090118 first kick, first cartwheel, first whatever. the point is, you get in there right away and you just jump in. you bounce in. you leap in. you go flying in. you don’t back up. you don’t press “delete” in the keyboard of your body. you slide across the floor, floppy grin on your face. you jazz hands. you bark like a fucking monkey. you commit fully. your roommates laugh. you laugh. you’re not sure whether they’re laughing a) with you, b) at you, or c) about something else altoghether, but it doesn’t seem that important either way. little rollicking scalewise sets of thirds. there’s no good way that i know of to write words in Englishish about music. i played the piano right before i woke up. it was this lilting melody. mozartesque. started extremely simple. kind of a 6/8. the top of the basic intro melody could be described as -- aha! no wonder there was a D at the bottom. think of it like this: dotted quarter notes: d, d, c, c, then quarter not-eight note pairs: b, a - b, c - back to dotted 1/4s: b, a, g, g, quarter+1/8 pairs: g, a - b, c - dotted halfs: b , a , then that repeats but finishes is a downward melodic turn instead of that 5-chord hanging there like that (it’s in G major basically) then there’s variations, swooping arpeggios, trills, and the whole thing ends with giant rolling, crashing waves of chords. (Edit: just realized the beginning is basically like Super Trooper, which makes sense given the littles’ fascination with mamma Mia after staying with Mimi!) for some reason i was able to do all that while i was sleeping. I woke up largely unable to do it beyond the very basic melody and main triad of chord progression. Apparently some people have just the opposite problem: they wake up knowing how to play like a demon child. I guess that would be cool. It might interfere with your job or life or whatever, but hey. So anyway, what else is new. Like I said before, I’m having a little trouble getting into these sessions lately. Could be partially because I’ve been sneaking peaks back at recent ones. When you start ogling what you’ve recently written, it can be hard to continue the drudgery of the next day’s exercise, because, well because of a couple of possible things, which at first glance seem mutually exclusive but can in fact occur simultaneously: 1. you see a bunch of stuff you like and think is cool or awesome or beautiful or impressive, and then that slows you down tomorrow because you want to repeat that, and 2. you see a bunch of stuff that’s just rambling monotony and mundanity and then that slows you down tomorrow because you’re like what’s the point. My advice, just don’t look. When the urge to look starts overtaking your ability to resist, repeatedly, it may mean it’s time to shift gears a little bit, into WHAT I’m not sure because I haven’t read the next portions of the book yet. I’m kind of circling the airport, for weeks beyond the originally scheduled landing time. I’m stalling a little bit. A little bit I’m genuinely busy. Busy in the sense of not having the mental openness to spare, because I’m concentrating so hard on making all these decisions for getting my classes ready for day 1. Day 1 of my first semester as a FULL TIME eAchieve teacher. Am I proud of that? I guess so, a little, yeah. It’s also a little scary. More at stake, more to lose, more depending on someone else, knowing myself and my tendency to increase spending to fill up the vacuum of any additional income, no matter how incremental... constant self reminders needed (CONSTANT? Really? jesus dude, it’s no wonder you have trouble sleeping) not to freak, just to relax and focus as Lisa from Route 4 would have it, just do the next right thing, let go of stuff that can be let go of, put down the self-flagellating whip as my new-ish feather woman said, and remember things like braces and moving and college and cars and band trips and student loans and then we’re back in that maelstrom. There’s enough particles and warter vapor and wind energy and cows and houses flying through the air in there to keep you busy pretty much twenty four seven. I reckon most folks don’t need anything more than that maelstrom. The maelstrom becomes what we think of as life. They become synonymous. Well, I’m here to remind you that there ain’t no such things as synonyms. He said, then immediately doubted the veracity of that. Well, what I mean is, Wait he asks himself what DO I mean? What I mean is, the thing you think of as life, isn’t, necessarily. You construct a virtual solidity out of patterns of decisions. The magnetically encoded sequence of variations in the field of your attentional ions or whatever--that makes up a continuous signal. That signal fills your ears or whatever and is perceived by you as a “thing” you can refer to as “life.” If you get the pattern right and it matches someone else’s decoding of what the pattern ought to be, they pay you money that you can then spend on whatever. Some people buy houses and cars and pay off their debts. Some people buy a bunch of candy and soda and sleepy weed that mangles up the pattern for them because they’re bored because they’ve mistaken the pattern for “life” and they’re not sure they like the pattern because they forgot the part that has magic in it. Some people buy just a few more extra moments; the luxury of sitting in front of a blackish screen with pale amber letters marching across for no good reason. They buy a train ticket outside of the usual pattern. The ticket doesn’t get you on the train, though. It just gives you permission to build the train, or chase the train, or tell stories about the train, or listen to the train as it calls out to you, far away, accentuating your comely loneliness, spilling molten golden light out its racing windows, painting the dusty anonymous foliage with all the colors of unpredictable conversation. Somewhere between the tracks and the rusty river, a fawn looks up. Then goes back to munching leaves.