8:23AM Sunday
At the desk early this morning.
The dehumidifier hit the full mark around 7, beeped red and pulled me out of sleep. Next week, I'll be at the desk even earlier after we fall back a time zone.
I’ve figured this thing out - Sunday is cleaning day. Sunday is a day of rest. And rest for me is putting things in their place. Clearing out the clutter, which includes this writing at the end of the week. A mental scrubbing as much as a physical one.
After which, I will water the house plants, do two loads of laundry (darks in cold, followed by lights in hot with bleach), tidy things room by room, sweep the porch, and take the trash out before it starts to smell.
Halloween continues in the haunted neighborhoods of inner Indianapolis. In October, it seems one street per week becomes The Lost Boy's board walk for a day. In crooked old homes covered in ancient stucco. On Arts and Crafts porches decked in nylon spiderwebs. Along closed-off roads paraded with every manner of extraterrestrial, hatchet men, and the current year's rundown of meme costumes.
Fall has always been a mashup of holiday expectation mixed with a weird back-to-school melancholy we can never seem to shake as adults. For better or worse, I have always fought the darkness with work.
Working on the poster now for Bill Drummond's "Tied Hands" web tour, which has currently stopped at The Thinker Hub in Liverpool for the next 40 days. They're all shit now, the mockups, but everything starts at shit until it gets better.
Same for my interpretation of the Shangri-La's "Past, Present & Future." Reimagining it as it might be written by a 2001-era Mogwai and Alan Sparhawk. Except right now it's too slow, too out of tune, doesn't rise and fall enough, doesn't follow the Beethoven chords in the right way.
Shit, until it gets better.
I was recently followed by an author represented by one of the agencies I'd recently submitted my manuscript to. This was in an Instagram account where I have yet to mention the first thing about a book, writing, or anything at all about querying. It's an account where I post pictures of a dog and things around the house.
Which means my data has been stitched across unrelated and disparate platforms into an overstory that feeds into a prediction engine built by billionaires who own newspapers and superyachts. It's not hyperbole if our p@$$words won't protect us.
We joke that Siri, et al, has led us to happily accept a virtual surveillance state if it means our Amazon orders can be shipped same day. Our smart devices constantly listen and watch our every move, filling millions of rows of data in a server in the Las Vegas desert every time we stream a song, buy a toilet brush, check into a tavern down the street. But if we delete social media, how will we know what a skibidi toilet is?
Big questions.
And the querying continues to general silence. It was this way with the band, too. Sent demos to 50+ labels, back when that was what bands did to get noticed. We received two responses in total--one polite rejection from Polyvinyl, then later a phone call from Bob at Fearless Records. Go big, then go realistic.
As far as the book, I've got a plan to get public eyes on it if I have no bites. Watch this space. Or the next one. Or the one after.
Going realistic, shedding personal data like the flu virus.
9:30AM.
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What I’m reading: Anti-Story: The Anthology of Experimental Fiction (Philip Stevick - this is a dense read)
What I'm listening to: Piano Nights (Bohren & der Club of Gore)
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