I want a new computer, a more powerful one. I don't know why I would want this. I don't need it. I just need a larger hard drive. I have too much music, double copies, triple copies. It takes too long to manage. It requires a dedication that I do not have. But, I like listening to new music.
I don't buy the "cloud" concept for this, yet. All of these companies are eager for you to put all of your data in the cloud, for a price. It will only be a simple matter of time before they are charging you even more to give back to you what is already yours. It will be a form of renting your own property. People will line up to pay.
Their side business will be selling information about you to other companies. A perfect fiscal circle.
Few seem as bothered as me by all of this. I'm not sure why. I guess people just don't care that companies regularly sell information about them. I've had some argue that it makes life more convenient. So be it. Who am I to question such things. The concept of privacy is becoming antiquated.
Okay, today we go into the city, to see an old friend who has returned for the Burning Man holy pilgrimage week. On the way home we'll stop at Ikea and buy a shelf to house some more of my records. Whatever will not fit on the shelf we currently have and the new one will have to go. Somebody will become the lucky recipient of many, many boxes. Vinyl is on top again, I'm told.
A poem for your Saturday:
The Weight of Being Eden
Ran into Ben Henry Howard,
In the black of the hotel cellar a few hours back.
He had only a short time to spare and spoke
Full of confidence and consequence,
With his dromedary bottom lip,
And that speck of know-it-all worn by cosmic gurus.
The moths swarmed the solitary condemned glow
Like constellations in motion; peering, swirling,
Eyeballs gazing back from the mirrored walls
Smeared with interstellar dust
Painted in pigments of love and lust.
He suggested I kill my imagination
And count my chickens before they hatch
And begin to scratch at their shells and beg for food.
To do this would unhook the clasp of mystery's cloak
And send it floating rumpled to the floor beneath the hat rack,
Until it climbs again to weave golden thread as it did before.
You can feel the Spice Islands' trade winds
Warm your face before they pale upon the backs of whales
Across the shorn spring lambs skin
Of the bleating North Atlantic toward a battered bowing inn on the shore.
The torches light the drooping tropic night
That sags beneath the weight of its own perfume
And the weight of being Eden in each extreme.
It is always day where it snows.
Always white with perpetual light and fleshful of pumping blood,
Adieu, Adieu.
The last kiss before boarding a train
Lies frozen beneath the slow drifts
That creep motionless across artifice of day.
Look, there, another plump thigh
In purple garters warbling the songbird's goodbye to night,
Adieu, Adieu.
And I simply wait and hope the telephone rings
For a conversation about the evening's mundane trials
With the inevitable farewell, awkward and sterile
As it always is across the lines, across the miles. Â
And I simply wait and ventilate the balmy breath
That blows unseen between the wiry veins of all things.
See that wall there. It never whispers
Or cracks its toes or masks its intent
To become the universe in miniature.
Best as anyone knows it bears its load
And waits like a curious turtle in repose.
A thousand sermons dangle
Condemned sprung jacks in their boxes
They bounce and cackle from the tree's unsteady arms.
Each one naked knowledge,
A singular original sin to pluck and bite
And with delight begin another lapsarian lineage,
Rise, line of Cain, Rise, line of Eve
We are all fallen here,
Get up and breathe.
An empty urn black with tarnish
Greets the tongueless thirsty traveler
Beneath the neon's flinty flickers
And the maypole's sundered wreath.
We are the spring sprung children
Spinning, spin, spin
Spin with your nectar-ripe ribbons
So that we all may be born again and again.
My head is full of numbers
Manipulated and constantly recogitated in an endless algebra
To push aside the regret and all that is lost with it.
This time I hear the drums
Pound and drum beneath the Banyan tree
And between the fixed wooden wings
Of the samurai city's soaring gates.
All Hail a little sprig of jasmine, dazzling,
And placed in her hair, just behind the curve of the ear,
Or a wedge of lemon in the blue iris of her stare,
Come, Rise, Hail, Spin, Adieu- and again.
A deposed simple primeval emperor
Marches across the cold vast silver
Folds of the budding rose
As it sways in the infinite fields
On an ordinary day,
And now it's best I be on my way.
- Mushika
