Fark. Two days straight. I'm always amazed at time's relationship to usage. You use, time flies by. You stop using and time crawls, at least at first.
I know it's subjective, but as someone said, subjectivity is all any of us have.
Also - major RAID barf-up. I have lost .9TB of data. Perhaps 800 movies, 15000 songs, and most importantly , everything I ever wrote that I didn't push online.
I have to take from this that RAID is not sufficient alone as a backup mechanism. Especially if you spend every cent on gear and don't replace failing hard drives.
On my regular holiday from Moan, after another predictable 1am storm off. The futility of us hits me the most at those wee hours. When I realise the gear's worn off and she's really just a stranger lying next to me who shares certain behavioural patterns as I. I know that's a harsh way of looking at a relationship.
Uh oh. I've been listening to Kings of Leon for the last half hour whilst I wash up in between study bouts. My RAID loss took all my music with it, only leaving some downloaded albums that I hadn't bothered to move to the RAID, as I'd downloaded them for S.
Ooops. I've been chiding S for a year now, often in my most childish of ways, hands over ears when she tries to put a KoL CD on in the car, yes really, and often I have thought to myself - "She liked Crass when she was 18, how did she get here (liking KoL)? We walked the same path roughly this last decade and more, I didn't see this divergence."
So I guess it really ties in with what I discard as 'bad' music. And sometimes that's as trivial as the fact that they're on high-rotation on one of the more nauseating commercial stations that S listens to every morning. Nova, to be precise. Everything I hate in radio - formulaic, management driven radio-as-a-product. A calculated ratio of ages, genders and personalities distilled into a lifeless simulacrum of what Zed does better in its worst moments.
Sure, I'm biased. I see commercial radio as an evil up there with lack of education and not paying for polluting.
But there's a good reason. I don't believe anything useful comes from such formulas. They're a product like Coco Pops. Appealing and frothy, no fibre. Every dystopia I've read about - the Morlocks, Brave New World, Fforde's zeppelin Wales - all started with uncontrolled breakfast radio.
Anyway, I digress (I rant, actually). But I'm listening to KoL. And I'm thinking of a guy, JG, who loves this band and is definitely not a mainstream player. So maybe there's something to it. I would classify the genre as 'fuck-rock' - literally, music best listened to when you're 19 in bed with your 17 year old girlfriend and the world is unknown.
Unknown. Seven lovely letters. Us, Ks, Ws. You don't often see then together, but here they converge to tell us the one thing in life worth living for.
Life as a process of converting Unknown into Known (U to the mother*& K!). Sometimes I see myself as an earthworm, taking in sensory input, data, reactions to my output (basically the unknown) and excreting Known.
So that worm sits in my mind, and it gets lazy, like all life-processes. After a while it starts to pattern-recognise everything. 'Oh, seen that before'. 'Oh, know what's going to happen here.'. And it starts to believe that nothing will ever come along and surprise it. (No surprise that we're biologically designed to have kids at around that point, eh? What greater fresh-input for a bored mind than new lifeforms with a unique view on the world).
Like a fork, I digress.
This worm inside my head races amphetamine driven on that purest drug, straightness. Lack of gear, no greater energy source for me. Thoughts come unbidden to my front door, knock but then race off before I get a chance to open the door and invite them in.
I fear re-reading this page will be not unlike that time when I was 21 and smoked hash in Kathmandu and tripped for a day off a spot and wrote down the cure to the worlds' ills on a piece of paper, and of course I couldn't understand my scratchings the next morning.
But that for a day I did believe....