chatter. This, that, bing, bong, gobble, gibble, grunt.

A form of eccentricity evolved in creatures that made them spastic and unreliable. Multi-tasking was a name given to the crime. Those too afflicted were cut down and used to feed the remaining agriculture. Sockets that vomited into machines that spread this desease were converted to only connect a single apparatus with a certain focus.

I have meandered from my point, alas. Sockets still exist, of course, or I wouldn’t have had to leave the solace of my bed. Sockets line each floorspace, corridor, atrium, entranceway, tube, tram-capsule and IKEA. They are just not visible. They spew forth lines of invisible focus that are threads with diameters miniscule beyond the senses of creatures. Passing through suits, under-comforts and flesh, they drink each their type of input from all who pass.

Like Shambal, most of my time is spend idle, so sockets have fixed threads impaling my being at all times, even during slumber. Another anomaly of the past was that dreams were forbidden to the socket’s threads. Now, it is commonplace to have a profession that assists in the combination of datastreams from multitudinous creature-dreams to form films and video arcades for the entertainment of creatures too young to be healthily put into stability without damage. When earlier in the day, the socket that gushed threads into my cerebellum, facilitating the perpetual flexions of my muscles, exploded with a pop not unlike that of a creature exploding in a cell accidently turned quickly to vacuum, I harumphed in momentary despair.

Thankfully, my lower appendages still function, unlike what I guess to be Shambal’s. I rose from my comfort and danced along the mildly glowing bluish track that led to the rectangular prism that cleaned and depilated me with gusting powder. Some, also like Shambal, have had their hormones that grow hair deleted, sparing them frequent cleaning. Another machine stamped me with appropriate colour and pressured me outwards into the tube. A bubble-tram awaited. I climbed in.

My first destination had to be for porridge. When one is forced to leave his premises, one must at least have porridge. In the past (yes - again during that distance!), other warm comestibles were available, along with something called fruit manufactured in long forgotten factories. Porridge is what remains of that part of a deceased culture. I am not sure of its actual contents and honestly don’t enjoy putting in into my gullet, but it remains one of the only links to the past and I am stupidly sentimental in my middle age. Being far more decrepit, I’d imagine Shambal to be even more so.

Conversation with a woman outside:

She drives up in a car. I am smoking a cigarette.
“Did you need something?”
“Like what, for example?”
“You were staring at me.”
“No, I am smoking a cigarette.”
“Well, did you need something?”
“Who are you? Do you work here?”
“No.”

Why was she so uptight?

“Do you like sex?
“It’s ok”
“Can I come in?”
“No, you cannot.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I am just smoking a cigarette.”
“You must be a fag.”
“If you think so.”
“Your kind is everywhere.”
“Possibly.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”

I watched The Lobster last night whilst lying in bed with Marisa. I’m fairly certain that I enjoyed the film much more than she did, though one is never to know exactly the thoughts, fears, delights and scandals of a woman, exactly. Regardless, I did watch The Lobster last night.

In fact, our taste in film is very divergent, as it was with Jana. I tire of endless realism in the same way I tired of Renaissance paining and its anal-retentive need for precision. During the opening minutes of the film, Marisa began asking questions concerning the reasons the people were in such an environment and what forerunning elements might be. My reply was to dismiss such details as irrelavent. The characters have been placed in this situation by the writer. Let’s see how they cope with it. For me, it is the immediacy that is important. Any historical discourse as to how on earth did we get to a state like this in our culture / society means little.

I am reminded of a brief conversation I had with Christián once concerning the film The Road. He asked me to muse about what may have happened to the world that left the father and son in their situation. My reply was similar to mine to Marisa. It is not important to me.

Relationships often sink to a point of lowest common denominator. One central point of the film is that for a relationship to be healthy, both parties have to have a similar affliction. For example, Colin Farrell’s character is myopic. The film states that it is his defining characteristic. His ideal mate has to also be myopic.

One of the first scenes, confusing at the time, was of Colin sitting on a sofa communicating (italicized since the method of communication in this film is staggeringly stilted) with his wife, ex-wife, or soon to be ex-wife. The line he speaks that resonates through the remainder is Does he wear glasses or contact lenses? All relationships most strongly bonded by a lowest common denominator.

I’m forgetting an important detail. Once of a certain age (never specified) and without a mate, one is placed in a hotel with others in the same condition. Gradiations of this condition do exist, as we see couples in the hotel during the course of viewing, but later find out they are experiencing a trial run as a pair. Therefore, they are being closely observed. After a specified time, anyone who do not find a mate and subsequently prove him / herself during the trial run is transformed into an animal of his / her own choice and released into the forest. There, they supposedly fend for themselves.

The film’s opening is a fixed shot within a car of a woman driving. It is strangely tension-building in its simplicity. She eventually stops, gets out, strides into a field of donkeys, pulls a gun, and shoots one dead. Another of the animals slowly moves over to investigate his fallen companion before the film cuts to the next scene. The situation is never revisited.

But back to relationships: the defining factor of one’s existence.

One female is cursed with spontaneous nosebleeds. A male character (Ben Winshaw) has a limp as a defining characteristic. To gain salvation, he fakes nose bleeds by bashing his head against flat surfaces, slapping himself silly and slicing up his nasal cavity. The hotel establishes that the two have similar afflictions. They are allowed to become a couple. They are married. During the ceremony, the management makes it a point to mention their affliction as source of bonding. It is never clear who the employees of the hotel really are, though one is shown in an entirely different context in the second half of the film. They are, however, the arbiters of the guests’ fates. Again, I am not bothered that their role is not made completely clear. Use your imagination to fill in the gaps, ya cunt!

I see pairing off in this regard as a micro-example of group-mind. When tethered to a partner at all times, your level of awakening is diminished. At last, you are only able to see the world through a filter fashioned by yourself and your mate. The affliction metaphor is apt. Both parties sink to the defining point of each others’ maladies. To use an hick expression: a group is only as quick as its slowest member. The expression doesn’t actually originate from hicks, but from Ancient Greece. Again, when tethered at all times to another, it is inevitable to sink into a morass of duonymity. A couple is only as swift as its dumbest half.

Colin’s charcter, too, attempts to fake an affliction, though one much more complex. He chooses a psychopathic guest. His sights are set on her, so after another guest, reaching the end of her days, attempts suicide from a second story window, fails and lies wailing in a pool of blood on the cement, Colin attempts to garner favour from the psychopath by pouring nastiness on the suffering woman’s plight.

The point is extreme. To be solitary is an affliction in itself. The hotel members go on hunting expeditions with tranquilizer guns to drag back loners from the forest. They gain points extending their hotel stay and their chances of appropriating a mate with each kill. Childish, theatrical demonstrations are given by the management illustrating the advantages of coupleness.

It’s never said outright, but hinted firmly at later in the movie, that the nearby city is filled only with couples (or, rather, families). Solitary hangers-on are not allowed. One scene sees a copper questioning Colin and his (admittedly pretend) wife about papers proving their coupleness. The city is also shown as consumerist heaven. Salvation is being a family and endlessly binging on products, useful or not. These parts are shot in a dreamlike manner to heighten the sense of unreality from the point of views of the outsiders.

When this sort of society comes to pass, as it surely shall, I will be drug thrashing and croaking from my solitary hut on Saaremaa.

Fuck um.

Well, this one has the most formiddable memories attached to it.

She spread her wings, and then she was gone.

Invigoration.

I need a splash in the face with the frigid water of existence. Probably existentialism, as well. I am surprised that I grew up to be anything interesting psychologically at all. The drab, washed out setting all around me attests to only stagnation and death. From where did I pull my inspiration? Possibly from pain. Obsession?

Newly found old friends have inspired the gut instinct of creation to an extent once again, but it is not going to be nearly enough to get me off of my lugubrious buttocks. Of course, Sweet Entropy sucks out my soul once again in a mere ten days.

But how to keep up until then without it being a toil?

No, Maggie, making lists don’t help.

I turn, once again, to bygone days.

I can’t forget that by ideal standards, we’re all of us silly-looking, witless geese.

My idealism is a thing my parents certainly cannot relate to. Peering at it from outside, from the, as it were, listless sands of West Texas, it seems an unlikely oasis. I must be a stream of pure water amid the muddy regularity of their life. I do not mean to seem pretentious in that statement. I just want the imagery of contrast to be readily apparent.

By platonic standards, our clunky reality certainly has shortcomings. I do posit, however, that the clunkiness, when not sanded down to soundless and frictionless clockwork, is charming. It is also the nectar of fecundity. A platonic solid cuts out its place in space by sharp edges. As less than ideal worm-fodder, we less-than-perfect must struggle against routine which will smooth those edges completely away. It is a curve which peaks somewhere between beautific perfection and mechanized perfection. First, beating at beauty with an angry, iron rod to shout against its implausibility is fuel for the upwards climb. The calculation and craziness combined. Etched upon the peak of the curve, shrouded in clouds, looking outwards from the two-dimensional page is where we want to be. But submitting in entirety to routine will swallow us whole. Tempering routine with jagged bursts of chaos is the meta-routine, and the only solution which does not let us drop downwards into the doldrums of mediocrity.

I have just finished a rather large plate of millet, dates, honey and pears. My stomach is relatively happy. I shall most probably be late to work again since I am procrastinating that diabolical shower thing, but no-one will say a word when I arrive. They will only place aggrivated glances on my back at poisoned times during the day.

This appears to be the first entry in the brand new, fantastic, orgasmic Fucksheep Blog. May more come with regularity. Ooouh, baby.

The firm, barred back of this ancient, wooden chair bites into my back and I flash back to the dim yet burning sensations of my youth. I took a stroll today. Through the park in which the red, ufo of a carosel stood immobile in the dry, bitter wind. Where the chains of the swings jingled greetings to their old solitary friend as I passed. I circumnavigated the pit of a swimming pool, protected from molestation by ragged and crumbling chain-link fences. My feet kicked up dust along the shoulders of the old Alpine highway and passers-by gave glanced at me oddly as if I had been naked without the ugly bulk of automobile clothing hanging about me. Entering the ‘Alamo Grocery’ where a piece of gum used to cost one cent and four years prior, my handsome friend, Chris Bender, bought at least six lottery tickets, I thought momentarily of purchasing a Root Beer but then decided with a stupid simper on my face to get a Snapple instead.

Fucking America again.

I’m reading Quiet. Yes - I’ve been reading this book sporadically since April. I do love it. That is not an issue. My scattered thought patters and erratic behaviour is the cause. But I’m not particularly concerned about these causes or symptoms at the moment. See… I’m reading Quiet and I am on a muted train bound from Miranda de Ebro to San Sebastian. The mustelid brain is trusting of the future.

I quote Quiet.

The papers turned out to be chock-full of irregularities. If I’d been in the bankers’ shoes, this would have made me nervous, very nervous. But when our legal team summarized the risks in a caution-filled conference call, the bankers seemed utterly untroubled. They saw the potential profits of buying those loans at a discount, and they wanted to go ahead with the deal. Yet it was just this kind of risk-reward miscalculation that contributed to the failure of many banks during the Great Recession of 2008.

The topic is risk-reward. Well, no, the topics are Stonecrop, Quiet, Hedonism and Introversion, as anyone reading the top of this entry can clearly see.

I made the Stonecrop connection whilst reading this section of the book. The parallel is clear. It is unmuddled. Doug and Steve and Poggi are acting exactly like the bankers describe in the above quote. They are obsessed with immediate risk-reward. Any reward which is delayed, no matter quality of results, is not as important. Jeremy says they have hired an additional four Rails programmers. I suppose that brings it to five, including Fred. Jeremy continued to muse about them all buzzing (my word - not his) in the increasingly cramped office but never moving forward. I suspect he means never moving forward to my satisfaction, but the idea still holds.

I was brought on in May. This risk-reward seeking seemed evident from the first. Steve, especially, the epitome of extrovert, pushed. Undoubtedly, he was being psychologically kicked around by Doug. As Jeremy always claimed, Steve was led on by the golden carrot in front of his nose. I have no doubt that Jeremy was/is right.

Jeremy and I, both introverts, longed to create something over the long term which was quality, expandible and modular. This brought us nothing but misery. Ok - it wasn’t exactly misery, but close.

My father’s reflex reaction to me declaring that I have some sort of semi-spontaneous plan is Emotional Blackmail. He exhibits this tendency almost daily in differing quantities. Today, I am absolutely sure that he didn’t even have time to consider before his response was uttered.

It is their anniversary. Less than an hour before my announcement that I would have dinner with Sandy, my mother had stated that they would celebrate their 43rd in Ruidoso this weekend. We are all going to Ruidoso together. But, once I received the message from Sandy and opened the door to the garage where my parents were smoking to inform them of my evening plans, my father’s immediate response was something along the lines of “But we are going to do something tonight for our anniversery.” Now, of course there had been no plans I was aware of, and my mother had stated that their ‘celebration’ would be in Ruidoso this weekend, anyway. Why does he do this? Why does anyone? My first thought is that it is a gut reaction to his perception of a loss of control of a situation (though there wasn’t really a situation; it was concocted spontaneously in his mind).

The Emotional Blackmail page on Wikipedia lists four types of emotional blackmailers. My father pretty much falls in the first of these. They are:

(Emotional Blackmail)

• The punisher
• The self-punisher
• The sufferer
• The tantalizer

A punisher will, regardless of the situation, attempt to take control of the situation by emotionally manipulating its participants. Loss of control is their greatest fear. I’ve found that resisting this sort of blackmail is to not take the person seriously and even just laugh at their attempts at manipulation. Of course, this becomes more and more difficult proportionally to the size of the group involved, as one individual resisting becomes a weaker and weaker voice. Another defence (and a defence to any of the types of listed emotional blackmail) is apathy. Well, that is a defence to pretty much anything, correct? :)

I have been guilty of being the third type of emotional blackmailer many times in the past. Realizing this fault of mine again and again, however, I have done much to purge this ‘feature’ of my personality. Bastard upbringing. However, I am certainly not the only guilty party. Pretty much every girlfriend (and wife) I’ve had in the past have employed this method to some degree. And at times frequently and in a manner which was wholly unfair (yes, unfair in my perception, which is the one that counts in this case).

Soon I shall enter a vehicle and use it to transport myself to Andrews whereupon I’ll have dinner with Sandy. On the way, I shall listen to Guapo. Everyone loves Guapo.

The bridge would collapse even before he got half-way, Shambal thought. He’d been thinking the same for years. Realistically, he’d been crossing said bridge for years. On the way to the center, the point at which he figured the collapse would occur, he’d been collecting. His mother had always told him to goal in life is to collect.

To accumulate.

His feelings now were not just presentiments. He could actually see the absolute center. The apex was obvious because his life was a simple one: A series of crests, each of varying heights, that wore him thinner in preparation for a collapse at the peak.

In a sense, his life was only a half-bridge. He had no intention of descending in ease and good-humour the more or less descending second half. Nah. At the zenith was the place to climax. In slumber and in waking, that climax meant loosing every drop of accumulation.

His mother would have been proud at his accumulation. To accumulate is to be divine. So, in the proper manner of his fore-folks, and being the last in a long line of hoarders, the universe will welcome the imminent explosion. Possessions will rain down into the abyss. The wretched wraiths below will scrabble for the shattered pieces - the ones who are not pummelled by weighty debris.

His mother would have been proud, but she was dead. Or perhaps she is among the wraiths now, waiting to snatch greedily at the air as bits and pieces she once owned hail from the sky. If this is the case, Shambal can see her spittle run down a chin fouled by tough, white whiskers. She has that silver chain in her left hand. It fell directly into her left hand. The amber pendant swings listlessly. Two drops of spittle patter soundlessly in the dust.

Every crest on the way to the top has been a mini-goal of accumulation. At times, these accumulations have been literal, but mostly they consisted of filling empty vessels in his spirit with assembled stones. Once assembled, these stones were static. They did nothing but sat in his chest and on one hand augmented his stamina and strained muscles, but on the other weighed more than solely physically.

Easily, upon each crest, he could have lain stones aside. Then, at the apex, he could look back and see his marked progress. He could even colour each completed stone according to whatever aesthetic an individual climb had instilled in him. He never did so.

His discrete goals stayed with him as eventual burdens. And, as over each hill he went, to lay any of them aside seemed more and more of a task that to carry them all to the zenith.

Oh, what an explosion it will be!

Christián once again clarified his love of goals to me in a message a few hours ago. He had just left some sort of movie premier. Some of the actors (including Brenden Gleeson, woo hoo) were also there, and his titillation shown through even in messages. I resisted the urge to mock it. The urge was strong, however, since I have a deep hatred of star worship. The deification of celebrities is repugnant to me.

I can try to see it from Christián’s point of view. His apex, of course, is to be a successful, and therefore, famous opera singer. Or a rock singer. Or a writer. Or just about any sort of famous thing possible. I’d suggest to him to become a famous pursuer of sexual relations with goats, but he’d probably just laugh it off. Cunt.

He wrote this:

We seriously need to get our stories out there. The world thirsts for them.

And I replied:

It’s not really my objective to get my stories out there. the journey is much more important to me than any destination.

Impermanence pervades life. I admire the artists in San Sebastian who create sand sculptures and relish the moments when they are washed away by the tide. They build them purposefully below the tide-line. I respect these humans.

The idea of Shambal’s bridge is an echo of what I typed the other day about discrete points of life and goal-oriented living. I find it to be a terrible waste. To crush an existence to a number of points with the passages between being only means to those ends makes me at times literally weep.

I was raised like Shambal by a mother (and a stubborn, niggardly father) to create a life of discrete points. With what I have left, the journeys are for the savouring.

The sad tree shelters the hammer’s progress.

The parasite which sucks oil from the earth in the middle of what my mother calls the “Walking Park” here in Seminole stands oblivious and mechanical over a small tree (dubbed The Sad Tree by the Smaller One). The actual name of the park is the SS Forrest park. It was constructed, I believe, in the 80s during tortured times at Fort Stockton High School (for me).

I should have written the opposite, really. The hammer is actually sheltering, if one could call it that, the tree. Regardless, they are both out of place.

They are both artificial.

By artificial, I mean out of their environment. Both placed by humans. The hammer is more blantant in its artificiality, but the tree, having to be constantly irrigated lest it wither, is in a sadder state. This is akin to your frail grandmother having been born frail and during every second of her decrepit life being hooked to life support.

If some system of isomorphic neurological structure exists inside this tree which gives it a sort of consciousness (though alien to our own), it is screaming for euthanasia.

The evil hammer pounds away as the Sad Tree possibly observes. It will break down into constituent elements one day much further in the future. Or if the explosives are effective.

It is wacky Tuesday. In two days it shall be Acy day. Imagine that (imagine that)! How well has bob (in all of his slothful grandeur) progressed with his chat application? Hm? Well, not really any at all, if the truth need be known. The initial item in my two entry list circa two days prior has been completed, but the second not even touched. A new problem has cropped up, as well, and I shall enumerate it here:

The ImageButtons cannot load their images because the images can only be loaded by the applet class itself (fucking security). So I must load all of the images using the applet class (which results in horrific object-orientedness) and pass them to the ImageButtonPannel object which will feed each ImageButton with its image/text pair. Good fun, eh? Meanwhile, I infuriate people on Průvodce, amusingly.

And so I shall follow that larger bit of a problem with a seznam of smaller ‘improvements’. Yipeee!

I failed the universe’s tenuous strands that hold its gauze together two days ago when I did not write about the dream I had which featured not Lucía herself, but a physical search for where she might be. I used to have tangible address books and there were essential to me. They were sacred. Tangible address books! Ones one could actually touch! Imagine that! And one of these tangible address books still exists and it is in a box in the closet in my bedroom in Seminole. When I was last there in March, I did not peruse it. Next time I shall.

In any case, the dream of the search for where Lucía might be. Well, we know where she is at the moment or should be at the moment and that is in New York City. Her current position in space is immaterial, however, as she exists in another form in my dreams and in my memories or even in my life. There are two Lucías. One is (usually) in New York City. The other is still in Patagonia.

In any case, the dream of the search for where Lucía might be. The moment in the dream was brief. I was thumbing through one of my sacred address books and found her page of residence. Perhaps that page was also her location - not just New York City or Patagonia. Blurry scribblings surrounded her entry and to the left was a quote I had notated from Melanie. Are my eidolons merging?

It’s thrilling to be at home with the smell of freshly washed laundry wafting on the chilly breeze from the open window cross the drying rack to my flaring nostrils. Herr Wolfgang Riechmann’s synthesizers howl in my ears, playfully. In brief, I am happy I am here in this moment. It may be the beer, however.

The río Tíron is one of the last refuges of the European Mink in Spain. We think there are approximately sixty left. Well, Madis thinks there are about sixty left. I think there are less. Most important are females within breeding age. They are harder and harder to find. They are smaller than the males and fall victim more often to the highly territorial and invasive American Mink. Bastards. Well, actually it’s not really their fault, but the fault of the fucking humans who brought them to Europe in the sixties. Bastards.

That being ranted about, this stretch of the river is very calm. I can sit for hours with a pen and journal (a sandwich also helps, plus a bottle of highly potent liquid) and be lost in the current, so to speak.

And right beside where I took the previous photo is:

Ok. I slept. I have no idea where we are now in the dialogue. I was thinking of Melanie. Poor soul. Stupid expression, I know. Damnit… mind … don’t let things escape me.

When we were in New York, in Washngton Heights (I’d mapify that for you right now, but I don’t have the patience), it broke when i whipped her too badly.

We bought the whip in Arkansas, at a trailer shop that shouldn’t have been. It was to be for Corliss and Jayson. Well, that was what Melanie said. It was a fucking joke, like everything about her was. She was pretending. Cunt. Well, we proceeded to the north and fucked constantly on the way. She was that type. Once we reached NYC, and after Boston and another story with John, we found a very comfortable place in Washington Heights. I think Loyal could attest to it.

She wanted me to beat her with this thing we bought for Corliss and Jayson. So I did. Again and again. Of course, since I am an extreme person, it became too much after a time, and the bruises on her back were telling. The cycle went down from there. However, I’d never be here were that not to happen.

I’m not sure why I am thinking about things that were so long ago right now. Bastards… I’ll kill them… They destroyed my life! I think that insecurity breeds a new form of armageddon. Striking out at your friends is never a healthy option.

Oh! The hypocricy! Yeah, I’ve done bad, as well, but, even if I was the bad guy, in peoples’ eyes. In my friends’ eyes, I still see nothing I did that was wrong. Why? Why was I crucified?

Fuck um. We’ll get back to the subject of La Rioja at some point.

But really… why were all of you such assholes? (Christián not included)

Now a certain error is being an irritant. It looks like this:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Key must be integer

Here is the code spouting the error:

(defpage "/expand/:id" {:keys [id]}
  (let [e (entry/get-record id)]
   (normal-entry e)
   (expand-contract-link "contract" e)))

As any observant mustelid can see, there is nothing wrong with that code according to the Noir documentation. I shall pull out pieces of my pancreas for a few more minutes flummoxing myself about it.

(Noir documentation)

I dislike it greatly when a problem solves itself, and especially if it is just from tinkering a bit.

Here is the code:

(defpartial expand-contract-link [which e]
  [:br.clear]
  (link-to {:id (str which (:id e))}
           "#" which)
  [:hr.clear])

(defpartial ajax-hovno []
  [:script "ajax_hovno();"])

(defpartial normal-entry [e]
  (:entry e)
  (expand-contract-link "contract" e)
  (ajax-hovno))

(defpartial truncated-entry [e]
  (trunc (:entry e))
  (expand-contract-link "expand" e)
  (ajax-hovno))

; Ajax paths                                                                    
(defpage "/expand/:id" {:keys [id]}
  (normal-entry (entry/get-record id)))

(defpage "/contract/:id" {:keys [id]}
  (truncated-entry (entry/get-record id)))

I’d like to make some sort of intelligent commentary on this film, but I seem unable to be coherent at the moment. So how is that for meta-tagging the entry? The feeling, from the beginning, is fucking intense. What a great start! What do you think, my elegant reader? I stopped the film just now. I was going to register something — mayhap here, mayhap in yon journal, but it has escaped me. Shit.

Definately, this film burns like Acy’s blowtorch to the leg of my cardtable back in 1991. You can feel the tension from the start. I am just to the point now where Jasper takes Faron to his place. They are about to smoke weed and listen to Radiohead. I remember so much. Fuck, that is a good idea. Oouh baby.

Another interesting point is that the version of ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ is sung by Franco Battiato. What the fuck kind of coincidence is that, my fine, feathered friend?

I wonder when it is time to feel old. I think my parents insist that it should be soon. It was only last year that my mother mentioned to me that I should be passing into middle age soon. Stereotypes are fun, eh?

The conversation with Mike in early 1994 is important. There are people (like, as he said, Miles, who would grow old naturally and happily) who grow old and people who are damned to be young for the rest of their existence. That reminds me: I’d be good to get in touch with him sometime soon, not only for nostalgic’s sake.

I think a large portion of the film is about forgetting people who are important. Well, perhaps that is just an ironic point of view. Ach Jo. What scratching impulse does one have when all one’s friends have been murdered because of some absurd political reason?

So I am going to watch the remainder of the film and sadden myself because of its inhumanty. I gotta figure out how to translate this to fucksheep zitra, for sure. FUCK.

I am incredibly fucking frustrated concerting Project Euler #254. I am befuddled. Flummoxed. And overall - irritated. The problem is an irritant. I posted some things about it in the Sheep Blog earlier and have since learned that none of that matters at all. Of course, this will be soon merged with the Sheep Blog, so the last sentence is half superfluous. But, anyway, creating a list of every number which has digits which add up to i was big fun, though ultimately pointless. Having the values of f(n) does nothing for me because with each of them I’d have to calculate the n. The sheer amount of computation involved is staggering. Furthermore, to get each f(n) for i = 150 takes longer than it would to pull a tugboat full of raving mustelids from here to South Africa without encountering any water or poisonous snakes.

So!

I hope you have noticed that I have begun writing these entries (starting today) with markdown since the Sheep Blog uses BlueCloth to create the fucking html from fucking text. Yeah.

So!

My next strategy was to make a map of sf(n) -> n. The code I have just come up with is this:

sfMap z = sfMap' (IntMap.fromList []) [1..z]
    where sfMap' theMap [] = theMap
          sfMap' theMap (x:xs) = sfMap' (if (IntMap.lookup sfx theMap) == Nothing
                                         then IntMap.insert sfx x theMap
                                         else theMap) xs
              where sfx = sf x

I’m using IntMap because I read in the glorious ghc library reference that it is exceedingly quick (maybe even quicker than a marten). Now, this creates a map with only one entry for each i (which is sf(x)). Since I am being sequential in my xs (note the [1..z]), the first time a x results in an i (sf(x)), it is recorded. Any further duplicate *sf(x)*s are ignored. I think this is the correct step forward (as opposed to the false stagger in a random direction earlier) even though when attempting to find is up to 1 000 000, it was taking so long I had to interrupt the process. I need to create a more efficient way of making this map. I have some shades of ideas, but they are still murky.

I shall continue after returning from an excursion to ‘Southern Rose’ with my parents for dinner. Yum…. I suppose.

I have returned. Actually I returned over two hours ago. What have I done since then? Well, unfortunately, I have not forgotten about Project Euler and my little problem (cue the song, though it has little to do with mathematics). I played Hand and Foot with my parents (I came out on bottom and do not mind in the least), consumed some oatmeal cookies (much to my tummy’s chagrin) and wrote a program.

I had this brainstorm whilst at the restaurant, actually. There was a book I espied in Luxor in Praha back in, um, most likely 2007. It was about sharpening discursive skills or some rot of the like. I enjoyed thumbing through it and desperately wanted to purchase it because I felt my quickness of mind has been dulling like a blade scraped repeatedly on porous rock. Yeah. Like that. Unfortunately, when I next returned to the bookstore, I could no longer locate the tome. I did remember a point from it which stuck with me and has taken me over three years to implement. insert smiley. The book suggested doing a number of simple arithmetic problems quickly every morning consistently. I always liked the idea, but have, as I just wrote, and you know I love repeating myself, procrastinated until about 30 minutes ago in employing the method in any sort of tangible manner.

So I wrote the program. It is called daily_arithmetic.rb. Any fool can see that I wrote it in Ruby. I really should have done it in Haskell, instead, but IO in Haskell flummoxes me terribly, as very few of you know. Possibly none of you knew that until the very moment you read the last sentence. Just for fun, I’ll post the whole program here. 750words.com would probably call this cheating, but it is an original work, after all, and I’ll attempt to vomit up another 100 or so words afterwards to appease the spirit of fair prose play.

require 'rubygems'
require 'datamapper'
require 'dm-mysql-adapter'

DataMapper.setup(:default, 'mysql://localhost/morning_quiz')

class Arithmetic
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id, Serial
  property :question_count, Integer
  property :score, Float
  property :time, Integer
  property :type, String
  property :created_at, DateTime
  property :updated_at, DateTime
end

choices = { 1 => :+, 2 => :* }

puts "Good morning, Schweinehund."
puts "1) Addition"
puts "2) Multiplication"
while !choices.keys.include?(choice = gets.chomp.to_i)
  puts "Don't fuck with me, sunshine!"
end

puts "How many questions, you dullard?"
while (count = gets.chomp.to_i) < 1
  puts "You are straining our relationship, cabbage-boy."
end

puts "Ready?"
gets
start = Time.now
correct = 0

count.downto(1).each do |i|
  fst = rand(9) * 10 + rand(9)
  snd = rand(9) * 10 + rand(9)
  ans = fst.send(choices[choice], snd)
  puts "Question ##{count - i + 1}: #{fst} #{choices[choice].to_s} #{snd}"
  if gets.chomp.to_i == ans
    correct = correct + 1
    puts "Very good, vole."
  else
    puts "Nope!"
  end
end

finish = Time.now
score = correct.to_f / count.to_f * 100

puts "From #{count}, you answered #{correct} correctly."
puts "Your score is %.02f%%" % score
puts "It took you #{finish.tv_sec - start.tv_sec} seconds."

Arithmetic.create(:question_count => count,
                  :score => score,
                  :time => finish.tv_sec - start.tv_sec,
                  :type => choices[choice].to_s)

Isn’t that fantastic? DataMapper is an especially cool gem. I recall the days of struggling with mysql (or postgres, or whichever). Now, well, existence is made more beautiful by the simplicity of DataMapper.

Ok, the next task of the evening is to begin working on the Loopy piece. I wish to flesh it out and shall exude mellifluous energy from my beta-brain into LMMS and Audacity. I think I will not even bother with Lilypond. The spirit of the original ‘composition’ was one of spontaneity. Jesus Christ Mother Of Satan And His Holy Bedfolk, I do not even recall what key (if any) it is in. Perhaps that 7/8 5/8 ostinato was an A and a…. well… I am not sure, actually. Doesn’t this ‘unknowing’ make it more exciting, however? I am babbling away. So have nice evening.

At one point in my life, I knew Python well. That point has receded to the point that much of the syntax escapes me. Though more so than the syntax itself, the practise of using list comprehensions and generators escapes me. Well, it escaped me. It no longer escapes me, as I am using these constructs in my current Python programming, though I’m certainly not adept at it yet. I have no recollection of using list comprehensions or generators when I initially obsessed myself with the language. I believe I was more concerned with object design. Those constructs may not have existed yet in Python, in fact. Possibly, my Haskell explorations were the first to enlighten me with higher programming paths, which brings me to the point of the current blog entry: My memory erodes more quickly than I’d like. This is especially true concerning anything academically oriented. Programming is very much at home in this bucket.

I believe this erosion of memory is related to my lifelong habit of poor concentration. Let me clarify. I don’t concentrate poorly if I immerse myself in an activity, such as programming or musicking, or even reading. Though the latter has given me problems time and again through the muddied epochs. The issue, and I am even experiencing it at this very moment, is the so-called background rumble of the mental apparatus. Perhaps that is not the most usual term for it, but said background rumble is interfering with my ability to pick the “correct” term from muddied epochs of memory. Damping this background rumble is a constant battle. I’m not sure if it can be ever completely quieted. As a mental module, and in direct comparison to another class of modules I’m familiar with - Eurorack Modules - the background rumble emanates from a noise source, and not a uniform white or even pink noise source, but from a noise source modulated by LFOs and randomly triggered envelopes. It’s not a completely accurate isomorphism since the background rumble is populated by fragments of coherence. Images and phrases and sensations tumble forth, stream from the noise source through empty spaces surrounding other, more fine tuned modules - modules tasked specifically to organise this blog entry coherently, for example.

The aforementioned erosion of memory occurs when fine tuned modules don’t have sufficient time to burn learning in place. That learning is distorted or dampened by the ever present rumble. It’s only scratched into the surface of long-term storage. Thus eroded over time. During my brief life in Clear Lake in 1994 - 1995, I obsessed myself with ways to quiet the noise source. My principal combat strategy was meditation. I sat Zazen every morning (I laughingly say every morning) for a chunk of time. Reading back my writings from that epoch hasn’t proven to me the effectiveness of the method, though, and at present, the heightened mathematical skills of those many months of schooling could be an idealization. I have no immediate plans for sitting Zazen again. I’ve found many other forms of meditation. Dribbling these words into my tablet (appropriately named Myx Nulu) is one of them. Has the background rumble decreased? I’d say so. The longer I place words in this grey rectangle, the more it diminishes and the more my morning brightens, and I mean that more metaphorically than literally since the persiana is still tightly shut.

Does the rumble have benefits? I’d say that it does only in brief circumstances. So-called stream of consciousness writing grabs at a fragment emanated from the rumble and expounds on it briefly. Then another is captured. Sometimes a relation is forged between the fragments. A third comes along and the three are threaded together by the needle of coherence. Or simply fragment after fragment is noted and no connection between any are found. Like anything else, stream of consciousness writing is a figure of many forms, or can be measured on an axis of absolute fragmented incoherence to a measured threading together of partials picked from the constant rumble vomited by that omnipresent noise module.

Etching learning into the slate of memory is a battle against noise. If the rumble distorts the etchings, they will be misremembered. As far as academic learning goes, and especially mathematics, I’ve found an acute relation to muscle memory. My guitar playing, for example, and patterns my fingers take on whilst touching the strings, are etched in a place more durable than where my original Python programming was etched. The so-called muscle memory is similar to mathematical memory, which also can only be learned by repetition. The objective should be, then, to create repetitious forms of “practise” in all my hobbies. Perhaps each of these morning exercises is simply that and I am finally “speaking” the idea aloud to myself for the first time.

So then what is my next task? Morning Python programming, of course! I veer back to the head of the blog entry and sense its imminent completion. The remainder of my day will be paced, and though a subdued trickle of fragments will butt at my more attuned modules more or less constantly, I’ll kick um aside. I refuse to allow dispersion to dilute the day’s soup.

Soup.

Yes, soup.

I seem to have not written yesterday. The reason for this heinous crime is the extreme productivity of yesterday. The Sheep Blog is practically finished. All that remains are parsing of new messages to create proper markup (I’m thinking of using RedCloth or BlueCloth for this, though I know absolutely nothing about them and have not even bothered thinking about Markdown or whatever it is called before) and to add an Edit page. This latter bit should be a cinch.

After waking up blearily yesterday morning, I showered and proceeded to immediately begin work on the Sheep Blog. I must admit that I breezed through the Ajax implementations with very little problem. The only small snag was that when sections of a page are reloaded via Ajax and themselves contain calls to javascript, they do not function. That is, The content section of the Sheep Blog has one or more Entries. Beneath each entry are two links, one pointing backwards to the previous day of Entries and the other pointing forward to the following day of Entries. These links would not work when the section was reloaded (though they did initially when the whole page was loaded at once). The solution was to place all of the Ajax code in a function, which I called ajax_hovno, and to simply call the function once more from the loaded content. I admit I had to google around a bit before I realized this was the proper solution.

I did an approximately an hour’s worth of this coding at Java Jitterz, the only ‘coffee shop’ in Seminole. I quite like it there, actually. And, it is a place to go to get away from the house (besides my daily walks), and getting away temporarily (or even permanently!) always improves productivity. Well, as I wrote in my ‘100 Things About Me’ five years ago: Small changes, no matter how rudimentary or subtle, always invigorate me. I must admit that my biggest fear is stagnation. Yus. Which brings me to the next topic and the biggest bit of productivity for the day.

I stayed up until about three in the morning working on Reprise. The night before I had written the Rhodes and String parts in Lilypond and was pretty satisfied. So, yesterday, I whipped out LMMS and programmed in the parts. It took longer than I thought it would even though there are many, many repeating phrases. It is, after all, a very repetitious song, though in a shifty, sliding manner. The repeating phrases slide over one another, some changing subtly each iteration, others remaining static. I enjoy the effect, which is fortunate since I wrote it. Heh. The original (and still current) intention was to pan each part hard to one side and throw a deep reverb on the combined result. All mixed together, I had hoped it would give the Rhodes and Strings a distant feel. It did not exactly do that, but instead made them more ambient and blurry. I have not worked out the exact mix parameters yet, but the demo I mixed down before I actually attempted to go to sleep sounds mediocre. I’ll reuse the word ‘blurry’ and call it appropriate.

The sequenced parts are three in number. Part two is nearly, but not quite, part one sliced in two. The third part is a melody of sorts which accompanies the chord progression and weird backwards/forwards guitar part which repeats and fades at the end of the piece. In the center, I created a bastardization of the vocal melody in ‘Union’. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time, somehow tying the ‘album’ together. The Rhodes part will in a way be featured during the extended instrumental section in Union, making another tie. Possibly it will show up somewhere in the Loopy Unnamed Song, also. Anyhow, this part three is mixed badly. I’ll bring the rhodes up an octive and maybe cut its bass frequencies a bit for better results. I may not actually do another mix or any modifications tonight, however, because I have plans for Intersection, which is the first piece in the sequence.

As a brainstorm before I fell asleep (which was long coming), I thought it may be good to add another song to the ‘album’, that being the ‘Acy Bob’ piece I wrote in the hotel whilst first in London back in February. I know I worked it out a bit later on and that Tony wrote some lyrics. The plan is to create something very simple and repetitive with a groovy beat. Yeah. A dance track! A hit! That’d be the cute little day.

I realize that I have problem recalling faces because I study lips as they speak. Were I to focus my attention on a central part of the face, or even directly between the eyes, I’d burn portraits of humans in my mind. As an experiment, I’ll begin to do so.

Meanwhile, I am listening to Dokken, provided by Nathan Waldrip on Facebook. The song is power pop metal stuff. It is not really my thing.

Of course, the tea has steeped and has been ready for consumption for some minutes now. To be completely honest, I’ve already consumed two cups. In contrast to yesterday (or yesteryear, for those of you in the throes of severe time dilation from marijuana or other assorted psychedelics), I’ll be drinking English Breakfast today. It’s wondrous bitter tinge overtakes whichever metaphorical warmth I’m feeling at the moment.

In my musings from over a month ago now, which were meant as the raw material for the blog entries that now sit lacklustre in MongoDb, waiting to be served on either a Gemini or Http platter, I continued my thread of thought concerning concentration. I wrote this:

The theme for the past week has been thought dispersion. I’m having problems concentrating even now. Possibly, this is because I just looked at the word count of this thurk and found it was ~100 shy of my daily goal. This, in itself, is rather unproductive. Instead of being in the writing, my mind is looking at the end of the session, to whatever comes next. Living in this moment becomes harder when the mind goes into a holistic jaunt concerning the hours or whole day surrounding the moment. The moment is a pinpoint, or, as we say in Lakife, tyk that is immeasurable in its tininess. It moves along the plane of time. I inhabit that tininess, but my mind wants to float above and contemplate the whole plane. There are advantages to both ways of thought, but during a writing session, tyk is where I want to be. Et mitin af tyk nis. I want to be inside the point, the dot, the atom. It is the point of the blade that etches. The mind that controls that blade has sensory apparatus uniquely at that point and nowhere else.

I’m listening to an ostensible improvisation by Jayrope’s Air Cushion Finish project. If you’ve ever heard anything by this project, you’d know that it distracts the concentrated mind. It, itself, demands concentration. Thus, I’m doing the exact opposite at this moment that my previous goal stated. I’m dividing my attention. Perhaps in this tyk, I’m resigned to that fate. And during this subsequent tyk, as well. Nolju is instant. Though another term might do, as well - tyk noliz. An atom, or seed, or singularity of time. Same idea, though different metaphor. As the book I’m currently reading constantly states - we are the metaphors we inhabit. That again reminds me of Vonnegut, though he’s not the author I’m currently reading, and also passes my mind back to an entry from a few days ago when I also mentioned Vonnegut. Ah, but my concentration drifts. Or am I riding the blade on a stream of conciousness wave? Fuck um.

I drift now back to my notes from early November.

I had just published Songs for Looptober (nine minutes before, according to said notes) and had begun listening to it, as I’m wont to do immediately after a publication. It begins with Christian claiming That’s because you’re a bad person, vole. Whether this is true or not is up for debate and has been for decades, centuries even. I’ll quote the rest. (Note - I was listening to Pôle by Besombes & Rizet immediately before putting on the Flavigula album.)

The first thing that strikes me is the loss of a bit of volume switching from Besombes & Rizet to the new Flavigula. Over the last few days, I’ve remastered the tracks, trying to let the max volumes hover between -11 and -12 LUFS. Possibly this is not enough. I want the compositions to breathe, however, having dynamics. The key may be not to just jam up the limiter, but carefully adjust each of the tracks’ volume to stay below a peak of -6db (headroom, ya know?), but to interact organically. All this before the limiter. I’m still an infant when it comes to the mixing and mastering process, I feel. And infants are only good for one thing - to be eaten. As Acy once said: Babies are high in protein.

I’ve since ended the mastering process by using ffmpeg (and its associated loudnorm) to normalise the track to -16 LUFS and somewhere between 12 and 16 LRA (loudness range) depending on the dynamics of the piece. This strategy has proven successful so far, or at least no one has made any comments regarding my mastering, though I wish they would, positive or negative. What are music communities for, if not that? Eh? On the piece recently (two days ago) finished for Quentin for today’s TwitchTV stream, I also wanted to add a touch of convolution reverb. Adding it before the normalisation process, however, resulted in muddiness. The muddiness was slight - a mere smear of filth on a thin, plastic plate, perhaps - but enough to make me remove the reverb. Adding the impulse response after normalization would be ideal, but the process’d be too convoluted (pun intended). Or, alternatively, my lethargy may defeat the process before it begins.

While I’m on the subject of sound design, I’ll blather a bit on the subject of Supercollider. My relationship with the system is tremulous. One grey, protruding half of my personality loves programming and programming for sound design seems ideal. The other grey, protruding half sees it as a mostly grueling routine that sucks away much more time than I’d like for it to. This complaint centers around the “programming” / “practising music” dichotomy. It’s a dichotomy that only exists, obviously, in my mind. Even wiring together patches on SBUP is a type of programming. All of this takes away from time I have my Telecaster cradled in my lap. So, in this querulous module of my mind, “programming for sound design” is lumped in with “programming in general”. The disillusionment arrives when something I bash out in Supercollider doesn’t sound remotely like what I had in my head. Usually this doesn’t bother me when I’m experimenting on “real” instruments, but with, for example, Supercollider, it’s programming. The machine should do as I say.

Yes, I realise that I must simply learn to speak the language better. Bastard machines.

In other news, my restlessness is piquing. I haven’t had the chance to have a “vacation” or trip to Praha since September. Am I stir crazy? No - I just need to feel that for some time there is NO ONE I need to answer to for anything. This is a difficult state to achieve when you live with someone. Someones are demanding. I am destined to live alone again. It’ll come sooner than I think. In fact, the knife’s edge of time, carried on an accelerating wave, speeds towards that very moment.

I was just thinking about lack of sleep and that sometimes you must make up for your downtime with uptime which dissolves, like salt does to water, whatever downtime you have made. Though the saline permeates, it can be driven away by other measures, such as piloting to the sea.

Though I don’t know if that is for me. I wonder how far the sea is right now. The UK. Hello, home.

My parents say that I only care about myself. But, actually, they care about me caring about them, which is caring about themselves. It is selfish beyond anything I have ever experienced. They are enslaving their young. They are the infants now craving young to care for them. It is a recipricol cycle.

It’s gone.

My parents informed me a few days ago that their friend Noka is now a corpse. Those are my words, of course, since, according to those who don’t get my so-called dark humour, I am an insensitive galoot. Be that as it may, Noka is now a corpse. Though it is a common thing, it still astounds me the ease at which a human can transition from a dynamic state into corpse-state. Noka experienced this transition after living for more than eighty-two years. According to my parents, she simply gave up. She had stopped eating regularly and possibly at all at the end. Depression wrapped her in its shroud. But why? It seems that only the dynamic Noka knew. Corpse-Noka probably doesn’t know.

Unfortunately, it is very easy for me to see someone reaching the state that Noka did living in West Texas. Living in a pueblo can be a extreme state of being. It is isolated from stimuli. The only things that my parents do to keep their minds “active” (I use this word very loosely) is watch television and go to the casino in Hobbs. It still astounds me that they have no hobbies. Did they ever? My father used to do handiwork and did a few additions to the house when I was a child. Since it wasn’t a frequently recurring event, however, I wouldn’t call it a hobby. They used to play cards, dominoes and other similar games. I used to play with them, in fact, but those pursuits are far in the past. Was Noka similar? Did she leave her “hobbies” behind? Of course, playing cards, dominoes and other similar games requires other people. Noka’s son and daughter fled Seminole long ago. I don’t particularly blame them. That begs the question - why didn’t Noka follow one or the other to a place that didn’t isolate her from all stimuli and humanity at large? Was Noka like my father? My father insisted on moving back to Seminole because he grew up there. Nostalgia trumped (pun intended) all other concerns. At this point, anyone he knew from childhood and adolescence either no longer lives in Seminole or converted from a dynamic state into corpse-state long ago. Though I feel he has enough presence of mind to not go the route Noka did, I foresee a future of suffering - suffering from the simple lack of things to do.

It baffles me how people cannot have hobbies. And by hobby I mean something that is actively creative. I don’t mean mindlessly watching television endlessly to massage the frontal lobes into eloquent smoothness. Sure - watching a film or a series can be somewhat creative if said film or series is intellectually stimulating and one discusses its ideas afterwards. I’m all for it, but naturally, the pursuit requires other people unless one is writing evaluative essays on said films and series. I’m also all for that. The point is to keep the mind alive and not to go the Noka route. I realise there are many causes for depression, but I’m positing that one of the most frequent in pueblo culture once one runs out of people with whom to gossip is sheer lack of stimuli. One has to create their own stimuli. Paint, play music, do math, program in Lua, cook, cultivate a garden, genetically alter goats, or build an interdimensional portal. Elevate the present. It keeps that transition from a dynamic state into corpse-state at bay.

In brief conversation with Marisa’s mother, Ilu, I encountered an ingrained form of response, or so it seemed to me. I stated We are leaving within an hour. (Marcharemos dentro de una hora.) and she immediately came back with Or even sooner! (O incluso más pronto!). I immediately correct her, as I am wont to do. Some call me a pedant for such behaviours. Fuck um. Nothing against Ilu, but I find such responses a symptom of sloppy thinking.

I like to hang back a bit with my thoughts before coming out with the first phrase that tingles my tongue. I’m unsure if I am among the majority that perform this way. I’m all for saying what’s on one’s mind, but when those thoughts come out in dichos or stock phrases, I wonder about the precision of expression.

Thus the central point of this entry. As I grow towards decrepitude, shrinking further into the groaning corporeal husk that houses my hara, I find myself surrounded more and more frequently by people who, instead of discursive conversation, resort to retorting in phrases which seem carved into their mental language tablets as if into stone. Certain stock phrases recur, recited in various orders to achieve various level of vagary. I’m aware that I am suppose to sense the meaning behind each black box after black bundle of words. I should interperet them in context just like a set a gesticulations. However, this process leaves me deeply dissatisfied. I don’t want to talk to a magician who has a bag containing a set number of stock phrases. He pulls one after another from said bag, sorts and assembles them as quickly as possible.

An interesting assement of dichos, as they are called in Spanish, is that they tend to create tighter bonds between community members, especially of those dichos are particularly local. They toughen the skin of the bubble. In other words, they further isolate the community from the outside with a barrier of impenetrable phrasiology. An outsider will have a harder time integrating when they don’t know the inner significance of three noses to the wind or he buried a pumkin near the ravine.

One could argue that such dichos give a particular bubble (community) flavour of its own, differentiating it from multitudinous other bubbles wielding their own stock phrases. My view is that this tendency is a barrier to fluid communications between bubbles and a barrier to globalism. It’s a small step towards culture-centrism, nationalism and a type of fundamentalism that irks me.

Accumulating music equipment is may way of subconsciously telling myself that I’ll be in the states a while. A Modal Argon8 is on the way, as well as a Subdelay phaser. I spend a small chunk of each day researching ways to expand my sound, which involves sitting in front of the computer watching videos on Youtube. I much prefer reading technical reviews, as I can go through them at my own pace. Videos force you into the pacing of their author. Video producers, no matter their intention, are a type of conductor. You must settle into their rhythm or simply abandon it.

Back to the accumulation: As I mentioned recently, the sensation and method is similar to my first forays into guitar sound sculpting, during which I was buying, reselling and trading pedals at a pace that would snap a stick figure back into its component parts. It excites me! And why shouldn’t it? I must be careful, however, to not let the fascination for acquisition of new hardware overtake the love for making music itself.

This sort of excitement for materialism is common. I’ve looked it directly in its cyclops eye many times in my life. One that springs to mind is whilst hanging out with Tomaš (Doot) in the winter 1998-1999. Oh yes, the very earliest of Praha-times. He posited that acquiring hi-fi equipment to blast punk music on was the ideal solution for heartbreak. He was trying to help his semi-depressed acquaintance, of course, and offered his method. It as a method that many men use. Yes, I’ll stereotype and say men here. I may be partially using it at this very moment, in fact, though apart from pangs that hit me at arbitrary moments during the day, I’m mostly through the longing for my place and life in Logroño - especially when I pause the chemical whorl of emotion and perceive my situation (and its contrasting past situation(s)) logically.

I pause to install a Neovim Lsp (Language Server Protocol) for Markdown. Yes! Another distraction. I’m full of um these days. I’ll follow up on that thought in a bit.

And TailwindCss is now thurking my markdown. It was already installed, actually, as it is (obviously by its title) the LSP for CSS (and Less, Sass, etc) and unfortunate me has to deal with stylesheets often. I simply had to place a certain file in the base Martenblog directory to let TailwindCss know to activate itself. Oh, happy me. It’s giving me quite a number of completions, as well, or is that nvim-cmp? Who knows? The whole Neovim setup process is partially still a mystery, which leads me to the topic of distractions.

I find myself wandering in circles, as it were, quite a bit these days. I place too many tasks within my mental agenda each morning and somehow get few of them completed to my liking. This contrasts sharply the way I lived in Logroño. I never rushed through my days. I placed practise time at a priority, but I knew that I would get there eventually, and if not, at least improve my playing greatly on the way. Seminole has an haze of stress that lingers. Do I feel like I’m aging too rapidly? I am not sure. Maybe. I don’t want to waste a modicum of my working hours. I find myself getting impatient with my mother when she constantly interrupts me whether I’m programming, practising or composing. I feel bad for her and am not happy with my reactions.

Adopting my Logroño attitude once again is a goal. Making some sort of task list would help, but not one with deadlines. Simply having the list would be beneficial as I could see my plodding progress. I shall begin now.

Daily

• Guitar practise from the book: attempt one hour and a half
• Current piece: just always get a few things added for the next morning’s analysis
• Experiment with new equipment: Do a short improv?

Weekly

• Elixir / Erlang: learn something
• Elixir: start rewriting the vDNA polling apparatus using Postgresql (& Ecto - much to learn there)
• Supercollider: stick with the videos. Experiment and improve. An eventual objecting is a complete piece in Supercollider

As a start, that is ok. It’ll be easier to accomplish the daily goals because they are more present. Weekly is harder since time is diffuse. Perhaps an after-the-fact bullet journal can come into play. I used to take notes of my daily activity, what all occurred to me, every evening. That is a slightly different methodology, but I should do BOTH. In my handwritten journal, I’ll scribe what I’ve accomplished each evening. I’ll also scribe instants that made impressions on my throughout the day.

I have made my organisational beginning. A new one! At last. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Oh, and every morning, type something into this grey box that some call Neovim. Any and all blather can be seed for future Martenblog entries.

So here I sit once again atop the bed, propped up like a mannequin and typing into myx-nulu, the trusty tablet with a cheap, bluetooth keyboard. Hey - it’s part of the morning routine, so I am certainly not complaining. I swigged the remains of yesterday’s Earl Grey with a dash of leche semi-desnatada. In a previous life, I always had a problem with the word desnatada. I saw it as something altogether different, such as desinatana or something even stranger. I believe this springs from an acute dyslexia that I have. I’ve rarely addressed this dyslexia though it’s plagued me throughout my life. Firstly, it interfered with English spelling as I was growing from a bud on the side of a spine of a desert shrub. That feature has carried over slightly into Spanish, as one can see, though the flaw is easier to catch since Spanish, like Czech (another of my linguistic adventures, as anyone who has lived my previous lives with me’d know), is a (mostly) phonetically spelled language. From time to time I still have to look up certain words in English just to be sure, even though I am mostly correct in my first “guess” at spelling.

From where does this dyslexia come? What is its source? I assume I have a very slight brain damage from being budding on the side of a spine of a desert shrub that could have been otherwise known as an eighteen year old party girl. So when I eventually became a conventional “human” infant, some water remained on the brain. I’ve noticed a possibly connected problem having to do with memorization of vocabulary in foreign languages. This may just be a normal facet of language learning, but if I don’t utilize a certain word multiple times daily in different contexts upon discovery, it is quickly forgotten and the process must be begun anew. However, if I am in constant language learning mode (which is a requirement for me for any language that is not my native tongue), the fault softens and I am allowed more and more of a delay between each contextual usage of new vocabulary without the forgetting.

Mathematical and programmatic concepts are also affected by the overly wet portion of my cerebral processing unit. The temporal distance between contextual usage of each concept can be much larger than in the case of natural language, but the decay will inevitably come with disuse. Therefore, I have to keep my programming chops fresh, honeybuničko. I advise you to do the same, honeybuničko. You will need them on your journey from this grey earth to the netherworld, honeybuničko. In said netherworld, you’ll be given a tablet much like the one on which I type now, honeybuničko. At its base will be an unattached, cheap, bluetooth keyboard, honeybuničko. You will type as you are engulfed in the pale yellow goop that swells endlessly from the netherworld seas, both polluting and cleansing each of the netherworld inhabitants, honeybuničko. You are now one of these inhabitants, honeybuničko.

The pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea, undulates to the horizon in all directions. Your islet is small, but you feel it is comfortable enough for the time that has been allotted to you in the netherworld. You have no shelter, per se, but there is really nothing you need shelter from. In fact, the only real irritation is the pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea. It mostly undulates calmly (and to the horizon in every direction), but from time to time, and at intervals that seem to have no predictable frequency, it swells to cover your islet. You are drenched. Well, drenched is probably not the correct word, since the pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea is more paste than true liquid. It has the consistency of mercury yet not the heaviness. Were you standing on your bowed legs, you’d be covered to your filthy thorax. The feeling is one of suffocation, and of a mildly pleasant suffocation, at that. Thus, the rise and fall of the pale yellow goop that makes up what you see in your mind as the sea is a phenomenon that leaves you with mixed feelings.

You sit at your escritorio. You type these last few words, which appear on the screen of your tablet with its detached, cheap, bluetooth keyboard. You think about a cup of tea, and it appears. You sip it. The netherworld isn’t so bad after all, eh? Fuck um.

(Original draft 2021-02-20. Heavily edited and added to today.)

I’ve just run out of tea. I remedy that by getting up from my half-lotus position and walking from “my” room into the kitchen. I refill the red cup perhaps 4/5 full of Earl Grey. I add Almond Milk. I return to “my” room and resume the half-lotus position. I sip the tea. I contemplate the next paragraph.

I shall now carry out those steps.

The tea is good. Saturday morning is quiet, as all others are sleeping. It’s my preferred state of the world. Roger Hodgson was right. Fuck um.

I just put on the album Traj Njim by Troissoeur. I had forgotten what it was. And, alas, that is the reason I activated it. It was a mystery. Mysteries aim to be solved, correct? Else why would they exist? Troissoeur is a collective that includes the double bass player (and composer) from Aranis. I could look up his name, but I shan’t. His initials will suffice. They are JV. The music is classically tinged folk to a fault, including vocals. To tell you the truth, though I admire the level of skill needed to produce the music fluidly, I am unsure if it “touches” me or not.

So why do I listen to music, anyway? If I peer back into my past, I can solidly say that during my teenage years, I was fixated on music that “spoke” to me. A gurgling infant could guess from this statement that I was focused more on lyrical themes. Complex textural and contrapuntal themes came into my liking, also, but I’d say that initially they were part of the backdroop. Yes, the backdroop. Perhaps the mathematical me, or the module that contained the mathematical me, inside, hovering in the backdroop, relished complexities within timbrel texture and counterpoint. I can only guess. We are not the masters of self-knowledge. Modules float, interact, lurch against one another, and submit and prevail. Regardless, I was more consciously focused on lyrical themes during my adolescence.

They “spoke” to me.

It did not seem like a conscious choice. The music chose me more than I chose the music. More, specifically, the music chose that I liked it. I didn’t do the choosing.

In my early twenties, especially after delving into more instrumental-friendly rock bands, I found that even wordless music “spoke” to me. It chose me. I remember lying in that broad waterbed I had in Clear Lake and not being able to sleep until my mind was quenched with Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part I. I hauled out the old boombox and listened to a cassette of it. It spoke to me, therefore I liked it. I did not choose. It chose me.

Those were halcyon days for music discovery. I was ecstatic at every CD purchase. I listened without any other distractions. I advocated and shared the music that “spoke” to me. I hoped it would speak to others. In fact, I was baffled when it didn’t speak to others.

During this time, however, the slow migration began. By slow I mean decades long. This migration was from the music choosing me to me choosing the music. At this point in my life, I’ve passed over completely to the other side, or so it seems. Nah - not completely. Some music still “speaks” to me before I decide to choose or not choose, but it is more and more rare. I posit that when people reach this point, and I also posit that most people migrate much quicker than I did, they abandon new musics specifically because these new musics do not “speak” to them. Perhaps they don’t understand that they have lost the ability to listen for that “voice”. Have I? Or, an even more complicated question - do I prefer to do the choosing?

I also posit that most people that have migrated rebel against the “choosing”. They feel that music has lost something essential. The music of their youth spoke to them, and the music of the present does NOT. They don’t realise that they simply migrated. If one speaks about musicians, the current creators of music, and this phenomenon, the result is that they create music based on the music of their youth - based on the music that “spoke” to them. Nostalgia is strong. And I think nostalgia is intensified by this migration. The ability to choose instead of being chosen is simply rejected. It makes no sense.

The fundamental fallacy here is the idea that there is a fundamental quality in art and that we are able to perceive it. Or, using the same vernacular as before, we are able to “hear” that fundamental quality when it “speaks” to us. To me, the vast diversity in taste in art over the swath of humanity rejects this idea. One would then argue of the contrast between popularity and esotericism, but writing a dissertation concerning my ideas of the lowest common denominator is not my objective at the moment.

I want my ability to choose what I incorporate into my musical life to be relevant to “taste”. I want the music I listen to to reciprocate and “speak” back to me, even though I am the one choosing it. I’ve come to the conclusion over the last decade that I basically choose what I do and do not like. Perhaps there is an initial hint of the music “speaking” to me, but I don’t think it’s entirely there any longer. I simply choose what I want to concentrate on and incorporate into my current listening habits. Will these musical realms will become the “nostalgia” of some later years of my life? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

So, I’m listening to Troissoeur. I’ve decided that it is relevant. I simply have to put it on often. It will grow into my life. That’s what’s always happened with every music. Did the music of my youth “speak” to me because I didn’t know myself well enough to choose or not choose it for myself? This is certainly my conclusion.

The film was fantastic. It is one I’ll see many times in my life, finding arousing details each subsequent watch. I’m not sure how far we have progressed on our flight. Static in a chair, I feel as if I never left Praha at all.

I am not sure how I’ll feel when I reach ground zero. I want to be in transit forever. Perhaps I am the happiest when I am on the move, when the ending is uncertain, or when the ending is so far away that I’ll never see it in my lifetime.

I am talking about a personal ending, of course, and not a universal one.

The black blocks of residential flats seemed to glare down at me as I passed on the train. If they did glare instead of it being only my imagination, it was in apathy. The consumers of such places are shielded from one another by black walls. The black absorbs all sound and even feeling. It mutes the percussion of emotions. The foetus beats in its sister’s makeshift womb. He’s tried to grow nails before, but just now has succeeded simply by force of will. He doesn’t wish to die.

The sister, once a foetus herself, wails as her innards are shredded. She even gasps for more than half a half-click of the device before expiring. The foetus, let’s call him Shambal, is gruesome, but we root for him. His erect penis impedes his progress as it bumps nagging on the floor. He’s headed for the food store. He knows its location, but by intuition alone. The sister was often there.

There are only figs. They crack and splatter on the floor after the effort to pull open the aperture nearly puts Shambal to eternal rest. He, too, finally tumbles to the floor from the counter onto which he had climbed, exhausting his frail form. The fig-muck cushions his drop. He scoops the pulp mass into his underdeveloped maw.

I am sitting in the dorm, I forget its name. Tony is gone to class. I set up the equipment. We are recording an absurd and beautiful tape full of songs we have not written but with mappings of our own present present. There are speaking parts. There is Tony flagellating with his bass. This is the final song and I place bizarre soundscapes over it. Tony plays along.

It is a constructive time for us. There is the microphone, suspended from a cable from some nut in the ceiling. We play over and over, though I know he is exasperated at my energy. He has other concerns. One piece, one that runs through my head 15 years later, over and over again, is written on paper (in the future, I think I still have most of it, though I am uncertain - unable to unearth with my clouded mind, the truth) and we play it. I push for (over and over again - for I am insistent) a great end to it. It never happens.

I wonder now what happened to those recordings of ‘Upon Awakening’, especially part … V, was it? I struggled with the keyboard part over and over and it beautified our days for a short time. The whole never made the light of day, though we did revisit it during concerts the next year (though only parts I-II _& III).

Those days cannot have been wasted. Were Tony here and had no other commitments, we’d redo it. I know. The knoll beckons. And part of it is still stuck in my head.

My implants must be malfunctioning again. The ones that control subtlety of hearing and touch. I usually get them calibrated before each cycle, but immediately following the end of the last one, I ran into a clone of my old friend Acy from back in pre-school and primaries for the eighth colony in-vitros. Turns out this version of him is over on Nereid. Or in Nereid to be more specific. We got shitfaced on ostensible White Russians on the temp base. I dare not think too hard about what passes for “Kahlúa” in these parts.

Back to the implants, though. The whole of the greenhouse and its extensions oscillate in a way that transforms something I don’t quite understand into living matter. The machines crawling through brain dampen the effects of sonic attack emanating from below. The sinewy undulations of the structure plugged into what we call “the guttering orifice” are helices of melodies that ever repeat, stumbling drunkenly across the circle of minor thirds and major seconds. Fortunately, I have drugs that knock me out during off shifts. At times I even dream and am always taken by a cascade of diaphanous arpeggios that eject me far, far into and then beyond the Kuiper Belt.

At long last, I can post again to the Martenblog (formerly called the Sheepblog, but I have graduated (or gradiated) from sheep form to mustelid from, so…). Yes, lethargy did prevent me from reaching this state in recent months. My time in Hostivice, for example, was riddled with disillusion and fatigue - loneliness and depression. My time in Tuzla was much the same, with the additional slights of alienation and boredom.

But here I am in Seminole. Isn’t it interesting that when I am here, I am very productive both creatively and programmatically? It must be the lack of alcohol. Heh.

Goals for the remainder of May are to write copiously about the correspondence Christopher and I have had over the last nine months, and to get the Foundation Lutreola site up and full of content.

Regarding the second goal, there is this: lutreola!. It may no longer be extant when my dedicated reader comes upon this entry, however. It is simply a hastily patched together demo for what could be a lutreola site. The best thing about it, by far, is that it is done in Clojure/Noir. I’d happily never code in Ruby again were it possible.

(lutreola!)

So, at six o’clock in the morning… here we go…

A few days ago, I began to read the novel Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. So far, it has been enlightening. As with any psychologically spun book, there are parts I’ve pondered before and others I’ve failed to.

Like most of our sweat glands, those in our palms respond to stress as well as temperature – which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous.

In the introduction to the book, he described an experiment where four decks of cards, two red and two black, were chosen from. Yeah, a top card from each. Players learned, consciously, after maybe eighty cards, that the red decks, though payoffs were good, were mas o menos awful. The losses offset the gains by a wide margin. The blue decks were more moderate in gain/loss, but the former gradually came out on top.

It took the subjects approximately eighty cards to realize this… consciously. However, intuitively, they began favouring the blue decks only after ten cards.

The book is about exploring semi-immediate unconscious (or, should we say *pre-conscious?) decision making.

As I am in Ruidoso at the moment with my parents, I thought I’d try to explore the idea during my bouts with the gambling machines. Yeah, today (and yesterday), I have only participated in amusement with automatons. I’ll get to the blackjack possibly this afternoon or zítra.

Clammy hands were to tell me when to stop one machine and migrate to another. Now, I understand that these games are pseudo-random, so the pre-consciousness cannot gauge in the same manner that it might an actual card game, but what the hell, eh?

In the past, I have had an intuition about slots that led to magnificent success. In Hobbs, approximately a week ago, I played the Bombay machine and felt a tittilation even though I had not won anything substantial. Call it superstition or just plain stupidity, but within twenty minutes, my grease dripping fingers clutched over one thousand grubby dollars.

I have not been successful on the slots in Ruidoso.

My hands, at this very moment, are becoming clammy thinking about it. Usually, money is not a source of stress for me. It may be emotional transference from my parents. They are perpetually stressed. They feed off of it. That is another story, one that has surely been told at various other places in this journal. (I laughingly call it a journal).

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

Job interviews directly relate to the point made here. Another experiment detailed in the book described impressions from close friends of twenty or so college students contrasted with impression from strangers allowed to visit each of the students’ dorm rooms for fifteen minutes.

As the avid reader may have guessed, the latter group did very well at assessing certain aspects of the students’ personalities.

I believe that if Steve from Stonecrop had been allowed to root through my room in Brighton for fifteen minutes instead of interviewing me personally, I’d have never got the job. Close encounters for which we prepare never reflect a great swath of our personalities. Most of those creeping, oozing, flatulent aspects are locked soundly away in a box underneath our hypothetical beds.

I turned out to be a cantankerous cunt in my work. Oh, I did good work, yes, but I questioned most everything the management tossed my way. The entirety of my employed life has been similar, as was my school days. The fact that the hierarchical organization of Stonecrop was rife with stupidities is neither here nor there, Miss Pan-theistic.

I am quite sure that Steve would have rooted around in my privates instead of bellowing at me for thirty minutes about the structure of the company and the application of which they were so proud, he wouldn’t have considered me as a candidate. Oh! My smile is charming! My room in Brighton, however, was not.

Relating directly to the quote above - most IT companies give new employees a three month probation period. This is the time and effort to see whether a new employee fits. Gladwell argues that rooting through someone’s privates would be just as effective and prevent the random tossing about of the company’s dinero.

I’m not complaining about the method they used, however, as some of that dinero which floated about on the apathetic air will secure me diggs in Logroňo.

For a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.

I could pour through my journals for hours, days, months and decades to validate the next claim, but my intuition tells me that I’ve only had three relationships in my lifetime which fit this criteria.

• Kierstinn
• (Blonde) Dana
• (Brunette) Dana

I left all three of them for other women. See! I am a masochist. The women who cut into these relationships, finally shearing them from my life, were insecure, sadistic and inflexible.

One portion of Blink describes a marriage. The couple were invited into a lab for to have a fifteen minute chat in front of a camera. The conversation mostly concerned their dog. The husband did not want the dog. The wife did. The husband related reasons, but always backed down. He’d go on and validate the wife, but she’d never do it back for him. She was inflexible.

The ratio of negative to positive in my relationships other than the three mentioned was far more than the pithy number one.

What psychoses possesses another person to begin cleaning up the ‘mess’ which is inevitable during a meal before the remaining diners have finished eating? Furthermore, what possesses them to complain, afterwards, using the ubiquitous language of emotional blackmail, that no one else does anything to keep the kitchen and dining area tidy? The other diners are surely not at fault. When dining, isn’t it best to relax and enjoy oneself? As opposed to rushing and having the mind elsewhere (like on cleaning up the inevitable mess)? I would include this behaviour in a list of psychoses, for sure. Perhaps it sprouts from insecurity. If one can accuse others of not playing their part in household chores, one can look at oneself as somehow better than others. Or, it could sprout from the incessant need to teach.

It irritates! My father always, no matter what he is doing when he is involved with someone else in an activity, has to attempt to teach some sort of lesson (at times moral in nature). Even when we play Cribbage, every hand is not just fun and games, but has a teacher-student atmosphere. Though I love playing cards (and my father is one of the only ones I have to play cards with), it is hard for me to keep quiet at times. I want to point out what he is doing time and time again. He probably doesn’t even realize his ‘teacher’ attitude. It is most likely an ingrained habit.

I’m currently working on the sidebar of the Sheep Blog. It’s pure JQuery at this point and being that I don’t do JQuery very much, I am learning gobs which will soon be forgotten if I do not continue to dabble in JavaScript on a regular basis. Searching through documentation is big fun, I can tell ya, especially if part of your brain kicks you once you are on a certain page and you realize you were looking the same thing up a few months back. That brings me to Mnemosyne. I began creating entries for Rails/RSpec ‘flashcards’ so I do not forget small things which are used seldom but at important junctures and have to look them up every time. So, I say to myself as I type this, ‘why don’t you do it now, Bob?’ Ok, so I’m creating another file called ‘JQuery’ and filling in some flashcards. Oouh, baby.

This is a rather choppy entry into this ‘journal’. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the word ‘blog’. I wonder what the etymology of it? I believe I shall look that up at this very instant. Ah, I should have known! (Well, perhaps not.) It is short for ‘weblog’, though, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was not originally used for ‘online journal’ at first (1994), but was instead a contraction of World Wide Web + Log. I can imagine it indicating expansive log outputs from over-zealous cron jobs, for example. Heh. I first began writing an online journal in late spring of 2000. It was a very refreshing, fruitful experience for me, though often I typed when in some manner modified. Jenicek and I drank a hell of a lot back then. When modified, however, I wrote whatever was on my mind with absolutely no censorship. My friends (Jenicek, Viking, etc) were amused and entertained by my entries, which ran the gamut from musings on networking, python/zope programming and work positives/negatives to in depth analysis of my relationships including sometimes scathing rants about the female(s) with which I was involved. While my friends read and encouraged me, some of the other people I wrote about were angered and alienated. That was good. I enjoyed that.

That brings me to the last month or so on Facebook and my conflict with Christian about completely open writing on that forum. He loves to rule his little community and control it to the best of his ability and was time and time again aggravated when I wrote something on his ‘wall’ which contradicted his ideas, or when I delved into the absurdity that I am so known for loving. Well, I am now banned from commenting on anything he posts or from writing directly onto his ‘wall’. At first I was irritated at his anal-retentiveness and his need to be in control of every aspect of his very small universe. Now I smile about it. Let him enjoy his despotism.

Forums such as this and the Sheep Blog, which I am still working on… yes, yes… I know I should have finished by now, deny any censorship.

Oi! That is it for today… I think.

I sit in a bar in Bilbao. The barman wears a beard and casually goes about his duty. This is in contrast to the previous bar, very close to the bus station, filled with backpacked women with demands for pintxos. Their drooling eyes almost matched the saliva that pooled on their thighs as they sat on metal barstools. They only wanted to get to the aeroport. It is a pity they are dead now.

But, anyway, I wrote these things to Christián, of which I shall elaborate on in turn:

I appreçiate that the Spanish in the north is more pure and delineated.

It is much easier to understand people who speak clearly. Heh. Crudity has its cruel pleasures, however, and those exposed to redneck life during formative years are victims. I find the south crude. Their gypsy and moorish blood birthed abominations. These died and fertilised the land. Music arises from the ashes (or asses) of humans who do not know anything else to do with themselves. Circumcised with drink, I am sure their filth crept into stringed instruments.

I can understand your love of the south and the rawness of Andalucia and Murcia and Extremadura. They slur their words and their brains fire on hormones dying without completion.

At times, I figure the heat is what drives people to vagrancy. Vagrancy of the mind, I tell ya. Texas held the same for me. I wanna sit here and press my ICED TEA to my forehead until the ache the LIQUOR I swigged to forget about YOU gave me wanes into oblivion. Yeah. That was Fort Stockton. There were two choices: the DRINK or the CHURCH. I suspected at times both. Fuck um.

Linguistic culture disgusts me, as it it deepens the stupidity of a land. I’d kill them all if I could, but I am a simple drunk at a bar in Bilbao at the moment.

Fleeing from cultural oppression is very similar to fleeing from heat oppression. Cold stimulates the ability to think rationally, to create sublime portents of the future. Heat lets hormones boil and excrete folk music - the music that, simply mourns loss.

Combining these things is genius. I’ve never heard Flamenco that did it. Other, much more angry forms of music do it better for me (the arbiter of ALL quality, errr). I want to put my throbbing, severed member into a goat right now.

I’m about to listen to a piece of music that will thwart everything I am thinking about at the moment. I’ll let it pause for a moment. Fuck um.

Actually, I’m done. Perhaps more later on the FLIGHT.

The piece I am currently working on is tentatively titled Fog Beings. I don’t particularly like the title, but I have a disability that disallows me creating catchy titles for things. You see: My novel is named November. The connotations are as endless as the synapse is wide. I believe a comment existed in a conversation from a few days back concerning the replacement of synapses with fatty tissue.

Fog Beings is divided into the following parts at the moment.

Introduction

Two synth arpeggios tumble incessantly. One consists of four sixteenth notes. The other has five. Yeah, I know that is very typical of me and harkens all the way back to Filter. One has to have stylistic continuity, right?

This goes on for twenty measures of four. During the latter ten, a stomping beat (remindful of The Fen) begins with the one of each measure. It switches to a pseudo 5/4, accenting the one and four.

Underneath it all is a hopefully exceedingly creepy slowed down version of Christián’s guitar scraping extravaganza he sent me yesterday that procedes to dissapear during the final bars.

Acoustic abomination

I layer a short sample of Christián’s acoustic skewed a measure. The reverb applied gives it a slightly distant feeling. I contemplate returning to the fore, however, as it is the centerpiece.

An organ playing Cis and G fades in during the last ten measures. One can imagine the purpose - tension is produced. I include the stomping during the latter half again, as with the introduction.

As a beat keeping mechanism, A bizarre panned squeak assults the listener every other bar. During the first complete take of the piece (posted on Soundcloud last night for Christián’s aural perusal) featured this abberation later, as well, but I have decided this portion is its only proper place.

So - spare is good, eh? Indeed, I say. Several listens to the first take told me not to have every sequence playing simultanesouly. My mixing bane formerly and still currently to an extent is lack of tone space. Too much clutter usually fills up different spans of frequency.

The result is a muddle. Fuck muddles.

I feel these two parts are complete. Immediately afterwards, the creepy slowed down version of Christián’s guitar scraping extravaganza re-enters. The arpeggios begin again churning. A short sample of strumming is taken and accents every measure.

One amusing thing is that I am working with both LMMS and Audacity. The rhythm structure is not apparent in the latter, which I use to create the samples from the long wav he sent me.

(LMMS)
(Audacity)

For this small strumming example, I took a the clip, repeated it and positioned the repeat at exactly 2/3 of a second after the beginning. Thus, we have two strums - on the first two beats of a measure. Either I have not explored all the possibilities that LMMS offers me (I’m a lazy cunt, I know) or I am indeed only able to position samples at the beginning of measures.

The piece clops along at ninety beats per minute, thus the figure cited in the previous paragraph. The relation between 90 and 60 helps, obviously.

So, there we go.

In my opinion a piece of music doesn’t “require” anything except that it does what it does because whoever made it did it that way. -Bob Drake

onionist (Ashley Spradlin) on November 24th, 2006 04:58 pm (UTC) I love this quote, and completely agree.