Sleep on it

Currently listening to and thanking God for Terry Callier. I can’t fathom the loss felt by his closest admirers at the time of his passing in 2012. He and his music were a rare gift. #WhatColorisLove #TerryCallier #soul and #jazz and other inexplicables permeate.

Created a playlist on Spotify. Jazz, outsider club sounds, and much more, in thirty tracks. Enjoy.

— Nick

Hi there. 

So, I’m currently lying stomach-down on the floor of my room, writing something (this post, actually)—which is the kind of thing I normally do, except the words get texted out to a good friend of mine who has less time on his hands than I have; but I’ll cut to the chase. Some time ago, I started this tumblr with the idea that it may become useful one day. I believe that day—the day before my thirtieth birthday—has come.

At present I have two followers. To one of them: thank you for putting up with the silence. I will endeavor to be less silent from now on. To the other: I’ll try to text less and write/post/draw/whatever more and just make it public. I often talk about how unafraid I am about sharing my work, and it’s time I lived up to those words. Here’s to more and better things.

- Nick

PS: Here’s a snap from a recent notebook entry, part of a spate in which I’ve been working out a story that first came to me in fevered images during the early stages of flu. The flu is gone, the madness has not left me. Enjoy.

[Edited Feb. 15, 2018]

No Claude-Lorrain sky lights my path, save in the low rent rooms of my huddled and slowly-recovering memory, but that is plenty. A life is compressed there, flickering amid the unknowable gap of an endless field. From one session to the next, the memories change—their shape, their order, their feeling—but there is one that surfaces, like oil on water, to borrow a line from Cervantes, and it is changeless.

This room buzzes, brisk, with dappled halos of rose-petal fuzz, like the background of an old movie-star glamor shot. I am lying down and through dandelion seeds of light I see them: a pair of green-gray pearls that should belong only to dreams and the youthful distortions of love’s true nature. There is a voice, too—I know there is—but it is confused and fleeting, so that when I turn to identify the speaker, there is no one, only the numinous outline of a someone, and thoughts; they are hazy and inexplicably musical. A piece by Henry Purcell, I think…

…Z. 379 ‘If music be the food of love, sing on’.