Squublog

Dear Future:

Send money.

- Present

out there
they make everything brilliant
all chrome and sparkling metalic
unscathed and unscented
except that fragrant oil,
that pleasant lubrication
just enough to silence the joints.

in here
things are tiny and falling apart
the components crowd in
all fighting for space
there's insufficient area
and the whole product suffers.

Out there
space expands to make room
for improvement and enhancement
engineering advances move
at exponentially increasing speeds
everything just works
and it's always something you need.

I know what you need
I have it right here
you'll understand that you need it
after we've talked
you'll wonder how you did without
up until now

Out there
beautiful waves lap starlight
moon silver grace envelopes dreams
that happen even while awake
as collisions create light
and explosions bring life
order succumbs to order
magnified, magnified

in here
the light is too dim
the bulb flickers irregularly
just every few minutes or so.
around the temples there are
buzzing flies or black noises
just above inaudible
a rumbling static hiss
the support rods snap.

Out there
time settles and slows, ebbs and flows,
exactly as it is needed.
The pull of gravity massages,
while the brilliant sparkles,
the reflective surfaces,
the contemplative moves,
and our prison is lost and gone.

I know what you need
you'll never be the same
It's a skill I have
to identify these things in people
and I've got you figured out
you'll be amazed and wonder
how you did without
up until now.

Out there
space drifts wider apart,
ever falling backward
the shadow branches over moonlight
with purple twilight sighs
our heavenward trajectory
our hands splayed and refactoring.

In here
the bulbs shatter
as too many things are packed
too tightly
just to get out of the door
or out of a window
just to get beyond the blight
into a light of another kind
just to reach
but in here it's all locks
and the roof crushes
our spirits deformed
in here dried up mildewed soaked murky life.

I'm having trouble. Still. No matter how pointless, interminable, unable to focus because I'm at the office, whatever, however, I'm going to fill a chunk of time with posts that I didn't write when they appear and nobody's going to know why because there isn't a why. I guess there has to be a why.

Why?

Now that we've used up all the oil, and have to power our cars with rain collected without our intervention through a funnel on the hood, what's going to happen to all the fuel pumps in front of the gas stations and convenience stores? Are we just going to leave them there to hold the windshield cleaner stuff and the squeegees?

I was hoping an entry from the future would show up here today.

Dammit.

"Hello."

"Who are you?"

"An Angel."

"What's your name?"

"Satan."



A brief clip from a 1985 movie called The Adventures of Mark Twain. I stumbled on this by accident. For whatever reason I really, really dig it. I don't know anything about the rest of the movie, but I'm sort of interested in finding out now.

Wow. Very quickly now the date approaches where the holes in the future meet the present. I'm only five days out now, which basically defeats half of the purpose. Or all of it. I'm not sure I can quantify the purpose that way. I'm not sure I ever figured out the purpose.

I think my only two "Musimemberings" posted over the weekend. I meant to do a series! Two! What a series. I guess I had one half done that I ended up giving the green light, too. That one will probably show up after I've given this thing up for dead.

Hope you aren't time. Poor, poor time. Or, pour time. If you can stomach it.

Today (not today as you read this, as I'm in that timewarp again,) I had but 6 bucks to my name. The nation's floundering economy probably has nothing to do with the fact that we're broke lately. Or, I mean to say that the fact that we're broke probably has nothing to do with the economy. It's got more to do with my wife's changed employment situation and our utter inability to think rationally about spending.

I had six bucks and I was hungry. There's no good food in the house, so I decided to drive to Taco Bell. That's where you get crappy food cheap. Or where I get that. The combo (#3, I think,) that I decided on was the 3 taco supreme thing. Came up just shy of 6 bucks. While ordering it I thought, "Cripes, that can't be right. Isn't Taco Bell cheaper than that? Someone should plot a graph of Taco Bell's combo #3 prices over time. I bet it'd say a lot about the economy."

"Hello? What do you want to drink with that? Hello? Hello?" the tinny speaker was saying as I pictured stupid bar graphs in my head.

Cut to: Later. I'm sitting here trying to work. One of my Firefox tabs says "taco bell pisses all over time."

I googled it. Except that's not what I googled, so of course that's not what it says. But that SHOULD BE what it says, cuz that'd be better.

I had hoped I'd be able to make an entry out of something in here. Looks like I wasn't able. Ah, well.

There's been a casio SA-20 (100 sound ToneBank) resting atop a shelf in the office where isquub has kept me pinned to various laptops for some months now. It was $2 at a goodwill, and it worked great. It was simply put away, waiting for me to get out my pliers, hammer, welding torch, and sharp dental implements.

Big issue with that thing: the selection buttons make a horrid clacking clickety of a sound when pushed. So it's got 100 uglydirty synth sounds, all toylike and not toylike at all; but anytime you switch between them you have to hear the chck-chck sound.

What do I need with a working toy keyboard anyway?

So I pushed squub hard into a door jamb and unscrewed the thing. I thought maybe I'd find a little button to turn of the chk-chk thing; more importantly, I thought I'd make some connections that weren't there before and have the thing rattling and buzzing of its own accord. I do this kind of thing. Granted, it's not as often as I'd like, what with the pressures of all the toothpicks pinning me down while squub "earns a living" or whatever the shit. But I circuit bend things on occasion, and I pretty much always end up with something broken enough to be put back together and used more like it should be used.

This time, though. This fucking SA-20. Oughtta have a fucking "do not bend these circuits!" sticker in there. Right over that one chip, that fucking M6387 (OKI, with a dash and some other numbers after it...) I jumped a solder point near the power input to some of the pins on that chip, after having hunted around for a while without finding a way to make it do much of anything, and then for a minute there it was, booping and beeping from one note down to another, hinting that somewhere here was a perfect wave. Then there were some tiny sparks, and the sound stopped. I powered it down, turned it back on... nothing. None of the keys would do anything.

There's probably a lesson there. Watch those solder points near the power, maybe. Or shit, maybe it's just a fragile chip. I've bent the shit out of some things in the past, been in there with a jackhammer and a shiv, and I've never killed a toy like that. Just fucking dead.

Two bucks, out the fucking window. Nah. It's not that, of course. I had hoped to a have new circuit-bent keyboard-like instrument for Halaka's impending implosion on August 8th. Now there's not as much time as I'd like to go find something else to play with.

On a brighter note, I screwed with a walkman last week or so, playing around with the pitch mods suggested (described in detail, actually,) here at an Of Sound Mind post. I modded his mod a bit, and came away with a re-assembled walkman with two light-sensitive pads on it that alter the speed/pitch of the playback.

There are also a few other projects I'm working on for the big 24 hour meltdown. Hopefully I'll be finished with at least one of them by the time I get to State College.

Pulled out Crimson Glory's "Strange and Beautiful" this morning while digging for some Galactic Cowboys CD I don't even know whether or not I have. I must've bought this CD, probably used, in the mid-90s. A good friend of mine either suggested it to me or played it for me or something. Stylistically it occupies a strange place in the spectrum of my tastes, sort of just on the edge. There's a progressive vibe to it, and there's a hair-metal thing going on with the guitars. Vocals a little like Robert Plant or maybe David Coverdale when sounding like Robert Plant on that one thing with Jimmy Page. The bass sound is almost identical to the bass on Faith No More's "Epic," and the rest of that album the name of which is strangely escaping me right now. I always got the impression that these guys were some kind of almost-Queensryche-like group, maybe the way Queensryche sounded early in their career.

None of that really describes the sound of this album. I liked this thing A LOT at the time I got it. I'm not sure what it was about it; the sound, maybe, though the vocals aren't exactly what I'm usually into. There's an ethereal quality to it that I can't figure out where it's coming from, as it's a pretty pounding album in a lot of places.

Funny, track 3, "love and dreams," starts off reminding me a whole hell of a lot of Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit." This track is doing a good job of reminding me of why I like the thing. The sound of the acoustic guitar is brilliant, a jangly strummed close-mic'd sound that I've always enjoyed (think the sound of that Supertramp song, for one thing.) There are some great harmonies here, even if the lead vocal has a lot of that Plant-inspired thing going on that bothers me just a tad. Here also is where the "ethereal" thing really comes in. And the bass line's got a tone of motion, very well done.

This is a little dated: things like those vocals and the fairly cheesy-synth sounds don't hold up that well. Nevertheless I'm still enjoying it.

Something I've always remembered about this CD has nothing to do with this CD: Crimson Glory's previous record, "Transcendence", which I've never even heard, featured cover art that's gotta be done by the same person who did artwork for Omni in the 80s. According to allmusic, that album's a lot better than this one. Around track 5 ("Dance on Fire") I'm definitely feeling the filler-ness, and that track's a long ways off of the progressive thing they apparently started off doing. Track 6, "Song for Angels," is really hair-ballad stuff, but I'm very often a sucker for hair-ballad stuff, and this is no different. I remember enjoying this track a lot, and I still do.