Scratch Pad: Pessoa, Foghorns, Corey

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ A bit of Fernando Pessoa after a very quiet three-day weekend, and as I’ve heard there’s something of a Brazilian social media diaspora underway:

I contemplate the silent pond
Whose water is stirred by a breeze.
Am I thinking about everything,
Or has everything forgotten me?

▰ The foghorns of the San Francisco Bay are doing Jaws karaoke again

▰ Me to my guitar teacher: “Instead of me trying to learn a new song at the same time as I am trying to learn to play it, how about I learn to play a song I already know well?”

Also apparently me to my guitar teacher, unwittingly: “How about I choose a song that changes from 4/4 to 2/4 briefly whenever it wants, and in which the melody is almost never the root note of the chord at the given time.”

▰ We’ve entered consecutive week 662 of the Disquiet Junto — which has been running since January 2012 — and I’m still astounded when within hours of the music prompt going out, recordings begin to pop up online.

▰ Yesterday in the car I got a Silver Alert on my phone at the same moment the driver got one and we were at a stoplight so after we turned off our alerts I could still hear the same alert klaxon ringing from the phone of the driver in the car next to the one I was in

▰ I was practicing on my parlor acoustic guitar and it was making the weirdest noise, a raspy resonance I’d never heard from it before, and I figured out that the snap on my shirt sleeve was resting near the bridge and ever so lightly vibrating. And yes, I’ll be recording, amplifying, and otherwise employing this analog effect in the future.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, James S. A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods. Corey is the name for the two authors who also wrote the Expanse books (and TV series).