2nd night without booze, should be fine. If I can find distraction, be it good writing or good conversation, I can get through the mental withdrawal. The physical withdrawal disappears quickly, it seems, thanks to the pills and thanks also to this body that wants to be healthy even as the mind that controls it has other ideas.

I was listening back to audio I made 7 years ago, with the first field recorder. Milling through it has been both rewarding and tedious. Much of it was forgotten, some of it deservedly so, other of it not just forgotten until now but wiped clean from the possible record of my life should pickers come and stick their virtual rubber gloves into the oceans of data I will likely leave behind.

Once in a while in these recordings from 7 years ago I accidentally recorded myself screaming and pissing words at the computer, asking “WHAT THE FUCK?” and hopelessly bleating “THAT IS SO FUCKING ANNOYING!” when nothing, I mean nothing on top of nothing on top of nothing can be done to remedy the situation at hand, however severe it might seem to me.

I read once, however, that people like me are less likely to have heart attacks, since we don’t hold it all inside. But I doubt that. I yell at machines because it is safer than doing the same at humans. In other contexts, as I’ve said before and will say again, if you want to win an argument with me just yell louder. Period. You will win. Winning is important, especially in interpersonal relationships. Right?

I finally managed to broadcast live over Facebook tonight. Or rather, I managed to broadcast with audio that was passably listenable and video that was about as good as I should expect from an 8- or 9-year old Quickcam. The crowd of people who commented were nice about it, though I felt bad for making them function as guinea pigs, even for such a slight inconvenience as this. There was, as far as I could tell, no way to test how the video stream would sound before making it live. Going live and waiting for feedback seemed to be the only option. Of course IF I KNEW WHAT I WAS DOING then planning better would be a superior option. But I thought I did know what I was doing, at least up to the point where my capacity for comprehension of technical and computer matters is not crowded out by my desire to be playing piano and making music.

The piano has, for much of my life, been the one place where I feel I have most control over things, over the situation at hands. But as technology encroaches into that space I find that sense of control is taken away. I don’t just play music now. I guess at bitrates, guess at volume levels, try to figure out why the camera and the microphone cannot get along. By the time I get to the piano I cannot remember how to play it anymore.

I just went out and walked around outside. It is warming up after a cold spell. I got a filling salad at the Trade Fair and rigged 4 LinkNYC kiosks to blast feedback and noise into the cool night. I am making use of new headphones, fancy kinds for real podcasters. I have been working on changing my tone of voice, and being not just more articulate but less inclined to trail off and never return to a lengthy and unquestionably fascinating thoughtstream.

I heard the music last night. When sober I hear the music made among the air filter, the box fan, and the small scraps of ephemera the fan disrupts with its blowing. Add to that mix the more recent hissing of the steam heater and it’s like living in a zoological Mardi Gras.

An ex-gf from forever ago might be in town this week, with her infant child. Sometimes I wonder what might have been had I given her a better chance. But the truth is we didn’t have all that. I know it. She knows it. That’s why we talk. Another ex is coming over here tomorrow, for pizza and maybe beers if I’m on board. Better to drink tomorrow than tonight, since I don’t always know if my brain will be plagued by the sticky hangover that I don’t realize is there until the end of the day, when I realize what a waste it had all been, that day.

But I waste my days all the same whether sober and hungover. I need to ask around on benzo forums if my patterns are normal or explainable. I’ve concluded that I get into the most trouble over forgetting to eat, or drinking on an empty stomach. Lately I think this has been causing hypertension that goes beyond the anxiety attacks of yore. These are full out DT seizures causing muscle spasms which felt like a severe form of indigestion or gastritis. The BP blasts off to something impossible, my chest feels like it is trying to push a hard turd out of it, my vision gets blurry… and then I take a couple of pills and everything’s back to normal — maybe not immediately but soon enough. The next day I feel fine. It’s my body wanting to be healthy while my mind has other ideas.

I’d be curious to know if another extreme variance behavior is related to all these conditions… but if I’m going to ask about that I’ll do it behind the shroud of an anonymous medical forum, from behind a VPN, using the Tor browser. Hah. There are, believe it or not, some things I don’t want to mention even here in a place I don’t think anyone reads anymore, and which they shouldn’t because it is invisible to search engines and findable only to those who might still care about what I’m up to out here.

I tried to find a copy of the Smithsonian’s publication of the Jelly Roll Morton transcriptions by James Dapogny. I already have a copy but it has always been a bother and a nuisance to actually use this book at the piano. I intend to procure a second copy so I can scan it, without destroying my existing copy, since scanning this clumsily-bound volume would of necessity be destructive. It was always hard to keep this volume anything close to flatly opened but since I got the big fat tablet as a primary sheet music reader it has been essentially impossible, since the tablet takes up a portion of the space on the music rack.

The cheapest I can find for a second hand copy of this volume is $30, which is not going to bankrupt me, at least not yet. But I feel like I deserve a free or very cheap digital copy for having purchased the expensive original. There does happen to be a PDF at archive.org which they claim you can borrow for 15 days using some Adobe hooks that make the file unusable after the checkout time limit. I tried to do all that and it just doesn’t fucking work.