can’t think of nuttin’ to say. life is fine, you know. i got some cables this week. 100+ ethernet cable which allowed me to re-arrange the office space somewhat, moving the RAID to a more secure and unassuming place. then i got a MIDI-USB cable that lets me play notes and chords on the piano and have them be automatically notated by MuseScore, or other such programs. I don’t remember if Lilypond has that Midi interface set up. I quickly reached a point with MuseScore at which I decided it would more expedient to just buy some expensive software instead of navigating the haphazardly-supported freeware. on the other hand it is an impressive enough product. i was turned off of music notation software some time ago when a friend expressed dismay that i would even use such a thing. she had no philosophical objections to software intervention upon the prestidigitational craft of writing music. she just thought that the work of engraving and making music publishable was better left to engravers and copyists, not the composer. composers compose. engravers and copyists copy and engrave.

a sensible philosophy, i agreed.

i have noted in the past that photographers take pictures. people who are not photographers do not take pictures.

writers write. people who are not writers do not write.

sculptors sculpt. people who are not sculptors do not sculpt.

mothers are an exception. mothers mother. people who are not mothers sometimes mother.

the focus of this philosophy, its onus, is that the act of doing something is the only distinction between people who do things and people who do not do things.

christ, i sound like gertrude stein.

…..

i was wading through some old magazines the other day. not old old, like the Etude Magazine project i continue to do, but old as in early 1990s, or mid 1990s. a magazine i co-created and helped produce for a few issues. my involvement is nothing to brag about, though it is essentially undocumented in the pages and mastheads of that august chronicle. which i say with no expectation of recompense or recognition, just a point of fact.

these old magazines are turgid, hoary rambles of societal backwash and accumulation thereof. too much of it and i need to bathe. i wish them out of my life, but i feel obligated to scan them first, for to save their precious contents whilst freeing my environment of their occupation of space… which suggests that their content is not particularly precious after all.

so i started scanning one of the issues. page 1, page 5 page 12…. then i returned to the computer and GASPED, sounding like my goddam mother when she’d see a cockroach in the kitchen, a inhaled/exhaled a gasp and a shock, stopping short of pressing my limp wrist to my torso, but otherwise sounding exactly like my mother.

the scanning had crashed the computer. blue screen of terminal-fonted text with a scrawl of error codes and critical information that disappeared within seconds.

so that was time wasted. all that scanning, into the toilet of a computer error. nothing new there.

i will try again tonight.

i prestidigitationally moved a shitload of paperwork from envelopes and drawers into more or less carefully organized file folders. old bank statements, cable and electric bills, credit cards and investment statements. infinite effluvia of an incidental financial life. so much paperwork for an inconsequential life.