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Neck

Leaving work, a passing joke about surgery awakened the memory of last night’s dream: I performed a casual sort of surgery on the neck of a friend, a musician.

He was pausing with me prior to playing a gig in a nearby locale, and for reasons not recalled, it was necessary to carefully flense two half-inch wide, seven-inch long, half-inch thick strips of fatty flech from the back of his neck.

Surgery completed, we were flummoxed by the suddenly-noted lack of dressings. Time dictated that my friend had to depart for the gig, and so he did, wounds undressed and bleeding.

The images in the dream seem to have erupted from one or more long-forgotten documentaries on whaling and sealing, and the vision of the bloodied, fatty flesh clearly reflects this.

Naturally, given the likely source of the imagery, there was only one proper denouement to the act of the flensing.

With a sense of compulsion and horror even within the dream, I ate both ribbons of human flesh

Posted on by mwhybark

Anniversary

Yesterday was my tenth anniversary. At dinner with Viv, we watched the nearly-full moon rise and reflect on the water, framed by scudding clouds. Just at dessert, trees framed a meteor. I watched it spark and fall flaming down the sky to vanish in midair.

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Independence Day

Endzone was the livejournal of SF writer Tom Disch, a master of dystopian SF and a treasured early reading companion of mine. The books that I remember best are 334 and Camp Concentration. Appropriately, he also executed the novelization of The Prisoner.

His perfect cynicism and hopeless view of the human condition are certainly the aspects of his work that remain with me most resonantly. Whenever I have returned to these works, I have always found myself chuckling in appreciation of the perfect blackness of the worlds he wrote of.

He ended his own life on Independence Day.

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Things n stuff

I generally find blogging about consumer goods a big fat bore, so it’s not usual for me to spend time writing about this or that new object that entered the house or to make more than a passing mention of some technological gimcrack giving up the ghost (martini-soaked salvage laptops being the exception that proves the rule).

However, since I killed our main A/V receiver amp due to fiddlin’ idiocy (bright sparking snap and curl of smoke included), I did replace it. Both receivers are capable surround-sound monstrosities with enough plugs on the back to cause a straight-up nervous breakdown. The new unit, happily, includes onboard digital-to-analog translation circuitry, which is a good thing. The old unit did not, and given my proclivity for inventing new harebrained ways to try to run computer-stored audio or video assets through the A/V, I was constantly trying to figure out why signal A was not coming out of output channel B.

Whatever: we all know I’m a classic techno-eejut, prone to cross-connect this thing with that thing in ways that, um, produce a bright sparking SNAP followed by a distressingly ghostlike curl of smoke. I’m noting this here because – oh joy! – The setup on the new unit literally went perfectly. I mean I, pulled it out of the box, traced the tangle of wires leftover from the unfortunate corpse of its’ predecessor, tried to remember which cable went to what in or out, and fired it up.

Unbelievably, each hookup was right.

Today, I spent most of the day downstairs working on scanning a friend’s earliest ‘zine output. In order to do so, I had to disassemble an older computer and consolidate its’ parts with a computer of equal age but which I have updated more frequently than the cannibalized unit. Two PCI cards and an internal hard drive, all moved from one vintage computer into another.

The whole process, including verifying that an even-more-ancient SCSI scanner works with the just-moved vintage PCI SCSI card, took fifteen minutes. One flaw emerged: the sticky tape used in the ten-year-old scanner to fix the platen glass had failed. Everything else worked exactly as it should.

I suppose I should take this as a sign that I know what I am doing, but I know that I do not, and therefore won’t.

On a countervailing note, my right ear is either totally clogged with wax, or a catastrophic ear infection has resulted in a massive loss of audio sensitivity overnight.

A happy, fortuitous even, independence day to you and yours, where and whenever you may be.

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Rex Bob Lowenstein

Listening to a fifteen-year old cassette of a friend’s old aircheck – hm, maybe even older than fifteen years, can’t recall if it’s a WQAX or WFHB show – I was amused by the song Rex Bob Lowenstein, by artist unknown, but possibly Mark Germino.

I started to try to figure out whose song it was and the search results I was getting made no sense. It seems like possibly the song was originated by Germino but covered by a not-that-name Flying Burrito Brothers reunion outfit. No-one’s blogged it or posted a live version so I was defeated in my quest to do an aural comparison and share a link.

I did find the lyrics, so, um, make up your own damn tune.

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Hear it

From that Hoosier 60s band blog, on my first sweep through it I found a bunch of cools pics and band names but a sad lack of great sounds! This June 2007 post highlighting a side by the Tribu-terrys is the best I’ve come up with so far.

I did think it was interesting that many of the other sides seem to bear out my thesis of a ‘midwestern fatalism’ grounding Hoosier pop. There were at least two I previewed lamenting the loss of draftees in Vietnam, but specifically not protesting that loss. One of the songs was called ‘Necessary Evil.’

Eventually I suppose I’ll get all OCD on the audio and see if I can pull stats out. Not tonight.