I sit at a table in the aeroport in Houston, awaiting my flight to Orlando. I am filled with an inchoate rage as I observe the remainder of humanity, going about their movement from place to place as if there is no overhanging emptiness waiting to engulf them.

They pursue minutiae in subconscious hopes that it will give meaning to moments they just place aside never to return to. Some of them have succumbed to biological imperative and descended into tribal lust for the survival of a small bubble they label ‘family’.

I am apart. Though i always have been apart. Shouldn’t I be used to it? Nope. One can never become used to it. I see them sat like puddles and others flow like streams around them, all in their own atmospheres, unfortunate and rotting.

Putrefying.

The base absurdity of being alive hits me with the force of a cellophane sheet. I tear it aside. I watch, furtively, the black guy sitting at the table in front of me who dons a pink cap and a furry, tan sweater. Just before, he placed his headphones, a brilliant blue, upon his head, then adjusted the hood of his tan sweater accordingly.

Are people so concerned with their appearance to the outside folk? To the other bubbles? To the other tribes? What does it accomplish?

I want to kill them all.

I dug this up from a file I had been making on my telephone whilst trudging randomly around Nashville in 2013 - sometimes even at the Zoo and sitting below towering giraffes and / or surrounded by bustling wallabies. Oh! The good ol’ days! Cough. Sputter.

“ALL AROUND YOU PEOPLE ARE JUDGING YOU SILENTLY,” warned a 1922 ad for Woodbury’s soap.

Though not related directly to this quote, what comes to mind is tangential. Tangential ideas toot my muffin. They enhance the darkness that extends from the membrane surrounding this house into the vast cosmos, stopping just short of the infinity peering back and sizing up said membrane, pining for its dissolution.

I get intermittent lectures from my mother about tipping. I’m not against tipping itself. I’ve been known to throw money around practically at random at times. However, I certainly have problems with tipping culture in the good ol’ USA. And how does tipping culture in the good ol’ USA relate to Woodbury’s Soap?

Tipping Culture is an extension of the idea that one must constantly attempt to sell oneself. Within tipping culture and within the ethos of the good ol’ USA in general is the bitter need to push every human to be a sales-being. It’s just NOT good enough for the good ol’ USA to do a job correctly or competently or even superlatively. The presentation of oneself is a process wholly separate from the work being accomplished. And, in many cases, and specifically in the case of formal food service, for example, the presentation of self is more important to the, ahem, consumer than work that went into creation of the thing being consumed.

Obviously, the concept creates a bias towards humans who are more aesthetically appealing, both physically and in “approach” - meaning mannerisms, gesticulations and speech patterns. Guides have even existed in the past and possibly still do exist that “teach” one to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible. That is, guides have existed in the past and possibly still do exist that encourage homogeneity.

Anyone who has read much of Martenblog will know that this is a repellent thought to me.

“CRITICAL EYES ARE SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOW,” advised the Williams Shaving Cream company.

I guess back in 2013, sitting in the shadow of towering beasts, by scribing these quotes into my mobile phone with its provided stylus, I was attempting to point out the same idea over and over.

Well, as Brian Eno once said as he was shitfaced with his friend Peter Schmidt, Repetition is a Form of Change.

Direct aesthetic appeal is overemphasized in occidental culture. I don’t have any problem with aesthetics as a concept, of course, but I do have a problem with anyone who says that there is a overreaching aesthetic to ANYTHING and especially with the idea that adhering to one cultural norm is “best” or (even worse) “right”. It reeks of homogeneity and fundamentalism.

One could kick me in the teeth and comment that art itself, and especially visual art, is pure aesthetic. It may be that it is the creation of a specific aesthetic or elaboration of a more general aesthetic. But that aesthetic is presented for appreciation, which I can certainly do. It is not claimed to be the end-all of aesthetics. It is not forced upon humankind. One is not told that if one does not adhere to said aesthetic in whole or in part, one is a lesser being.

The 2013 pennings (or stylusings) go on to say -

I Suspect that a certain person I shall not mention and his ilk are so subliminally influenced by such a so called philosophy and that it is so ingrained that they, like most Americans, don’t think any other Way of being has any purpose at all.

I was more concerned with the relation to fundamentalism of such overreaching “aesthetics”, possibly, back then. I was actually LIVING in the states at that point of my life. I had recently returned from Estonia and its generally different view on the way one presents oneself. That is, the humans there don’t find it so important to constantly sell themselves. They are content to do the work assigned to them or that pleases them and present the fecundities of this labour. The marketing sheen exists, for sure, but it is muted. It is not in the forefront of absolutely everything.

It is not yet repellent.

“EVER TRIED SELLING YOURSELF TO YOU? A FAVORABLE FIRST IMPRESSION IS THE GREATEST SINGLE FACTOR IN BUSINESS OR SOCIAL SUCCESS.” Here is stated the problem with job interviews and employers in general. Instead of proving Oneself competent, an interviewee must present him / herself confident. Thus the proliferation of incompetent employees in the workforce.

Here is another compelling tangent scribed in that antiquated and long lost mobile phone. I can say that in the dominant field I have pursued in the past, this concept is also muted. If one can prove they can competently solve programming problems, one is “admitted”. The need to bathe one’s hairy living corpse first in Williams Shaving Cream is, therefore, somewhat diminished.

I’m not necessarily arguing against bathing one’s hairy living corpse in Williams Shaving Cream. Why not? What has one got to lose? Practise up a bit on your Pascal, though, as well.

I woke up as usual at five in the early morning. Though I could not see it, I sensed the black of night expanding away from the house and into the infinity of desert sky. I had had a dream featuring Lucía. She’s someone I think of from time to time, though not as frequently as one might expect given the part she played in my decade of unrest (la decada de desasosiego / saqen lip tetyk liz li omikon hupum xutz myx liz). I had to pause there to make that translation into Lakife, which I am not sure is the proper translation, but as all my creative efforts are evolutionary ones, fuck um. But - Lucía.

I woke up from a dream featuring Lucía. We were at an inchoate concert, a concert never to be, at least in my dream, as I never got to its incipient point on the timeline. Peter Hammill was playing, and many of the audience members were made up to look like him. As Peter’s stage features are not necessarily as standoutish as, say, those of the members of KISS (for example), it was obvious to me that many of the audients (to borrow a word from Robert Fripp) had had cosmetic surgery. Good for them. The human form is malleable. I’m all for any and all modifications.

Lucía sat a step below me. We were on risers of a sort. Her body was half turned and her head tilted up at me. It was evident that our relationship, too, was inchoate. She was certainly always a timid person and though I no longer know her, in the dream she maintained the demeanour of the adolescence from which she decorated my decade (or perhaps a slight bit more than a decade) of unrest.

We were conversing about art and music and her future as a transformer of spaces. She was always thus and that she certainly is to this day given her current position in the world. Her head was always tilted and she was always a step below, turned slightly so she could easily look up at me. The sensation was slightly disquieting. Other humans intermittently intruded from the surrounding space, making our conversation crooked. One of them I violently rejected from our personal space. Or perhaps Lucía violently rejected him from our personal space. That part is not clear.

As is the case in dreams as it is in so-called real life, I had to get up and search for a piss-pot. From this point, the dream devolved into a nightmarish trek from gallery to gallery, beneath arcades and through different stadiums designed in curious ways to thwart anyone wishing to pass through them without taking notice. It occurs to me now that Lucía designed them all. From the stark to the ornate, monochromatic to psychedelic, I passed through tens, hundreds, millions. Poor me. I was simply in search of a piss-pot.

At last, I came upon the male human that either I or Lucía had violently rejected from our personal space. He seemed to only half remember the incident and promised to lead me to my treasured piss-pot, and then back to the stadium or gallery or theatre where Lucía and Peter awaited. I followed him, though his pace incrementally outpaced my own. Moment by moment, he became less defined, as did the endless whorling vistas on every side, to my back and forward.

I awoke.

Sometime in the early fall of 2021, I wrote, sitting on a bench in Pagan Park:

The waft of mental filth roams with me through the park. It is a space without its personal memory. It is merely a collector. Like most spaces, it prompts the memories of those who wander within its confines. The babe without a single drop of remembrance would swim in the nostalgia of all that came before.

I soaked up myriad musings stretching back to the dawn of the universe as I sat on that bench. I was the babe without a single drop of remembrance. I absorbed and penned a novel about the collective consciousness of every being that ever crossed the perimeter of the park. I experienced once again that one must remind oneself to clear the mind completely when traversing a space one has traversed before. If not, the danger of letting one’s own past interfere in the current moment looms.

What I was trying to say, surely, in a non-elliptical tangle, was that it’d be groovy were the park an accumulator of memories from all that traversed it. A container of sorts. Given that, I’ll write about something tangential to it.

Nostalgia is the danger. I’m as susceptible to it as most, though I’d like to think that I see it for what it is and attempt to set it aside. It may cocoon me for a time, but the cocoon is fluid and flows around and eventually away.

Nostalgia is the danger. Making decisions based on nostalgia cuts life short. One intentionally enters into a loop or even a devolution. I hear talk time and again of the way things once were and the good old days. Do those who speak truly want to regress to a time before without the knowledge they have gained in the meantime? I would hope not. But the commoner maps out life in well-defined blacks and stark whites. The latter are the times to regress to. The former are what said human has learned in the meantime, to be tossed aside, surely.

Nostalgia is the danger. And surely a conduit to loss.

I long to return to places I’ve been before because of past contentment, or what I perceive from this point of view in time as past contentment, though the reality may have been something else altogether. I’m not immune to viewing the past through barber-pole phaser coloured glasses. But time and again the reality of those returns is not the happy-land I’d imagined.

The pull of nostalgia is intense, and within resisting it is where the reward lies. It’s time-worn to claim that living in the past is detrimental, for sure, and I posit that the darker spaces I mentioned a few paragraphs prior shape our current state much more than the complacent epochs of contentment. In the end, it’s no surprise that I believe that moving forward is always the best option.

So, Renata has handed me the lyrics to Olšanské Hřbitovy. They are the following:

Sluneční žár
zalévá hrob
svým nektarem
žlučovitým
smrt se nezdá
smrt je tu všude

The sun’s heat waters the grave. It is its nectar.

The desiccating corpse below the ground is slowly emptied of water. It no longer needs its water or water from elsewhere. It’s DONE, vole! Watering the grave with the sun’s rays is a method of display, though also of outer decay, as the tomb itself will erode with time. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but when I kick it, just dump me in the river. Which river? Well, the closest will do.

The grave’s nectar is sunlight in that it attracts insects, or, rather, humans, who come to visit, to mourn, to weep or to scheme someone else’s demise. Nectar by proxy.

In the way that bile flows through a living corpse’s system, death flows through all systems of human history, culture and spirit. As Renata writes, it is not happenstance. It simply pervades everything living.

I’m sure Christian will get around to singing these words sometime during the next decade, after the rest of the album has been finished for centuries and most of humanity have converted themselves into non-living corpses and been dumped into various rivers.

Speaking of Christian, let’s talk about virility.

Virility makes me snicker. Or, rather, the need for men to appear virile makes me snicker. Briefly on the phone yesterday, I presented my idea to Christian that the redneck (or, more commonly called in my vernacular “peasant”) idea of a successful male is one who is strong, unaffected by pain and spreads his seed broadly, whether literally or simply in so-called conquests.

Clearly, this arises from the biological “protector” and “reproductive” roles assigned to humans. Though, if one compares to most other animals, it can be seen that most often the “protector” role is assigned to the mother. The stereotype that in ancient cultures women were on their knees making bread whilst the males of the so-called tribe were out proving their virility hunting is simply not accurate. There is ample evidence that the division of labour in this case, and especially in the small wandering groups that humans once were, was equal.

In any case, the view that the man need be seen as virile and as a propagator of seeds is outdated. Even if there was an accurate analogy elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the arrow of humanity’s evolution targets objectives ever above mere reproductive rites and staged hunting rituals. As usual, the rednecks have it wrong. And for this, they are a blight. Grinding up their living corpses to use to fertilize hydroponic farms is the way to go. Afterwards, a kind soul can publish a pamphlet concerning the “tumor we cut from the living corpse of humanity”, just to remember that they existed.

An internet pamphlet. Redneck remembrance. Fuck um.

If someone is keeping score, and I’m sure someone is, as it is what a certain subset of humans are wont to do, I’d say what defines a person’s so-called “worth” is their contribution to humanity as a whole, be that contribution scientific, artistic or directly altruistic.

That being written, what do I think that I contribute? Just remember to dump me into the closest river.

My productivity went UP yesterday. I actually spent “quality” time practising guitar, plus I added a section to Gibbet. Gibbet is the working title. The piece doesn’t actually sound like a gibbet, as there are too many major 7 chords one after another, cascading. There is one Jazz Standard that also does that for a time. It may be Alice in Wonderland. That being claimed, the whole is not focused around major 7 chords. The main sequence seems to ever return to a harmonic major tonality. One day, some one will lock me up in a non-ergonomic pit because of my obsession with minor 6ths. A lesser spirit would make a terrible pun related to that last sentence. I am not that lesser spirit.

Yesterday was also my first day to stroll around Pagan Park. I was alone except for a shambling mute hispanic man. Perhaps he sensed my love for minor 6ths and, offended, did not return my multiple greetings as we moved along the curving pavements, shambling opposite directions. Or perhaps he was mute for some altogether different reason, though I cannot think of any reason other than being offended by someone’s obsession for minor 6ths to be mute. In fact, it may be the most widespread cause of muteness in any sort of human, not just hispanic humans.

The aeolean mode must have left crushing silences behind in many a past culture. So be it and fuck um.

That brings me to the topic of modes. Christian, when not acting as errand boy for his family, has lately been working on his understanding of modes. Or, rather, as he already has an understanding of modes, has lately been preparing chord sequences to practise modes. Of course, he is following some asshole on youtube’s advice on how to actually proceed instead of simply asking his friend who is currently living next to Pagan Park and who is a certified EXPERT on modes. Doesn’t matter. Christian only trusts youtube and conspiracy theorist forums, so I shouldn’t be surprised. He’ll soon be consigned to the pit in any case.

To create a chord sequence over which one can practise aeolean mode is an elementary thing. First, one identifies the specific notes that give the mode its sound. These notes are, if we think about F# aeolean, F# itself (1), D (b6) and A (b3). Of course, combined, that’s nothing but a D major chord. To promote the aeolean essence, even whilst simply arpeggiating this LYDIAN (in the context of F# aeolean) triad in the backdrop, careful attention should be paid to noodling using DESCENDING returnns to F# using the major 2nd (G#) and DESCENDING returns to C# (the 5th) using the minor 6th, and in the process, develop an obsession with the minor 6th and with minor 6ths in general and be LOCKED UP by our intolerant musical culture. The Aeolean Sound, played on the piano, say, is simply a D major first inversion chord in the BASS with a tinkling C# and G# on top.

I’ve been awake for less than ten minutes and I can already feel the fatigue pulling my eyes inwards. Normally Herr Jet Lag doesn’t last this long. Or does he? It’s nearly five in the morning in Seminole. My time here so far has been wholly unproductive creativity-wise. Within me is a piercing guilt.

Perhaps it is a gradually newfound perception of mortality that creates this guilt. It’s not a guilt associated with any harm I’ve done or could do to others. It’s as if I am cutting myself down with the blade of wasted time. True - I am out of sorts at the moment. Usually after the nastiness that accompanies travel, I am useless for days. I must conquer the uselessness - fight the lethargy. It’s certainly not an easy task.

My writing is fragmented. My music making is non-existent. Bleh. Perhaps I’ll continue this later.

In fact, I’m continuing the next day. Or, rather, the next morning. The fatigue is already pulling my eyes inwards once again. Today I shall fight it. Though my sleep is still of the so-called fever dream variety, lazing about as if I were actually ill simply perpetuates the lethargy.

Let’s talk about something else.

Something that always HITS me when I’ve been away from the states for a while is the insanity that is nestled in this little berg. Humans’ ability for adaption is amazing. Especially for psychological adaption. Their ability to ignore facets of life that in other contexts would be repellent is also amazing.

So, this little berg contains insanity. What sort of insanity, you ask? Well, for me, familiar insanity. In specific, my mother seethes paranoia and obsessive compulsive preoccupation with matters that do not exist. Or, rather, with matters that have a certain potential to exist but do not yet exist. In other terms, she cannot pass her time without worries. Much like I cannot go an hour without munching down a raw clove of garlic and a loose bunch of fresh cilantro, her sustenance is worry itself. And much like the garlic stench that envelops me at all times, she exists in a bubble of delusional paranoia. Delusional paranoia is probably a redundant pairing of words. It has a nice rhythm, though. It wouldn’t exactly work as the second line of a haiku. One would have to sever a syllable. This is a pursuit I’d like to spend more time with. The severing of syllables in poetry. It’s much too avoided by the proper poetry community. Fuck um.

Mother's delusion
Alive in paranoia
Scarfs another day

The point, however, is that humans are possibly too adaptable or too forgiving of seething masses of delusional paranoia. She’s my mother, of course, and according to the seething sage properly known as a Newman, family should be excused anything, even seething paranoia. Our species is too adaptable to events that occur within our bubble until we come to think of them as the normal way of life. As if there aren’t innumerable other bubbles out there with variations and even vastly different normal ways of life, all filled with inhabitants that believe they are the status quo.

Of course, the other option is to delete said people from one’s life - excise them from the bubble, as was done with good cousin Emily. This is a slightly different topic.

After being away for a good while, or even being away during the short span of a few months, I forget about this shrieking disharmony at “home”. Well, forget is a hyperbole. Better said is that my mind suavifies the shrieking disharmony. It becomes simply a yammering disharmony at “home”. Thus, it slaps me across my garlic laden jowls every time I do return, and I must bear it unless I do want to delete my mother from my life, which isn’t going to happen at this point. The balance has not tipped to the negative and won’t as it did with good cousin Emily. It’s just shrieking paranoia and alas I shall not be able to change it or even contain it, but it is bearable.

I’m aware of the psychological origins of the quirks that the inhabitants of my bubbles (I inhabit various during differing occasions, as do most humans) exhibit. I also am aware that I’m not going to change these quirks. All humans are armchair psychoanalysts. Most of us don’t go around spouting about it, though, which is a relief.

My dreams during the night, and especially dawntime, were as clear as the air between my smudged window and El Parque de los Enamorados. The last one featured Loyal as not a drum instructor but a meta-drum instructor. What is a meta-drum instructor, you ask? Well! A meta-drum instructor collects information about potential students and, according to that information, assigns a non-meta-drum instructor to said student.

In the dream, I was the potential student.

A group of us were sitting around the bed of a pickup truck. This pickup truck bed served as a conference table and the expansive out-of-doors was the conference room. The would-be non-meta-drum instructor sat to my right, partially occluded from my murderous grasp by another individual - one with no defined face. Loyal was opposite me.

The topic of conversation was drum fills. I was to be assigned (possibly) to the non-meta-drum instructor after Loyal was content that he could teach me the sort of drum fills that I fancied. So Loyal began to ask me which drummers performed fills that I fancied. I pondered and then came up with Christian Vander and Dave Kerman. About the former, Loyal commented that he was a complicated choice, or something along those lines. His thoughts on Kerman are lost to the morning as the dream slowly drifts into oblivion.

Lastly, I named Bill Bruford, that Loyal misunderstood as Tupford or something similar. Of course, such an error makes no sense since Loyal and the poundings of Herr Bruford are, or were during our years together in the so-called sacred 90s, intimately intertwined.

Information was transformed and then transmitted to the non-meta-drum instructor through a type of light pipe. We all know why light pipe came up in the dream, so I don’t have to elaborate. The non-meta-drum instructor nodded.

Thinking about it now, I should have named Daniel Denis. Were I to take lessons on drum fills, he would be the prototype of my lessons. No other plays the way he does.

@rusty@sonomu.club tooted the album that I’m listening to as I begin to scribe today’s entry. It may be this week’s entry, actually, as I’ve been slacking on my blog writing duties. I laughingly call them “duties”. As if I owe words anything. What have words ever done for me? Absolutely nothing! They only suck up time and energy as they bombard me from every angle - acute, obtuse and metaphorical. Unfortuntely, to fit into any clan at all and be somewhat comfortable in said clan’s bubble, one must aguantar the barrage. I’d say I’ve got exponentially better at withstanding the hail of palabras, sometimes jailed in phrases, sometimes not, over the epochs, and especially since living in Spain. However, I still attest to the fact that they are mostly flying debris. One must fling oneself widely and wildly to catch relevant ones (almost always jailed in phrases).

In any case, @rusty@sonomu.club tooted the album that I’m listening to as I begin to scribe today’s entry. He labels it death metal with a burping frontman. By frontman I mean vocalist. Realistically, anyone in the band can be the “frontman”. Even the louse living in the dense jungle of dead protein atop the skull of the drummer can be the “frontman”. Personally, I prefer bands that have no “frontman”, per se, but that’s a different discussion altogether. The vocalist does appear to be using eruction as a form of musical expression. I am filled with joy.

Back to @rusty@sonomu.club, though. As everyone in this infinity of quantum universes knows, sonomu.club is a node of Mastodon. I’m the only one that calls it a node, as far as I know. The majority of humans’d call it an instance. I’ve enjoyed my sonomu.club time immensely over the years that I’ve been a member, and I enjoyed its predecessor, as well. That node was my first Mastodon experience, begun in 2017. I forget its moniker. One of the principal reasons I’ve enjoyed sonomu.club through the epochs is because it’s been small. It’s a community! A tribe, even! A tribe without tribalism, in fact. It’s been a space with which I can share my musical endeavours and partake of others’ musical endeavours. Of course, we gab about said endeavours from time to time, as well. Not everyone I’ve met and communicate with “live” within sonomu. Some claim their tribes on other nodes. Following these “others” is not a problem, or specifically wasn’t an problem before, but, as Shambal Brambel forced Bob Dylan to say: the times, they are a-changin. Recently, several orders of infinities of new (are they new? As far as I know they were recently birthed or crawled from test tubes. I cannot say for certain) humans are part of Mastodon. It’s becoming, if you will, inundated. Some of these humanoids (or are they homunculi?) have settled into sonomu. If I pay attention to only the local timeline of our (meaning sononmu’s) node, I don’t find it an issue. The time it takes to sort through the toots emitted by the humanoids or homunculi is minimal and I always encounter words and ideas of interest. @rusty@sonomu.club’s mention of the metal band with its burping vocalist whose eructions still meander amongst the molecules of my bedroom is just one example.

Managing a method to go through the toots of multitudinous other humanoids or homunculi that have claimed their tribes on other nodes could become an issue. I simply don’t want to spend so much time reading through the ideas, quips, musings and eureka moments of so many humanoids and / or homunculi - not because those ideas, quips, musings and eureka moments wouldn’t have any value to me, because many would, but because my time in this infinity of quantum universes is necessarily limited and I’ve got music to make.

One solution is to slowly create lists (possibly the best feature that Mastodon has, after the local timeline constrained to an individual node) of humanoids or homunculi that present ideas, quips, musings and eureka moments that enlighten me. I’ve already made one, including Jayrope, Tim and a few others who have chosen other nodes but almost always emit something of interest to me. The main point is to not be overwhelmed by the influx of humanoids and / or homunculi, and as I am easily overwhelmed by crowds, it’s not going to be a simple task for me. In similar situations in the past, I’ve simply eked away, little by little, as multitudes repel me. In this case, I do not want to be repelled, as I’ve met many fantastic and creative humanoids and homunculi in these parts.

I think his is my first blog entry concerning social media in the history of the Martenblog (excepting possibly ancient Livejournal entries). I am amused.

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

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

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

Since November is, as they say in the old lands, just around the leering hulk of the mutant termite mound, I’ve begin to prepare initial ideas of tracks for the so-called Noisevember. Noise! Everyone likes noise. Noise is the ever present fluid that allows us to swim through life. Those who take time to sculpt it to be their own are exquisite or damned. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between. Actually, one idea, currently titled Mollusk Pantheon is mostly done. It blossomed on its own from a noisy beat into a jazz infused masterpiece or dull, plodding funérarium anthem. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between.

My initial idea was to simply create beats using Plugh (which the newest iteration of my modular synth was named), and numerous ones, at that, and once reaching some arbitrary threshold, begin filling in whatever came to mind within each beat with sculpted noise. As is usual, plans evolve. Alas, the universe and the mind are not static, but instead seething pits of chaos. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between. How I detest those who have a fixed notion from the outset of how a musical composition, an abstract or impressionist painting or a piece of software should be in its final form. These are the conservatives of the day who will be hung by their own entrails from the sky-groping branches of Pagan Park’s skeletal trees! These are the conservatives of the day who will be hung by their own entrails from every branch that poises itself to caress the heavens on every skeletal tree in every park in this infinity of quantum universes and many others to come! When evolution of an art work (or a piece of software - don’t for get the software! And one could even call software art in some sense) is denied during the process of its making, the forces of inertia are truly winning and the rest of us tossed onto the vertedero to rot eternally. One of the two or something lurking within the infinite in-between.

In any case, once reaching some arbitrary threshold of beats chiselled out upon stone tablets or digitally captured by Tahr, but not something lurking within the infinite in-between, my plan (now evolved) was to begin filling in each with sculpted noise. It is Noisevember, after all. Then I thought of Christian, that poor schlep that has no initiative of his own. He simply drives a tractor in circles for five hours every day and then drinks himself into a stupor, falls down any one of a number of cracked stone steps in his vicinity, and dies a pauper’s death in a muddied ditch. I thought giving him a task might shake up his monotonous daily routine. As he is also a beat maker in the dark recesses of his lacerated soul, and as he has often expressed to me a desire he’s had since early childhood in the late fourteenth century to become a rapper, I tasked him to do beat boxing along the course of the noisy emanations from Plugh. He already has a couple to contemplate. Good for him! He’s evolving!

Now it’s time for me to create another, as it is banging itself upon the inner wall of my cranium aching to be released.