AUTHOR.CALHO: If I didn't write it, I would be hitch hiking cross country to Maine and then Alaska in that order. While taking frequent breaks to spread leaflets. And sit in diners. And write on things because I wasn't at a computer. I may still do that in a few years. Writing this also helps me forget about and better understand the limitations of being human, and keeps me busy enough to allow me no free time to burn the world down.

THEMATIC.ABOUT : Collapse often. The things that hold people together and hold them apart and scatter brains. The things that make thoughts go boom. The things that ooh and aah and [expletive deleted]. Sometimes poking around the margins where responsibility ends and the only one to look to is the Original Equipment Manufacturer and say "but, I already pressed 9 for more options and the menus are exactly the same. Can you just replace it?" The answer will be: "please hold." Sometimes hanging out in dark corners. Sometimes following the train tracks. Looking for ways out and ways in and all the while sharing the things seen and heard and done and drawn and written and scorched and healed and teased and caged and dreamed along the way.

7/29/11

Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer

Been smacking the knobs on my equalizer. Playing with sound things to see what other sound things I can make with them. Playing with sound tracks to see if I can mess with the levels in just such a way to drop the singer's voice right out of the track and hold the rest of it intact. It's been a pretty fun game. A fun way to pass time. Well actually not a fun way to pass time. That's kind of the annoying part. It's time consuming, but such fun. And I will not harp on lost time today. I have more time than most people get to enjoy and keep a roof over their head. Granted it is inconvenient time so its value is probably more accurately expressed in pesos instead of dollars, but creative currency no less.



I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.

However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.



Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.

So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.

More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.

Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.

I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.


///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)

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