Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 44

In the days after Sunset Electronica

[image error]Photo © Zlikovec – Dreamstime.com

(A conversation in a world after the devices stopped working.)

The Printer grinned an ironic grin.

“See, now, there’s the whole point. The printed forum was a place where the community gathered, and people wrote their piece, and views were exchanged with a common respect,” he said, recalling the times before the times before theirs. “As it all sped up and the words grew more careless and it all began to blink and beep, the impulse replaced the carefully...

Choose how you react

“Choose to have the right attitude, and you choose success,” Scott Alexander wrote the other day. It’s an oft-repeated thought: You can’t control what happens sometimes, but you always can control how you react.

Not that it’s easy — what happens can be infuriating or heartbreaking or unintentionally funny, and your first impulse may be to lash out or burst into tears or laugh out loud in, say, a funeral parlor — but you can (and often should) control that impulse.

There was the day, ...

That box again, like I did last summer

I was reading along and came upon that phrase again: “Do not be afraid to sometimes think outside the box.”

It reminded me I was going to write a book called There Is No Box, once upon a time. Because the whole idea of thinking outside the box is to push out the sides of an imaginary box and wait a minute it’s imaginary isn’t it? Ipso facto ergo e pluribus unum, There Is No Box.

I started collecting blog posts along those lines and started shuffling and reshuffling, and by the time I...

Words and music and words about music

I restrung the 12-string guitar on Sunday. First I took the nine old strings off and wiped the dust from my old friend, who had been hanging on the wall for a long time.

Something had made me wait. I looked up at her more than once in all this time, and I would take her six-stringed companion down for a few minutes now and then, but the 12-string Ensenada hung up there, the new pack of strings tucked behind the old, waiting.

I was astonished when I figured out exactly how long she had ...

Take back the time

Is that enough, muse? Am I finished writing for this morning? Say it ain’t so; say I can keep writing as long as I wish, say I can sing all day. Say I can stay in this chair and shape words and music and life into being and immerse myself in uncanny universes and special moments.

Out there is unknown something-or-other, out there is — but hang on, out there is out there, filled with other universes with stories to tell, people for whom something-or-other is not unknown and understand how ...

The gift of the wind chimes

I pause in my morning visit with my journal to breathe, to listen to the wind chimes outside my window, and to feel the warm coffee flow down my throat to warm my entrails.

The wind chimes are in the background almost always, because we live on a windy hill, and the song is always the same, infinite in its variety and comforting because no matter how the wind blows is the promise of music — the world’s energy not exactly harnessed but borrowed (perhaps) to find music in the gentlest breez...

The awesome explosion

I have come up with a new simile to describe myself lately. It can be yours.
Every day I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The land mine is me.
After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
Now, it’s your turn. Jump!

— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Boom.

He jumped out of bed and saw the possibilities, all scattered and beautiful and stretching out to the horizon.

No, don’t go picking them up and examining them to death, he thought to himse...