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September 28, 2002
mark thomas This is the time of year when my self-esteem makes its annual retreat. September and October. It's like clockwork. Individual days start to feel like a total waste, and meaningful things never seem to materialize. I go out walking at all hours, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. I can't tell if it's worse this year, or if the sarcastically encroaching state of solitude that I find myself in just makes it seem different. Sleeping until after 1:00pm, like I did today, goes a long way toward making any day feel like a waste. I don't know what got into me last night but I couldn't sleep so I thought I'd get my trusty Aero inflatable air mattress out of the closet and sleep out in the living room. I used the air mattress a couple of times after I bought it 2 or 3 years ago, just for the hell of it. But I mostly use it for guests, which are rare. The sun was already coming up by the time I started to get to sleep. I've stayed up through the sun rise many many times this year, but I don't think I could ever get used to it. It always makes me panic with a feeling that I've gone too far.
I think I came up with a slightly better recording of that Scriabin Etude in C# Minor today. It's a funereal piece, written when Scriabin was quite young. I still need to settle on the proper pace, and I need to try harder to express the crooning middle voices without distorting them. But as I said before, nuance is not one of the strong suits of my Roland digital piano. You can't blame the piano, though. I haven't done a lot of recording in a while, and I forgot how grueling it can be trying to get something right. Even with an easy piece like this, sometimes you just have to play the thing over and over and over. It's so much easier in performance or when it feels like you're communicating. Recording in a little room can be pretty grim, especially while trying to manage all the audio equipment and software.
I was at the grocery store today and I saw this guy, whose picture has been somewhere in the back reaches of this web site for about a year and a half. I didn't say anything to him. What was I supposed to say? "You haven't changed." Well, that would be accurate -- he looked exactly the same as in that picture -- but for a second I felt like the Robin Williams character in "One Hour Photo." I haven't seen that movie, just the commercials for it, so all I know is that Robin Williams plays a photo developer who keeps copies of the pictures people bring to his store to get developed. If I was genuinely crazy, and not just pretending, I'd have followed the guy home and, having figured out where he lives, I'd go home and print out copies of that picture of him and litter the front door of his apartment building with dozens of copies. Then, right at his front door I'd set up a table where I would sell copies of that picture in numerous formats: 4x6, 8x11, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, coffee mugs. I'd start an industry based on this guy's face, and I'd do it right in front of him. Or maybe I'd do it in a remote place. Maybe I'd go back to Nebraska and, on Main Street of some reasonably well-populated town I'd set up my table with hundreds of items, all of them bearing that guy's face. Stickers, mousepads, Rubik's Cubes, pencils and ball point pens, coasters, flatware. « Channel 222 • sorabji.com • A Good Burp of Gibberish »
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