#afternoonrant

Why can’t I run around in the snow and build stuff.

Why can’t I feel the same excitement again like when I was a child as the first snow came.

Why is adulthood so heavy and why do we have to schedule joy so it fits our calendars and can’t just live it.

There is a lot of ‘neo’ and ‘post’ prefixes attached to words that are hard to define even today. In literature what is ‘modernism’? It’s difficult to define without listing off examples of works one would define as modernism and that always comes with the caveat that someone else won’t come in and say, “Really, I find author XXX to be more YYY”. When you add in the above prefixes it serves to exponentially confuse the meaning.

-You have the root word that’s hard to define.

-You have the examples that are hard to fit into the containers of style and genre.

-Then you have the prefix that sends the above two points into a spiral that will cause endless disagreement.

It’s great. It shows the layers of perception, objective, opinion and the difficulty of logically defining the human condition through art. It’s okay to go “What the fuck is this mess and what the fuck are you talking about?” so long as we all do it civilly. 

I like albums. I like listening to a full plate of an artists music. All albums are concept albums if they’re put together at certain point in time with a certain mindset and a certain song order is chosen for them. If all of the songs are set behind some kind of memorable cover art it’s loosely a concept.

The way we consume music today is on a track by track basis. I’m getting older,meaning I’m not 22, so I’m hesitant to accept this new music paradigm. 

But I do. Or at least I try.

I’ve remarked in the past that you have to accept and respect the form of media the music is set on. Listening to music on cassettes is different than listening to music on CDs. You’re forced to listen to songs in order on cassette unless you really want to do some work. When CDs were in the their heyday you had this hidden and secret tracks that are ANNOYING when listening to music digitally. But when a new album on CD didn’t have a secret track I was disappointed. 

“This in some form or another was sitting in my early draft list and I could never get around to really write something about it, so here it is in it’s unfinished form with a 10 finger stretch explanation about why or why not”

All the stuff that was on my mind to do at the moment was listed here. I probably had some silly thing to say about organizing consumption but I didn’t get around to that. My day to day reading and watching habits change so much though I don’t think I could really create any kind of to do list that I’d actually follow. Better to go with the flow.

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I find I need to write to do lists for my extracurricular activities, like reading, watching film and tv, writing ect, as much as I have to write to do lists for work.

If I don’t I basically float about and don’t get anything done. Tonight for example has to go to: 

-reading about a spa in my backyard that needs to be cleaned

-Finishing a full chapter from Thinking in Systems: A Primer

-Re-reading a paper about complexity

-Watching an episode of Agents of Shield

-Watching one of the Oscar nominated documentaries I have saved on Netflix

-Finishing two Age of Apocalypse series’ (X-Calibre and Factor X I think)

-tidying the house

-Not getting behind in Libra the Delillo novel I’m reading right now

-Also I need to finish Pretty Deadly Vol 2 and the Fade Out

-Write/Edit/Transform the note from Manchester in Sea into an essay

-Finish the Not Part of Your Scene Newsletter

These 10 finger stretches require a minimum amount of thinking but it’s still thinking and sometimes I only have the base of what I want to write, or perhaps I have an idea of what I want to write but the meat needs some thought. Sometimes all I have is a title. 

What that effectively means is I have a lot of half written, notes only written or titles only written drafts sitting around. So the next few days I’m going to release those to the wild, titles unchanged but with a short explanation...just for the hell of it.

I’ll preface each one with:

“This in some form or another was sitting in my early draft list and I could never get around to really write something about it, so here it is in it’s unfinished form with a 10 finger stretch explanation about why or why not”

I didn’t give Underworld a great review by the time I had finally slogged through it. Maybe it’d be different now that I’ve read Libra and am currently reading The Body Artist. 

Underworld felt like an epic of nothingness to me at the time. In a lot of ways it probably still is that, an epic of nothingness. But I also might see it as DeLillo unchained, just his writing style allowed to go all over the place and do what it wants when it wants coming in and out of American stories.

It took me awhile to realize this but alcohol makes me lazy. I’ll have to start scheduling drinks when I’m not doing something analytic or creative (or both).