Scratch Pad: CD-R, E, Books
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ There was a period of time during which I’d receive “dark ambient” releases on CD-Rs and it felt totally appropriately futuristic and now I receive “dark ambient” releases on CD-Rs and it feels totally appropriately retro
▰ I love how an “E” rating for music means “Explicit” but an “E” rating for video games means “Everybody”
▰ My guitar teacher: “I know you know this.”
Me: “There are different meanings to the word ‘know.'”
▰ My browser (Safari) keeps triggering websites to think I’m not me, and I must repeatedly pass tests. Today such a test involved sliding a jigsaw piece to complete a puzzle. Several times I mistakenly thought this meant to slot the piece next to the one it fit alongside, not filling the evident hole.
▰ I finished reading four books this week: two graphic novels and two non-fiction. The graphic novels were Mark Millar’s Kings of Spies (about an aged secret agent exacting revenge at an institutional if not societal level), which I mostly appreciate for having reminded me of how talented illustrator Matteo Scalera is, and Samir Dahmani’s Seoul Before Sunrise, a watercolor-rich story about a lonely college student in Korea grappling with growing up and apart. The two non-fiction books were Susie Ibarra’s Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm (my review will appear soon in The Wire) and Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which I read for a funny reason, which is I thought it was by a different author, but I stuck with it when I recognized my error. It’s well-written, if loosely so, like a series of public journal entries. More importantly, I have long agreed with its conclusion, which she mostly attributes to Alan Watts, whom I’ve only read a little of (a smidgen of The Way of Zen, which I should get back to). In May’s words, “When we endlessly ruminate over distant times, we miss extraordinary things in the present moment.” More easily said than done, certainly, but worth ruminating on.
