nyyki

My editor, lanalucy, told me before we started an editing session today that Michaels is taking the retail coverage space Joanne's vacated. They're getting in inventory to sort of incorporate a Joanne's into their stores (they already have some machines and other things in their stores now), and if you log into their web page there's a link that'll show up if you're a Joanne's customer directing you to additional information (not sure how they know someone is a Joanne's customer). So that's going to be an option for y'all, and for those not in the local area and thus denied the joy of Perth street you're not stranded. Joanne's was going to try to tough it out as an online store, but they didn't know how they'd manage that because of their problems, but since Michaels is stepping up to the plate they've decided not to go down that road.

I hope this provides some hope for y'all.

There is no Forward
But backward is also illusion
Find true perspective

Well, it seems my plan is going to leave me searching for diversion when I’m eating, relaxing to go to sleep, etc., now that I’m avoiding any romance novels other than those written by people I’m familiar with. My download yesterday consisted of an issue of The Week, a quarterly compilation magazine dealing with art music, and one of the extreme viewpoint magazines I check out so my viewpoint doesn’t get to focused on what I know so far. Other than those three nonfiction magazines, I got one novel by a romance author that I’m familiar with. I’ve got season 2 of Andor on my player too, video described of course, but that’s the gamut.

I don’t connect with most westerns – Craig Johnson seems to be the sole writer, and the Longmire novels are modern western of sorts. I don’t listen to war novels, and spy & Espionage is limited in appeal, like mysteries. And this is not me fishing for recommendations, because as a blind person my options for reading materials is way limited. But there is going to be some readjustment of my strategy.

I’ve reached page 250 in the novel I’m working on, and a lot has happened so far. I know what one of the major points of the novel will be, but I’m deciding if it’s a big enough finish for the trilogy. I’ve also got some ideas for the next Inspector Peep story, but the crux of it is eluding me – I need something from a folk tale, fairy tale, nursery rhyme, or something adjacent to those that’s lost. I’ve got an option, but I think it’s a bit weak. Note that I’ve also included elements from fables, movies, and books in this setting. I won’t reject things from operas either. Caveat – please don’t get offended if I don’t use what you suggest, my brain is wired so suggestions often spur new idea directions and that will be what I use; contributions are very welcome because of what they do more than what they are. Still, I appreciate every one I get

The rest of my life is going okay as long as I don’t think about the things that don’t work in my life. No matter if someone considers what I’m giving up or has been taken from me to fall within the category of needs, I find no value in obsessing on something not available to me. So I’m moving forward in a different way from how a lot of people would, but I’m still moving forward some.

I found a new strategy – I was tempted to do a passive-aggressive thing to drive a point home to my roommate, that a pair of boxes she put in the way were in the way enough to annoy me. I was going to set them in front of the back door, so when she went outside, which she does a whole lot, she’d see them and maybe get the message. I wasn’t comfortable with that, both because I don’t like being that way and also because the point might get missed. So instead, I got up front about it and told her what I was planning on doing, and why I was considering that course of action, thereby removing the passiveness from the action. She moved the boxes, and not “later” like she does a lot of stuff, but right then and within fifteen minutes the boxes were in her car to be taken to Half Price Books. That worked a lot better than I thought it would. I also got into a conversation with her about her broken memory, stemming from her attention span that’s slightly greater than the diameter of a gnat’s anus, and how that seems to me to be a manifestation of neurodivergence of the ADHD kind. I was able to deliver it with enough finesse that she didn’t batmobile up. The key to all of this, at least for me, is to make sure that I include my part of things – It’s my reaction to things she does that make me get tweaked – I can’t speak to if it’s universal to those behaviors because I don’t have either the time or inclination to do that level of analysis, not to mention the required funding. This is starting to feel like the interactional style I had when lanalucy was my roommate, where we had free and open communication and owned our part in everything, also knowing when to step away and explain that the emotional one of us (it varied, of course) needed processing time to approach the issue in a rational way. I miss that so much, and getting any of it back is very much welcome. I thought it was either impossible or at the least improbable… and it only took a bit under six years for this to work out. I’ll of course keep aware to find out if this improvement is persistent or if it’s an aberration.

From Motion by Penny Reid

Drop one of these in when you can’t think of something pithy to say.
1. “But at what cost?”
2. “In this economy?”
3. “So, it has come to this.”
4. “So let it be written, so let it be done.”
5. “And then the wolves came.”
6. “Whatever.”
7. “Is this why fate brought us together?”
8. “Be that as it may, still may it be as it may be.”
9. “There’s no escape from Destiny.”
10. “As the prophecy foretold.”
11. “And thus I die.”
12. “Wise words by wise men bring wise deeds and wise pen.”
13. “Just like in my dream.”
14. “And so it begins.”
If you feel the need, you can use (D10+½d10-1) or other random generation methods.

What now
After making a major life decision the next step is to work on how that affects the other things near it and what making that change does for other initiatives (at least for me, but I understand what the word consequences means). Some decisions can be done with a lot of the thinking and planning before taking action, but some don’t do this all that well, and in many cases what will result from a decision is difficult to speculate until the tire hits the tarmac. It’s also counterproductive in some situations to switch to the thinking of post-implementation while some chance that decision won’t need to be. made So I’m now assessing how the decision will affect my life moving forward.

I have decided to no longer expend any effort or (if possible) mental energy on attracting or locating romantic relationships. I want to stop expending energy toward something that’s not getting any return – that smacks of hope thinking. So it’s time to evaluate how this will affect my life and what other plans I’ll want to make to fill in the gaps that effort was designed to fill or help in filling.

Again, it’s not my intention to avoid such entangling alliances should they come my way, but the effort to rectify my solitary condition is taking too much out of me, and it’s also leading to depressive episodes. So I’m stepping out of the game, off the board, away from the flame the other moths are throwing themselves against.

These issues also benefit other facets to my life, so this isn’t all about how I don’t seem to trip anyone’s trigger, or at least anyone I’ve come in contact with so far.

Issue One: Roommate
My roommate is problematic. I’m living with someone who I’m pretty sure has ADHD and is self medicating with nicotine and alcohol along with caffeine. She’s in debt to me, working a table service industry job that is about to become a much bigger concern because of supply chain and tariff issues. Her age is also a factor – she seems to be in good physical health, though not going to a doctor makes that uncertain, and both smoking and drinking to excess tax a body. She got her cosmetology license, which she’s let lapse, because she wants to be accepted as a woman without working on aspects of her presentation that scream male, and her low-pitched voice and deportment has gotten in the way of her getting a chair at any of the places where she’s applied. I won’t assume that it’s bigoted salon owners behind this, but an owner of a styling salon has to factor in customer reaction, and she absolutely will not pass. I’m being supportive, but this is not a healthy situation for me to be in thanks to the crazy increase in natural gas prices and homeowners insurance. I swore that when I moved in here I wouldn’t be The First Bank of Nyyki anymore, but here we are. What’s the real world situation here? I’ve overdrafted the last two months, and for the first time in multiple years I have a balance on my primary credit card. What’s sitting on there are my bill payments for power and exterminator service, nothing more. I’m hoping the warmer weather will solve some of the tight money issues, but I’m not sure how that’s going to play out. Also, I haven’t bought groceries since November of 2023, relying on my roommate to pick a few things up to keep things from getting dire and letting her grab stuff for me, most of it fast food or things from restaurants, which aren’t the most healthy sources for nutrition and needed substances.

I’m in a tight space here, because in a roommate I need someone who can help me out because I can’t do some key things like know what I’m taking from a group of cans in the pantry, and this is discussed up front before a roommate moves in, but this means I get folks who are down on their luck and their finances are unstable, and this can turn into a debt. So my roommate situation has got to change.

Add to that her car – it’s registration has been out for several years, as was her prior car, and the car hasn’t been inspected in a while . I keep wondering every time she takes me somewhere if she’s going to get pulled over and ticketed, or a worse case of her getting told she can’t drive or getting her car towed. I’m not all that up for walking home from my infusion clinic that’s located in Rowlett, especially thanks to me having no easy way to get myself out of such a situation (no folks who could pick me up, accessibility issues with the transport for hire service interfaces, etc.). All of this is normal for her – she’s used to taking side streets and being furtive in the presence of police cars to minimize notice of her car. That tense energy bleeds off from her, so I have to clean that out of my system – it’s no wonder I have higher BP readings when I first get to the infusion clinic.

Some of you might be wondering why I haven’t brought any of these concerns to her. That’s because she deals with any constructive criticism by shutting down and turning into a radiating stress ball of sad, and it’s an avoidance technique. She will consider the issue done when we finish talking, so there is no follow-up on anything we discuss, and she’s got a problem with remembering things, important things, like agreements she’s made and things she’s told me she’ll take care of. And she doesn’t look for ways to resolve problems, she continues to hope they’ll go away. I realized years ago that there was no value in trying to work anything out with her, and this flies in the face of how I operate, so a lot of stuff is left unresolved and I’m left uncomfortable and feeling like my feelings don’t matter. She often uses a tactic of postponing discussion on something until “the next day”, and as you might imagine I’ve got stuff where the next day hasn’t come after several years. She isn’t a supportive person, and she doesn’t exhibit empathy, at least not in a way I can perceive, until things start to get critical.

This leads to the point – I need a new roommate who’s going to pay their half of the bills and the small amount I ask towards the mortgage. I also need somewhere for my current roommate to go, where hopefully she’ll figure out how to move forward with her life. I have mixed results with finding roommates, and at this point a potential roommate either needs to already know me or come with a vouch from someone I know and trust.

Issue 2: Socialization
I fit the definition of an extrovert, the social facilitation variety. I like to get people in a social group interacting, playing off each other, and having fun. Since I’m looking at a solo life there’s value in increasing my social interaction. Last month I left the house once – to get my infusion at the clinic. That’s what I have scheduled this month too, and maybe two in May because I’ll have a doctor’s appointment requiring a trip to get labs drawn, or possibly three if my annual checkup with the transplant clinic puts the date there. Notice the trend – I’m leaving the house for medical reasons and nothing else. Visitors to my home are rare, , so I’m sort of living a hermit lifestyle. I have social interaction online – I’m in four PBEM role-playing games right now. But still I have days where I’ll get a single email in a twelve hour period. This is not good. Also, I’ve done the online social interaction thing for 34 years now, and I know it’s not the same for people like me. Online interaction isn’t going to cut the muster.

How have I managed it so far? By shunting the need aside. I understand on a core level about letting go of needs to survive – I grew up in a very abusive household, and I learned early on how to do what it took to survive. This is how I’m shutting down the desire to find a romantic partner – I’m letting that drive fall by the wayside so I can survive the other stuff. This gets a lot harder when another table leg is missing – a table can have three legs, but a two legged table requires a huge amount of support. Note also that this isn’t suppressing or stuffing feelings down, if a need can’t be met I let it go, because it’s counterproductive to worry about things I can’t change or obsess on them – we live in a rare time when someone’s needs might all get met, and this is not normal across human experience, so if something isn’t in my life I cope; after all, a lot of people think human companionship is also a fundamental need, but I’ve lived with minimal amounts of it for a long time now.

So I’ve got to figure out a way that I’m less isolated. Note that I do get phone calls -- flamingsword calls me every week and we have a nice talk about many things, though so far we haven’t gotten onto the topics of nautical cargo vessels, footwear, sealant for letters and the use of signet rings, leafy vegetables nor monarchs. I also have a couple of others I talk to via phone, along with my weekly editing sessions with lanalucy. But that’s not enough, and my roommate isn’t giving me much social interaction either – she comes home and heads out to the back patio most of the time to watch things on her tablet and smoke because it’s a no smoking house, and at least one day a week and often more pass with no communication between us because our life flow is so different; she’s also a second shift worker most of the time, so our schedules don’t match (this also often means that I wind up eating at non-healthy times).

Issue 3: Self-Protection
The hardest part of this endeavor is not continuing to expose myself to broken glass and razor wire – self harm isn’t my schtick. This means I need to disconnect from things romantic. But cold turkeying isn’t productive, so I want to work out a plan for it.

First off, a majority of what I’ve read in the last two to three years, at least when it comes to fiction, has been either stuff with a romantic component or out and out romance. I know some folks can read these things and live vicariously through the romances the characters go through, but I’m not one of them – there’s a point in most of them where I feel the hit that comes from reading about something I might never have again. This is going to change my reading habits a lot – for one thing, I’m going to probably read a lot more nonfiction than I have in the last year. I had a plan of alternating between one nonfiction book and a work of fiction, back and forth, but in the last year it’s been shifted a lot towards fiction more than anything else. I’m at the mercy of the Library of Congress’s National Library Service for the Blind and Print disabled program, so I’m not the boss of this situation, and I’ll read the works of authors I’ve grown fond of, but I don’t know that I’ll pick up much stuff that has a romantic component in it unless the synopsis is enticing enough, and I’m going to be less picky about science fiction and mysteries. I don’t read westerns, war fiction, horror, or much fantasy – the big problem with a lot of epic fantasy is that in the end it’s all about the magic, so I’m a lot more selective, and I’m going to continue that. This will, however, probably give me the space to do that deep dive into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld some of my friends have suggested to me.

It's not only what books I listen to – there are songs I won’t be seeking out moving forward, even though I love the tunes. Hurting oneself isn’t a sign of healthy self care. Some of these songs key to specific times and events, because music is great at doing that, so this isn’t a light choice, it’s down to a survival one.

The bigger problem is in what I write. I’ve written two classic love stories, both of them edited, and I’ve got ideas for two more, with the next one into the plotting and characterization stage, but I don’t know how positive it’d be for me to dig deep into those works. Likewise, my next two Holly and the Wizards novels involve romantic content, and I plan to finish them, but I’m not sure when. I’ve got one speedbump to get past in a novel that starts out feeling like a romance novel but takes a drastic turn in the next two chapters after what I’ve already written, and I’ve got other things in progress that might or might not get any attention for a while. This is part of my dual extended middle fingers to genre conventions, because I float across genres like they never existed (Like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Roald Dahl, and many others). Still, once I manage to procure covers for them there will be fans, I hope, and shippers gotta ship. So I can’t excise that from my life right now. Still, this is going to change my focus some in what I write. I don’t need the stuff in my face for multiple hours a day if I want to maintain my normal upbeat positive outlook.

This is also probably going to involve me cutting some friends out of my online circle. I’m not going to do it here, because nobody here is going to cause me mental unrest, but over on Zuckerphuqt there will be some culling. Why am I keeping that account active? Two reasons – there are people there that I can’t find elsewhere, and it’s a decent place to announce the publication of my stuff. If that second item turns out to be false I’ll be much more prone to shutting that vector down.

Issue 4: Identity
I’ve been working hard with my higher power to rid myself of the thoughts that my inability to attract anyone (yes, anyone, not someone) is a failing of mine. The reality of it is that I’m isolated and out of public contact because of reasons outlined above. Also, my friends aren’t coming up with anyone who might find me interesting enough to want to hold my hand, much less do anything more. It’s way beyond being touch starved or deprived, though I don’t have a good word at the moment for the extreme isolation that’s involved (touch gulagged?). And this can be hard to take. I was told in meditation that it wasn’t me causing this, it was willing participants who weren’t interested in getting their participation award. Okay, but still, that can, thanks to the labyrinthine twisting’s of thought, come back to being an issue centered on me.

What doesn’t help is how greater society views independents as somehow failing – outside a diner or seats at a bar, how many tables for one have you seen? The other troublesome factor is that my life is about sighted guide for the most part – our society isn’t equipped to deal with blindness these days. Table kiosks don’t have an audible option and few servers know to fold a receipt so a blind person can know what line to sign on, and a tip is its own issue. This means that so often people see me with someone and make the jump to us being involved romantically. In a recent conversation I joked that I could buy scrubs sets for those guiding me so people would get that it’s someone helping me, not someone dating me, but that’s a funny idea and nothing more. Of course there are some people who would hit on someone who was with someone else, but I have no interest in those people, and nobody’s asking us if we’re involved, probably out of politeness or fear of rejection. And this leaves me slogging through life alone for the most part. I hate this. But what am I to do? Work on myself and get to where I don’t let those identity issues bother me, because I know I’m a valid person who has a lot to offer. Offering it to someone else doesn’t seem to be in the cards at this point. I don’t like it of course, but as Ringo said so well, “It don’t come easy”.

So…
I’m thinking about this, and I don’t think I’m going to let this define me. I prefer the belief that I’m taking care of myself over the more popular label of a loser in the love department. And myriad other factors are playing into this, like my health, my disability, and where I own a house. I’m going to make the best I can out of what I’ve got and what I’ve created for myself, and try to continue being the blonde, blind, badass broad that I know myself to be.

Right now I’m not working on any longer writing projects – I’m dropping short stuff, almost all flash or short story length, and jotting down notes for a potential project or two. I’m running out of talking books because I’m not getting as many of a particular genre that seems to have a high broken glass quotient for my emotions. This means I’ve got some time to think, and thinking is a gateway drug to introspection.

I grew up in a strange household. My mother was absent by court order, my dad became a father too young and had emotional issues and inadequacy problems, and he married a woman who had too many issues to list here without a cut tag. My brother could be a handful, because he inherited a mood disorder from Mom (the people that believe attention and mood disorders aren’t heritable and that they’re all nurture issues are either ignoring data or in need of more studying of the literature) and despite the labels people liked to put on us (I was the smart kid, he was the cute kid) he’s also bright. My half-brother was the kind of kid who was always at the ER because he didn’t understand things like risk analysis or moderation. This meant that I was the child that didn’t cause any problems; I was the fire that didn’t need to be put out, and I didn’t get much attention. This was to my benefit in many ways, because neither parent had stable emotional control, and the Step-monster could be vindictive and punitive. I also learned that not being seen meant not getting hammered down to the board surface.

So, this means that I struggle with being noticed. In social situations it’s not a problem, but I learned early on that it was wise for me to vacate places where I wasn’t wanted around. My gauge of when that condition exists isn’t the best, so I sometimes step back before anyone wants me to go away, and I will accept that I might even get back away when folks like having me around, but most people don’t have the assertiveness to say, “Hey, where are you going, I like having you around.”

I have no interest in being The Invisible Girl (I have a long list of Reed Richards’s flaws, for instance) but my musings in the last couple of days have opened a line of thought that I’m good at being overlooked. I don’t know how to change that or if in this current socio-political climate it’s wise for me to be on some folks’ radar. But I do realize that that approach isn’t getting me what I want, and it may also get in the way of getting needs fulfilled. This is a definition of being stuck – I am not me right now, and I haven’t been for a while, I’m a shadow or echo of me. Does that non-shadow me still exist, or is it lost forever? I have no answer for that either.

More to come from this time of analysis, I’m just getting started.

This part of April is always a tough slog for me. A friend I thought of as my sister and who I loved very much passed several years ago, but she’s still in my memory. Several other things have happened in the first two weeks of April too, ranging from the high point of getting a functional kidney on April 13 to the low of fourteen years ago, when my last romantic relationship was ripped from my heart and mind and crushed. I’ve always had bouts of suicidal ideation, to use the modern buzzword for it (note how like so much else these days it’s a step removed from feeling – suicidal ideation instead of suicidal – it’s typical of the disengaged way things are spoken of nowadays), but that was the closest I came to doing it. I’ve always had a feeling that I would be the one to take myself out of the picture, but that got to the bleeding edge back then.

Losing amy”pippi”Boyd was another blow to the system, and it’s been sort of touchy in the intervening time.

A couple of things, and I know some of this is rehash to get some others on the same page, so if it’s old news or an old argument please don’t repeat your side of it here, because my feelings haven’t changed on this. I spend many days feeling romantically unlovable. As far as I know there is nobody wondering what kissing me would be like, or even holding my hand. This is because romantic expressions toward me dried up on April 8, 2011. That’s a decent stretch – I’ve seen relationships come together, bond, then break apart in that much time, and if my forced romantic isolation was a person that child would be entering high school in the fall. And since I don’t gain any emotional benefit from hope, because I prefer to deal with the now instead of expending mental and emotional capital on what may or may not happen in the future, This is the way it is right now and no amount of magical thinking will change the here and now. But it does cause me to wonder about how much consequence I am in general (no, not for specific people, but the wider community) and if that will ever change.

This is where some people will say something like, “You have to be your own agent of change”, but at this point the answers and strategies for the change that would help me are beyond what I can fathom. The simple fact is that online dating sites may work for some people, but they don’t often work for blind people because of accessibility issues, and those companies don’t have to comply with the ADA because they’re classified as entertainment – yeah, one of Maslow’s hierarchical needs is entertainment according to these firms. Also, each time outside of the house is a huge risk, because to keep my transplanted kidney happy I take anti-rejection meds, or to put in more recognizable terms I’m immunosuppressed. This is way real to me – that immunosuppression came very close to killing me during the spring and early summer of 2023, because I got infected with a pair of fungus infections a normal immune system can kick out of the pool with little effort. So that leaves me with recommendations from friends, or someone I know trying to hook me up with someone they think would be compatible with my particular personality and situation. But the great unsocializing has made those kinds of things far more difficult – attempts have been made, or at least one attempt, but for multiple reasons that fizzled.

In general I’m not an emotionally demonstrative person for part of that range of expression – I don’t get enraged or wrathful in loud ways, though my former roommate, who has a high amount of empathy, says when I’m angry or upset about something she could feel it and it made her want to run from the house, and crying is very difficult for me – it’s like there’s a wall around sadness for me, and it’s constrained within it, so letting it out requires extreme sadness or a long slow overflow of the walls. That means when I get sad it can stick around until it reaches a critical level and overflows, which it’s rare for it to do, so it often takes willful action to alter my mood. Chalk that up to another place where I’m nonfunctional in some way. Note that I don’t think of this as all that unusual, everyone’s nonfunctional in some ways, because we’re not assembled to exacting specifications.

I believe that alone is one thing and lonely is a way different level – alone is a condition, not a state of being and emotion, so someone can be alone and be fine with it. Lonely has that emotional component mixed in by definition, so it’s not going to manifest as gladness – can any of you think of a situation where being lonely is a happy thing or even a satisfied one? How about a situation where loneliness isn’t toxic? Then there’s the third level, being a loner. At that point the loneliness has gone metastatic, but there are people who can find happiness or satisfaction in being so. I don’t take any positive feelings out of being lonely, never have, but I’ve been fine with being alone.

One thing about being alone though – touch deprivation sort of goes with the territory. Other than my dad’s parents my family wasn’t much into physical contact, so this has been my life – I don’t want it to be. But I also don’t want to go through life alone either, and life bears no guarantees.

I like to think I’m a better person than I was back then, and that I’ve been a positive impact on others’ lives. But I don’t know how to measure that, and since it’s a subjective thing there may not be a way to measure it. Besides, is there value in putting a measurement on that anyway? I don’t know.

All this to say, I give up – they win, my ex wins (though I suspect my ex would not like that that breakup was the end of a feature in my life), and I’m throwing in the towel. Poly folks kind of mystify me, because, how does someone find one partner, much less more than one? It’s clear that I don’t know how.

Don’t worry, I’m not so down about this that I’m at risk. One of the most annoying things about losing my sight is that everyone is now abstracted a level. The eyes are in many ways a direct extension from the visual cortex, with thousands of connections hardwired directly into the brain, as is common among predator biology, so turning that off is a huge change. And there are so many elements relating to eyesight that evolved in how we interact as humans that I can no longer participate in. This includes the pre-conscious attraction signaling, so before someone is aware they’re potentially interested in someone else an exchange happens between them to determine if that interaction is worth getting conscious minds aware of it. Of course a blind person or someone visually impaired can miss that first blush of attraction, the part of it they don’t know about yet. I think this may have something to do with why I’ve been alone for so long. Other factors also may be at play that I’m not aware of.

All in all, I think I’ve grown and developed in the fourteen years I’ve been overlooked. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t also done some damage and left some marks. And every day is another dot in a chain of them, and I try to keep in mind that anything’s possible in a constantly changing universe. But an extrovert in isolation is a hard place to live in.

Which one of you let Insomnia out of the jar again?

It was a productive week. I’ve got the Zen Room closet repacked, again with better organization and with less stuff sitting in other places – I kind of wonder if I did that process enough I could get everything down to a single box. I’ve got the ten space live PA rack sitting in there, but that’s all that needs to move, and I want to finish the cabling on it before I return it to the other PA gear.

While I was doing that I had music playing, and I chose some things I haven’t listened to in a while.

Merril Bainbridge In the Garden: I got turned on to this album back during my big career growth year of 1998. I was working IT for a credit card company, and they had a sort of Muzak style loop of songs going, though all of them popular songs by the original performers. The song “Spinning” off this album would pop up from time to time, and the glow and optimism of it always put a smile on my face.

Dave Weckl Hardwired I got turned on to this one in a Sound Warehouse right before they became Blockbuster Music. I was there with the person to whom I was espoused, and the first track is an attention getter. I commented that I liked the sound of the group a lot, so my former partner bought it for me as a gift with no gift giving day attached to it. I miss that kind of casual love expression.

Rare Silk Black and Blue and American Eyes I saw this group at the Starfest site at Park Central in Dallas, opening for Spyro Gyra, and ran out and bought their first album, New Weave as soon as I could. They’re in my personal opinion the best vocal jazz ensemble of the modern age – I like them more than Manhattan Transfer and a little bit more than Take 6. I wish they’d done more albums. Their version of “Red Clay” by Freddie Hubbard is amazing, they do a great job with Chick Corea’s “Spain”, and they do an acapella take on “Lush Life”, but these are three standouts on three top notch albums

Porcupine Tree Signify This album blows me away. It’s full of atmosphere and some killer lyrics – one of the tunes, “Dark Matter”, inspired a short story I wrote that was accepted over at Magnets and Ladders (www.magnetsandladders.org). This band puts to the test my contention that there’s nothing much to listen to released after 1992. I found this band when I was looking for Genesis on Emusic, and they referred me to Porcupine Tree instead.

I also listened to a lot of movies too – the first three Beverly Hills Cop movies, Constantine, Jackie Brown, and Poor Things, and I cleared out my talking books on my player, so it was a media heavy week.

There are many names given to our modern age – the atomic age, the space age, and the information age are all popular. The first two are, at least to me, undisputed – we as a race have access to atomic power for good or ill, and we’ve sent items and people off planet and into space. The third one is more problematic.

In one of his books (I think it was Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson discussed information theory and the fast acceleration of its repetition. In this discussion he wrote about the amount of information generated from the discovery of fire to the start of the common era, and this was named for a notable figure of that time, so it was one Jesus of information. He then goes through history, describing the increase – 2 Jesi were achieved by 1400CE, more or less, four were reached by 1600, and so on (I may be misremembering these dates, it was multiple decades ago when I read it). But information theorists predicted that we would reach a point in February of 2012 where the amount of information would double in a single day, and from then on it would double in parts of a day. This is exponential growth, not linear, so it’s a crazy number of Jesi in play by now.

I wondered when I read it how that much data increase could happen. Then the World Wide Web came into existence and I realized that those estimates of data doubling might be conservative. This in one of the base reasons for the use of the term “Information Age”.

It’s said that knowledge is power. Note a word that’s missing in there – it doesn’t say that factual knowledge is power, just that knowledge is power. False knowledge, what’s properly called factoids (the term for small facts is a factlet) has as much power to drive people’s minds and actions as accurate information. Look at one example, the claims that an election was rigged, stolen, or corrupted. One faction claimed this with vehemence in 2020, and those claims persist, though it seems there’s no reason to keep beating that drum. But there is – by casting aspersions on one election it creates the potential perspective that any election is also potentially flawed. The phrase “Existence of one is proof of another” doesn’t mean it proves others do exist, as many folks in the conspiracy community like to believe, but that proof of the existence of something is proof that others may exist. So now we have allegations about how the same steal was perpetrated in 2024. The poison of doubt for elections was introduced, and now it’s going to fester and cast doubt on any moving forward.

The reality is that all conspiracy theories are false, save the one you believe in. It takes someone who’s got both a skeptical nature and a drive to question their own convictions to analyze, from a critical standpoint, what the person believes. Or as the saying goes, this one also introduced to me by RAW, convictions make convicts.

So, in light of this, I think of the time we’re living in as something other than the three names I started this entry with – I believe we live in the disinformation age. Thank you Mr. Orwell for showing us the mechanism of disinformation.

For me, this extends to an avoidance of short cycle news – the Occupy summer showed how different what news outlets generate can be from what folks on the ground experience (one of the few places where I found social media to be useful). This puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, because so much is fast cycling right now. And I’m in the crosshairs for multiple reasons.

The second war in Iraq used a tactic known as “Shock and Awe” to get the point across that the West had superior firepower to the middle east. I believe that the same thing is going on right now – so much is happening in so fast a time cycle that people are dealing with questions about which problem they spend their energy on. The ones creating this shock and awe condition are most likely hoping that some of their initiatives will become fait accompli. The reality is that those are what’s being described as “stick” measures, so people are getting hurt by this course of actions.

I have no idea where I’m going to end up with all of this. There are some potentially very bad outcomes if things go in certain ways. I’m not giving in to fear, because that’s part of their plan, make people afraid to act – they want the flight and freeze reactions, not the fight one. Also, intense emotions don’t paralyze me, they hyperactivate my mind so I think faster and look for ways to resolve the issue. I entreat everyone to do the same – asking why is always prudent for anything presented. It’s like the old method acting concept, “What’s my motivation?”, for information coming in. What motivates the person who sent it, created it, or reported it? I believe at this point that nonpartisan is close to mythical, though some holdouts exist. But the way to know what to listen to and what to discard remains the same – use of the scientific method more than the sniff test – question everything, take nothing as fact until proven to be so. That’s what I’m doing.