Category: thinking

  • Revisiting Syd

    Since last week, I’m been very much in a Barrett mood.

    It’s been a while since I last listened to Madcap Laughs and Barrett, and I was only slightly surprised to see that they had been pulled from my streaming service. It seems like albums are chronically coming and going, especially when they are from acts “across the pond” [Syd Barrett joins Jesus and Mary Chain for albums I can’t listen to… at the moment]. Without super-simple access to Syd’s solo albums, I opted for Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn album to tide me me over until I could either pull up my MP3s or find time to find a quality upload of the complete albums up on YouTube for me.

    Listening with “fresh ears”, it strikes me just how much Syd indirectly and directly influenced some of my tastes in music.

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  • Half-Penny Thoughts | 23jun25

    Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

    I used to be really proud about how clever I could be and how much information I was able to amass in my cranium.

    The past decade or so, however, I’ve been discovering how liberating it is to be the one asking questions instead of being the one who “knows” stuff. And how freeing it is to let “knowledge” slip away when the information does not have an immediate and proven need. I can always ask the questions, or read something, again and — sometimes, even — I learn something completely different when I learn something “from scratch”.

    That means I can often reread books, for example, and see the story or the information with completely new eyes. Or find a new technique to troubleshoot a problem.

    Forgetting doesn’t have to be the horror that some folks make it out to be. Memories are not something that require preservation. They may give you joy or feel useful, but there is no real reason to cling to memories, or that joy, just for the sake of remembering. Or is there?

  • The long drive, connectivity and tech

    Image of a writing journal and a pencil.
    Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

    In my post where I mentioned I will be busy this summer with things that take me away from posting here quite so frequently, I alluded to a lack of connectivity for a spell as being one of those reasons. Well, those plans are starting to firm up and I will be incommunicado near the end of July for about 5-10 days.

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  • Wot up?

    Image of a writing journal and a pencil.
    Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

    I’m going to be posting less often over the summer. I think so, anyway.

    Why?

    I have a couple of irons in the fire, among other reasons:

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  • Half-penny thoughts | 12jun25

    a path in the middle of a dark forest
    Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

    I’m doing some spiritual alchemy this morning. You know, calcination, dissolution, separation… yada yada yada. Fancy words for a messy process.

    As most of you know, I don’t have much patience with fancy language to describe simple things. I also don’t have much patience with elaborate processes when the processes themselves should be (and tend to be) simple.

    Stepping back…

    I was thinking again, about this process of rewilding my spirit, getting back to the beginning. Part of that involves taking what you perceive yourself to be and going all Zen by seeking out the face you wore before you were born. Or, as the kōan would have it, before your parents were born.

    [A kōan, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a Zen “public case” meant to help one realize satori, otherwise known as enlightenment.]

    What better place to set as a destination for rewilding your spirit? Your original face, before even your parents were born!

    Before nurture came around… Before your nature evolved…

    What face did you wear?

    And can you find it again?

    Note: For the curious, my philosophy is largely Taoist informed by Zen, my spiritual practice is largely animist, influenced by panpolytheistic understandings (with many of those trappings removed). Confused? Now you know why I think these kinds of thoughts.

  • sixteen

    Sixteen years ago (to the day), I woke up with a monster of a hangover. Well, it was a hangover if you can have a hangover when you’re still drunk… To save my life, I couldn’t tell you how much I had to drink the night before. Probably close to 24 bottles of ale, chased down with half a quart of Jameson. I might have cleaned up the rum that was in a nearly-full fifth… Was there some tequila? I’m afraid it is all a fog.

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  • Storytime

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I just got to the stage where my fiction subdomain is getting becoming functional. The keyword is “functional”, but it is far from finished/polished and the content quality there is. erm, lacking at the moment. Of course, it is purely for testing ideas and functionality, so it will eventually be wiped.

    It is not currently behind a “maintenance mode” wall, so if you want to see how the Fictioneer WordPress template demos on my site, you can check it out at fiction.ravensweald.com.

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  • Experiments in stereo

    Picture of an audio soundboard
    Photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash

    I am curious; there’s an idea that might be interesting to pursue. I’m not sure it is a good idea to pursue, but it is definitely interesting.

    Are any of my readers interested in scratching that Sisters of Mercy (or similar musical act) fantasy and write some lyrics for a song in that flavor that I have already written save for the lyrics? The flavor is more “First and Last and Always” than “Driven Like the Snow“, for those of you familiar with the band, although it might have a touch of “Lucretia, My Reflection” to the sound as well. Bass and drums are a bit more on the Mission UK side of the equation than Doktor Avalanche. [If all of this means nothing to you, that’s okay! Think gloomy rock.]

    No need to sing them (unless you want to).

    Tentative working title: “Living With the Ghost of You” (open to modification, but a repetition of this line over the “chorus” section currently works in my head).

    I can modify the song structure somewhat to fit the lyrics if the right ones come my way. Or the other way around. I think (at the moment, anyway) that it might be more fun if participants didn’t hear the music they were writing lyrics for…

    If you want to see if I think what you write will work, drop it in the comments below. The basic (current) structure is:

    • verse
    • verse
    • chorus
    • verse
    • chorus
    • bridge
    • verse
    • chorus to fade

    All verses would probably fit with a 4-lines/verse structure. Or 2-lines/verse if the lines are longer. Bridge may be left instrumental, but let me know if you have injections that work (no “babybabybaby” stuff, though, puhleez).

    Any takers?

    I can’t promise it will work, but it would still be fun to see what y’all come up with. And who knows? I may ask for your permission to use it!

  • Half-penny thoughts — 02jun25

    Photo by enkuu smile_ on Unsplash

    I recently realized that sometimes I take what was said or done in the past and apply it to the present, which is flawed thinking when I consider how it might the reality of a given situation.

    Yes, that’s how our minds tend to work — we use our experiences to inform our futures and presents. That’s how we try to maximize our situations to our advantage.

    And, often, it works as intended.

    But there are times where the past does not necessarily inform the present. Or, even when the past informs the present, it does so with such imperfection as to be essentially useless. Instead of advantage, assumptions about the past offer us greater opportunities to stumble and fall face-first into a cow pie. And that’s if we are lucky. Unlucky, we tend to crash and burn in a dung heap.

    I’m often on the unlucky balance of the equation. [Aside: If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all, as the saying goes.]

    I need to remind myself that, absent other assurances from the past, there is still only the eternal present. Putting too much faith in the (often illusionary) past to explain the present is a fool’s errand. Forget about the future.

    Excuse me while I go remind myself of the nature of things by sitting in the dojo of my mind…

  • Past Penpals

    Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

    I received a lovely surprise thanks to social media yesterday morning: an old email “penpal” reached out to my Facebook account to ask if I was the Michael xxxxx they used to exchange emails with. Of course, I recognized her name right away as Kate (“K8”) from around the 00s, back when the internet was both a much more friendly place, as well as being quite a bit more “wild west” in feel.

    It was the era of making connections, the creeps and trolls hadn’t found a foothold in cyberspace yet, and MySpace was still the hotbed of the music scene. If I come off more as a “blogger” in the flavor of that time period, it’s because that’s where I cut my teeth on blogging, before everyone had to monetize every little thing they did, and influencers were still a daydream. We were largely an online journaling community still, the precursor to the oversharing of social media, which is why some of us learned our lessons very early on and are somewhat circumspect about what details we share online (all the while going to great lengths to sound like we aren’t being circumspect).

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