Music of the morning.
I slept in this morning for the first time in... forever. I mean, like, really slept in, as in "set the alarm for 7:00AM, and woke up every hour after that until I felt like I could finally get my ass out of bed" slept in. Feels good. :D
But each time I became conscious again, relaxing in the same general position I had been in for the last eight hours, waiting for the next pang of sleepiness to drift me away into the sweet nothing, I heard noises from outside my window. My apartment building has two-layer brick walls, followed by insulation, wood studs, two layers of drywall, and a final coat of paint; therefore, the quarter-inch or so of glass that is my window tends to bring in the best of what goes on outside in the real world. This morning was no exception.
The first sound I remember hearing this morning was the "nails on chalkboard, time-stretched to roughly three times the length and a third of the frequency"-sound of grinding brakes on an old bus, picking up the first load of passengers of the day. It's only the old buses that squeal. My route, Excel (#22), is the second-most-active off-campus route, and it picks up students every 7 minutes at peak times; it is a random assortment of old and new buses, and you can only hear the new buses stopping if you actually listen for it, while you can hear the old buses stopping from four length-wise street blocks away while in the bathroom with the fan on. Fucking buses. :P
However, the next sound I heard was a mysterious one; it took me three times before I realized what it was. Imagine, if you will, old 1950s doo-wop music, heard from a mile away, and filtered to where you can only hear the lower-frequency sounds of men humming in unison. That's right, it's the sound of wind through a window-screen; that wonderful conjugation of pink-noise and ever-varying sine-wave whistle of wind being pushed through a fine metal mesh at a high velocity. It's the original sound of fright; the sound of wind through the trees when you are walking alone in a dark, dreary cemetery, not knowing who or what could jump out at you at any moment and devour part of your soul collection. It reminded me of watching old Halloween cartoons on a dying projector in the library in elementary school. It was divine, hearing this greatly emotional sound of my fright-filled past, while still half-asleep in bed; a wonderful time to take advantage of yourself and quickly find your head quivering under the sheets, laughing maniacally at the darkness. Ahh, childhood.
I heard the music; the cacophony that is real life. I heard what makes life worth living; the sounds and memories that drive us all away from our past and blindly into our futures. We think we have plans, but those are just to "fool the man"; if only we knew that "the man" did exactly the same thing so many years ago. If only we knew that nothing we're doing with our lives is new or groundbreaking; it's all just levels upon levels, and at the base of it all is our will to survive at all costs. Only the dead know what it is like to break past that foundation, and they don't reproduce. Thankfully. ;)
I wanted to jump out of bed and get immediately to work on a new piece of music based on what I had heard this morning; to create the greatest sequence of sounds I have ever compiled in my life. Full of aural inspiration, I got up, stretched, put on some socks, walked to the kitchen to look in the fridge, went the bathroom to piss, and walked back to my room... And that's when I woke up, both realistically and metaphorically.
The pains of my human limitations kicked in like a tickled horse: I can't remake that sound; the sound of those long-dead men moaning in the wind. I can't record that sound; the signal-to-noise ratio is much too low and I'd never get anything useful out of the hour I'd sit there by the window with a microphone. I can't do any of that; fuck it! :/
I sighed and turned on my computer to get back to my normal morning of reading a few bookmarked websites for news/updates I might care about... Maybe Slashdot front-paged an article that interests me, maybe Hou De added a new item I simply can't live without, maybe one of my Youtube videos got popular over the night and got a hundred views since yesterday evening, or maybe one of my "friends" on LJ posted something interesting. No, nothing particularly substantive, as usual... Maybe I'll just write something for once... ;-P
Nah, but really... I'm doing fine; life is good, and I'm happy. School is going ok; I'm still struggling to get my life settled so I can start being productive again, but that's to be expected when I'm in a new place and still getting used to being where I am again. I've got the past in my head, and I'm doing my best to keep myself from being in the same situations I was two years ago.
Everyone else lives their own lives, and I'm just doing the same. ^,^
But each time I became conscious again, relaxing in the same general position I had been in for the last eight hours, waiting for the next pang of sleepiness to drift me away into the sweet nothing, I heard noises from outside my window. My apartment building has two-layer brick walls, followed by insulation, wood studs, two layers of drywall, and a final coat of paint; therefore, the quarter-inch or so of glass that is my window tends to bring in the best of what goes on outside in the real world. This morning was no exception.
The first sound I remember hearing this morning was the "nails on chalkboard, time-stretched to roughly three times the length and a third of the frequency"-sound of grinding brakes on an old bus, picking up the first load of passengers of the day. It's only the old buses that squeal. My route, Excel (#22), is the second-most-active off-campus route, and it picks up students every 7 minutes at peak times; it is a random assortment of old and new buses, and you can only hear the new buses stopping if you actually listen for it, while you can hear the old buses stopping from four length-wise street blocks away while in the bathroom with the fan on. Fucking buses. :P
However, the next sound I heard was a mysterious one; it took me three times before I realized what it was. Imagine, if you will, old 1950s doo-wop music, heard from a mile away, and filtered to where you can only hear the lower-frequency sounds of men humming in unison. That's right, it's the sound of wind through a window-screen; that wonderful conjugation of pink-noise and ever-varying sine-wave whistle of wind being pushed through a fine metal mesh at a high velocity. It's the original sound of fright; the sound of wind through the trees when you are walking alone in a dark, dreary cemetery, not knowing who or what could jump out at you at any moment and devour part of your soul collection. It reminded me of watching old Halloween cartoons on a dying projector in the library in elementary school. It was divine, hearing this greatly emotional sound of my fright-filled past, while still half-asleep in bed; a wonderful time to take advantage of yourself and quickly find your head quivering under the sheets, laughing maniacally at the darkness. Ahh, childhood.
I heard the music; the cacophony that is real life. I heard what makes life worth living; the sounds and memories that drive us all away from our past and blindly into our futures. We think we have plans, but those are just to "fool the man"; if only we knew that "the man" did exactly the same thing so many years ago. If only we knew that nothing we're doing with our lives is new or groundbreaking; it's all just levels upon levels, and at the base of it all is our will to survive at all costs. Only the dead know what it is like to break past that foundation, and they don't reproduce. Thankfully. ;)
I wanted to jump out of bed and get immediately to work on a new piece of music based on what I had heard this morning; to create the greatest sequence of sounds I have ever compiled in my life. Full of aural inspiration, I got up, stretched, put on some socks, walked to the kitchen to look in the fridge, went the bathroom to piss, and walked back to my room... And that's when I woke up, both realistically and metaphorically.
The pains of my human limitations kicked in like a tickled horse: I can't remake that sound; the sound of those long-dead men moaning in the wind. I can't record that sound; the signal-to-noise ratio is much too low and I'd never get anything useful out of the hour I'd sit there by the window with a microphone. I can't do any of that; fuck it! :/
I sighed and turned on my computer to get back to my normal morning of reading a few bookmarked websites for news/updates I might care about... Maybe Slashdot front-paged an article that interests me, maybe Hou De added a new item I simply can't live without, maybe one of my Youtube videos got popular over the night and got a hundred views since yesterday evening, or maybe one of my "friends" on LJ posted something interesting. No, nothing particularly substantive, as usual... Maybe I'll just write something for once... ;-P
Nah, but really... I'm doing fine; life is good, and I'm happy. School is going ok; I'm still struggling to get my life settled so I can start being productive again, but that's to be expected when I'm in a new place and still getting used to being where I am again. I've got the past in my head, and I'm doing my best to keep myself from being in the same situations I was two years ago.
Everyone else lives their own lives, and I'm just doing the same. ^,^