The Dorian Spanky Mode is the normal Dorian with an added flat 6th. Therefore:

d e f g a bes b c

It is, obviously an eight note scale. Now, it is your task to write a melody using it. Ready? GO.

I am affected by a grave state of lethargy today. In this state, I wander aimlessly second by second towards my grave. I feel every missed moment is a tragedy, yet I cannot lift a hand to create.

Well, besides this drivel.

My mind stirred a few minutes ago whilst listening to The Only Unforgivable Thing by Marillion and urged me to awaken from my malaise, fire up Ardour and dredge from my right brain at least a sound collage. Instead, for whatever reason, the result is this collage of words, instead. I listened to Incoherence by Peter Hammill in the truck on the way back to Seminole from Andrews and my dinner with Sandy and it struck me (well, mostly the liner notes, to be truthful) as a template for the way I live and create.

I stumble through incoherence and organize bits of it into what I feel is meaningful. By this I mean the soup of my left brain organizes the chaos into a less daunting chaos.

I’m skipping around.

The Only Unforgivable Thing may just be the ability to develop something from only a thought or an intuition and the audacity to just let it sit, then fade to eventual oblivion.

I attempt to keep my ideas and dream of their fruition. It is the rationale for a journal, even a PocketMod. I jot. The jots usually do not become jitters, however. They sit and rot.

Does the river widen so markedly when approaching the delta? The spread courses drearily as opposed to rapid currents of youth. Focus! Focus!! Focus is lost with lethargy and age. It is more and more difficult to funnel all of the stray thoughts into coherence. Out of incoherence.

Do I second guess myself too often?

I used to not.

But, then again, much of my output when I was in my funnelling and focused years was hovno.

I have second guessed myself once again. I shall read.

I’m in bed.

Yes, in bed in Seminole, Texas, at my parents’ place. Austin is no more. It is the ex-Austin. I fled it Sunday – two days prior to now. And now I am in bed.

The snaky feeling which tingles in the backs of the thighs is less tangible during my middle-aged languor. It used to excite to the extent that I had to defecate four times daily. The bowels were very stimulated by that feeling. Now, however, it is fleeting. I wish it were again as strong as it used to be.

I called it Sweet Entropy, and she was my beacon when time drug me from one place to another. Yeah, she lit my way. I suppose she has grown old and haggard alongside me. Well, alongside in a metaphorical sense. Were she a real being, she’d be eternally youthful aesthetically, perhaps like the girl from a dream two nights ago: Dark brown hair framing a face, wispy in the back and on the sides, blowing about and ill-arranged. Walnut eyes which dart and dance in time with a simper playing on her lips. But inside - decrepit.

I leave for Boston on the 19th. I fly from the squalid aeroport which sits flat and repellent between Odessa and Midland. Justin should pick me up. It has been a year and approximately four months since I’ve seen him. A whorlwind has ravaged his life since and delivered him into a new existence. We’ll see how we get on this time. May I find time to write of it.

I have just come across this in the book I am currently reading:

This, I have come to think, is a very American reaction, rewarding eccentric effort with scorn and violence.

The book is one that Christopher got me for Xmas, titled Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux.

I agree with him that it is a typical American reaction. But I’ll go even further. It is the reaction of any peasant to unknown or unintelligible behaviour. I have been greeted, as has many a human I have known, by such upon numerous occasions. I surely have mellowed from my outwardly eccentric ways over the years (and I find this unfortunate, to tell you the truth), but they still broil within at similar temperatures as they did in my youth.

In a village in the Czech Republic, I go swaggering in wearing outlandish clothing, unwashed, with a capacious pack on my back, and I’ll get odd stares, hear peasants muttering behind my back, be passively scorned. Being a peasant is an insular state of being, no matter the outward appearance. In Theroux’s book, the man who arrived after a 2600 mile journey in a rowboat is scored by drunks and ruffians. America being what it is, a parallel in most of Europe would just be passive-agressive scurrility.

The group I fell into in Prague was insular. It was evidenced by the long table they sat at in Hadry. Other such groups existed and interaction between them was limited to the occasional foozball tournament. I fell in and I fell out eventually because I did not conform to their particular set of eccentricities. My own were, as Christian says, out.

Being out is relative to the insular group which drifts in and out of your social patterns the most.

I dare not spill the Sweet Leaf tea onto the blankets where I shall later sleep. I create enough wet spots as it is with my voluminous drooling.

Tonight is the night that I shall attempt to record all of my parts of the piece I have mentioned several times in this blog: Reduction. Instead of the synthesized bassoon, an acoustic guitar shall play the eternal melody first sketched in Intersection, which begins the still unnamed album*****.

The melody is this:

c d bes c g a bes g f

It is playing in a four three 7/4 manner with varying notes taking a whole 7/4 bar.

As long as I have the music in front of me, I have no problem creating it with my new acoustic guitar (appropriately named Aonyx Cinerea). Following that is the strumming of the original chords Tony gave me over two years prior which helped spawn this project (album).

The chords are:

Csus9 Cmaj7 Fmaj Fmaj7

Csus9 Gm Am Am7

Dm Dm7 Besmaj7 C

Wish me luck, oh happy-go-lucky angel, you.

The invented reminiscence of “the way that guy or gal used to be in the good ol’ days” has a cozy quaintness and seems harmless enough, but the element of self-deception in it can lead one badly astray.

I am reminded of Lee. Yes, Lee, the guy who no longer exists and the fact that he no longer exists is most likely a fortunate thing for all who knew him and would have otherwise known him. I say this not out of bitterness, but from the result of much contemplation of the topic. His self-destructive behaviour was only just beginning to leak out onto those around him when he snuffed it. The situation would have only become worse.

But that is not really the point.

What is the point?

Time seemed to stop for Lee when he was away from us. By us, I mean Tony, Jayson, Chris and I (among others). From the very moment he disappeared in late fall 1991 until he returned in late summer 1993, in his mind nothing had happened in College Station, Texas. The fact that we had written new music confused him. The fact that the extremes of our personality had obtained new edges while old needles were blunted flummoxed him. He felt he did not belong and quickly grew impatient, introverted and paranoid. I believe he was only there just short of two months. Maybe even less.

Pertaining to the quote which started this entry, Lee envisioned life in College Station and our personalities as static. The day he left, we froze. The day he returned, we thawed. The truth was not solid. It was liquid.

As I have said, I realize skeletons are all I have of my most cherished memories. When I write, I do try to capture portions of the moment, but it seems when I describe situations, I mostly do it from a future perspective. I am affected more by poignant past situations at certain points after they are long finished. I contemplate. I muse. I piece together a puzzle. The unfinished portions are fleshed out by my current state of mind.

Having neglected this apparatus for a while, I shall try to write at length.

Most of last week was alloted to recording, and Tony and I performed relatively well in this respect. Beginning with a lost improv, Monday hooked us up by the armpits after drowning us in equipment failure. In specific, Tony’s N-Track machine died. The details of its repair and eventual failure again (resulting in the loss of our improv) is not important.

The improv began with an oscillator droning along the lines of Vegkoref but with a steady rhythm. A mandolin joined on the second pass. Tone throbbed on bass. Incidental percussion littered the piece. An Emerson-like keys part dueted with bass and mandolin. I already miss it. Loss leaves only vestiges of memory which quickly decay into a skeleton of what actually was. What actually was no longer exists. It is only the bare bones now.

The other pieces recorded are perpetually alive for posterity.

Now for the PocketMod.

I’ll go backwards. Whilst walking by the main building at the University of Texas below the sadly famous tower, I read these words on a plaque:

CORE GOAL

Transforming lives for the benefit of society.

I thought to myself, wouldn’t the following be better?

Transforming society for the benefit of lives.

The reason I think so is simple. Creating a structure and then attempting to force people to live in it and conform to it leaves a large swath of humanity out in the cold. A preferable alternative is to have a malleable infrastructure which bends to the quirks of its members. I believe that Acy, at least, would agree that the education system in the US of A suffers from the words on that plaque at UT. It aims to file off all of the rough edges of each individual until each fits snugly into place.

Malleability. Think of it.

In the cafe, the voices of people sound murky. They are commingling with the music murmuring from hidden speakers. It all combines to be a muddy slush flowing into my ears. I removed my headphones and it washed sluggishly over me. My mind moves more and more slowly.

I shall leave.

I’m at Diner 24. That, in itself, is not surprising, since I was hungry after seraching for the Steve Reich boxed set called Phases. Searching for good music makes my tummy rumble and always has. I used to sift through the cd stores in New York City (Greenwich Village) for hours. I was faint from the effort. Once, Natascha had to pretty much carry me to the diner across the street and feed me forkfull by forkfull until I had regained my strength.

Yes, those were the days.

I just ordered Phases. I look forward to perusing the contents as well and indulging in the fantastic music for hours. The day it arrives will be consumed by the overlapping melodies.

I wonder why Justin does not like Steve Reich. He pointedly told me once that I should explore Philip Glass until my ventricles explode with delight, but to stay away from Reich for fear of clotting.

I wonder how cobbler came to mean a sort of pastry filled with cooked berries or other fruits? A cobbler is someone who fixes footwear. The idea of the semantic drift is truly staggering.

• Repairing a shoe
• Filling the shoe with a foot after reparation
• Allowing the shoe to become a crumbly pastry
• Detaching the foot from the remainder of the body
• Allowing the meat of the foot to become vegetarian
• Making sure the vegetarian items within the ex-shoe is now a fruit
• Popping the whole thing into the oven
• Feeding the result to southern geezers in casinos or upscale hotel buffets

Yeah.

The moment of Viking showing himself to me. It was so real that I know my subconsciousness misses him. I wish I could recall the remainder of the dream. Besides the multitudes of people in the past, and how we were all at Tony’s before we went to the… the celebration. But Tony didn’t come. I was sitting and Scott Hazle was there (actually, he was there from the beginning), and reminding me of lucidity. Damn.