../melody in chaos
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
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.
Spotify playlist #105 for June 2023 reflects movements in space, internal and external:
listening to jazz with my father on the lanai
stories of my parents’ meeting in 1969
my mother’s covid while recovering from a broken hand
my father’s pneumonia while recovering from covid
the WGA strike and potential SAG-AFTRA walkout suspending Cat’s latest gig, extending our trip by 3+ weeks
finding peace between the days of Luna’s now kinda-regular bi-weekly epileptic seizures
the kinetic calmness in the chaos of a tennis court
weekly quests for the perfect mango
the road from Florida back to NYC
Not bummed to be back in NYC, but I don’t return home after being away with unbridled excitement anymore, either.…
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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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tr: Because nothing is yellow, everything is green.
haha, at least everything’s not blue…
Sound is physical art.
it’s better to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer
Nothing is random.
You don’t need things you use all the time to “look like new”, just well tended.
We see in most people what we look for, more than what they project.…
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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!”
My IRL family, Maplewood, NJ, 1981 [me: 2nd from bottom left; paternal grandparents Ida & Morris: top row left; self-timer composition, Kodak stock, format unknown]
Down in Florida last month, I began to organize my parents’ 6 bins of photographs, the earliest of which reached back into the 1880s. Aside from being an invaluable record of my family history, the trove also provides, upstream, a fractal of the entire era of mass manual photography.…
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AI still “artificial,” for now :^D
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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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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a week of scattered thoughts
Grass is a reflective, not euphoric drug. That’s why it was made illegal
Fwiw, nuclear power is a form of solar energy. Stars are just big AF reactors.
In a way, every nuclear plant on Earth is a man-made nano-star.
Nuclear bombs explode microscopic suns.
there’s only so many times you can say, “I’m being taken out of context,” until your actual context becomes questionable
Let’s pitch Name That Tune except you have to ID songs behind white noise at varying intensities – (vacuum cleaners, hvac, subway entering station, side of a highway, etc)
No Justice = No Peace also means No Injustice = No War.…
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medium mirror: https://westyreflector.medium.com/…
It’s absurd that war is just “declared,” whereas peace requires “negotiation.”
Peace, for some reason, always requires a “process.”
Sometimes you have to “sue” for peace. Taking someone to court, in a way, makes you an aggressor, so, in a way, litigating the end of a war turns aggressors into defendants, and defenders into plaintiffs.…
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Words are my thread; music is my needle
I haven’t written too much on the internet in the last few years because I am afraid of what…
This internal poll will be open for the rest of eternity, or until eternity runs out of time, power, or storage
To run out of storage is to run out of time.…
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I have quite a bit of fun losing tennis matches as long as I take a ton of risks.
The zone that takes me to a place of calm courage happens when I finally displace the notion I’m playing against someone, with the notion that I’m playing with someone.
My mind and body also need to find a space of equilibration, where body forgets materiality and mind forgets gravity.…
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A society run on batteries is kinda non-biodegradable, yes?
In due course, billions of bricked iPhones will need to be shot into space
At some point, everything will be hand-cranked
lol the hand-cranked car was the future
Is half-baked… a moment of potential or decay?
No one ever says they’re “half-baked” as the drugs kick in.…
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