Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 12

Frequencies: Updated / Mower Keys: Still Lost

Might as well get the return stuff out of the way here (since this is, apparently, what I'm thinking about this morning): this daily return is born not out of some need to escape social media or whatever but out of a simple desire to try new things (or, I suppose, old things in a new way) and centralize all of my writing – my ongoing public thinking / expression of self – in one spot. Alternatively: if I'm going to talk to myself / think out loud in public, I'd rather it be in a form I enjoy and prefer. Turning 40 does have a way of reorienting one's communicative priorities.

(As for what will be in this space, I've no clue. Settle for "all sorts of things" as they strike my fancy in this post-breakfast, pre-run interregnum.)

Updated Frequencies:

A new Informality arrives here, at PARENTHETICAL RECLUSE, daily. (RSS)

THE SOCIALIZED RECLUSE, my interview podcast featuring conversations with interesting people who make interesting things, arrives whenever it arrives, but usually on Wednesdays. Monthly, more or less. (RSS | Apple Podcasts)

MACROPARENTHETICALS, my similarly monthly – more or less – email newsletter, invades subscribers' inbox the last Sunday of every month, as well as whenever new SOCIALIZED RECLUSE interviews or other nifty exclusive and/or early things arrive. You can sign up here, if so inclined.

The best way to contact me is via email: tww(AT)parentheticalrecluse(DOT)com.

The mower keys remain missing and I am utterly baffled as to where they've vanished. Current operating theory: somewhere in this house there's a Stargate portal specifically designed to move locations as soon as I come close to finding it, just to fuck with me, because the middle finger of missing keys is always extended.

On that “Omnipresent Unease”

Yesterday was my wife's first day of school with the children and, as I wrote then, hers is one of the few districts in the county (a county with 36.5% of its population fully vaccinated) with a mask mandate, a mandate which, it would seem, caused no uncertain amount of strife on the part of anti-mask parents who profess to being "pro-choice" – the irony of which cannot be understated.

My (fully jabbed and masked) wife would die for her students – even the assholes: that she's placed, continuously, in a situation where the ability to fulfill her calling puts her at greater risk of that death – be it via plague or via gun – to appease the beliefs of sloganeering fuckwits is infuriating; that the local newspaper is brimming with references to "smiling faces" and resentment-filled headlines speaking of "like it used to be" only compounds it: in a land where the motto is "Keeping tradition a part of our future," the only tradition left is the increased likelihood of having no future at all.

A note from myself to myself on a morning when I feel like I’ve hoped to feel

Grey skies, certainly, but only outside – and, though I know that this sensation (or lack thereof) is one brought on in pill form, this is how I’ve hoped to feel: neither elated nor numb, just here, doing my thing. Able to concentrate, to focus, truly, for the first time in years.

But I also know that, thanks to insurance, this is could – and probably will – change. Perhaps irrevocably but perhaps not, perhaps for the better, perhaps otherwise.

But I’m prepared for it. No choice, really.

Writing this Informality, then, as a way to remind myself that I am capable of getting here, to this space where I don’t feel guilt for doing what I love and where, even though I have no clue where this story is going and have only an opening line ahead of a self-inflicted deadline less than two weeks away, I am, nonetheless, enjoying myself for the first time in years: I have no imagined fictions and caricatures of past and future perturbations screaming at me with every word I think, with every word I type – or, if they are there, they’re nonetheless quieted to the point that I can simply be and do. My blood sugar is normal for the first time in over a year and my nerves over the afternoon’s interview are settled: I’m ready to listen, I’m ready to learn.

Writing this to myself as a record of when I reached a point where I was ok with being myself, a record what it, this wonderful quiet, felt like. I’ve gotten to this space once now, breaking through the illusions of my mind’s perceived notions; I can do it again – I can make it the regular, default baseline rather than a joyous exception.

Totally off the subject, but I started replaying CRIMSON SKIES (thanks GamePass) last night and that game is still fun – and beautiful – as hell. A remaster/remake would be most welcome.

Listening: OCEAN SONGS (REMASTERED), by Dirty Three

On Afternoons

Writing this with a Jorkie on my lap and thinking - more than I should, probably - about my afternoons, those hotbeds of self-recrimination, depletion of self-respect, and general ennui. Efforts to fill those with another workblock of The Main Project useless: tried yesterday and ended up deleting everything I had scrounged in this morning’s session.

Moving forward, though, with another way: since I’ll be recording tomorrow’s GROUND LOOP this afternoon, I’ll start using the block for side projects - stories, RE/EMERGENCE tales, and other - perhaps scripty - things - that aren’t necessarily beholden to my intractable requirements for repeatability and allow me to let other parts of my brain roam free.

When I reach the point with Main where more time is required, I will, of course, use that afternoon block for it (as I’ll use the morning chunk for sides, should their end be in reach); however, at this point, I think it’s better to use that postprandial time for moving smaller things forward, spinning the side dish plates, as it were, in addition to the Main platters.

On GEARS / On TENET, with blips

Finished the third game in the GEARS OF WAR series, the first trilogy of the saga: tears, as per series usual at the game’s all is lost section (see last week’s TGL for initial reaction), and, after a bit of trepidation at the outset of the game, a feeling of completion, accomplishment, and that particular satisfaction at having taken part in a great story well told - even if it took me ten years to find that magic - and heart. So very worth it.

(Let it be stated here that few things depress me more than a great story poorly told.)

Speaking of: tried watching TENET but a.) I fell asleep (which isn’t saying much these days) and b.) HBOMax was in stutter mode, rendering the film nigh-unwatchable and causing us to cancel our viewing. Most likely outcome: will rewatch from the start, but, if what I saw holds - and I truly hope it doesn’t -, it’s by far my least favorite Nolan film (with some of his best action sequences), the director having climbed so far up his own ass that his trademark steely-cold, detached gaze on everything has been rendered a parody of itself.

Kirby is now three months old. The day awaits.

Proof of Existence, 03-08may2021

Trying to wrap my hands around flam rudiments. They were bastards in my previous percussive life and continue in this present effort at personal re-education. Anyhow, this is what I’ve written and said this week:

Misplaced Confidence / Endo-bound, 03may2021.

Cereal / First Thunder / Intuitive Creative Permission, 04may2021.

THE GROUND LOOP, Ep0003 - What haven’t you tackled, creatively, that you’d like to try?, 05may2021.

Wrist-Cyborg Fadeth / Tech Updates, 06may2021.

Replenishing a Mind Numbed, Kinda, 07may2021.

We have entered the teething phase…, 08may2021.

See you tomorrow.

We have entered the teething phase...

…farewell: puppy teeth, table legs, slippers, shoes, pedals, writing desks, desk desks, carpet sides, carpet corners, carpet interiors, chair legs, human legs, plant life, huchera, vegetation, mulch, rocks (ok maybe not those), drumsticks, stick sticks, pond piping, pergola frames, rope, couch leather, couch fabric, blankets, towels, magazines, book spines (sorry bottom-shelf dwellers, I still love you), kettlebells, dumbbells, bell bells, crockery, crockpots, baskets, barrels, pots, pans, food bowls, ceramic frogs, terracotta frogs, garden gnomes…

Mem: invest in Kong as we should’ve done with paper towels during housebreaking. Puppy teeth NFT FFS WTF LALALA

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Replenishing a Mind Numbed, Kinda

Rather intelligently, I think, composing this after the dog-children eat in a flurry of play-growling, toy thievery (while educating dog-children in the nuances of tug) and bouncing a la goats or somesuch barnyard animal. Kirby’s efforts to scale the couch continue - though, if he doesn’t think about it, he can make it in a single bound.

Life lesson in there, probably.

Forward motion being made on The Work in my pre-breakfast working time. Embracing the weird, Realizing - no, accepting - that my issue is not from not getting to work in the afternoons but in it being so long between morning workblocks: too much time for that self respect gauge to deplete, particularly in otherwise mind-numbing afternoons - though, by that point, I’m so exhausted that I barely have a mind to exhaust, just an emotion to invade.

Note: work on making afternoons and evenings about refueling and replenishing, not further depletion and opportunities for the invasion of bad mental actors.

Wrist-Cyborg Fadeth / Tech Updates

Dear Apple Watch,

I tried.

But, Series 3, you’re just not what I need right now, not in the least because, as The Verge so ably put it, Updating an Apple Watch Series 3 is a nightmare in 2021 and I lack the monastic patience to partake in that particular endless and thankless process.

Plus, I found that I just prefer capture notes in my cheap memo pads with my Fisher space pen (and retrofitted clip from a Pentel Sharp pencil). Easier for me to process the loose capturings on tear-off pages, even if my handwriting is shit.

But, I did order a Casio G-shock GA-700-1BCR, because I do miss wearing a watch and need one that I won’t destroy (I love watches and have a penchant for demolishing them; might as well get the “fallout shelter” iteration of a watch - if I fuck this one up, I can consider myself done with wrist-based time-telling).

Back to using the Samson q2u dynamic mic for pods: have to have the gain too high on the condenser mic - and the intemperate temperature of my office seems to have fried the cardioid pickup. But that’s OK: the condenser mic was an experiment, I didn’t pay much for it, and I’ve found that I prefer the way my voice sounds with the warhorse of the q2u. Used it on the latest GROUND LOOP episode.

The dog-children demand sustenance. On with the day.

Cereal / First Thunder / Intuitive Creative Permission

Endo appointment was a typical one, a case study in the fine line one must walk between sacrificing just enough and sacrificing too much: T1D, I’ve found in my almost five years with it, is nothing if not a perpetual balancing act, a give and take, between living and staying alive.

(You will not take my breakfast cereal: this is a line that shall not be crossed.)

Kirby endured his first thunderstorm in a melange of abject terror and chewtoy coping while I passed a significant threshold in The Work: 12,000 words… cut.

But: there is forward momentum, diving deeper into the tale, bit by bit. Reached a point where I was comfortable doing so, apparently having crossed that Saunders-threshold of the positive-negative meter (he writes of it briefly somewhere on the web, and at length in A SWIM IN THE POND IN THE RAIN) which gave my brain / instinct permission to continue forth.

A modicum of intuitive permission? Sounds about right. Maybe the goal is to add to that permission each day - a little bit further into the water, as Mr. Bowie would say.

Recording THE GROUND LOOP’s return this afternoon; you can find earlier episodes here.

Listening: DROPSONDE, by Biosphere… SIGNALS IV-V-VI, by Sabled Sun.