Music plays a big part in my recollection of scenes from my past. Though I can divorce myself from the phenomenon when concentrating on a piece or song, I can easily swap out the chip (as they say, and I am paraphrasing, in España) and have myriad musics hurl me back into certain swaths of time. This assists me in recalling the whole event surrounding the listening “session”. The remembrance extends to fuzzy frontiers that are quite likely different for each “song”. The strength of impression varies.

A good example, and one I often for some reason come back to is during a walk from a shop somewhere in Galicia back to the tent I was occupying with Jana One in late summer of 2002. The music was the first few songs on Sometime / Anywhere by The Church. Now, these remind me of another prominent time in my life, also, and it seems contextual which nostalgic event washes over me - meaning the context of my situation in the present as I’m listening. In any case, I’m walking back to the tent along a dirt road that runs along one side of the whole campground. There were signs marking off the distance to the entrance. 200m. 150m. 100m. I thought about the length of time it takes to walk such distances and I wondered if slowing my pace would let me enjoy the moment more thoroughly. I had a bottle of beer with my purchases and knew it would irritate Jana One, but didn’t let it bother me much, as I was listening and strolling. I recall the air, the humidity, the track and the crunch from the soles of my shoes. I remember Jana’s surly impatience in everything as we travelled from San Sebastian to the western tip of Spain.

Music is very important to recollection. Because of this, I am saddened by the fact there is little music that I shared with Marisa. Nothing directly reminds me of her. Perhaps if I heard some of her favourite songs, they may, but there certainly won’t be many situations that come up that involve such a thing. On the other hand, much reminds me indirectly of her. They were all private listening moments for me - as I was in a headphone universe - but she was there in the room and / or we interacted intermittently concerning trifles. A good example was whilst we were in Siracusa and we both lay in bed doing our own things. I was reading (as usual) and listening to Hawkwind’s newest album Stories from Time and Space. Much of it, if I am not active listening, hurls me right back to that bed in that hotel, reading Geddy Lee’s biography. Marisa was beside me, doing her own things, writing, going over plans and thinking about painting.

It’s possible that this lack of musical context with Marisa during our time together will make our times dissolve more quickly - memory-wise. I find the thought rather disturbing. Even though I left in the end, the ten years we spent together were filled with amazing moments. BUT I say to myself again that many of those moments were, even though I was with Marisa, spent alone, doing and creating things alone with her somewhere else in the flat carrying on in her own fashion.

Music also sings association with the fetid place that I am in now, of course - Seminole, Texas. And, en realidad, some of those associations are extremely positive. The epoch from 2009-2012 is a bright moment in my mind. I should probably go back and reread Martenblog entries from that period for perspective. Numerous musicks bring it flooding back into my brain. Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat, Carla Kihlstedt (solo stuff), Tin Hat (also Carla related), Phaedra, The Mountain Goats, Incident era Porcupine Tree, some Radio Massacre International, etc. The brightness comes from the idea that I was very prolific creatively during the period. It’s true that Tony and I began working together again (for the last time physically together, unfortunately, I predict). Ajitter came to light and though listening to it now is not a very pleasant experience, the ideas are amazing. More of it will be remade in the future. And Fold will be remade again in the future. I also began writing my so-called “book” in the midst of this epoch. I’m not sure it’ll ever be finished, but, as with Ajitter, some of the ideas are fantastic. During those years, I was in Seminole, Prague, London, Tallinn, St. Johns, and Seaforth. The road trip from Texas to Newfoundland also occurred. Plus, I hung out many times with Justin. Yes yes - The Shostakovich String Quartets! They were part of that epoch.

Though I still have twinges, my feelings for Marisa (and unfortunately for Molly) have receded. They exist, but are distant. I can peer at them, evaluate them, sense them from afar. But the ache is gone. Tony always called me a romantic because after an emotional shock, such as leaving one’s wife or having one’s soulmate (I guffaw) do the abandoning, I am intensely wretched for weeks, months, even thirds of years, but then the ache fades and I am well again. I move on. Tony, on the other hand, never seemed to be able to follow suit. He most likely still pines for Melanie.

This society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children. For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.

This topic has been the subject of conversation throughout my life with multiple posses of friends.

Bender and I went over time and again the idea of his that there are two types. Yes, I know it seems a bit black and white given my love for the grey and the muddled, but given the subject matter, the memories came to the surface and float there still, and besides, it’s certainly not a poor concept.

Bender and I went over time and again the idea of his that there are two types. There are those that stay. There are those that leave. The former remain to keep the traditions and some might say rituals of the village alive. They perpetuate its legacy. The latter are the banished. Well, according to our original conversations, not exactly the banished, but the ones who choose to leave (or are self-banished), though in the context of the quote above, I’d say the choice is heavily influenced by the cognitive dissonance involved in living and / or growing up in said village. The latter may choose to leave, but their choice is in line with their “rejection” by the former of the two types.

One important point here is that those of the latter type - the banished by their own freewill - are not all of the same mind or, shall we scribe, type. Their only commonality is that they do not wear a skin that suits the village. This by no means indicates that these banished are able to relate psychologically amongst themselves.

Most recently, Christian and I have touched on the subject time and again. And it is clear to me that I am one of those black aardvarks who is indeed, in the end, banished from the so-called village.

Well, one must just go out and start one’s own village, then, eh?

When the topic emerges from the morass of conversation, I’m always struck by the fact that I am much more interested in those that are on the verge of or have already been banished from the village. The ones who are out. These are the people I relate to. Or at least I relate to their context. As mentioned above, I may not be able to relate to all of them or even the majority of them personally or ideologically. They are, in a sense, my “extended family”. They are the ones who either couldn’t stand to or couldn’t be bothered to conform enough to fit the role or wear the skin.

Biologically, some would say, and you know who I’m talking about, when those who are out are tossed from the community, only the void awaits, but I am in disagreement. Sociology be damned. Sociology is a kick the pregnant woman in the belly sort of pursuit, in any case. Those busy with riding on the raft that drifts in a straight line down the only river said to be correct by the sociologists are seeing a narrow slice of reality. The jungle springs up on each side of said river and within it seethes creativity - a deviant procession of fractured routines. We, the out, even at times watch as the raft wafts along. And, of course, there are hangers on. Those who tread beside the raft as quickly or as slowly as it goes and keep track of its goings on no matter that they are out. They are the fools of the out. Traipsing through the jungle at our own rhythms, polyrhythms, ever external from that miniscule capsule of so-called “order”, we live on the love to create.

How long is it possible to subsist with no “support village”? I’d say eternally, but most would disagree. I may even disagree with myself at times, and especially during the days after a binge has left me weak of body and of mind. When depression sets in like any illness, the brain behind the forebrain pines for the village. It yearns for support - a structure to uphold it. The solution is to never put oneself in the situation where depression (weakness) reigns. As there are more situations in life than extended hangovers that weaken one’s spirit, the solution is to move to Greenland. It’s obvious.

So what can uphold someone other than the village? The solution that I see, besides or possibly including moving to Greenland, is the richness of an inner life that resembles a village. It’s a virtual world within one’s mind. One lives in it, eventually, more completely than in the so-called “real” world. It becomes one’s village. It becomes the village (or, more specifically, collection of villages) in which those traipsing through the jungle live instead of creating their own sort of “raft” to let float on some offhand tributary but not along the main stream. “Mainstream”. Queue the song by Kansas.

Keiko in Convenience Store Woman found a trickling tributary to build her own raft on. It was a microcosm that was the Convenience Store. She could relate to no other environment. She spoke constantly during the book about how her family and friends wanted to cure her. This simply meant that they wanted her to reboard the “raft” that floated down the widest river. Unbeknownst to them, however, and even to her until the end of the novel, she had already found a smaller stream that suited her just fine.

As long as you wear the skin of what’s considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won’t be driven out of the village or treated as a burden.

The personaje Shihara is the voice of the out in the novel. He even reflects it in his “appearance”. He is unwashed, voices his thoughts directly without any “filter” and obeys none of the unwritten cultural rules. So he’s basically me. Interesting that he is the “author” of the above quote, but he follows none of its “advice”. He wears only his true skin. He won’t lower (in his eyes) himself to wear the skin of the masses and therefore be accepted, or at least tolerated. His outcome is to find a place to hide from society. He wants nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want anyone to bother him or even communicate with him. So he’s me, or at least me when I’m on a boat in the middle of the Pacific with nobody but the “cat”.

I have severe psychological issues when I feel I have to wear a “skin” to fit into any given situation. I know it is uncommon and one of the major reasons that I am out. I discuss it with Christian often. I also discussed it with Jeremy when last I visited him and perhaps also the time before. If you pluck any arbitrary human from the seething masses, or at least mark him, you’ll observe that depending on the environment he is in, he quickly covers himself with a “skin”. His gesticulations, articulations and diction changes subtly and sometimes not so subtly depending on with whom he is. The portion that strikes me as rancid is that it is a plea for acceptance. It is a form of begging. For without said skin, he would be regarded as someone who does not belong. He’d be rejected, detained, jailed or even murdered, depending on context.

Is the need for acceptance a survival instinct?

It most likely grew from survival. Humans originally had to belong to groups to “make it” in the so-called savage world. Some (including Shihara) say that we haven’t changed much in the intervening years, decades, centuries, millennia. I disagree. The simple fact that one can become a hermit and get along fine “in the world” denies the deniers. The ache to be alone can be fulfilled. It has been able to be fulfilled for centuries now.

Memetic inheritance may push against the wish to be alone. It may scream at us from our so-called primal brain, chastising even the thought of ceding from society. I’ve certainly learned to ignore this so-called primal brain. I suggest you do, as well.

You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange - maybe that’s what everyone means when they say they want to “cure” me.

Being in West Texas, I can’t help think from time to time about growing up, though not in Seminole, but in a similar place - the fetid dump that was (and surely still is) Fort Stockton. Why was it a fetid dump? The smell? The stench? Well, the metaphorical stench was very difficult to abide. The strangeness that I inhabited in my natural skin opposed the idea of elimination of the stench by wearing a new skin, albeit a false one. It would have been a skin that would not just have camouflaged me but would have created of me a new being altogether.

Being that it was High School, I naturally got the curious stares and even the “why are you so weird?” from the token “popular girls” that I shared some classes (notably Journalism) with. They didn’t know it at the time, but they wanted to cure me. Or perhaps they did know it on some level that wasn’t only unconscious. In their universe, the day-to-day was all about fitting in. It was all about conforming. It was all about manicuring the skin that allowed one to flow fluidly with the masses. The masses here meaning the hip crowd, for lack of a better phrase.

So what could I have eliminated during that portion of my life to become something more fluid with the mainstream? An obvious one would have been to stop listening to weird music. Stack all my Pink Floyd, Blue Öyster Cult, Nektar, Jethro Tull and Klaatu records in a heap in the back yard and start a bonfire. I could have invited Sharon Weber over. She would have embraced me and yawped for joy at my new persona. Or at least she would have died of smoke inhalation. I hear that burning vinyl exudes toxins. Fuck um. And, hey, from where I sit now, Pink Floyd, Blue Öyster Cult, Nektar, Jethro Tull and Klaatu really aren’t all that weird. It’s all about context, vole.

I would have eliminated my apathy towards fashion. I’d’ve gotten me some trendy threads. I’d’ve eliminated my desire to read long form Science Fiction and fantasy and taking joy in solving mathematics equations. I’d’ve eliminated my apathy towards sports and joined the polo club. I’d’ve been number one, vole. Number lippin’ one.

Numerous other items’d come to mind were I to sit here and muse. And I’d’ve been cured. My skin’d have been fluid. I’d mingled and melded. I’d’ve been whole.

Cured == whole.

Fuck um.

Today is day ZERO! Amazing! I can only gawk at the implications! And very appropriate is that day ZERO lands precisely on Lee’s birthday. My subconscious also acknowledged this small nugget of “truth”. I dreamed last night of Lee. We met in a commodious transit station full of diaphanous haze. Yes, my dreams often feature ostensibly open spaces with walls or barriers or even membranes in the receding distance instead of pressing against one’s senses. This may be a reflection of my claustrophobia.

Hey, Brother.

That’s what the song just said. I am cleansing my “main” phone. Rather, I’m changing its cache of music. A new epoch demands new listening habits. The music I’ve been binging this whole year has Logroño infused within its rhythms, textures and questionable melodic leaps. It must be put to rest for a time.

I must be cleansed from all my sins.

So says the song. I agree, in a very abstract sense.

I dreamt (consistency is for the weak) last night of Lee. We met in a capacious interval of space-time. It may have been some sort of transit station, as possibly all places in dreams are. It had been years or decades or epochs since we had last seen one another. In fact, he didn’t even recognize me. Of course, Lee looked exactly the same, his youth unchanged, the same as it was at the age of 23, in November of 1993. Many things rush back at me from that epoch. Lee’s presence among us was one of the most piquant of those things. He and I’d take a synth and his guitar and some sort of amplification device from the Enfield house (why didn’t we work on music there?) to the Bright Building on the A&M campus, into an empty, spacious lecture hall. The only concrete memory of music toil was the guitar solo of Yesterday’s Train, but it’s quite possible that we also explored A Fool Fancying Cliches, a tune that will be remade by Flavigula soon, along with its companion piece Sonata for a Sombrous Spirit. We did record the guitar solo to Yesterday’s Train at the Enfield house on that battered 6-track, a machine of which Tony has a replica. If I’m not mistaken, and I may well be, I have the cassette containing that “take” and that cassette is ripped, sitting somewhere on pCloud. Sounds like something I should listen to tomorrow. Something to etch into my charcoal scorched spirit.

Lee’s login on the server called Picard at the Statistics Department at the University was leel. He was fond of palindromes. The piece of cardboard or paper or plastic hanging on the door that entered into the most claustrophobic room in the Enfield house read Otto. It was his place of repose. A very temporary place, for sure, as he stayed with us for perhaps six weeks at most.

Still looking for the hat peg you can hang your hat upon.

That is what the song says. Lee would have enjoyed Peter Hammill quite a bit. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover his music until half a year or epoch after Lee’s demise.

One simple but deep regret I (still) have is the evening of Lee’s or my birthday, or even the day in between them, during which we were going to get drunk together. Unbelievably possibly at this point in my life, but not from the point of view of my 23 year old self, it would’ve been the first time we would have experienced such a thing. It did not happen, however, because Marcie called and kept me on the telephone for hours. I chose badly. My days with Lee were numbered. My days with Marcie were numbered, as well, but in a different way, a more capricious way, a more essentially pointless way. What I should have done and would do as my present self was just begin drinking whilst on the phone with my nubile teen until I didn’t give a fuck enough to continue the conversation.

An excellent strategy! In fact, it can be used in multitudinous contexts! I shall etch it into my charcoal scorched spirit.

Bow down to the Jargon King.

So the song states.

We walked along a passage with translucent mamparas to each side, again allowing washes of light. I said how are you doing, vole? and realized that I’d have to integrate thirty years of accumulated shibboleth into Lee’s vernacular. What was his response other than the sardonic grin he always wore, even in times of deep displeasure? The dream becomes vague. Or its pellucid light is dimming in my mind. Either way, much like the human, it is gone. It was a glimpse of a parallel reality, as perhaps all dreams are.

I say “Nothing is nothing!”

Bellows the song.

The restlessness is peaking and has the savory smell of anxiety. I welcome it. It comes rarely enough that even its unpleasant edges are a stimulus. At this time tomorrow, I’ll be on the way to Soria (or, rather, Rollamientas) with Dani to shoot the last scene I’ll most likely ever have within his productions, soundtracks not withstanding. On seemingly infinite occasions in receding epochs, I’ve chosen to let life displace me from everything I’d previously known, or at least displace me from everything within a defined chunk of time I’d previously known. I don’t mind. Take Sweet Entropy’s hand. Let’s go.

Fuck um.

The problem with day ONE is that there is still 48 hours to go, vole. Well, counting is for the weak, in any case, so I shall take it in stride.

I just created a rather pedestrian improvisation using the Syntrx II. My original intention was to explore the so-called Holloway Melody that I plan to use in heavy repetition and with moderate modification ongoing throughout the yet to be named 40+ minute piece that the semi-primate that calls himself “Christian Newman” will have to do some singing over. What kind of singing, you ask? Well, we are going to go full Zeuhl on this one. Zeuhl, you say? Well, not full Magma Zeuhl, but more along the lines of Weidorje Zeuhl - a type of Zeuhl that drifts through my mind in dreams and supplicates to be scribed into a long form composition. The Holloway Melody will play a vital role in the chant.

Speaking of Zeuhl, I’ve written one Zeuhlish part within Řeka (working title) that the aforementioned semi-primate will also be forced to sing. He’ll do it with all the eagerness of a wingless, caged raptor. That piece will be saved for the original electronic album that won’t be very electronic at all, at least on the surface. And surface forms are the only forms that matter to the gobbling hordes awaiting their musical meal.

The pedestrian improvisation I mentioned as recently as two paragraphs ago is playing again. I’m not too impressed, though that is to be expected. The days leading up to Sweet Entropy’s smack on the back of the head are always fraught with creative problems. I don’t feel specifically distracted, nor do I have a sense of anxiety or kinetic imprisonment. The hidden mental modules that feed my need to create are somewhat muted. The restlessness, not apparent when I practise guitar, perform household duties, walk to & fro about the neighbourhood or worship the local ministry of ungulates, plays havoc with my creative prowess.

Thus the pedestrianism of the improvisation. I’ll juice a few ideas from it, though the quantity may be meager.

Not much is left to do before my departure. One large box will go containing clothing, books, cds and miscellaneous knickknacks. I’ll buy another roll of bubble wrap to ensure the Yamaha monitors are safe during transport to Dani’s place. The original boxes vanished at some point. Since my “Decksavers” never arrived, I’ll be constructing cardboard cones to tape securely over the joysticks on both the Syntrx II (whom I need to name) and Gutter Fiend. I have excellent BAGS for the both of them. However, one must always care for joysticks. Joysticks are essential. I may need one at some point for the Modular system (which also needs a new name). “Perhaps”, as the semi-primate going on lumpish putty sometimes says.

Oh yes - I must copy my static Flavigula site over to nuevo thurk, my current cloud server. Why? Yak, the Raspberry Pi that hosts the flavigula site, its gemini counterpart and the Dobruszka bot, will be packed in one of the three suitcases that fly with me. After doing so, I have to temporarily change the Openresty config that points to Yak along the wires of my mesh network and point it instead directly at a directory structure on nuevo thurk itself.

Oouh baby.

After my ostensible final entry on Day ZERO, meaning tomorrow, I’ll perform this duty.

Now to urinate.

The dream found me, or the eidolon of me, in a diaphanous and capacious space like a high school gymnasium that extended to infinity in all directions. A song by Tears for Fears sauntered into my ears from the sound system. It was nothing that I know on this side of the dream reality, but my eidolon had it placed on the first album, despite the fact that the lyrics had something to do with “happy endings”. I’m aware that Tears for Fears has an album with a title that has something to do with “happy endings” and that my eidolon twisted the origin of musical sources. I’m not very familiar with that album, as opposed to their first, which I know intimately, like I knew Melanie’s skin during the months we lived in that hovel in Washington Heights. Oh, the nostalgia! Not that we listened to much Tears for Fears back then. But I have desviado, as they say in the ancient lands.

A human who was a combination of Jesus (not the historical figure) and Rostej (the historical figure) was at my side in the dream. Other humans were dotted around the shadow dappled interior. Whether these other humans were historical figures or not is open to interpretation. The Jesus-Rostej insisted the song that flowed around us had an aura of positivity and that it lifted his charcoal scorched spirit. As I am wont to do, and sometimes without adequate rationale, I disagreed. As if I could disagree to whether something was lifting his charcoal scorched spirit or not. I disagreed because the lyrics were in contradiction to any conceivable positive message. Anyone familiar with Tears for Fears’s first album can do a mental verification.

What followed was a discussion about how each person hears music differently depending on many factors. Rostej-Jesus argued that because of the physiological sameness of humans, everyone has the same listening experience. The intervals and rhythms are all interpreted by the brain in a way that could not result in anything but equality.

As anyone with more than a brain stem knows, and as my eidolon knew, the experience of art involves much more than the physiological. The emotional place a human is in within that human’s existence is essential. That is, the emotional place one is in at the very point in the day / night / crepuscular haze plays a role. But that emotional point doesn’t play the most important role. The sloshing chemicals that interpret music into both emotional and intellectual responses are subtly different in each human. Sometimes much more than subtly. Listening to a song by Tears for Fears and it having an affect on both the rational and wubby wubby parts of a charcoal scorched spirit is an extension of every experience one has had up to that point in one’s life.

Humans who have similar taste in music have either had very similar experiences since birth (such as growing up and never leaving the same pueblo or even state or país or bubble) or have arrived to where they are by convergent evolution. The latter is much more likely in the case of me and my compatriots. But despite my point, Jesus-Rostej continued his insistence and introduced into the conversation a range of homogenizing therapies and especially drugs. He was a proponent of today’s psychology, a rat-ass pseudo-science if there ever was one - and you can quote me on that - and of today’s psychologists and psychiatrists, a rat-ass pseudo-human collection of entities if there ever was one, and the propensity of today’s psychology to modify the perceptions of humans chemically. And especially to modify the perceptions of humans chemically so that humans all perceive the world in the same way.

The grand evening-out.

The grand evening-out is blasphemy in the face of the individual charcoal scorched spirit. It is repellent to me. The beauty of humanity is its diversity and especially the ability to interpret art (and to interpret, well, just about anything) in a manner that arises from the intellectual and emotional accumulation of a life’s unique path.

I’m going to shank the next psychologist I meet.

Day five. Amusingly, I miscalculated on Day 14, which should have been Day 15 if I planned for Day One to land on the day before I depart. It turns out that the day before I depart will be Day Zero. Well, why not?

As my departure approaches, my emotions churn, as I knew they would. They are affected by everything from what I have for breakfast (or if I have breakfast at all) and lunch to the temperature of pockets of air I walk through as I make my way from the building that houses “our” flat to my guitar lesson or to the supermarket or to the post office.

In an ancient epoch, let’s say sometime in 2004, I was drinking wine on an embankment overlooking the Vltava with a certain Zuzka. This certain Zuzka was the same Zuzka that was in a relationship with Michal and who also was the “best friend” of my then girlfriend Jana One. This certain Zuzka expounded at me about emotions. Feelings are the only thing that matter. Act upon them. Act upon them at the moment you sense them welling in your blackened spirit! She left out the blackened spirit part, but I’m sure it was implied in her delivery. I admit that I have left my spirit to roast upon the charcoal for far too long and far too many times. Be that as it MAY, this certain Zuzka insisted that I should obey impulses of sensations the chemicals sloshing around in my head give me and at the very moment they give me these sensations.

Right now, I cannot think of poorer advice from anyone I’ve known.

But I have taken this advice, subconsciously, time and again, and especially during the throes of recuperation from an alcoholic binge. Alas, those are the moments when my psyche is most fragile and I am wont to obey impulses spawned from quickly shifting emotions, mostly of sadness and solitude. In fact, I’ve made decisions that drastically changed the course of my life several times in that state. Were I only to wait a few days for my mind to clear and for discursive thought to reign again!

My point is that that certain Zuzka’s words were poison.

I’m not in the throes of recuperation from a binge, but I am feeling doubts, twinges of despair and other slow oscillations between questioning myself completely and knowing there is no other way forward. Discarding the hillocks and valleys, I strive to focus with the precision of my mathematical mind. It sorts through every event of the last ten years and makes comparative analyses. The conclusion is, of course, that there is no other way forward.

The extreme would be to say that sloshing chemicals should never be one’s guide, but I understand what is happening now is an edge case and emotions have to be discarded. In so-called normal life, I attempt to temper them, but not necessarily consign them to the pit.

Exuvia by The Ruins of Beverast bellows from my studio monitors. Black metal is certainly cathartic.

Day seven and there is still a proliferation of random objects in arbitrary locations around my place of “work”. The word work is a slippery one, especially on the lips of the American humans I grew up around. Though it never quite implied the same thing each time I heard it, it was almost regarded as sacred. Our indoctrination during childhood was to always focus on work. Work was the road to a “successful” future. Work was the path to salvation.

From the perspective of adulthood, this shifty word comes across as an quasi-religious form of self-enslavement. And I’m not just referring to being employed by another person or entity. The guilt that our indoctrination induced when we were not constantly doing or in the search of doing something that generated income indicated that no matter our form of work, we were subconsciously electing enslavement.

Of course, this has to do with class hierarchy, a concept that came into play millennia ago when striations had to be created for the good of agriculture. The lack of machines in that epoch created machines from men and birthed the peasant class, not to mention middle management. Yeah. I’m not a fan of anything relating too strongly to sociology, so I’ll leave it at this:

Humanity perished with the advent of agriculture. It’s been slow decay since.

The idea of work ethic my father tried to instill within my trembling spirit had nothing to do with the work I do when I am focused on music or even programming (for money!). The work ethic my father tried to instill within my shuddering spirit had nothing to do with contentment and everything to do with participating in a system too large for him to see. Well, I can’t say for sure that he never thought about the sauntering beast that was / is Western Culture and its insistence that we all be cogs within its machinery. He might well have, though somehow I don’t think he was trained up that way. In any case, when I went against this work ethic, I was punished. As a child, I was punished by my father, and later by a series of institutions: elementary school, high school, university, and employment after employment after employment.

Yes, following the work ethic kept me out of trouble, which is a form of contentment, but it never made me happy. I suppose glory be to the man or woman or machine entity that can BE a cog in the machinery within the sauntering beast that is Western Culture and BE that cog with contentment. Glory be! Of course, there is the question of indoctrination, brainwashing, whathaveyou with reference to said individual, but still - Glory Be!

The concept reminds me of the show Severance. The system (Lumen) is researching a manner to create cogs that know nothing other than the work itself and therefore have no comparison to how it may be like to exist in another manner. I’m certain their downfall will be ignoring the power of the human imagination. Well, unless they figure a way to suppress that, as well.

Backing up a moment - of course, had agriculture never come about, it’s likely humanity and thus society would not have evolved in a way that would have allowed me to be typing this. Probably I wouldn’t have even existed, at least not in this form. Whether humanity / Earth / the universe would have been better off is another speculation. The idea touches on something I’ve thought about more and more in recent years - that of systems evolving to be what they are in the same way that life evolved on Earth from simpler constituents. Humanity, at its base, is a system. And it is made up of other systems. That is, political states, empires, religious organizations and oxen like me making music that no other oxen will likely listen to. Each of these systems, including humanity itself, change constantly. They evolve. At some point, it is likely they reach a threshold and beyond that threshold they are an abomination. And they begin their decline.

As they say in the old lands: Fuck um.

Today is day nine. I shall pour myself some Houjicha - another reminder of Japan. I mentioned Japan the other day not only because Christopher is there but because to me it is a vague concept. Yes, it is a concrete land-mass, but the reality of actually being there is just an abstraction. This points back towards my resolve to not make plans that are, as it were, etched upon the surface of my skull, or upon the surface of anyone’s skull, for that matter. Leaving future ideas abstract creates multitudinous agreeable future senderos.

The idea is coupled closely with my rejection of expectations. To have absolute goals is to create narrow roadways into the future. If deviated from, the results is a sort of emotional devastation. This devastation can be so powerful that it becomes a stasis of disillusionment throughout a gelatinous chunk of time. Time ultimately spent mourning something that never existed in the first place except in one’s mind: said expectations. This is a condition I seek to avoid. I also encourage anyone reading this to also seek to avoid it, which means not placing one’s goals in the terms of the exceedingly specific. Keep the future vague. Don’t let the haze clear completely until arrival.

Rejection of expectations also serves to create life satisfaction on shorter time scales. Don’t approach a film or a book with a portion (or all!) of the expected story already scribed in one’s mind. Don’t listen to a piece of music while thinking intently on how it evolves or devolves from other music by the same or similar artist(s) or weighed by bias from its presentation. Don’t impose whole or part of a theatrical experience from one’s past or even from one’s imagination onto a situation one is involved in later in the day or later in the week or even later in the present epoch.

The uncertainly of existence is one of the only constants. Imposing strict guidelines onto the haze approaching from the opposite direction of time’s arrow does nothing but invite disappointment.

The ancient tapestry (I laughingly call it a tapestry) that habitually covers the Raspberry Pi with attached mini-screen whose name is Yak and to whom I am connected now writing this was on the floor at the base of the monitor stand earlier. Yak sits on top of the monitor. Possibly it’s not the best position for him / her / it / zubby, but I chose it for its proximity to the 12TB hard drive that is filled with backups from various parts of other machines round the household. Oouh, baby. Now what was the purpose of this opening salvo? Ah - yes. It was the cat. It had to be the cat. It’s always the cat. The cat is to blame.

Bender-boy is in Japan at the moment. He’s sent me various photos and brief commentaries. I said that I should join him. This is truth. I should. And I will. Or, rather, I’ll join his wraith because his corporeal being will be long gone before I show my presence there. Yes. I shall head west. Go west, my son and all that rot.

It will be an intense change for me, casting off the European shroud that has held me in its nervous comfort for twenty-six years. And as time and moth eaten as it may be, it will be painful to cast it off, but ALL change has a delightful flavour. I won’t go to extremes. There will be no burning of the shroud or leaving it to rot on some shitheap in the Seminole landfill. I’ll carefully place it in a strong-box to be picked over carefully and incrementally as epochs pass. And I’ll head west. West is refugees’ home, as the song says.

So, once again I can say that I’ve been influenced peripherally by Christopher, though I felt the pull even a decade ago when he was in Vietnam and spilling to me his mental flow about the beauty there. I wonder if he fell asleep in the sun and nearly died of sunstroke like fair Lucía did one time? I think Lucía was in Thailand, actually. Same thing. If he did die of a sunstroke in Vietnam, and it’s highly likely as I’ve not actually laid eyes on his corporeal being since May of 2003, then his wraith is ALREADY wandering Japan and, being a clever wraith, has learned to interact with the “physical” world, at least enough to send me messages. Or perhaps said wraith interacts directly with the flow of electrons that surge and ebb throughout the internet.

Yes, I can visualize the scenario. He “dies” of a sunstroke in Vietnam in a suitably remote spot. A few passing “scientists” steal the fresh corpse in enough time to preserve the brain. This brain has its consciousness injected as a wraith to ride the surge and ebb of electrons. Yes. This is what happened. It all makes sense.

Day 12.

I just played with the cat a bit, and, as the song says, or at least implies, I’ll miss my cat. After all the trinkets, feathers and simulations of twine we’ve bought for her, in the end, the most effective device for pay is a long, wobbly, flexible (but not too much so) wire attached to a handle that has a piece of real twine tied to its end. Goes to show you that some ways from the ancient epochs are the best ways. Or at least the most effective ways.

As is usual when a threshold is approaching in the mid-distance, my perception of time creeps. Well, it usually creeps, and especially when I have diverse offerings for my mental modules each day, but right now it creeps in an even more lugubrious fashion. Well, good for it, then. I’ll take advantage of the perceived extra time and attempt to get as much music done as possible. I may even do some programming along the way, and not just for myself.

I’m in the midst of recreating Dobbs Rakes His Knuckles Across the Wooden Fence. In fact, just this morning, for the section of pulsations in which that mass of bacteria and filth that I occasionally call “Christian” chants about some pseudo-religious fetishes, I replaced one of the repeating melodic synth lines with the Scarab Fuzz. It’s an exciting time when one gets to recreate one of the genre’s most iconic of albums! Dobbs revisited! Or somesuch. In the original, there are many murky things lurking in the backdrop, but this time round I’ll try to keep it cleaner and let the mass of bacteria and filth’s vocals belch themselves into whatever constitutes a foreground in the end. These plans may change slightly, however, as they often do.

Dani and I spent a bit more than an hour in Café Antiguo “round the corner” and had a grand time drinking coffee and talking animatedly about film and music. It was almost as if I were revisiting that other epoch when we regularly met at London Café, consumed bad hamburgers and talked animatedly about film and music. I do find it a bit triste that most (but not ALL) of my best, or at least solid, memories of the last decade in Logroño are those when either I was with Dani or with Matthew or when I was alone. Most of them, yes, but fortunately, not ALL.

Radiofreefedi gurgles in the backdrop. The show is “RFF in the Atmosphere”, though it should be called “RFF Plays Music that Squats in the Middle of a Commodious Chamber Humid with Almost Infinite Reverb”. Oh the reverb the musicians use! It’s almost a disease. But - I do like reverb. It’s utility in many contexts is clear to me and I’ve been known to slather a few pieces of “music” with it, as well, though not as often as the aforementioned mass of bacteria and filth has. But, VOLE, it’s ubiquitous on the squatting music channel! Well, nearly.

Now I shall unsheathe Uruqi the guitar from its capsule of stale atmosphere. After all, soon enough it’ll be in others’ hands.

As I just wrote to the swarm of protozoa that infest my “friend” Christian’s living corpse, the new album (the one about greenhouses, if you are curious) is now published on Mirlo, Jamcoop and my own Faircamp. In celebration, I’m listening to the album. I thought I might have burned myself out mixing and mastering it, but I am enjoying the run-through. The Yamaha HS5 monitors gurgle forth its mellifluous recital. Speaking of the Yamaha HS5 monitors, they must be taken care of. Taken care of not in the sense of a hit by some mythical mafia but in the sense of being sold off at an exceedingly reduced price to some lucky individual - probably a human.

This morning was my second to the last guitar lesson with the best guitar instructor I’ve had so far. He expounded at length on the importance of solos interpreting the melody of a piece of music. We’re talking Jazz here, but I’m sure the idea can be applied elsewhere, though possibly not in the context of hits by mythical mafias. He subjected me to this barrage of words after we went through Memories of Tomorrow a few times, which I FUCKED UP. Admittedly, its pace and it’s twisting chord sequence make things slightly difficult, or at least more difficult than Corcovado or Out of Nowhere. My strategy for this week, and onwards (including after our FINAL lesson), is to slice up the piece into sections and concentrate wholly on subtle variations of the melody. As everyone who’s hung about the moons of Neptune will know, one of my favourite variation strategies is to modally shift melodies as well as rhythmically shift them so they cross over bar-lines that they possibly shouldn’t.

I shall also imbibe a new Jazz Standard, one I’d never heard of before this very morning entitled Alone Together. It is riddled with ii V goopiness, all of which resolve to the minor I. It is a sound I am fond of.

After my lesson, I strolled to the Pošta to mail a box to Seminole. What was in the box? GARBAGE, I SAY! Nothing but garbage. Truly, it was filled with things I hardly use at all and I was reminded of another conversation I had briefly with the aforementioned swarm of protozoa about knowing the border between:

1. Things one use almost constantly
2. Things one use often
3. Things one use often enough to have value
4. Things useful, but only taken out of the receptacle from time to time
5. Things that should not exist in one’s possession because they are never used

The box I mailed today was in the soupy grey area between #4 & #5. There was a fuente de alimentación by the marvellous (ho ho!) Joyo and actually it was the first fuente de alimentación for guitar pedals that I ever bought, back in the years of Flavigula infancy. A pair of glasses was in there. And the rest GARBAGE.

Before I sign off, I should remind myself of something that came to mind earlier: Do not mistake a system that has evolved over epochs and epochs for intelligence. “Nature”, for example. Or the universe. Movements of such systems feel intelligent because we assign the status of “intelligence” to them without any deep understanding of the system itself. Such systems do the things they do because they have multitudinous moving parts that have fallen into a synchronous equilibrium.

That’s all.