../melody in chaos
just launched an alt substack called The Dark Slope focused on my very recent dive into cryptocurrency investing. My second piece for the publication centers on how we are now turning energy into money (current into currency, that is), and how that upends the value of work.
CVS, NYC / 20240125.1521
I spent ten minutes last Thursday afternoon wandering a Brooklyn CVS while waiting for an Rx. This was my first time back in a city pharmacy since returning from 2+ months in Florida. Amazing how many more shelves are inaccessible than when I left.…
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“I have pickleball, bridge, yoga, pottery, then beading. I won’t be able to shower, or change all day.”
“You could skip bridge.”
“No I can’t! I cannot afford to miss a lesson.”
“Blackwood’s easy. I can teach you.”
“I will skip something else, then.”
“Hey, did you hear me?…
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This “advice to self” list has grown, plateaued, and shrunk through the years and ears, and continues to evolve. I return to it every once in a while to add and pare, and laugh at some of the sillier constraints I’ve set on my happiness and contentment as time rolls.…
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If the web was scratch ‘n sniff, how many posts would you bring to your nose?
If sites and blogs emitted odors, how far would you keep your phone from your face when you check the subway status?
The internet, as with a war epic or a make-out scene in a barn or a Victorian-era period film, is easy to romanticize (and project ourselves into) because it doesn’t smell.
90 minutes
1x / week
give or take
holiday suspensions
78 hours =
3¼ days
every year
give and take
time suspended
sitting
idling
avoiding citation
on the alternate side
standing still
in the driver’s seat
nothing but space
on the alternate side
to
go figure
the moon out
yourself out
the odds
the risks
in my ny city
fruit hangs low,
so low,
aamof,
that
parking enforcement officers,
none the wiser,
sweep the vehicles
even when
the street sweeper
never shows to
sweep the streets
and no one
with a fresh ticket
on their unattended car,
nestled between
wiper blade and windshield,
is any the wiser
to the unswept grit
left underfoot
or the inside grift
right out in the open
on the alternate side
“…We dated, like, freshman year, and it went really bad and to this day he still calls me a bitch.”
“What? Really?”
“For, like, a year and a half! His friends, too. And they don’t even know me!”
“Shutup! One, you are not a bitch. And two, you have never been a bitch.”…
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“So Tom Cruise enjoys the intimate company of a grapefruit cocktail?” Luna piped up, inquisitive, as we lingered over some new sidewalk scrawl on 4th Avenue.
We had just walked through an adjacent park that contains our neighborhood’s biggest playground, a full soccer pitch, 8 handball walls, a skate park, a dog run, six basketball courts, and two small community gardens.…
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Eastern Wall of the Richmond Police Department Headquarters
Grace and Jefferson Streets
Richmond, VA
20230624.0735
Sculpture
“Thin Blue Line,” Michael Stutz (2005)
Public Art Commission
Plaque
“Site Of The House In Which
Samuel Preston Moore
Surgeon General
Confederate States of America
Lived From 1863 To 1865
—
This Tablet Is Placed By The
Confederate Memorial Literary Society A.D.
The internet from the start offered a grand social paradox. Everything’s apart together, but also together apart. And everyone’s alone together, but also together alone.
Fwiw, pandemic lockdowns aligned our interactions in the physical world to how we interact with each other on the internet. Everyone alone together, and together alone.…
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I promise this isn’t about to become a tennis blog, though I’d have no objection. This is the first in what will be a 10 or 12-part series on the game’s deep impact on me, and its confluence with playing music. After all, racquets and guitars are both strung and played.…
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This Terminal command to disable MacOS’s default “low-priority throttle” has been indispensible while backing up with Time Machine of late:
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
Leaving it on (“=1”) shunts the backup to the last in line for the CPU no matter what. My backup process, however, is a VIP club goer.
Would that I could control, with one simple line of code, the throttle on my darkest thoughts.…
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tr: Because nothing is yellow, everything is green.
haha, at least everything’s not blue…
The idea that alien life forms would conform to our dimensional perspectives and physics, and yet still leave themselves vulnerable to human weapons and hate, is naive.
…“An Earthland vacation this light-year? Really?”
“I heard it’s pretty, and I always wanted to go.”
“Okay, but just remember to bring ‘sion-block-“
“Yes, I packed ‘sion-block!”
AI still “artificial,” for now :^D
“Hey Westy, when you grew up with no internet, what on Earth did you do for fun?”
Action Park, Vernon, NJ 1982
Caracas, Venezuela 1980
Myrtle Beach, SC 1981
lol. Wouldn’t trade my 80s childhood for all the TikTok in China.
DALL-E 2 AI INPUT: “A former musician, surrounded by destroyed instruments, under a pink sky, photographed by William Eggleston” (2022)
Someone randomly came into one of my social feeds today with “former musician” in their bio, and the notion sent me, well, riffing…
What, exactly, constitutes a “former” musician?
Did they never “make it?”…
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A few of the things you have fine-tuned control over in life:
How clean your home is
How made your bed is
How tired your dog is
Whether or not your passport is current and active
All of this adds up, really, to the one and only thing you have control over:
How you react to chaos.…
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the trick is to get paid for just being you
to “turn a trick” is to be paid to be someone else’s “you”
adopting war terminology for sports (“bomb,” “shotgun,” “blitz,” “strikers,” “defense,” “offence,” “flanks,” “attack,” “sacking,” etc) turned war into sports
Now, those not fighting are said to be “on the sidelines.”…
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There’s no such thing as “living a lie.” You live your truth and only your truth, and enjoy or suffer the fallout, whatever your truth creates.
The phrase isn’t, “you’re living your lie.” It’s, “you’re living a lie.”
At the very least, if it was your lie, you’d have some agency
If there are lives “lived in lies,” then life itself is devalued
The “problem” today lol isn’t that everywhere there’s lies.…
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