Category: thinking

  • 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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  • Half-penny thoughts — 30may25

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

    One of those ideas that keeps coming back to me is a question that has been on my mind for at least ten years. Whether it is music, writing, or art in general: Where is the disruption and subversion?

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 07may25

    Photo by Cornelia Munteanu on Unsplash

    Eyes chase the dust motes playing in the sun framed in shadows cast by the window frame. I wonder that they might be alive, even if we think of dust as the slag of our skin, cast off in a neverending shedding season, our constant state of ephemera we purposefully cast a blind eye toward — afraid of our own mortality. Unable to accept we are a season of dust, we focus our gaze on the verdant, the thriving as we sweep the parts of our dying under the rug for someone else to discover after we have passed on.

    Consider this: Could the “dead” cells of ourselves still be alive? By what measure have we to decide when they are finally and truly dead things? They never had a heartbeat and we cannot confirm they ever had mind — although I will argue that there is more mind than we are inclined to recognize in the world around us — much less this have an active mind.

    And yet, be it the vagaries of air eddies and their imagined whims, or dust motes at play, one has to wonder if any of this must be as it seems. Who is to say that if we look beyond the scrim before our eyes and truly see, if we might not see more than what everything seems.

  • Rewilding: grounding

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

    Lately, I’ve been feeding a greater need to improve my grounding. In the increasingly chaotic and manic world we have stumbled into over the past decade and a half, I feel like I have lost some of the ability I used to have to ground myself. Chances are that it is more likely that my abilities have not changed so much as they have not adapted to the current state of affairs — they are a little off-key might be the better way to think of it.

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  • Threefold returns

    Photo by Cornelia Munteanu on Unsplash

    All that you give returns threefold, or so they say.

    Or they used to, anyway. I do not know if that still holds true. Sometimes it does not seem to.

    The world has moved on in a lot of ways. Maybe such concepts just refuse to stick around anymore.

    I do not know.

    Laughter. That uncertain, awkward laughter one uses while scratching their head and looking down at their shoes. Are those my shoes? I suppose they must be. Heh. Alrighty. Hello shoes.

    I seem to be staring at my shoes a lot in life. Awkward laughter and all.

    Trees… They do not concern themselves with these things. Nor do big granite stones.

    And they do not have shoes to awkwardly laugh about.

    I then give myself to the wisdom of trees and stones. Perhaps I’ll grok at least some of the things yet.

  • Mean

    What compels a person to be mean just to be mean?

    I am thinking of a couple of scenarios I’ve encountered lately, but when you dial back the vision and look at things 10k feet up in the sky, there seems to be a lot of mean-spirited shit going on at this time. Why?

    someone’s interpretation of Death of the Endless; unknown copyright, found online

    I mean, people are getting off on someone else’s misery as our country goes off the rails. And it isn’t just my country where certain people are reveling in the miserly of other people… There’s evidence of it all over the place in this world, like 00s 4chan took over everyone’s sensibilities. People are obsessed with keeping score on who pwn’d who.

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  • Thoughts on rewilding — 10 apr 25

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

    It often feels pretentious to talk about my thoughts around my path towards rewilding. I mean, who do I think I am to turn away from the norms and follow the trail deeper into the woods?

    It is also difficult to do so because I have rejected most of the labels people use.

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  • Another Half-Penny Thought

    I sometimes wonder what prompts people to answer questions which were never asked.

    I think back to myself, “Did I ask anyone about their preferences when it comes to pie? No. I only mentioned I had a slice of apple pie with my lunch.”

    And yet, someone tells me: “I am totally not an apple pie person, I can’t understand how anyone could ever eat apple pie because apple pie is gross.”

    I scratch my head and say the only thing that seems sensible to say:

    “Cool story, bro’.”

    I sometimes have to fight the urge to flash two thumbs up.

    Is it just me? Or do you encounter these kinds of random responses when you make otherwise neutral statements?

    It’s not as if I said, “Everyone must love apple pie! Apple pie is the best pie of all pies ever made! Fight me if you think otherwise!”