i think my plan to subsist entirely off of food purchased with restaurant gift cards will not go far. i wanted to try it for a week or so, at least consuming one large meal a day at places like TGIFridays or Applebees. these are the type of places i can get gift cards via my credit card rewards program. the food is what it is, and it ain’t much… i shouldn’t be surprised. i have gift cards from my sister, though, for real-live steakhouses… i just don’t have anyone to go with, and i kinda wanted to share the gift. i’m kinda steaked out, though…
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i practiced pretty well for an hour or so today. Schubert, F Minor Impromptu. that piece was a favorite of my mother’s. i want to broadcast again but i should be able to play some things credibly. not note perfect or even start to finish, but what i do play should be credible, and it will be. i gotta get the setup going again. it’s really pretty elaborate, and annoying in its way, to manage all that broadcast setup and then concentrate on playing. but the Schubert feels good, and what’s the use in keeping it all to myself and the neighbors passing in the hallways when i can blast it off to all the world?
a few weeks ago an upstairs neighbor told me how much she enjoyed hearing me play as she passed by in the hallway. it was nice of her. those hallway passers-by have been my primary audience for years now.
i think i last broadcast about 2 years ago. i invited a friend to tune in, thinking she would be the only one there. she was a potential romantic interest, or so i thought at the time. she showed up to tune in, but 35 others got there first. one woman in particular really got to the girl i invited. the invitee was a jealous type. jealousy is a trait that makes the most beautiful creatures of our earth look like pigs. but that’s another story. what happened here was she showed up just as a woman in Germany was gushing with comments of nearly lustful admiration. i take that stuff for what it is (i don’t know what that means, except that it is all in good fun) but the jealous romantic interest must have seethed. i could sense it through the wires, through the faceless internet, that she would rather not see the suggestive enthusiasm of other women toward me.
that’s the last time i plugged in my piano and broadcast like that.
otherwise it was good fun.i don’t talk to that jealous woman too much these days, so maybe the coast is clear.
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now that i think of it, i had a strange dream last night. i was faced with some kind of number keypad into which i would enter a security code or a password to gain entrance to some place. i knew my passcode but as i started punching it in i noticed that the pushbutton keys emitted tones which could be assembled into musical constructs. so i started trying to play some kind of march, maybe a Sousa march or something from the all-American canon of patriotic tunes. an audience quickly gathered and i got nervous. i didn’t really know the tunes from start to finish and i was playing them on an unfamiliar set of keys. it was not a 12-keey set like on a touch tone phone, it was more like 40 buttons, 8×5.
i think i tried to play revelie, and then maybe something from “Carmen”, but then i felt that the timbre of this device was best suited to American patriotic tunes.
it was an odd dream. i think these thoughts of broadcasting again influenced the dreamscape.
in high school i had a vision of myself broadcasting over the radio, over the airwaves, from a table in the desert of Florida. i guess there is no real sahara in Florida, but i imagined myself sitting at a table with nothing but a microphone and the broadcast gear hidden under the table, or underground. i would sit at the table daily, talking into thin air with no regard for whether anyone heard me, satisfied only in knowing that my voice was flailing into the misty vapors of oblivion whence maybe i would be heard or maybe not. it idnd’t matter. i imagined doing this into my shriveled years, pontificating and streaming before streaming became a term that harkens incontinence but actually refers to a relatively obscure HTTP protocol (obscure to non-techies, that is).
no, i would stream from the brain, stream from the mouth, stream from the consciousness.
and it would be righteous.
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going to try out the laminator tonight. i got 2 days in the hole, with work to do tomorrow and snow/rain on wednesday, so i can work out the logistics of the laminator project at home.
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bathrooms are the last bastion of privacy. toilets and shitters and urinals. no politician alive would defend a government’s or private business’ right to point security cameras at people defecating. or would they?
i just thought of that, not for the first time.
