Two Octobers ago, I attended a lecture in Tallinn at which my friend, Tiit, was speaking. Two people lectured before him. Well, lecture is not a proper term. They made presentations concerning their life among indigenous peoples elsewhere. The first was a woman who had spent most of her live in northern Siberia.

I’m referencing this entry. During the conference / presentation / whatnot, I wrote a number of short entries hoping to get back to them and elaborate. Predictably, I never did.

(this)

Places are not immutable, but they are less immutable than the people who occupy them. They are arranged by their occupants to reflect traditions. In this instance, the places are named after people buried in them. As time passes and other humans pass to the soil, the name of a village or region drifts. I’d like to think they first become combinations or hybrids of two dead humans’ names. Distortion happens and history changes. At times, maybe two or three humans become one in the minds of the present occupants.

In a way, I wish art was the same way. And, actually, folk music pretty much is. Traditional folk music, that is. It drifts through time and is reinterpreted again and again, reowned over and over. Printing, publishing and the internet has decayed mutation of art. Reinterpretation is frowned upon except in specific contexts, and even then rigid frameworks always remain (see – jazz).

I want to lay my hands on something / anything, and claim it, remould it into my own. Perhaps its fundamental will be retained. Maybe not.

Fuck um.

Over the last month, I have been transferring to MongoDB (in the same manner I create normal entries) old some would say ancient hand written journals. Yesterday, I did this one – the first in a sequence concerning my and Christopher’s trip through Australia together. Oh, and an intriguing journey it was!

(this)

I was inspired to look over a series of emails that Christopher and I traded in the summer of 2011, when I was in Praha, then in Seaforth.

Writing of the amount of money spent when in a relationship in contrast with when not in one:

Christopher: Have you done this lately? Or are you reflecting on more distant past circumstances? Anyway, I think it’s a pretty common (for lack of a better, gentler word) trap. Which can become a habit, and necessity.

Me: I do it all the time. But I was especially referring to expenditures. My financial resources are very much drained by being in a relationship. I’m not cursing the relationship. I am making an observation. Sometimes I despise the fact that it happens. I’m not sure what it is about being in a relationship which makes one spend not twice as much money as if one were alone, but more along the lines of five times as much.

Later in the email conversation, I claim I was making a hyperbole by saying five times as much, but looking back on the relationship with The Smaller One, I am pretty sure five times is rather accurate. When I eventually get to transferring my writings from journals concerning that relationship to this medium, perhaps that figure will be justified. Heh, like anything I write is based on FACT and not EXTREME EMOTION.

The Emlekkonyv journal details (mostly) the year of 2000. I went through a number of wenches in that year and was drained monitarily by only one of them: Vesna. However, I was only drained of money because of purchasing flights for her. My five times figure concerning The Smaller One is up there also because of travel expenses. During the spring of 2001, I was jobless and Vesna paid for most every one of my living expenses sans rent, so I suppose she made up for it.

I began moving writings from Emlekkonyv to here also recently. Read the first about Vesna if you like. Typing that in made me understantably nostalgic about living in Tuzla. My three months there need to be remembered at some point in time, but that particular instant is not now.

(first)

When I am alone, I am exceptionally frugal. I give up many so-called luxuries and tend towards mock-aseticism. Meat and heat, for example, to mention two rhyming mono-syllables. In my flat in Tallinn, I had a swiss army knife, few plates, scant glasses, and absolutely no furniture in the living space. It was perfect for myself, but when Gudi visited, I belive she was slightly uncomfortable with the one chair in the kitchen situation.

(flat)

I squatted on the floor for breakfast. Well, so did she, if I recall correctly.

Being in a relationship is the first step towards being in a family, a condition that sucks a large percentage of one’s pocketbook away into the aether. An ideal for my next (I laughingly imply there will be a next) relationship could be a completely independent woman. All finances are split. No expectations of gifts or other silly friviolities exist. Of course, I am extrapolating from memories of Dana dredged up from the aforementioned Emlekkonyv. I’d have had exactly that ideal had I remained with her.

She was a crossroads.

Others existed and most likely will again, but no other could have been such a successful merger of metaphorical highways than that one. The other Dana came close, and perhaps Hela, as well, but these stories are better left told in their own contexts.

All know by now that I chose to not have a family. If a relationship is the first step to being in a family, then I am relationshiply doomed. If so, I’m not too bothered, however. Fuck um. Nor does the fact that the past is so-called gone bother me. Illusionary time is a comfort. I relive all of my happinesses in the present.

Fuck um.

Me:

good morning from Seaforth, Nova Scotia. The pale bay which can be seen from the window also bids you greetings.

In my search for another ideal – splendid isolation – I look back to my time in Nova Scotia. I was not there alone, as the following paragraph describes, but I felt alone much of the time. Yes, that is called memory reconstruction, as my feelings now about the time are vastly different than when I was experiencing them in, for lack of a better expression, real time.

I told Hope that I’d buy the place off of her. It is a trailer house, elongated and railroad-apartment-like as any my fine reader might imagine, and everything I’d need to be satisfied. Well, the internet connectivity was a problem during the duration of my stay, but were I there permanently (I laughingly call anything in my life permanent), it’d be easily remedied.

Hope was not very keen on the idea. I don’t think it was ME she was not keen on necessarily, but the idea of giving up ownership of the roughly rectangular prism in general.

Damned packrats.

The calm here is pervasive. Even the occasional whir of a passing automobile or the sudden squawk of a seagull seems muted. I’m here with Jana. Although I am enjoying myself immensely, I, at the same time, feel I’d be happier alone. Perhaps more free. Free to do what? That is the question. I’d certainly spend more time writing. I’d help with the animals which are only a few minutes walk away, whereas I am unable to when she is here because she balks at anything “dirty”. We do spend time playing with some of them together, however, (especially the young and violent Martes Pennanti) which satisfies one of my longings. It also signals to me that Jana’s slow change out from the influence of the stoic and ironcast ideals of her grandfather is quickening. 4 years ago, she dismissed any passion for science or art as useless, as her grandfather still does. Her love for the Pennanti is clear to me.

While we are on the previous subject (or coming back to it) of women costing one precious cash, we can abstract that to something else: them costing precious time. Yeah, yeah… I’m trying to erase time completely from my life (or so that bastard Christián would retort), so why do I harp on it?

(Christián)

Fuck um.

Well, being in a relationship again could certainly put a spanner in the gears of my spiritual mechanizations. Just like clockwork, baby. The Smaller One was obsessed with time. I suppose we are all raised to be scheduled, as I have certainly mentioned before. We clock in when our alarm buzzes patronizingly every morning. Mostly, we clock out in front of the television or computer in the evening after happy-job-time is up.

I shouldn’t forget organized, timed and delineated evening activites. So I shall not. They are bounded by an exact window. I miss open-ended evening pub times. Fuzzy scheduling is a poor substitute for complete lack of scheduling, of course, but provides a breather, at least.

As for distaste for art, I’ll not go into it, as it is surely described at length in either other entries here or in handwritten journals. I’ll leave it at this: it was a burden.

The fantastic Pennanti, by the way, is most likely dead. His name was Henderson and the government of Nova Scotia demanded that Hope For Wildlife set him out into the big, bad wilderness unprepared. He’d been raised in captivity, you see, having been found as a cub injured by the side of the highway.

(Hope For Wildlife)

Therefore, he is surely a dead mustelid. Most likely, he’s been consumed by preditors or seekers of carrion after an accident. His corporeal form has been shat out and distributed among the receding forests of Nova Scotia. Yup, they sure released him back into the wild, all right. He’s one with it now, baby.

Mostly, we are in our small house by the sea. I spend my time writing, programming (I’m improving hpeforwildlife.org), and reading. Actually, I am now rereading “All The Rest Is Noise”, which reminds me of you because I was supposed to send you the book, but it became lost in a shuffle of moving and I have no idea what became of it. I now have only the pdf. I feel I appreciate the second read more. Perhaps since I am more familiar with many of the works. Perhaps since I am concentrating more on details this time round.

This reminds me of the project that Christopher and I had beginning in the late summer of 2011 and extending into the spring of 2012. It petered out afterwards, unfortunately.

We chose a piece of classical music, listened to in in detail, discussed it, and then moved on to another. I suppose the book I mentioned was the impetus for our aural adventure.

As most of my plaintive readers know, I grew up in a pit called Fort Stockton (the point on the map should be a smidgen south, though). Much like Seminole, there was little to do. My schoolmates (let’s call them peers) spent time congregating in the evenings, drinking and fucking. I did not take part in these revelries. I sat at home and listened to music or read. Sometimes I’d do both simultaneously. When I did the former, I payed attention ravenously. This is called active listening for all you dunderheads out there.

(Fort Stockton)

As I have grown towards decrepit old age, I still listen as often, perhaps even more so, but not actively near as much. This experiment with Christopher helped curb that for a time. We began with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In fact, I listened to it just the other day, though not actively (for the most part). In particular, I recall a bus ride to Žličín, a shopping episode at Interspar, and a bus ride back to Hůrka during which I listened to the Symphony intently. I may have even got through the whole of it. I recall this particular listening experience because I wrote about it. The files are in my phone. At one point, they’ll be come part of the Martenblog.

We continued with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto (I also listened to that at some point during the last week) and then Children’s Corner by Debussey. I believe the final piece we put under the proverbial microscope was Verklarte Nacht by Schoenberg. And, as usual, the sojourn came to an end.

I do know that Christopher perused the pieces with vigor, as he always has with any music, but I am unsure if he wrote about them. This is something I should ask him. The timing may not be right, however, as his life is rather complex at the moment – another story altogether.

A dog barks, probably the collie tethered usually to the house some ways away, reminding me of the silence. I shall listen to something subtle and continue to program.

A good ideal for a piece of music follows from these few sentences. Ambiance pervades, symbolizing silence, and is then puncuated at places with barks. Well, maybe not actual barks (but who knows?), but with harsh interruptions that come and go within instants (what a phrase! WITHIN INSTANTS!). A Boon to Dissolve (the title of the Flavigula album I’ve begun) needs a piece to host Renata’s spoken word poem.

If work continues as it has been for the last 6 months, I shall begin saving money for a trip to Wellington.

As my left patella already knows, I never made it to Wellington. It’s certainly not out of the question in the near future, however. Jeremy will be in Vietnam for a good while, a fact that beckons me to visit the general area. New Zealand is just a few metres away, no?

Christopher:

I believe I also have a pdf copy of The Rest is Noise, somewhere. Perhaps I will read it as well, though I don’t have much free time for reading. I am currently near the beginning of a novel you would enjoy, Borderliners by Peter Hoeg. It is about delinquent children (outsiders) being manipulated for their supposed good by the education system, but also seems to have some interesting notions of the flow of time.

Ah! The flow of time again!

I have not picked up this novel yet, though I attempted to find it on several occasions. Or maybe I attempted to find a place online to download it illegally. Whichever it was, I failed. I think I’ll check again right now, however. So, hang on a bit, vole.

No luck on soulseek. I can get a .mobi copy (Kindle, baby – no, not the wench) from Amazon for eight bucks. Fuck it, for the most part, everything Bender has suggested to me has been exceedingly enjoyable. I’m snagging it.

Fuck um.

I am struggling with a decision, whether or not to return to the South Pole for a summer contract. I don’t believe I told you but I recently found out that the job I was applying for in Wellington did not come through. I had contacted the South Pole group I worked with earlier to set the machinery in motion for my return, and now it is bearing fruit. The problem is I am having second thoughts about leaving Anne and Sylvia for the four months. It is hardship for them, and I would miss seeing my daughter grow up for that critical time which cannot be recaptured. I will have to make my decision soon however. If I go I will be gone from October through February, so if you intend to come here it would best if you could schedule your visit for afterwards. I will let you know what happens.

He didn’t end up going to the South Pole again. At this moment, I am very saddened by that fact. Certainly, it is not for me to judge, and I am not, but I worry about Christopher and the choices he has made. He has begun a family. It needs mentioning that we are very similar. He may more easily tilt towards desolation and depression than I do, however, and, as any of my multitudinous readers know, I am prone to those plummets often. Well, not as often as in former years when I slid down allies to funnels of despair almost daily.

What bothers me the most about the situation that Christopher put himself in is that he would be easily dominated in a relationship. Most choices would be made by Anne. And one very important source of happiness for him – and for me as well – communication with like minds about abstruse and abstract topics – would be very, very limited.

Thus a slide into lethargy and sullen days upon end at a job he hates. He has told me many times in the past that it sucked his ambition and motivation. He has also told me many times that he is an outsider there. A borderliner, if you will. That much needed communication does not exist.

I always saw Christopher as someone who could become a Suttree. Oh, he may still. Actually, I look forward to it.

Oh, and I never made it to Wellington.

It will be nice for you to spend the time there, I imagine. Do you associate with anyone else while you are there? I find myself quite isolated here, which is a drag. I have Anne of course, which is great…I would be lost without her, but it would be good to have others I can relate to. My coworkers are aliens to me. Or I suppose I am the alien…

I skipped a few of my bits.

Fuck um.

I read in Emlekkonyv yesterday a line I wrote sometime in 2000. It went something like this: Note to self: Go make some friends. That wasn’t verbatim and I am not going to look it up at this moment even though the journal is within my reach because Fuck Um.

I know that, like me, Christopher is an extreme introvert. It takes a bath in scalding loneliness for us to get off of our buttocks and socialize. I’ve improved over the years and I had assumed he had, as well. I say improved meaning that I am not as afraid of going up and talking to strangers. Alcohol is good for this, as well, but that is a topic for another time. Being less afraid of talking to strangers, however, doesn’t mean that I am able to play the game of so-called normal social interaction. So, given this improvement, I must face more rejections and let downs in general. My attitude includes a big dose of Fuck Um, so I’m not too bothered. Christopher, however, perhaps lets rejection destroy him to an extent.

My only real reference points since I know almost nothing about his and Anne’s relationship except what I surmise from his messages and our phone conversations are his relationships with Christie and Tracy. Perhaps relationship is a bad term to use in regards to the former. He was obsessed with Christie for years, and there at her bidding no matter the stakes. With Tracy, his heart was torn from his manly chest and frozen in a tub of liquid hydrogen, retrieved and shattered over an overfull wardrobe. He smoked enough cigarettes in those days to defrost each one of those uncountable pieces strewn about his morose home.

It’d be easy for him to let Anne rule because he gives all of himself to each relationship he has. He knows no other manner of relating to the situation.

Yes, I am usually dissatisfied with whatever situation I find myself in…but my desire to escape my job is not a trivial thing, as it is killing me. The job itself isn’t so bad but sitting in a cubicle surrounded by people I don’t understand (or particularly care to) is demoralizing. I wonder if it is merely a lack of talent for being happy.

Hm. A lack of talent for being happy.

Apparently, talent is an inborn trait. I take that to mean that our minds are wired for certain abilities. If the ability to be happy, or content may be a better term in this case, is wired and one happens to have a scant amount of it on board, I endorse any manner necessary to rewire.

I once decided that even if I looked back on my life as I lay on my proverbial death bed and saw I’d never truly been happy, I’d be content with that. I think I laughed. What did that mean, anyway? Many things I experience in real time have made me miserable (as my journals can attest) but find me feeling very content as I reperuse in forward time.

I want all time to be flat.

I also have a lack of talent for being happy. I’ve circumnavigated this problem with writing, making music, travelling, being generally chaotic, and drinking throughout my life. My only real enemy is boredom. My greatest fear is being locked away in a cage with nothing as company but boredom itself. Examples: a stagnant workplace, a prison, a suffocating relationship, or the bottom of a well. All qualify.

I’m happy for so many of my friends and acquaintences because they are content in their family life. For them, it is not stultifying. They are not locked in a barrel falling through a lake.

I would be. I feel like Christopher is.

Fuck um.

However much it irks my mother, I attempt to go for a walk in the magnificent Forrest Park in Seminole every day. My mother thinks that I am perpetually stranded in my pre-teens, and therefore very vulnerable to the elements, so she’d rather me not be out in the nefarious daylight.

Nighttime is even more out of the question. Her nerves are rattled if I return from dinner with Sandy in the darkened evening hours. Manifestations of evil swarm in the West Texas twilight. Yes - ultimately I shall become their victim.

What will happen, exactly? Well, of course, I’ll be swallowed by the tenebrous dusk! I’ll be another child on the back of a milk carton. Yes, the potrayal of me will not be an image at my current age or thereabouts, but of me as my mother still imagines me: a youth. I’ll be scrawny, gaunt and weak in the photograph. The public will pity me.

The demons of night will have long digested my flimsy soul.

At times, because I imbibe heavily during my time in Seminole, I must take a break from the strenuous circuit vaguely round the perimeter of the park. This photo is the place where I unerringly deposit my urine.

Stále uložím hůl chcankách právě v tomhle místě. I’ve always wanted to go up to a girl in Stramovka and tell her that. She’d be sitting idly on a bench. A portion of the wood would be caved in on the opposite side. She’d have chosen it because of the damage. No one could join her without possibly falling through or impaling their buttocks on sharp splinters. She’d be reading a book. It’d be a mystery or thriller written by an American or British author. Naturally, she’d have the Czech translation. I’d approach casually, as if just to keep on my way, but suddenly stop in front of her. She’d do nothing for a few seconds whilst I stood silently. When she finally would look up, I’d utter the sentence: Stále uložím hůl chcankách právě v tomhle místě. Then, I’d unzip and hose her down good.

My pee-place is one of the only groves (I laughingly call it a grove) of trees in the area. I wonder what the whole of the park was like in olden times. My father comments time and time again that when he was growing up in this decrepit little berg (my words), none of the area round the park was developed. Yes, were I to be zapped back fifty years suddenly, I’d plop from the height of a aproximately a metre down onto the red sand of a vacant pasture. Or, more likely, my backside would be scraped and slapped by mesquite branches. Possibly a scorpian and / or tarantula would scamper into my rectum. I am not wearing pants.

So, if my father is not fibbing, the park was a pasture. If one were to wander directly south of it in the present day, a fenced off area belonging to Hess Oil would follow. However, no trees are to be seen in said area. Only scapy and slappy mesquite bushes mottle the flat, red landscape. An occasional reptile skitters from one point to another, as well.

As I mentioned fences:

If you look closely, you’ll see the rusty twisted wire that once enclosed the whole of my special grove. It’s trampled and snapped at several points, providing me with entry and exit spaces without the danger of tetanus or some other wasting affliction.

At times, whilst urinating, I consider the dead grass and other foliage to whom I’m providing nourishment. I worry that my body’s excrement is either frighteningly sterile or poisonous, as no beautiful thing has spouted even though I have used the same spot for seven and a half years as a watering hole. Perhaps I am becoming like my mother and worrying about unimportant matters just to find any minute unsettlement in the cosmos though there may be none.

It’s entirely possible that the trees in my grove sprang from the flowing urine of other beasts (I laughingly imply that I am also a beast). These possibly fictitious entities could have for decades trotted a circuit vaguely around the perimeter of what would become the Forrest Park. Like all benevolent creatures, they’d have had to pause and empty their divine bladders. The sweet nectar could have birthed not only this grove, but one filling the entire area of the park.

As humans slowly supplanted the magnificent animals, the quality of urine peppering the earth diminished and the trees gave way to mesquite and lowly lizards. My grove, then, is the last remnant of a grand and now lost world.

Having come to this conclusion, there is nothing to do but build an altar to the urine of deities now vanished. I can sacrifice West Texans upon it. Perhaps their blood is more full of nutrients than the sour salt of their piss.

Today’s special question is what exactly are on these cassettes?

I’ve gone through three quarters of a cassette. It’s the one on the bottom right there. Interminable noise making experiments make up the bulk, but I’ve salvaged a few choice cuts. In six months, these will disappear from the server. Someone remind me to create a cron job to do so and a Google Calendar alert to force me to update this entry.

Sex with pregnant yaks

(Sex with pregnant...)

I’m not entirely sure who this is. During most of my beloved high school days, I recorded phone conversations. Only a portion of that time consisted of recording unbeknownst to the other participant. After a bit of thought, I suspect it is Richard Bays. He was no longer living in Fort Stockton, as I date this to 1987, most likely, being that it is immediately before the following snippet on said cassette.

The infamous Richard Bays telephone snippet was used on the official KRAP 93 tape and is, to this day, rather offensive. I’d like to re-listen, but the tape is in a box in Michal’s garage in faraway Praha. Here, in fact, if anyone would like to retrieve it before I arrive in April.

(Here)

Bill Holstein and David Williams - What do you want for Xmas?

(Bill Holstein and...)

The Sir Alfred IV Christmas Special was, as they say, a mixed bag. Various skits (or breaks, as we called them - a term I appropriated from KWES djs John Clay and Jim Scott) featured Bill, David and me whilst others included Ira - the original Sir Alfred IV mastermind. I’m pretty sure I’ll dig up some stuff with him as I continue this journey.

Like many of the breaks on the Xmas Special, the end would plummet into Mysteries and Mayhem by Kansas. It was otherwise known as The Killing Song. For the slow of wit, that means it played when the break called for the death of a participant.

Sir Alfred performs brain surgery

(Sir Alfred performs...)

Well, there you have it: Ira. I’m not sure what this was used for, if anything. I do recall the ending was to be a flushing toilet. For the uninitiated, the music switched off and on again and again in the backdrop is Anesthesia by Metallica.

Sir Alfred and the Narrator jam

(Sir Alfred and...)

Feel free to switch this one off whenever it gets irritating. Again, I’m not sure the exact purpose of it, but it amused me sufficiently enough to rip.

Miller Robison - Third eye in the middle of your chest

(Miller Robison -...)

The Search for Sir Alfred IV began here. Most of the remainder - actually, all of the remainder is better left on a reprehensive heap. That pile of sodden creativity is there for us all to learn from. It’s sordid putrescence wafts remindful of failed experiments and the need to bury them forever.

I cannot remember the purpose of the series of breaks. Again, all of the memories are lost. I can picture Miller and I in my room in Fort Stockton kneeling in front of that iconic boom box. Everything else is rather sketchy.

What are you doing in my house?

(What are you...)

What the hell is David Williams doing these days, anyway? Someone should dig him up and ask him if he can wail the way he used to. We used to drive around the windy back alleys (read - country roads) of that bleak town with windows down and obscure music blaring.

Once we arrived by probably no plan of our own at some chick’s ranch house. Was it Eva? Was it Missy? Was it Julie? Was it Brandi? My mind cannot dredge up the answer. David decided to let out a piercing scream as we drove away. Some time later, after wheeling about the rural routes, we returned. We faced an angry adult with a shotgun. I clearly recall him glaring at me asking…

Is there a little girl with you?

(Ok, maybe I added the little part there.)

Weird times, honeybunch.

Glaspheomus Barkestle - The fucking weather

(Glaspheomus Barkestle -...)

Glassy was the weatherman at KRAP 93 in Siberia, Russia. As I mentioned, the centerpiece of that particular idea is in a box in Praha. Well, unless someone has fetched it in the meantime. Knowing much more about Siberia, Russia and the world in general now, I’ll most likely cringe at parts of the tape when I eventually do listen again.

This break was not part of said centerpiece. I’m not sure what it was for. It amused me to hear it again, however.

The Force

(The Force)

I believe this is the original idea / version / whatever of The Force. Expanded versions were featured on other cassettes. I hope to get my paws on them at one point for everyone involved’s enlightenment / embarrassment.

The first Sir Alfred tape was lost soon after completion. Perhaps this was a part of it. The lesson learned was to make a copy of everything. No exceptions. I guess this idea carries over well in the digital age. Har. Har.

Jim Miles lost that tape. Damn him.

Postscript

Obviously, I went through more than three quarters of one tape. I went through all I had - the three in the photo and one other. Most was drek.

This adventure was inspired by a facebook conversation began by Raymond Garcia and Randy Ham. It can be perused here.

(here)

Gurgle.

He awakens from another dream. His sleep lately is punctuated with dreams. They are small climaxes. It is like this:

He falls asleep at the foot of a wave and the dream begins soon thereafter. The wave swells and at the crest and froth is a poignant moment. The wave breaks and he wakes. He always wakes. There is no transition between dreams within sleep.

Consciousness is an interlude. He thinks it the part where the audience mill about for a time in the foyer between acts. He is the sole member of the audience.

At times he has a moment within one of these dreams. The wave, then, is a metadream. No, that is not exactly right because it is not a dream within a dream, but a calm within a rising climax. The climaxes always rise. They cannot diminish. He doesn’t know why this is so, but the rule cannot be broken. He is miniature upon the wave’s swell. To him, at this point, it is a calm expanse of water.

His wish, maybe the only real wish, is to wake up from this state. To wake up from tranquility, which is nothing. Perhaps when he was born he had this pleasure. A newborn can wake from nothing at all. Somehow he knows this is not right, though. The foetus has a mind, so it must dream in the womb. All minds dream. He at least knows that.

What does it dream of? Is it of Tuzla or Wellington? Is it of Gweek? Again, he is unsure. He doesn’t think so. Say the mother mused aloud about places she’d been during her interminable pregnancy. Well, musing wouldn’t be enough. Say the impressions of these events are passed into the infant’s mind.

He had a theory that a monther’s consciousness could pass to the foetus. Yes, impressions, at least, could congeal there. Dreams in the womb would be taken from these impressions. They could be a collage or mishmash. A jumble of images make up an aleatoric slideshow. Some more thought can be given to this, he thinks. He’s in one of his intermissions. He is walking around in the foyer thinking about the previous act.

It was about dreaming. Dreaming in the womb.

Without the experience of moving through space, a foetus couldn’t know anything about time, either. Bobbing in amneotic sac may have a sort of rhythm. It could count its heartbeats. It’d have little notions of numbers, but could manage by setting at first a random impression provided by its mother to each heartbeat. Eventually those images would repeat.

A cycle forms and the impressions have taken on meaning. The sequence is the first idea of time. It must be jarring, he thinks, when the infant is thrust forth into a world with a different conception of time altogether. He laughs. It’s the first sound he’s made since awakening and it startles him. Perhaps that infant is scarred for life by the disparity between perception of time in the womb and the perception forced on it upon entrance into our world.

In his groggy state, it seems plausible.

It is also disturbing, and brings him back to his thoughts on awakening from nothing. From tranquility. Another question is whether the foetus is even awake at all during its bobbing journey. Periods between sleep and waking are periods of the utmost lucidity. Threads from both worlds combine in this purgatory. Perhaps the transition is much slower in the foetoid state. But before the impressions or even noticing a heartbeat, a dawn of actual consciousness must occur and that is the awakening from nothingness.

He wants to experience that again.

He speculates whether he was an in vitro child. In this case, no impressions would pass between another being and himself until the birthing. His drop into our world was the waking from nothing. No concept of time existed before and therefore no trauma could result.

This state of purity is an argument he’ll have to make later at work with any clientele who’ll listen. An argument for a sort of artificial conception. He smiles and his pillow moulds the shape of his cheek. Foam is pliant much like his clientele. They hold the shape of his words whilst in conversation, and especially whilst in drink, then leave and drift back into their original shape.

His dream had been about Tuzla. He was in the midst of moving back there into the same flat he vacated years before. A few people were with him, straggling behind as he entered the space. One had probably been Shambal. Usually, it’s Shambal. The strands holding him from this world to the other had mostly snapped already, however, and the others are now unknowns.

He’d opened his refrigerator. It was packed full of jugs of orange liquid. He’d supposed, in the dream, as he still supposes now, that they were a type of artificial drink, representing displacement and its falseness. The jugs were the same that milk comes in. Milk in the United States. He hates the United States. He did in the dream, also. He wondered why the tenant between him and him again never bothered to replace anything.

The flat was one room, but a corridor opened immediately after the fridge, range and counter. It proceeded to the left, opening slightly, continuing and becoming another space altogether. He believes that in the dream, he was both surprised and not surprised at the same time. He expected it but found it unnerving. Shambal had disappeared.

The corridor walked him forward from bare plaster and concrete to carpeted hallway. He espied, in the distance, in the tunnel-like dimness, in the tube-like constriction, a red sofa. Light bathed it and the low table in front of it. Bent rivulets of steam crawled up the air from two mugs. He knew they contained green tea. He desperately wanted to drink.

The girl stared at him as he approached. Her eyes seemed closer, but receded into her head the closer he came. Her dark bangs brushed her eyes and her pink lips did not part. Her nostrils flared, taking in the smell of the tea. She was waiting for him to drink. She desperately wanted a drink.

He wondered then about constriction - not exactly of the tube’s constriction, but about constriction in general. It puzzled him the thought of the dream and his near opposite manner of living. In Tuzla, as now, he’d had a self-imposed constricted space. He’d needed lovingly clinging spaces for as long as he remembers.

The flat in Tuzla from a childhood he never actually experienced had only one true exit. One apparent exit. Two ways out onto opposite balconies only led to a plummet. Well, those, too, could be an exit of sorts. The only real exit was the doorway safely into the hallway. This new portal in the dream, and from the flat, illustrates a new direction in life. Afraid as he is, he may pierce the bubble and travel through the tube towards unknown destinations.

During the dream, he approached the girl. He knew she was betrothed. He may even have been the lucky one. He knows, however, that no matter how much importance the universe around him seems to place on human bonding, it overrated. He smiles again. The pillow complies.

The girl played incessantly with the ring on the middle finger of her left hand. She didn’t look down at it. She just twisted and twisted with her right hand. When she spoke, her mouth opened and seemed to become all of her face. He saw into the depths of her hollow gut through her jittering oesophogas.

Nataša, he whispers as his smile fades. He’s falling again into sleep.

Right here in the good ol’ days, I whip up a pot of millet every morning. The morning meal round these parts is called breakfast for all you flaky new-agers out there. I know mealtime routine sickens all of you, but I have to subsist and millet is a damn fine way to start another day of subsistence.

I prepare it in a pot. Yeah, I know it’s old fashioned and stuff, but I cling to my pot like it were my first child. It serves all the uses of a first child, as well. Besides millet, I can make soup in him, store dried fruits, boil tar for the roof, etc. In a way, actually, a pot is better than a first child. The latter, you have to skin, gut and bone before any good use can come of it. I suppose afterwards, though, all the bits and pieces can be stuck together this way and that to create a great many tools.

Anyhow, I prepare my millet in a pot. I boil about 118 millilitres of water and 118 millilitres of llama milk with a dash of nutmeg and a palmful of cinnamon. When that lactose gets good and frothy, I add about 0.000118 cubic metres of millet. The heat goes down to as low as possible and I put hardened skin from my first child over the top to trap steam.

(llama)

Around 1392 seconds later, it’s ready for eating.

My mother calls any grain I eat in the morning sorghum. I’ve personally never tried sorghum, knowingly, but am sure it is, with proper preparation method, as tasty as millet or quinoa. She grew up on a farm near Seminole. Very near Seminole, in fact. I’ll attempt to find the approximate place on the map. As the sordid funk surrounding Christián always says - Hang on a sec.

(Christián)

I pilfered that image from Google Maps, baby.

The point is that she grew up on a farm and only knew sorghum as a grain for livestock. She abstracts this idea out to any other grain unknown to her. Oats, though also fed to livestock in this glorious country, are consumed regularly by humans, as well, so they are exempt. Millet, quinoa, bulghar and surely others are firmly in the category of sorghum. Of course, these other grains are widely eaten by humans in countries on the outer rim of the cosmos. IE, not part of Texas.

They are all sorghum to my mother.

Shambal sits in his room wondering idly about his sorghum crop. He tends to worry like an old woman about temperatures, rainfall, sowing times and whatnot when he surely shouldn’t. One can attribute such paranoias to excessive boredom.

There is a surfiet of boredom on his (he laughingly calls it his) moon.

His mind drifts back to a note that daft neighbourly cunt sent him recently. They’d been trading notes for ages now. The small slips of poignant words are better thought through than hours of idle conversation. Shambal much prefers this method of communication. He can muse and ponder as he paces his room, sows his sorghum, or contemplates an octatonic progression he’s wanted to play on his ukulele for ages.

He always forgets fingerings on the ukulele. The daft neighbourly cunt blames it on dementia. Shambal laughs it off as drool splatters uncontrollably over his steaming plate of sorghum.

There you go, my compatriot! boasts the daft neighbourly cunt knowledgeably.

My saliva is freeflowing! It is a faucet! It is an indication of my love for my precious sorghum! he retorts.

Shambal’s solution to his fingering dilemma is to retune the instrument to a differing set of pitches before each practice or discovery session. He briefly contemplates the ukulele as it leans limply in the corner. His thoughts drift quickly back to the daft neighbourly cunt’s note, however.

Here’s what it says:

There was a fork in your proverbial road, my friend, and you chose the way more recently paved and travelled since you were hoping to meet more chicks.

The daft neighbourly cunt certainly got this right. He followed convention instead of turning fate on its cranium and forcing it to follow him. Convention left off on his expansive dirt patch on a moon far from any chicks. No no no…. chicks had been outlawed in his quadrant. His daft neighbourly cunt’s quadrant, also, which happens to be the same quadrant, actually.

No chicks means no shagging. Shambal misses shagging more than most anything from his previous lives. Fate made him a sorghum farmer, instead. Sorghum is said to provide eternal life. Eternal life is an escape from responsibility and an escape from haste. Sorghum is a good compliment to this lifestyle. It’s easy to sow, grow and harvest.

His (he should say their, but he is also a cunt) moon is excessively arid. The temperatures vacillate between 24 and 36 degrees during all seasons. He corrects his thought and blames it on previous lives. Only one season truly exists here.

He sometimes apprasingly and other times lovingly stares at his planter. It is also lazily leaning in the corner (though in a different corner than the ukulele). It’s always set to 4.213 cm. Its interface is easily programmed to plant parallel rows of seed. The sandy soil is first wetted to a depth of approximately eight centimetres. Therefore, the contraption makes two sweeps through the whole of the field.

Shambal is delighted watching the process. He even forgets about shagging for most of the time, though once he wildly masturbated as the planter (who we’ll call José from here on out) sped along row afer row, back and forth, fluidly. He didn’t actually realize he was masturbating until his own fluid splattered up over his chest and chin.

Time is measured by growing season. After José’s poignant journey, he counts 143 days before harvest. A routine set in quickly after his arrival and after the first few growing seasons. 94 additional days always go by for Shambal. He calls the period post-spawn. He likens it to a calm after a child is born (a remnant of memory from old lives) and before it is made into pot coverings, flutes, fibrous baskets and various scaffoldings. The time is pleasant, tranquil and mostly spent on music.

He shakes off these thoughts and rises. Deciding against any form of creativity, he gives the ukulele a swift kick. Shards of bark and wax scatter over the floor. A few splatter over his table. Oddly, they form a near perfect oval. He thinks to himself at this strange phenomenon:

I’ll measure the shape and use it for the next instrument’s construction.

He removes his red pen, which is by far his favourite, from his skin pouch and flips a leaf of parchment in front of him. He scribbles his return note to his daft neighbourly cunt.

It says this:

For sale by owner - another ecosystem teeming with life awaits its apocolypse and some dim ape just has to come up with the cash.

Smiling, he crosses through the last word. He time and again falls victim to residue from former lives. The word’s replacement is obvious.

The note now reads:

For sale by owner - another ecosystem teeming with life awaits its apocolypse and some dim ape just has to come up with the cash sorghum.

A contrast between my last entry’s spiel about my parents’ incessant scheduling is their pseudo-spontaneity. I use that word very loosely is this context. They did schedule the call to my Uncle for today, as it is his birthday, but did not set a specific time. I’ll call this spontaneity within constraints. When they just finished their morning duties (ie, routines), nothing was left. Therefore, the time to call my Uncle had come. This is spontaneity within constraints.

I was summoned. I refused. Luckily, they are not as petulent as they were in my formative years, and my mother took it with a grain of sorghum. I’ll call my Uncle later and chat with him for a while. Birthday or no birthday, he was a big element in my young life, surely shaping me.

Birthdays.

As long as my parents live, I’ll not be able to forget birthdays. Their whole life revolves around scheduling. And yeah, it’s more than just my mother’s cukrovka.

Someone fucked up at some point in human history and invented scheduling. Oh, yes, it was a gradual process. Meetings at sunup. Dinners at sundown. That sort of thing. Somehow it became birthdays, SCRUM and bi-annual dentist trips. I’d enjoy not knowing when it was. I do my best in times of spiralling downwards, actually, though most likely I have other intentions. I smash my clock. I draw the draperies. I exist in a cave where the so-called fourth dimension is static.

I came across this in the book Blink:

One of the most imporant of the rules that make improv possible, for example, is the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story (or humor) is to have characters accept everything that happens to them.

This nails the crux of why Christián and my spontaneous conversations are successful. I use the word success here in a specific context. That is, the conversations, duologues, make us immensely happy. Or content? Well, we laugh heartily at our own absurdities, in any case.

(Christián)

I’ve had this sort of repartee with other people and it is always a highlight of the era. I recall phone calls from Austin to Acy in, er, Euless and talking about the amount of evil in the atmosphere (light, that is). These conversations were respite. The daily grind was always sandpaper to my soul.

There’s another word: daily. Everything revolves around scheduling.

Improv is a way out of time for a time. (Heh.) There is no compositional set. The rules are implicit. No lead sheet sits in front of Christián or me when we begin our brilliant babbling. Reaction is the only key, and yes, as Señor Gladwell states, our ability to accept.

Another tangential concept: Positivity allows continuation. Negativity promotes blockage. This simple lesson need be taught early on.

Placing improv in the context of composition is stranger to me. The pieces I am creating now in the context of Flavigula are semi-composed. I look at the composed portions as templates. They are the implicit rules. The remainder wanders around within their bounds.

In a sense, it is spontaneity within constraints.

I’m using the term improv loosely, as well. I’m a loose guy. I do have a problem with the following refinement, however. I’m never sure whether to do it at all. Should each creation stand as it is when birthed? I think of the melody from yesterday. Let’s take a look at the finished product. (I use the term finished loosely here).

The revision sits before you. Originally, the last four bits ended differently. I am only happy with one change. The final resolved too neatly and the tritone now fixes that. Of course, the piece may well spiral into a vortex of dissonance immediately afterwards, anyhow.

Deliberate composition creates an environment difficult for amorphous structure. I use the term structure loosely here. I have to get used to these absolute words as being softer. Structure is an axis between chaos and rigidity, methinks. As one travels from the former to the latter, the template hardens. The area for exploration becomes more fixed.

I only want to have vague ideas of where the current piece may go. I’m happy with last night’s realization that the current melody comes and proceeds too quickly. I’m contradicting myself claiming I am plotting a revision! Contradiction is important in improv, baby. Deal with it.

The slow, ambient beginning is desperate in its calmness. I cannot force the melody, which is too quick for my taste to enter immediately. The next step is a transitional melody. Christián will have fun singing this hovno. Well, if he actually chooses to do it in the end.

Finé.

I deny ritual outright. I see positive and negative consequences. Firstly, most ritual denies spontaneity. The compulsion even to have that morning cup of coffee before anything else after dragging oneself out of a comfy bed deletes anything residual from dreams. They fade quickly.

I need again create a dream diary. In the past, it has spawned stories and poems - even sometimes music. I’ve arranged lines of code in unfamiliar fashions because of dream piques.

I’ve returned to a ritual, as I always do when I am with my parents in Seminole. Today is time to delete it. I mustn’t set specific schedules. If I feel like writing when I awaken, I can deny myself that first cup of coffee for even hours as I work on November. Sometimes musical flourishes arrive in dreams. They can be captured upon awakening with Lilypond easily.

(Lilypond)

I do walk in the arid park every day. These walks are never at a specific time, however, and are geared towards Spanish vocabulary. This semi-routine was ridden with more creativity in past lives here. I’d pause at random benches (there are fourteen, methinks) and scribble small epithets about a certain position of the atmosphere. I, even now, use those as jumping off points for weirdness.

I am most concerned when a ritual becomes a habit. Habit implies to me something done in a similar manner repeatedly but without much thought. Rituals, though repetative, can be carefully planned each time, though a template is always the starting point. I’ve written elsewhere that habits frighten me. The more ingrained they become, the more one is a slave to unconscious processes.

Beyond ritual and habit comes stagnation. When I was a child, I was fascinated by small programs which created virtual robots on the screen of my Tandy Radio Shack Hovnisimo Shittypie that learned. Initally, the robot was placed in the center of the play area - a bounded arena containing various obstacles. It set off in a random direction. Each time it collided with an obstacle, it’d remember its velocity and angle of impact. Then, it bounced off at a random slant. Again and again it gathered data until it found the easiest circuit within the arena. The path of least resistance! It no loger had to gather data because it’d be ensconsed in a routine. A ritual. A habit.

My parents are like those virtual robots. They have, over years and years living in my ex-grandmother’s house in Seminole, found their path of least resistance. Being a bit more complex than a virtual robot, however, their habits deviate occasionally, but are mostly set in ahem (red ((sand))) stone. Even though their jobs are in the dim past, weekends are reserved for cleaning the house. This example strikes me as bizarre - scary.

Mealtimes are also set. I believe they would be even if my mother did not suffer from cukrovka.

Modifying the details of rituals may give them more life, more intellectual stimulation. I’ve noted before that even tiny variation in lifestyle invigorates me. John once told me that I gravitate towards change. That was in 1995. Yeah, I still do. Ritual is fatty between dendrite and axon. Habit is akin to death (muscle memory not included). Shave a different species every morning. Don’t just stick with goats.

Pink Kaksteist

A hamster consumes her master (her higher power) and lies back, picking her teeth, contemplating her evolution into a carnivore.

One think I forgot to mention about Shambal’s squalid abode is the smallish recess in the wall to the right of one of two portals. It is here that he performs his experiments. These strange dealings are confined solely to rodents. Well, so far, he always thinks.

The hamster’s name is Pleurisy and she recently returned from her morning hunt. Small carnivores prefer hunting in the morning, you see. Shambal always knew this and further encourages the practise. He was a small carnivore during his stint on Neo’odiaba and rose every morning before what his compatriots called the split of nightlessness.

Neo’odiaba was lush at the time. The forest streamed with brooks, leafdrifts, and rivers of herbivorous hominids. Shambal always tried to take a portion of a hominid back with him.

A kill was never absolutely necessary. Wounding a hominid only took a bite to the back of the ankle. Shambal loved the feeling in his teeth as they sunk into calloused flesh. The popping as the scabby covering broke and juice flowed over his tongue and wetted his palate justified any amount of trek uphill, downhill, across empty fields patrolled by owls, or solitary waiting for the hordes to flow past.

When a hominid collapsed, Shambal always went for the upper thigh and groin. He tore flesh and stuffed it unerringly into his pack. One in three, he’d finish off simply because he couldn’t stand its pitiful sagging expression. Exasperation sucks.

Pleurisy left her pack in front of the recess and now naps, curled into a shape Shambal was surprised hamsters could achieve. He lifts the pack and grey meat slops onto the floor. Moving it to the table, he sits still with his nose centimetres above it for upwards of ten minutes. Then he begins licking the juices.

Of course, Shambal, too, is a hominid. He devolved from rodent form soon after arriving here. I’d like to say that he still has a portion of that rodent spirit in his blood, or in his soul, or in his satchel. Maybe I am exasperated and should be put away. No, even old Shambal seems to have succumbed to the red drift. As knowledge of the outside recedes from our moon, our beings become more and more diffuse.

It’s as if the wavelengths of our particles themselves have stretched.

One day, he’ll not be loitering in his park on that bench - or even on the opposite one. No, he’ll be consumed.

And I’ll be next.

By then, however, my greatest achievement, a monument to the order of Rodentia, will be complete. Made of grease, semen, glass, sod and fruit pits, it will be the last idle beast standing on our moon. We, the hominid lethargics, will be a fading memory.

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.

As most humans have, I also have boxes full of hovno in various places. Well, I’d suspect that most humans don’t have their boxes of hovno in various places, but rather in one place. As we are taught to accumulate from a very young age, most humans I know are various degrees of packrat. I’ve tried to shed the tendency, but cannot fully.

(packrat)

I have boxes of hovno in Seminole, Praha and München. Those in München are most likely forever lost, however. Qué lastima. Two handwritten journals were in that stash. The contents of the boxes here in Seminole were distributed between dilapidated containers originally used to mail them from various places. Ok - from just two places: London and Tallinn. I went through the hovno, scouring my hands thoroughly afterwards, of course, a few days ago. I found a few nostalgic items. Most I just repacked. The rest I left in plain view so I wouldn’t forget to allow their inclusion here.

In 2010, I lived in London. I rented a room from a large house wherein lived seven or so other humans. I suspect other animals lived there, as well, including spiders, wasps, and squirrels. In fact, a particular squirrel used to visit me through my open bedroom (I laughingly say bedroom where actually the whole room encompassed everything - bedroom / living space / office / kitchen / vomitorium). I lived here. That cretin Christián even visited me once. Miracles do happen (said the gleeful executioner).

(here)
(Christián)

One evening, most likely in early August, Wayne and I sat in my room after fetching a horde of pivo from probably Sainsbury, just down the road. By down I actually mean down the hill since Telegraph Hill Park (the park nearest the point on the map indicated) is at the top of a hill (hence the name). Most every day, I had to walk down and back up that God-Rotted thing. Were I the deity that some lowly humans make me out to be, I’d have sand-blasted the whole of it.

Anyhow, most likely in early August, Wayne and I sat in my room after fetching a horde of pivo from probably Sainsbury. Sainsbury was (and most likely still is) the local supermarket. I shopped there often. I purchased litres and litres of alcohol there. I gave up rational comforts to do so. I splurged.

During my stint in London, I also shopped at two smaller potraviny up towards the park a bit and to the left. They were run by Indian folk who were always bemused at my purchases that usually consisted of microwave heatable Indian lunches, various greasy snacks, and a bottle of vodka.

Anyhow, most likely in early August, Wayne and I sat in a room after fetching a horde of pivo from probably Sainsbury. Wayne was also an avid pot smoker. I wouldn’t call myself an avid pot smoker, but I have been known to indulge.

As on many occasions, in my state of consciousness, I elected to write haikus and also insist that my companion join me in the process. I had recently returned from Cornwall with a sheaf of postcards. I intended these postcards for others. The haikus were to be messages sent thousands of kilometres to unsuspecting victims to riddle their minds with a confustion concerning the state of existence, a frustration regarding the fabric of their lives, and a judicious joy of the absurd. Unfortunately, they remained unmailed.

I am not sure when I stopped my absurd practise of sending bizarre postcards to friends and acquaintences. I suspect early to mid 2000s. I remember John Feldmann telling me about his grandmother’s reactions to oddities I sent him from various locales. He used to live atop his grandmother’s flat in Queens. That place knew many throbbing weirdnesses involving myself, John, Christopher, Loyal, Nataša and others. I’m quite sure many postcards could have been regarded as messages from a mentally dysfunctional miscreant. In truth, they probably were.

Anyhow, most likely in early August, Wayne and I were drinking pivo and smoking spliffs in my room in the house called Cranbrook near Telegraph Hill Park in New Cross Gate, London.

I miss that guy.

The remnants of my time in London are many incomplete recordings. The Fen was one. I’ll try to translate the remainder into coherent wholes during the next weeks. Perhaps I can even finish the sequence that can be the first Flavigula album.

I still think of music in chunks known as albums.

As in most places I have lived alone, my time alone was the most poignant. I recall episodes with Wayne and with that cretin Christián at the Cranbrook house, but mostly I was alone. I wrote, I drew, I composed, I read, and I drank there. I even made sandwiches on occasion. Pretty good sandwiches, I might add.

Alone time is creative time. When I press inwards, it becomes harder and harder to probe when my mental tentacles close in on the centre. Therefore, I’ll never completely know the whole of my being. Well, perhaps whole is a bad term there. I’ll never know the fundamental of my being. That dark singularity is unreachable. My tentacles never pass the event horizon. Instead of being sucked in or absorbed, they are repelled. My core is repellent! Imagine that.

Imagine that.

Alone time is creative time. I try to press inwards and I only reach a certain point. From there I can dig no deeper. So I dredge from that point and lift up what some call inspiration or substance from naught. It probably spurts up erratically from the fundamental and refuses to be dragged back to oblivion. Instead, I use those molten chunks to form a melody, a fragment of prose, or a drinking binge. It’s a dice roll to choose which.

• 1 or 6: melody
• 2 or 5: fragment of prose
• 3 or 4: drinking binge

Equal odds.

I’ve always enjoyed the haiku form because it forces one to crush a complex idea into a formal shape. Each word must contain a broad scope of feeling. Or, simplicity can result in vague feelings of natural phenomena. Or, you can just write stoner hovno.

Regardless … I miss that guy.