Author's note: I generally try to leave old "insomnia" entries alone so they maintain their frenzied, unfiltered observations. They capture a version of me I don't see very much anymore. However, this one was riddled with typographical mishaps, so I made minor adjustments. Where appropriate, I added contextual hyperlinks. I performed these edits as part of my 2026 blog migration scheme.
There's a humming coming from somewhere in the room. Doesn't seem like it's the one lamp on. What could it be?
Sometimes I scroll through my text message logs with individual persons (redundant? seems clear), especially when no new messages come in. Is there a way to link back to old messages and say, "Ha, remember when we said these silly things?" I suppose a screenshot attached to a new message would work. Would people be interested in that besides me? If the log spans years with few large gaps, you probably have a friendship with someone. Or at least plausible evidence of one. I think these blog posts are mostly long chat logs with myself.
I haven't written here in a while, and this was the most likely type of entry to be posted first. I've had plenty on my mind to keep me awake, not least of which current events. Some feeling in me feels like it's waking up (again). It's shaky and too unclear to name. I'm seeing evidence of it here and there. I wept when driving across a long bridge today, at water with large white and gold (or was it blue and black?) spots on it below tumbling purple clouds. Further weeping at a crashing beach below a yellow ring of sky below those same clouds. My most common exhale lately is a sigh. Puzzles seem fine when there are only a few moving parts, and then you learn the full scope and it's daunting. Example: making a 10 x 10 x 10 Buckyball cube; mess up the alignment of one row and the whole thing could be ruined! Similar feeling for sorting through and getting rid of my various junk: one box seems to open another, and eventually it's a good idea to put things away and nothing really happened with the box contents. If only eBay could teleport your items away.
Listening to Courtney Barnett's The Double LP: A Sea of Split Peas has me wanting to play guitar again. Incidentally, yesterday I found a cassette tape of my recordings that I label "Late Night Radio Hour", because in between songs I pretend to be a radio DJ with a soothing voice. This is normally a secret I save for the third or greater time of meeting someone, so shhhhhhh. I covered Courtney Barnett's "Boxing Day Blues" (my favorite song of hers) on that tape, but my guitar Stella is very out of absolute tune (but in relative tune), so I sung, like, three or four half steps down, sheesh.
I want to find more random blog posts of people talking about their favorite things. I often search for things like "favorite Radiohead Amnesiac song" or "favorite Magic expansion", but those rarely yield anything. Often I get forums, which I find noisy and unhelpful. I really want to see people with enough courage to just lay down their favorites publicly, and not give a damn about what a "poll" or "top ten list" or "forum discussion" says. I'll answer my own questions for other searchers with the same questions above: 1) "Like Spinning Plates", especially the live version in I Might Be Wrong, and 2) Lorwyn. Bandcamp has a nice feature of marking which song on an album in your collection is your favorite.
While we're at it, I want to find more random blogs that aren't about anything really, or ones that take huge tangents to get at what they are trying to say, or ones that dive deep into topics of personal interest to the author. One example is The Pokémon Sprite Guy, whose blog I found two years after it ended, but whose delivery in writing I really enjoy. That's another criterion: the blog needs to keep being updated! (Hence a stab at writing this very post.) My good friend S and I have scenic detour conversations, and the nonlinear form makes time irrelevant. S had a blog of no-topic musings, but I can't find it anymore. [Author's interjection: S has a cool new blog mostly concerning probabilistic numerical methods applied toward economic problems. It's well-considered and infotaining.] I think I want more "content" out there that is written by people who just like something, not because they want followers, "highlights", or money, or something bogus like that. I'm talking something like Geocities or the original vision of the World Wide Web, where if you wanted a page about your favorite thing, you wrote it, in your own voice. [Author's interjection: I find it fascinating that the cool blogs I linked in this entry are all Blogger blogs.] Now we just click our interests and are served "content". I'm tired of that. Maybe with enough musings here I'll have covered all my interests in some detail. I like to read about others' interests in their own voices, so I'll pay that forward. For the three of you who know who I am, you might even learn something new.
Mostly I don't like signing into Facebook, and I don't want to deal with Messenger. Snapchat makes me feel like I have no life. Twitter is so noisy. [Author's interjection: Do not use Twitter/X.] I want to asynchronously catch up on my friends by reading stuff like what I'm writing here, but I know that the platforms above are easier to use. They just don't give me the same sense of knowing someone like you'd get out of reading their writing or having a real conversation with them. I guess they're not really for that purpose, but it seems shallow to say they are exclusively status-promoting tools. Oh well, I'll relish the longer form stuff as it comes.
Some more favorite things I have searched for, and my answers to them:
- Radiohead album: Amnesiac
- Magic set: Lorwyn
- Album of the 1990s: The Real Ramona by Throwing Muses, followed closely by King by Belly
- Painting: The Nostalgia of the Infinite by Giorgio de Chirico
- Book: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
- Pokémon game: Silver
- Pokémon:
DiglettCubone - Color on a guitar: Surf green
- Candy bar: Zingerman's Candy
Ca$hew CowPeanut Butter Crush, but Butterfinger does the job for the most part
Infinitely Yours,
Art