Delightful Inconsistent

G. F. Handel's fault somehow

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:30:48 GMT

Dashed across the street between programs to drop off sheet music for an accompanist at the music school. Had to dodge a screaming turkey on the way back. To any kid who fantasized about what it would be like to live among dinosaurs: similar to jaywalking. Silly noises.

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Johnny Gossamer

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:25:35 GMT

I dreamed I had gotten a third tattoo. I don't remember what it was, just that in the dream I kept reminding myself not to forget that now I had three tattoos, not two tattoos. I think the third tattoo was on my back in the area between my neck and shoulder, a place I was not likely to see it.

I read in today's Globe that tattooing was illegal in Massachusetts when I got my first tattoo (in DC), an aspect of banned in Boston that had completely passed me by. I was legally a resident here in the late 90s, because of the way insurance and college financing work (because my parents moved here, I was counted as a resident for voting and car registration and tuition even though I was an adult who lived somewhere else), so I guess I was sticking it to the man even more than I initially thought. (I didn't actually live here until 2010.)

I've been watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and reading Ninth House, and my day job is US news, so I've been bouncing from one story of sinister elite cabals with terrifying dark rituals to another. The overlap didn't really hit me until this evening, but it's probably part of why I'm nervy and drained. It became the theme (or a theme) of the sci-horror novelette I just finished as well, because it was what was in front of me.

I do still have a bit of escapism - after a month of, you guessed it, sinister elite evil cabal with terrifying dark ritual storyline, Genshin Impact is in the middle of its fictional lunar new year festival, and it's a relief. Coins and silly jokes and paper lanterns.

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profiles in profiles

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:21:21 GMT

My face is still mildly distorted from last week's gum graft - green-yellow bruising, puffy jaw, unevenly flattened smile. It irritates me more than it might otherwise, because it's on the left side of my face, which is the side that looks like me. I can't say it's my "good" side, exactly; neither side is bad, and the right side is probably prettier. But it's my left profile I identify as myself when I look in the mirror. The other side, not really.

I'm left-eye dominant, so it may fundamentally be that when I look at my profile in the mirror with my left eye, I have an easier (more comfortable) time processing what I see (left side of my face). I look at photos binocularly, and don't have the same alienation from my right profile in photos.

All of this has made me wonder whether other people's preferred self-profiles align with eye dominance.

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Motives

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:18:07 GMT

Is this the year I finally get into Hüsker Dü? My problem has always been that I find the vocalist boring, but I was listening to a live set (in a recording) where I couldn't really hear the vocalist, and then I liked the music a lot. Potentially, if I listened to enough Hüsker Dü, I'd start singing along with it, and then the vocalist I'd hear would be me. Hmmm.

The current issue of Wired has an interview with that deranged tech guy who is trying to stay eternally young by injecting himself with his son's blood and semen and so forth, and he says something fairly revealing because I think it's a belief widely shared by our current tech guys: "Most people today spend every waking moment pursuing wealth. And the time they're not spending wealth, they're pursuing some sort of status or prestige."

Um, no. No, Bryan Johnson. No most people are not doing that. The revealed preference of most people is that they want a comfy chair and something good to watch on television, and want to spend as little time pursuing wealth and status as possible so they can spend more time in the comfy chair with the television.

It did make me think about my own motivations. Unfortunately for me, I am very much a team player, so the answer to "why did you do that" is almost always either (1) somebody asked me to or (2) I saw that it wasn't getting done - either because it was being done incompetently or because nobody stepped up at all. Absent one of those, I mostly play games and solve puzzles and read. The reason I say "unfortunately for me" is that there's an endless supply of (2) so I overclock most of the time. I have to be careful when listening to true crime podcasts because when an investigation is poorly handled I start thinking I need to switch careers and become a police detective. Just run straight toward the dysfunction.

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I Keep Encountering The Same "Heterodox" Complaint About Poetry

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:06:12 GMT

If you like contemporary art, you’ve periodically encountered a guy proclaiming that he doesn’t understand modern art except that he understands it’s awful and a monolith. Usually he makes this declaration in a museum with many other wings full of other art he might prefer. But he is here, in the contemporary art wing, demanding you pay attention to him instead of prioritizing your own experience of the art you came to see, which really gives the game away.

If you are in the US, he is almost always a straight middle-aged white man. I don’t think he’s particularly representative of straight-middle aged white men, plenty of whom are contemporary artists, but I think if you’re in any other category, you’re less susceptible to the nostalgic idea that the past was unambiguously better. For instance, I enjoy having property rights.

You run across the same old sawhorse complaining that hip hop isn’t the 1812 Overture. That sweatpants aren’t four piece suits. Imagine that you have brought a plate of chocolate chip cookies that you baked over the weekend, and I have complained that the microgastronomy restaurant Alinea would have presented me with chocolate chip flavored smoke breathed out by a mechanical bird. You get the idea.

When people complain about contemporary poems, there seems to be less of a category error: a poem is a poem. It isn’t, though. If I could support a family on a couple of poems a year, I wouldn’t necessarily write better poems, but my ambitions would be different. There are plenty of things I don’t ever attempt because I know I don’t have the time.

But mostly what you’re seeing is survivorship bias combined with selection bias. If you compare A Great Poem of All Time to almost anything else, Great Poem of All Time is going to win. And it already exists. We don’t need to write that one again. You can re-read it whenever you want, just like I can sit down and watch Casablanca or listen to Fleetwood Mac. Lots of people do.

Older poems, back when they used to all rhyme (they didn’t) and used to all have strict meter (they didn’t), are not universally great poems. You can read a 1920s issue of Poetry Magazine for free online right now; it’s archived and out of copyright. Most of the poems are dreadful. Try this yourself. You don’t have to trust me; it’s all in print. You’re going to find more you like in a contemporary issue, because the editors are now selecting from a much larger and more competitive pool of authors (and in the case of Poetry Magazine specifically, they’re paying better rates than they used to).

But let’s not let actual knowledge of the field get in the way. Any of these complainants is perfectly allowed to write a sonnet with the gravitas of the Gettysburg Address. (I’m a contemporary poet and I write sonnets all the time.) But no, he’s not a poet himself. He could commission poets to write sonnets with the gravitas of the Gettysburg Address. (I’m a contemporary poet and I write sonnets all the time.) He could type the phrase “a sonnet with the gravitas of the Gettysburg Address” on an index card and pin it on the wall as conceptual art. He does not. It’s almost as though his chief interest is not the creation or discovery of more sonnets with the gravitas of the Gettysburg Address.

In conclusion, I don’t understand why all my neighbors aren’t my best friends, and why they don’t constantly throw masquerade balls where we drink amari and dance the foxtrot. I blame the schools.

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unobtrusively relentless

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 02:00:48 GMT

Random bit of autobiography that never comes up: I'm naturally an endurance athlete. I was terrible at everything in gym class because I'm not strong or flexible or fast and I don't have much in the way of ball skills. But I would win contests that were about going forever: jogging around the yard, jump rope, sit ups. In martial arts dojos, teachers would use this fact about me to take overly aggressive dudes down a peg - here, let's all do a contest. I can swim forever. I can float forever. I can hike an infinite distance.

Unrelatedly, I was also reasonably good at archery, but not brilliant, and this was almost never relevant.

Anyway, I don't like having to do tedious repetitive tasks (I mean, I do, it depends). But the answer to "are you still hanging in there" is always yes. How is not something I can answer; it's intrinsic. I assume someday age or illness will knock that out, but based on my ancestors I also think maybe not. My whole family of origin is like this. I used to joke that it was the clue I'm secretly a robot, but the thing is, I outlast robots.

If civilization goes down, I can walk to you if you are in the Americas. I can do it. It will probably take me less time than you think.

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The Long March

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 17:23:22 GMT

I have so much to do and so little time to do it in. And when I get a little time, I don't do the tasks: I rest, because rest is what I need most of all. This pace is unsustainable (and impermanent). I had a free day February 9 (when I caught up on tasks) and a free day March 9 (when I caught up on tasks). My next potential free day is May 24. It's all naps on trains and scribbling notes in waiting rooms and calls during lunch breaks. I'm operating in a hybrid of disco naps and infantry tactics: sleep whenever there's a chance to sleep, eat whenever there's food, make sure at least your socks are clean.

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The Return of Bedtime Bear

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 02:59:34 GMT

Feeling beleaguered because most of the tasks I've been dealing with are like level grind fetch quest chains, where doing any given thing just unlocks the next stage of the thing I have to do:

request medical record; wait for medical record to come in the mail; send medical record to someone else

request an actor fill out a questionnaire; submit answers to the theatre company for approval; hear back the next day that they're approved; send actor link from the theatre company so they can re-upload the same documents

ask over and over for information from various writers and editors so I can make their form letters and galleys and send them money and make a report about the money I have sent

I know all of this is fairly normal for management and admin work; it's sheep herding essentially. But it feels very similar to getting nothing done while also being incredibly vital. I don't feel I really should be in these information chains, but other people are fairly determined that the information does need to flow through me, and the systems break down when it doesn't.

It's like I'm constantly increasing how full completion bars are, but the tasks don't actually clear until I reach 100% so my to do list stays exactly the same. Very hard to feel I am making any progress, although I am. Bogged down in the producer side of being in the arts (and the household), basically.

On the other hand, my Salsa teacher has asked me to help with a dance demo next week, which should be fun. I think it may be the first time I've performed dance as an adult; the last time would be when I was maybe four, when I did a tap dance number about the Care Bears.

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would happily rewatch The Expanse, for instance

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 04:29:38 GMT

A friend and I are trying to pick a TV show to watch together, and she said as a sorting idea that she remembers I don't like science fiction

which is a pretty amazing thing to say about me

but I think what she's actually picking up on is that she watches all the Star Wars and Star Trek shows and I don't, which I have finessed as "I don't have a lot of time to watch TV so I can't watch something where I have to have seen tens of hours to be able to talk about it"

but really it's that I don't like shows that are too big to fail, and this includes a lot of science fiction franchises, but also includes saturday night live and bake off. Once something can't be personal and weird and smash its format up and go in new directions and decide when it's ready to resolve things, it becomes smooth fuzzy surfaces with the fingerprints wiped off.

this is a friend who does not understand art, and she worries there is something wrong with her because she doesn't understand art, but we will eventually figure out a show

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repugnant

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 03:48:52 GMT

Something I can't get out of my head is a clip from the senate race in Texas, a debate earlier this week between Ted Cruz and challenger Colin Allred. It's a question about abortion rights. Allred says something sane. Cruz then addresses the audience very smugly, and says, approximately, "as a mother don't you think you have the right to know your daughter is pregnant?" I'm paraphrasing because I can't find a transcript and don't want to watch the clip again. It's a non-sequitor on top of everything else; it's not following any mention of underage pregnancy. Just hits out of nowhere.

I completely recoil from it (literally I cringed backward into my chair), because he's not actually talking about parental notification, he's talking about parental nullification. He's saying "I know that as a woman, protecting your own life is less important than this: you want to be able to force your underage daughter to give birth." He knows this! He knows this about me, he's sure!

He's sure that's definitely what I dream about. Definitely that's what I want for my children and also for myself. Who cares about the stuff Allred said about rape victims and lives at risk and sterility? I might have been persuaded, but ultimately the cost of not being able to force a minor in my care to remain pregnant is too high a cost to bear.

Ultimately when people are really monstrous what gets to me is their assumption that I'm also monstrous and am only pretending to have other feelings, feelings that aren't a rapacious and bottomless need for control and dominance.

I just cannot imagine ever in the world feeling I should be allowed to force a child to have a baby. It's stunning that he suspects this is a feeling most mothers have, and that he feels comfortable saying so on television.

I have no place to put the feeling of hearing this. I don't know what the feeling is called.

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tanks and surrealism

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 03:16:52 GMT

Earlier this week, I read a message board discussion of ways you can tell you're attractive. (Presumably this is more difficult to guess for people who aren't same-sex attracted.) A lot of it boiled down to: people pay attention to you, and it's positive attention. Doors are held for you. You notice people watching you and they don't look angry. You get good customer service.

Today I went to a WWII re-enactment outside a military history museum (The American Heritage Museum) and there were a lot of people there, and the museum staff was probably stretched pretty thin. But continuously different uniformed volunteers would appear out of nowhere to draw my attention to unusual vehicle facts, even though I am not an obvious member of the key demographic for vehicle facts. I got to hear about a motorized sidecar (so unusual!), and about a tank with wheels that could each rotate in ways that let it do things like strafe and spin around in place (apparently this was handy for not getting bogged down in sand), and about a Korean war policy to paint tanks to look like tiger monsters (an absurd cultural misunderstanding about what is scary but I love a crazy paint job).

For my inktober sketch today (topic: remote) I used a more Surrealist style as a change of pace. Since it's inktober, I've been posting these sketches as I make them, taking quick photos with my phone. With this drawing, it's much more charming in person. It feels more lively and humorous. I don't know why it would be so different on a screen - it's a very "flat" drawing, felt tip pen on paper - and other drawings don't have this same drop off.

I've noticed that effect with Surrealist works more generally, not just mine. Dali paintings are much more impressive and much funnier in person. Miró, same. I think maybe something about a photograph signals that an image is realistic and serious and historic, and distanced from you. Surrealism is playful and wants to intrude into the room.

For this reason, I think probably a scan of the drawing will similarly be less insouciant (and therefore more pointless and ungainly) than the real thing, but maybe less so.

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Grace

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 18:04:37 GMT

I was first introduced to the album Grace, by Jeff Buckley, my freshman year of college. And at that point he'd already drowned and was already mythologized, and at that point I was already more interested in his posthumous album, My Sweetheart the Drunk, because of the ways it was less polished, although I was assured that this was not what Jeff Buckley would have wanted because look at the smoothness of Grace. Wouldn't it have wound up more like Grace?

So I listened to Grace and I own Grace and I'm very familiar with Grace and I like the songs on it.

Only... I keep gradually recognizing not only how much of Grace is covers, but how much of Grace is straight imitations. He's not just singing "Lilac Wine." He's singing "Lilac Wine" exactly like Nina Simone. He's singing "Corpus Christi Carol" like Janet Baker, and Janet Baker sings it how everybody sings Corpus Christi Carol, because that's how Benjamin Britten wrote it. My love for that song probably doesn't have much to do with Jeff Buckley and probably has a lot to do with how much I like Benjamin Britten.

I feel confused about what to feel because I could say that Jeff Buckley introduced me to those songs, but I sort probably would have found them anyway. We live in an age of recorded music. There was not a time Jeff Buckley was alive when he would have had to say "let me sing it to you so you know what I'm talking about." He could always have put on the record.

I'm not sure what the point of cover bands is, if they're not reinterpreting. I mean, I sing karaoke and I love to. But I mostly do it alone in a room, because who cares? Who cares that I can sing that song the same way it's sung on the recording? I sing Lilac Wine like Nina Simone does. I'm not Nina Simone.

I don't know. I run into this problem with Cream too, with early blues, although there at least there's an actual recording technology gap.

I feel weird about it. Simultaneously, I am in the process of ordering the Benjamin Britten sheet music.

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Souffles Clocks Hobbies

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 02:38:53 GMT

Mom made an enormous souffle that rose to more than six inches in height (I measured).

The new cable box doesn't have a clock on the front. For the time being Dad and I have repurposed an old desk clock, but its ticking sound is too loud.

I wish there was a cultural shift toward recognizing cleanliness hobbyists as hobbyists. Most people do not floss exactly 20 minutes after each meal (immediately afterward? you're stripping your enamel, my god!), wash every body part every day in a highly specific order under a rigorously monitored water temperature, vacuum every surface in the house daily including the ceilings, or wipe down the inside and outside of their purse weekly with a special cloth, and the impact is roughly the same as not being able to identify a bird call or train whistle, or not having an opinion on sash collars, or not being sure how to modify the soil under a hydrangea, if that even is a hydrangea, or writing a shopping list using a slightly crushed ballpoint pen with an ad on it.

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Go go go

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 02:23:31 GMT

I've picked Go back up after not playing for about 20 years. I was never any good at it. I am still not good at it. From reading Go forums, that's just how it is - you play a hundred some games of Go and you start actually seeing patterns, but also you always feel bad at it, always, forever.

(I am bad at it, though. I do not win against other beginners with even less experience than me. This is surprising to them because I'm very good at most board games.)

It does not seem like I'm getting any better, but I have one clue that something is going on: I become very tired and headachy after about 15 minutes of doing tsumego problems.

Clearly my brain is working hard to figure out something. But it's still a black box.

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In fact it is beyond my capacity

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 14:48:29 GMT

Once again, am running into the problem of my own competence and sterling reputation. I keep whistleblowing on a dangerous situation, and the response has been overwhelmingly "wow, that's awful. Thank goodness you're there to handle it. Everybody's so lucky to have you."

It's like my hair is on fire and everybody's reassuring me that I still look good. Yes; I am able to look fabulous even with my hair on fire. But that doesn't address the problem.

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Cinnamon Bluebell Ice Cream Dinner

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 01:24:56 GMT

In Atlanta visiting my sister and her three-legged dog. Spent the morning at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, and took a photo with The General (a historic train), Nana-style. This means posing as though you made something you definitely did not make, in homage to a picture of our paternal grandmother next to a gingerbread house. The museum itself is excellent at walking you through most the war's strategic decisions (very very very railroad-based).

I'm going to do more reading on the USMRR (US Military Railroads) - an organization of mostly Black railroad workers who not only maintained, repaired, and extended rail lines throughout the campaign (this is sort of an origin of the Pullman porters) but spent about a month early on figuring out the best ways to sabotage and destroy rail lines, and made a how-to guide.

Bought a light switch plate at the gift shop, and some peach butter.

At Waffle House, the waitress and I both had blue mascara, and were both interested spectators as her truck's windshield was replaced in the parking lot.

Played pinball for about an hour. The machines I was good on were Addams Family, Swamp Thing, and Doctor Who. I regret that when I picked out my socks in the morning and was torn between Toulouse-Lautrec and Daleks, I did not chose Daleks.

House is cold. Temps aren't hideously low, but there's not much insulation. I sleep in a sweater.

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The stairs to the stage

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 16:34:36 GMT

I haven't written a poem in more than six months. It's a low priority and I'm busy. I had an idea for a poem in October(?), about a shapeshifter being upset by a mimic (although they both changed forms frequently, one of them had an essential self which was consistent across the changes and one of them did not) but I couldn't get it to work - you can see how clunky my explanation is in prose. If I had the poetry of it, the prose would be better.

It occurred to me today that the majority of the poems I have written have been love poems. That's not the bulk of what I send out for publication; my published poems are predominantly not love poems. But the day-to-day things I have dashed off have mostly been love poems, intended for a one-person audience and the amusement of the moment. And I think maybe that has been the equivalent of me running scales on the piano. It's not what I perform, and it's not terribly impressive, but it's what keeps my hands in the right position when I want to throw off something virtuosic.

I don't know whether that's right, but I think it might be. Might have to go back to silly limericks, like in high school.

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In the Future in the Present

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:30:05 GMT

I continue to do a lot in any given day while also feeling terribly behind because of all the deadlines I'm behind on, all for things that don't pay my bills (or in some cases anything at all). Most impending are a huge pile of unfinished slush reading and 9/10 of my manuscript edits for Nothing in the Basement.

Friday:

On work breaks, packed the kids' weekend stuff for Ciro's and did Pilates. Ended work, ran Nico to a friend's house, headed into Boston for Boskone; was on panels about the idea of separatist space colonies (I moderated) and about writing an imaginary doctorate. Ate a quick sandwich in between in the lobby, which I'd packed in my purse for dinner. Parked at a cheap garage about a seven minute walk from the convention hotel; passed some fun public art. Stuck with that garage for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday:

More Boskone panels (screenwriting, then a discussion of hiking in Lord of the Rings); another packed sandwich. (This time, cheese and Branston pickle; yesterday was speck and hummus.) Waltzed for about 90 minutes. Caught up with writer friend Rob Cameron, in from NYC. Back home to do some magazine and scouting admin. Ate roast duck to celebrate Lunar New Year. Watched Jennifer's Body, which I hadn't seen. Was shocked by how underpraised the directing was; I remember a lot of buzz about the screenplay, but... Karyn Kusama directed Girlfight, which won Sundance! She's a protege of John Sayles! A really genius director who I guess got pushed into TV after this movie? Aggravating.

Sunday:

Spent an hour or two deep-cleaning the rug in the parlor (the cats' favorite room.) Then to a Boskone panel on the legal and economic rules surrounding ownership in space - what the treaties are and how I think they're going to be violated and who is going to get away with it. Then a song circle on celestial themes. (I sang Darkest of the Days, which has the solstice, the moon, and a collaborator named star.) Home to very quickly eat leftover duck and an orange, then headed to the dance studio to mambo for about 90 minutes. Scrubbed a pot in which carrots had burned (Mom making dinner for a friend undergoing chemo). Ate dinner, then picked up kids from Ciro and got them to bed.

Monday:

Pretty wiped out; physically tired after a physically demanding weekend. More admin for Strange Horizons and cub scouts - helping someone book a space, setting up a special issue, looking at a Poetry Foundation grant application. Spent two hours tweaking and formatting documents for a fellowship Chris and I are applying to, the Rhinebeck Writer's Residency, where we'd be able to finish revising our musical The Lady Takes the Mic. Short nap. Did Pilates. Made bone broth. Fed kids weird new "cosmic" Oreos that seemingly have Pop Rocks mixed into the cream. Do not recommend from a taste perspective but I guess experientially it is worth having a bite of one. A bite. Of one. Will play D&D later.

--

I should probably summarize what I actually said on panels, some of which was interesting, and some of which I'm the primary source on ("this is how I approach doing this specific thing" or "this is what I predict is going to happen in this area"). But I'm exhausted. Tomorrow is a huge snowstorm, so I imagine I'll be shoveling. And trying to get through slush and all the thousand things.

Always a bit weird to be on panels and constantly say totally true things I've done and remember that I've done a lot of stuff. It surprises me to recall or notice, even though it's obvious in a day-to-day way that I do a lot of stuff. Just none of it seems to matter beyond the moment, maybe? It's like I'm simultaneously messing up both sides of Yoda's "All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was! What he was doing!" I am always so much in the moment that I can't remember or be satisfied with the past, even the earlier in the same day past, and I am always so aware of the pile of things that I still need to do, that stand in between me and where I want to go.

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let's get together, yeah yeah yeah

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 04:29:55 GMT

First "day off" in a week and a half, which means a long list of postponed admin and housework rather than a chance to relax. But I didn't even get to most of that, because the day was a series of emotionally charged and exhausting conversations that weren't instigated by me. So now I have to try to do a lot of admin and housework tomorrow, on top of an already busy tomorrow.

I'm too tired to be able to avoid making small but critical mistakes like transposing numbers, and my hearing isn't quite what it should be; probably have some head congestion.

On the bright side, I flippantly proposed to my sister that The Parent Trap (based on the book Das doppelte Lottchen, 1959) is a fantasy about the reunification of East and West Germany. Thing is, having looked into it in order to make more jokes, I have found that German pacifist author Erich Kästner wrote quite a lot of political satire, including in the form of children's books. So I might accidentally be correct.

I did receive hugs; watched an episode of Taskmaster; ate orange polenta cake for breakfast.

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unintentional reverse of volume

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 17:35:21 GMT

The house catty-corner from me has been toilet papered, which I think is something you do to show you are displeased with someone. However, it looks beautiful. Snow on the ground, leafless trees, waving white paper. It reminds me of art installations by Yakusaki Onishi.

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cactus, soup, ice

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 03:25:11 GMT

Got prickly pear prickles in my fingers; tweezed them out. Ate red lentil soup with salted lemons. Temps well below freezing.

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clap your hands, sweep the floor

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 03:07:00 GMT

Been sleeping badly. I can fall asleep but I wake up, sometimes multiple times and always too early - racing heart, stress. Early in the day all the skin around my eyes hurt like the skin was sunburned, but I managed to nap and calm that down.

Spent a few hours working on being able to eventually work on things - re-installing software, figuring out where various sound files got shuffled to as Ciro repeatedly moved things from drive to drive without warning or documentation, hooking it back up to the DAW, and figuring out how the DAW now works (the usual nonsense where if you look away for a minute, an operating system update changes the entire user interface for no real reason). Then trying to make the whole file architecture a little more robust so I don't have to do this again. I have things working well enough that maybe the next time I sit down I can actually compose.

I also listened to and cleaned up some of the sound samples I made last week with my sweet little Sony field recorder - working from an idea of industrial music that is instead domestic - brooms sweeping, pans scraping, coins rattling in a leather cup. I'm working on a piece that I'm going to try to make only rhythm and vocal, but multitracked vocal and extremely textured rhythm sounds. And it's blues. It's funny and angry and doesn't rhyme.

Is there an audience? Is there a distribution plan? Probably, and no.

Hoping to get it finished by the end of this month, although I wouldn't be surprised if it takes through February. It's nominally a New Year's Day song, but I mean "it's a new year" more metaphysically, the same way "Independence Day" might mean the fourth of July but might also have a different personal date for someone. "New Year" meaning a clean slate or a dividing line. It's possible I'll drastically rewrite both the lyrics and the melody. This is one of those rare times when I know the drum line before I'm sure about the vocal. I know it's often that way for Paul Simon and for Mark Ronson, but it's atypical for me.

A family member has a mild case of the flu. Have to cancel things, reschedule things.

"Darkest of the Days" got really popular all across India last week, where "really popular" means like 70 different people listened to it. But they are people I don't know and they are in different towns. I am not sure what happened. I assume they know each other. It's nice to think about, though.

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out of alignment but it's been me the whole time

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:17:02 GMT

It's a cliche in movies that when somebody outraged says "do you know who I am," we're supposed to understand they're horrible. But I don't think it's ridiculous. It's exhausting to have to constantly re-prove myself to people who assume I have no qualifications, instead of being able to point to any of my experience or reputation, instead of having a cushion of trust.

On the one hand, I get it. They don't have a way to know my resume by looking at me, and it has some unusual stuff on it. On the other hand, I feel like I'm living in "men explain things to me."

I have spent the last two weeks having people worry about whether I can handle singing a Christmas carol with a couple of kids at an assisted living facility, which would probably be insulting in itself, but it's incredibly exhausting when I've spent all day giving notes on a stage musical I wrote, making plans to get down to perform live music at a club in NYC, checking on the song I just released, and researching which local bars I might want to approach about getting back into gigging. I've working as a live musician since I was three, and sometimes bandleader or musical director or accompanist or music teacher. It's a big part of how I supported myself up until the years I needed to be home in the evenings for family reasons.

All of that is invisible. All of that is a life people cannot imagine me having. It's very difficult.

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Beatbox Hygienist

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 03:24:10 GMT

On Monday, I went to my first appointment with a dentist (the usual U.S. issue of suddenly having different insurance coverage and having to switch all your providers). It was tricky to find the office, which is in an old brick warehouse by a highway and a creek. There isn't a radio or anything so the hygienist sings to himself while he's working. He is an impressive beatboxer. So while my teeth were being cleaned I got to listen to mouth orchestra version of "My Favorite Things." It was the best.

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Midnight Operations

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 04:03:02 GMT

Several months ago (I think) shortly after we got a new dishwasher (last one broke) someone (mom?) got overconfident and did not pre-wash a bowl that had quite a bit of cake frosting in it (pink) and then ran the load with a heat/sanitize drying cycle that cooked whatever it was onto the entire inside of the washer, including the insides of a lot of mechanisms. None of the subsequent dishwashing cycles have dislodged the stuff, and somehow I've been the only person aware it was there even though I'm not the person who does the dishes. (I think I have significantly better visual processing than anyone else in the house, and most people outside of the house - a realization which has made it hard for me to know how the world seems to other people, because it's not about eyesight it's about how much you see of what you see.)

Ciro finally noticed it a few days ago but thought it was bacterial spores until I explained no it's basically a candy coating.

Between about midnight and 2 a.m. in sort of a cross between a spy operation and an operating room we ran the garden hose into the house and power blasted everything (which also involved a flashlight, pipe cleaner, toothbrush, and hand towels). It was time-consuming and involved a lot of contortions. I cut a cuticle on my left hand but perseveres.

The cats were alarmed but also vindicated because they are extremely suspicious of both the outdoors and the dishwasher.

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Today, I gutted and scaled a bunch of line-caught fish (a junior member of the household has developed a passion for fishing) and made caldo de pescado. It's been a few years - the last time I had to fully prep a fish was in Pescara.

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Paul sent me the current draft of "Darkest of the Days." It's wonderful. Fingers crossed we'll be ready to release the song on Bandcamp in about a week, and on streaming services in early December. I may (or may not) need to reconceive the cover image, which I built when it was just my half of the song; Paul's bass and rhythm section adds have shifted the song tonally (in a way I like). My version was very Velvet Underground meets Angelo Badalamenti meets Nick Cave; that's still present but now there's also some Beach House and The Cars going on.

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