What I'm Reading...

In the March issue of Scientific American there's a well-written article about polyamory. After hearing it I gave it a lot of thought, and it's something that I think any rational person who doesn't have an axe to grind can agree with. I didn't learn anything new from it, but I think it covers the basics in a fair and rational way. Note that I'm looking at the poly community from the outside because I've never been allowed to get involved in it; I've been interested for a very long time, but with the romantic and close in partner life I've lived (so far, things can always change) I've been excluded from real, direct, on the ground experience.

It's way noisy here – banging, sawing, the dropping of objects that sound heavy; it started at six in the morning, woke me up from a deep sleep; that said, a bit of thumping and sawing and hammering is preferable to getting woken up by a water leak. Once this is done my next windmill will be my master half bath.

Other than those two things, everything is going along like it often does, and there's a chance of editing and factotum stuff today too.

Yesterday I put half down to get my roof replaced. This is a one step at a time type of thing, so first is the roof, then the ceiling in the master half bath and the improved insulation in the attic, then I'll move on to flooring issues and the countertops in the kitchen. Of course when my contractor picked me up to run to the bank to get a cashier's check for the half down the rain started as we were pulling into the parking lot of the bank. The time we spent inside was enough for the buckets to get filled so they could be poured on the city, so it was a soggy walk back to my front steps and into the house – I was wearing a light cotton tie-dyed dress, so I got skin soaked, but on the hand without Kung Fu grip it dried fast. Yesterday was also an infusion, so I was a bit out of it for most of the day.

I'm writing two albums on a single project at the same time; the first album is a collection of songs, the second involves multi-part suites. I've mentioned this before, and I'm still working on the second part of the first five-part suite on the second album, but I remember what I did for the third part – it's a descending bassline and a melody, and I got an inspiration yesterday when I realized that I could play that melody using a cello sound; the next mental step is to treat the entire section as a string ensemble, either a quartet (2 violins viola and cello) quintet (the quartet plus either a piano or double bass) or maybe six parts with both the piano and bass. The section is called "The Black Cat". And then there's section 4 – "The Witching Hour", which is reminiscent of earlier Tangerine Dream, with lots of note cycles blending and interacting with each other, along with a Morse code line too. I'm also working on other tunes from the first album, and my guitarist is a houseguest right now so he's getting ideas for things, including some significant changes to pieces we played decades ago; he says that he sees the tunes differently thanks to the effects of time and experience. I'm feeling some of the same things, so I think these will be interesting records.

Last week was a busy week for writing, so I'm taking a bit of a breather – I'm tempted to dive into Love Meme? 3: Ready, Set, Inaction starting on the first, but that'll depend on what else I'm devoting time to – writing a 100,000 word novel in thirty days takes a lot of focus and crowds out other things, so it's a matter of having the time to dive into it. I don't know that I'll post progress updates here like I've done for my other plotted 30 day novels – nobody comments on them, but that very well may be because I don't have many friends here at this journal site – I miss the dynamic communities I was a part of in the LJ and messaging systems, but those are gone so there's not much recourse anymore; and the current crop isn't making much if any attempt to include blind/V.I. folks, so their interfaces are a lot to too much to navigate.

Fender Music Manufacturing Group may have stepped in it big time, a vile puddle of filth that's deep enough to go all the way up to the crown of their heads. A lot of people are so bent out of shape at them they resemble gordian knots; the issue at hand is the body shape of the Stratocaster Leo Fender created, an iconic shape that the company is claiming was creative expression and as such should still have a valid copyright. The biggest problem with that stance is that they haven't said word boo about all the companies using the design and shape for seven decades, but now they're using cease and desist orders in the European Union. What makes this more complex is that the design is public domain in the USA. So far a minute number of people are cheering them on while the majority is swearing that they won't buy another new piece of Fender gear ever again, and that kind of bad will is not productive. The other big problem is that this is a typical post-enshittification move – Fender hasn't developed anything notable in decades, so the bean counters and legal folks are trying to drum up revenue this way. This is going to be an interesting fight to watch, and I hope the folks innocent of this whole affair don't get trampled in it. One of my custom guitars is of that body type, but it's bought and paid for and it's also almost 100% American made (nobody makes string tuners in America, but the rest is sourced from here), so it's off their litigious table.

Other than that, not much else going on right now. I hope this entry finds all of you well, and that all the hinky stuff misses you entirely.

The night before last I had a disturbing dream. It's clear I was down based on the content of the dream, and it involved things like me passing Dixie on to someone else because I was done – all the way done. The disturbing thing about the dream wasn't the content per se, it was my coping options after I woke up – thanks to several factors, including close friends getting demised and stuff, along with some collateral damage from me being so much more isolated, I had a head full of dream I wanted to process and nobody to discuss it with. Being an involuntary introvert due to reduced social options is a form of punishment for me, and this is part of the reason why I'm not sanguine about some of those connections getting sundered.

On the other hand, there's not much I can do about this problem, and of course it's not something those I still have around can grok, because I have an inordinate number of willing introverts in my semi-social circle.

This dream did an interesting job of illustrating the situation I'm in, while leaving me pretty much nothing to do about it; I don't care for information delivery systems that include the tag of "you can't do anything about this".