I think I'm being cheated out of the number of nights per week promised by the calendar. It says that there are six black lines between Sunday and Saturday, but I can only remember one or two of those. Those black lines are where I wind up the day, close up all memory recording and shut down for a little bit for some inactivity and R.E.M.. "Sleep Experts" say that you get those most REM sleep in the last hour of 8, so if you wake up an hour early, your brain is still all miswired and fragged. I remember it seeming like the last ten minutes of sleep were the best by far, especially when they were the tiny scraps raked together between floggings of the snooze button. That probably wasn't the gratitude of a body receiving concentrated doses of a nights big REM finish; it was more the sweetness of one last hit of crack (or whatever. Maybe crack is different. I don't know. Crack: poor metaphor for things)

I'm reading about songwriting. "Do not confuse poetry and song lyrics", it says. Poetry, it seems, is often too complex to be set to music. I wholeheartedly agree with this. In fact, I bet I can spot a song with poetry as lyrics a mile away. Long ago, as a shorter, younger beginning songwriter, I worried about formal training and methods getting in the way of creativity. Now I realize that this was a little like worrying that knowledge of spelling would get in the way of my creative writing. One good method of coming up with songs is standing in the middle of your room with your eyes closed and your hands clasped in front of you, humming random notes. (Actually, this is a terrible way to write songs.) Ok, instead of humming random notes, you visualize a shelf full of hit records never recorded. You take one off the shelf, slide it out of its sleeve, put it on your phantom turntable and hear it begin...

The songs I hear when I do this exercise tend to sound sort of like Bad Motley Beach Boy Religion Crue. Fortunately, there are many other ways to write songs (and this is not even the hokiest of them).

I ran out of case badges. I can't believe so many people are making new computers! Next time I design a badge graphic, I'm taking print gamut into account... this radioactive green just can't be represented on paper.

The only thing of value is a heart. If you have one... get rid of it.
    -- rules to the card game "hearts", a la "Way of the Gun"

m10 technope (782k mp3)