It’s the last day of February! About fuckin time. February is the worst month of the year for me, and has been most of my life. I wish I wasn’t attached to the climate as if there was an umbilical cord involved, but despite my self-coercing (and the coercion of others) I can’t seem to forget that it’s winter, it’s cold, and it’s dark.
I haven’t written a blog in a few months. It’s not that I’ve stopped thinking or even stopped writing. Au contraire. I’ve been tired. And I lost my free internet connection, so now I’m online on the weekends when I can get myself to a coffee shop and pay $1.50 for a cup of tea.
Laptop also died, finally. It had been seizing for months, with sudden bouts of blue screen fever, compulsive rebooting, inner ticking and clicking. Apparently it contracted a virus at some point, and it was defenseless. Now when I turn it on there is an endless stream of data lines looking something like this:
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
C:\\WINDOWS\PROGRAMS\DATA\SOMETHING\WENT\WRONG\A;20959S7238948-S;LRKJ304
No respectable software business will retrieve the data for under $300. Goodbye, music and pictures. Goodbye, familiar user interface. Goodbye, two poems I forgot to save to my thumb drive. I’ll miss you, “Stockhausen vs. Bus Ride Home” and “Janitorial Filing.” I’ll miss you, compulsive Zappa collection. I’ll miss you, photos of drunken revelry.
Enough of that. Turns out, my brain has a hard drive of its own, and its viruses haven’t completely materialized or taken over (yet). The other day as I was opening and categorizing mail for 12 corporate attorneys, I found my blood pressure rising at the hopes of not fucking up (slicing through Stipulations for Compromise documents, Settlement documents, and other official court documents), and softly I heard the opening chords to “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” and I became almost as calm as an insurance rep. Musical memory can be good for something. It doesn’t always have to work against you, like when you hear someone’s ringtone playing Shania Twain in the elevator and it stays in your head for two hours. Spontaneous Zappa is possible.
Shorter than February will this blog be! The following mp3 is something I stumbled on Ubu Web’s Contemporary Chinese Experimental Music page. It’s titled “Satisfaction of Oscillation.” (I recommend wearing headphones.) It's what Philip Glass has tried to accomplish through woodwind arpeggios for decades now, but Dajuin Yao does it more intuitively and, despite the synthetic sound quality, more naturally.
