Strange Overtones
been listening, all day, to David Byrne’s Strange Overtones. it’s beautiful. i, too, sometimes hear things through walls
but… BUT: i’ve known this song, for the longest time, for a cover or alternate version i can’t place for the life of me. it’s no longer upbeat but rather morose, sentimental, wistful, Ahnoni and the Johnson’s style. it has a sense of loss. and i cannot find it. i dont know who it’s by, i don’t know when it’s from, I can only hum and feel it, or listen to the original and imagine what I know exists there somewhere, or if doesn’t exist now should still somewhere
or maybe it was put-upon painful, a la xiu xiu
i am dreaming
of course the story means, the question’s what’s it mean specifically
this is about I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning | U&U Forums (LibreCrawl archive 2026-09-03)
the story’s of course spreading a bit (or so i hope or so i imagine), and the twists a pretty open secret also (if you don’t know it, don’t read on), so i just wanna look at how the twist functions, huh
recontextualization, yeah, we get it, but i love the way that’s already what the story is before the context gets put in. it’s a paranormal story from the start, and what’s a paranormal story if not a desperate search for context. it’s like detective stories, but more open-ended: not so much who-done-it what-is-it-that’s-done: the evidence is all there, what could it mean, what does it mean of the unknowable world?
anyways i’m incredibly charmed by the nature of the recontextualization: it’s emotional. why understand the world? for others
nice
what do you do when you have trouble sleeping?
i’ve rarely had full on, sustained insomnia, but ever since college, maybe once a month, i’ll have a terrible night of sleep. it’s trouble instantiating sleep, for all my insomnia enthusiasts out there, and so i’m often very conscious, aware the whole time
i never know what to do
at best, i’ll read. i love to read. strong memories of books i’ve read late: the metamorphosis with a cat on my girlfriends floor, george perec curled on a futon under half light and humming of an air conditioning, librivox recordings of greek dramas sometimes, as though amateurish retellings of child murder might help me drift off. always important: laying or sitting in some position uncomfortable. half-wakefulness is dull like a pin through felt then skin, so ya gotta exaggerate all the sensations
tonight: a blog. legs up on the back side of the couch, eyes dry, i present an image of myself into the world
Making Obsidian my CMS
I am so slow at updating, so lax in this blog. I have even stopped posting translations, though some are done, wasting away on my harddrive right now. (apologies to my mostly imagined audience)
why? cause this is a static site, so i have to work to post things. sucks
instead: i’m copying my whole-ass blog into obsidian, which i use on my phone
daily posts?
daily posts
perhaps
you could swap 'em out (2026-25 weekly post)
i bought a whiteboard last week, in order to be professional. nothing is more professional than the ability to erase. there is some kind of message in this, something like truth
what i mean to say is some of my agent submissions have, as you say, “timed out”, so im looking at more agents, more publication attempts, and i’m attempting to be more strategic and ordered this round of submissions. people speak of cargo cults as if they were a bad thing, but organization like this soothes me thru small failures. at least i’ve tried
(i do, to be fair, believe in the novel i’m sending out: The Girl. It’s just a good deal non-commercial: surreal and confrontational, with no named characters as such, so it’s almost definitionally an uphill battle. this year i’ve been submitting directly to smaller presses as well, on the hope that random luck gets my stuff read. its hard!)
life: a week of allergies. since my last update i’ve been diagnosed with cat allergies “pretty bad”, and it’s also shedding season, so i’ve spent a lot of time with puffy eyes, wandering the days like the before in an allergy commercial. television, antihistamines, dragon quest. maybe why my similes are so dully television commercial now
next week im going to fl to help my dad after a surgery. preppin for that