When all the weapons are silent
———————————
What will the Glorious Fourth be like
when all the weapons are silent?
Will fireworks mimic the shrieks of the dying,
the hiss and bubble of burning flesh?
Will a rocket fly moaning into the sky
to break with a dying gasp?
Ladies and germs, allow me to present the new flag
of the United States of Perpetual Warfare:
green for oozing pus, black for charred bone,
red and yellow for bloody vomit.
Nearly seven years ago I was writing my last epic fan-fic novel, Borrowed Time. Hashmark Pin, the world’s smallest hacker (though very tall for a Borrower) travels from northern California to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in search of love and a purpose in life. He finds it all.
I was also re-obsessed with music, having discovered the world of tracking. While Hash was stranded in Topeka, unable to move on for most of a year, I attempted to create a short tone poem that would evoke a sad longing, with images of trains passing by in the night. The piece, called Kansas Nights, turned out well, IMO.
Last night I put together a video using that bit of computer-generated music and a montage of railroad photos and fractals. It’s not too bad, though I would like to have found some better images. I could, but it would be easier to write another 187,000-word novel than get pernission to use dozens of photos that are not in the public domain.
So here it is:
Borrowed Time is no longer available on the web because of a character (who shouldn’t have been in it) whom I do not want exposed in his original incarnation. Fan-fic about Borrowers is a dubious commodity as well. Wottever.
Composed in MODPlug Tracker with original computer-gernerated sounds, Kansas Nights is perhaps not everyone’s cuppa. It depends on what you come expecting. Let the sound flow through your head with the images, let it be what it is. After all these years, I still like it.
I live on a peninsula carved out of solid stone by glaciers, long ago. Stone has been quarried extensively in this area for building. Once there were many stone masons here; they are a rare breed now. Knowing one gives me interesting opportunities for exercising my cinematographomania.
It was raining off and on, but I took my chances and though I got a bit damp and cold, I managed to capture some real “rockin'” action. This is a small sample that I threw together. I’m saving the “building the pyramids” scenes, in which they maneuver the big ones, for later. This is a low-quality video too; the original is better.
The flagstones are up to 6 feet wide, and only a few inches thick. They are laid on fine gravel. Fitting them together and making the entire surface level requires an enormous amount of strength, patience, and care. This is true craftsmanship. Art is nothing without it.
Still obsessed with video. I’ve collected enough software to sink the hd of my first computer several times over. SilentBob bears it all uncomplainingly. Edit, convert, edit, save; my bitty movies are piling up. The duds get deleted — I DO sometimes get rid of useless things. Sometimes.
The third edit of Brick Geek, an opportunistic documentary starring a bricklaying friend, is my best work so far. Though far from a masterpiece, it has some good moments. I worked hard to get the timing right. A lot of work for a mite short of four minutes of final product :).
I would upload it, but the star is out of town and I don’t want to be rude. Meanwhile, a nice, if sloppy, flower and music vid is up on Youtube: A Walk in the Garden. You can’t smell the roses. 🙁
Update on an earlier post — I see by my site log that I’m not the only one who had a problem with MSE’s mpminisigstub.exe (and Comodo firewall). I still don’t know why the unpleasantness ended, which program gave in first. Doesn’t matter much. I fired MSE a couple of weeks ago because it did the unforgivable again. It rudely and peremptorily snatched harmless files away from me, with no hope of recovery unless I have them on a backup CD. Nothing does that to me and gets away with it.
I still recommend it for know-nothing users; it will protect them from even the stuffed tigers, so no harm is done. I just isn’t suitable for ornery old granny-hackers who refuse to run as admin.
It’s an established fact around here. Actually it’s fading rapidly into summer.. I gathered a few of my accumulated photos and a piece of music that I cobbled up several years ago — and recently edited — to make another practice video. It’s not too bad.
It’s been some time since I went into Obsession Mode with ModPlug Tracker and cranked out dozens of odd bits of music. I’m getting musical again, so watch out. My favorite piece, Kansas Nights, is high on my video to-do list.
Long ago I took a filmmaking course at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. The campus was embryonic in those days. I learned the basic tricks of cinematography with an enthusiastic instructor and a close friend who was mad about animating dinosaurs.
Now, in the digital age, like everyone else, I have a camera that can take both still shots and movies. Until a few days ago I had not gotten around to exploiting my little Canon’s moviemaking abilities. It took the cumulative effect of various upgrades some time to sink in. Suddenly it hit me: Oh, I can do this — I have enough drive space, Windwoes will not hork up because I have sufficient RAM for every process, I have a decent video card. I can eff around!
And so I have been effing around. I am pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Canon PowerShot A550’s performance. IMO it does very well, for an affordable (barely, on my budget, when I got it) point-and-shoot. Of course all depends on the steadiness of my hand and the readiness of my eye, with a good measure of luck thrown in. Anyhoot, the short movie clips I’ve shot so far are at least good enough to play with.
I have lost my YouTube virginity.
I shot these iris pans during a long insomnia session this morning, stitched them together, and uploaded before I crashed. The original shots are much better quality, but bandwidth is a resource that I believe should be used judiciously.
Or — since the embed seems reluctant to function for me right now — Morning Irises
The flowers are just around the corner from my house. The sound is what I live with.
It was a day.
The worst of it is not knowing what happened. I remember starting out on the walk back home, I know what direction I was headed. I had thought I could get through that maze of streets. Even if I had to cut through a back yard or two, it should have been possible to make a shortcut to where I was going.
The maze turned out to be more impenetrable than I remembered. There were also dogs. I had to backtrack.
Then things get weird. I was again walking in the right direction, but I was a couple of blocks on the wrong side of a street that I should never have crossed and don’t remember crossing. I know that street. It is the one I should have gone down instead of trying to angle away from it toward my destination. It has several times as much traffic as the side streets that balked me; I always have to wait to cross it. There are familiar landmarks everywhere; I do not remember passing them. There are no streets in the right places. How did I get that far off?
The longest and worst stretch of the walk was still ahead of me. When I finally got to the top of the hill, my home and my workplace were equally distant. I figured if I went home first, it would be too long before I felt like walking that one extra block. So I took the shortest route to JAK’s Place and revved up a computer to do the newsletter mailing labels. I went home a couple of hours later, after planting some sick looking cucumbers.
Several hours and a short nap later, I’m still wondering where I was. I’ve been looking at maps, crawling over it with google Earth. It’s imposible. But it happened.
I think I have watched too many episodes of The United States of Tara in too short a time.
Holy moly, the spam count has risen lately. I have a shneaking suspicion that it has to do with integrating my blog with Facef^ck and Twitter. ‘Sall right, Akismet sorts it out beautifully.
The really sad part is that there haven’t been any funny random-phrase posts. They can be so much fun! Lines like “I shouldn’t be surprizing so hard at that” give me a case of the tickles. Yeah, I’m easily amused.
Whatever the minor consequences — including loss of time — I’ve been enjoying Twitter. It keeps me more on top of a lot of news and a bit more in touch with more people.
In the garden now:
Yes, again. I paid for a good night’s sleep and all I got was a 2-hour nap. This is worse than usual; four hours is more typical. All you normals out there, please don’t bombard me with suggestions for how to overcome insomnia. NONE OF IT IS RELEVANT. Most of it is old wives’ tales, AFAIC, and the best of it comes off as horribly patronizing. I am not mentally impaired, not inexperienced, not ignorant. I am very aware of what is going on in my own mind and body, accustomed to finding my own solutions to problems, and my success record tops anythig medical professionals have tried to perpetrate on me.
My sleep irregularity has roots unfathomable. It is an irregular irregularity, a chaotic cycle that has no truly predictable pattern. I can often tiptoe around it and achieve some apparent success by timing and regulating my food intake — but there are no guarantees. A day filled with healthy outdoor activity, ending with a light snack at the proper time, and no big worries, may result in too-short sleep, while a good night of 6+ hours may follow a low-down day with a heavy afternoon nap. It’s my body and it’s fucked up. Always has been, always will be. You don’t have my genes or my background, so shut TF up. BS me no BS.
In my early years, my sleep was often disrupted or delayed by my immature parents’ screaming battles. That certainly had its effect on establishing a pattern, or lack of it. However, it’s been a long time since then. 3am is a peaceful time here and now. I am in control of my own life — as much as anyone can be.
Yesterday I could understand the short night. Although I worked hard and could, by “normal” standards, expect to sleep soundly, I anticipated an unusual schedule, and that left a back door open for unconscious sabotage. It was no surprise to suffer what I call the four-hour curse. Today, with no fixed appointments ahead of me, no restraints, a good feeling following a pleasant conversation, I expected something better than a two-hour nap after staying up until after midnight (going to bed earlier is a guarantee of short sleep for me). Yesterday was productive, too. I earned a good sleep. I didn’t get it.
So here I am, having a beer or two and blogging before dawn. There’s a good morning’s sleep ahead, with my head buried under a pillow. If you love your life, don’t call me.
For your irrelevant amusement, here’s my latest desktop screenshot, featuring a bit of my own front yard:
A short excerpt from Chapter 14 of A Drum Is Empty:
The long tassel of his hair, tied securely by Jesumi, flopped against his shoulders when he turned his head to gawk at his fine companions. It all seemed like a dream. Who was this newborn stranger inside his skin? Certainly not the bad-luck boy who had fled from the Bull band. Ratovin-scatovin, son of Nobody, was no longer. Nor was he the prancing child who made his mother laugh even longer ago. He had entered a third phase, with a future full of unforeseen promise.
Three is a magic number; he could not know what it might bring, but he was ready for any– Woh! He made a hopping recovery from a stumble. Ears hot, he paid more attention to the ground ahead of his feet.