Everything is a muscle

Saturday 1/18/25

Everything is a muscle. Your mind, your ability to process, to recognize, your memory, your emotions, the ability to connect.

When we don't use these muscles, they stop working as well as they had and they don't get to come close to working as well as they can; when we hardly use them at all, they are barely there; when we never use them, they are gone; and when they are gone, it is all but impossible to get those muscles back.

The internet and technology does all the work so that these muscles are no longer used. Or, rather, we think the internet and technology does the work, but what it really does is replace these things--the ability to process, to recognize, your memory, your emotions, the ability to connect--by removing that muscle--turning it to flab--and subsequently effacing us, the individual.

That person, though, is apt to be left with feelings--even if they are not articulated on the a conscious level--that now have no way in which they can be addressed or resolved, for feelings often require resolution. The same way a chord may provide resolution in music.

There is no more a destructive force in the history of humanity than this. It stands as the end of humanness. The thing we have going for us, if we have anything is that we are human. But here we are willingly parting with our most precious commodity. We're increasingly less able to even realize or understand what we're doing and it just becomes what is happening and what is and remains. The muscles are gone then. There's nothing that can be worked back up. You need muscles to move from the first rung of the ladder--or the ground--up to the next. Can't do it with fatty tissue only.

Technology of this nature serves as an opiate, and people play a role in the opiating of their own selves. They fashion this narrative--a series of lies to self--that with this technology they will be rewarded with time with which they can do the really important things, but they won't. Without will and commitment and drive and purpose--all of which require this muscle I'm speaking of--we do less and less. That's human nature. Simply reality. No matter what we tell ourselves. And this is how the takeover happens, as well as the reduction of humanness and its eventual eradication.

When people--and I'm speaking here about people who pretend to be artists but are not artists--say, "inspired by," what that usually means is, "This is something I took things from." How doesn't anyone see this? People make things, but it's remarkable how so few people--or so few people ever--create anything new and unique.

I am not inspired in this way because it's not inspiration--it's pilfering because of one's own artistic shortcomings. I may hear something, as an example, that turns the light on in me--the life--in some brighter way than with the setting it had been on right then and there; and the light/life makes me want to create. But normally it is just me--I provide the light and the life. It comes from within.

If you have to wait for inspiration of any kind, you will not go far as an artist. You have to be able to do what you need to do without special ceremony or coronation; by saying, "Okay, time to get going," and sitting there and doing it (or walking around and doing it). Perpetual instantaneousness.

I have not excelled on the fitness front lately and will get busy redressing that this afternoon.

Best advice in the title of a song alone: Take the long road and walk it. Titular words to live by.

Was asked to determine where illustrations should go for a piece of mine on Leo McCarey and Make Way for Tomorrow, so I did that. It's a 5400 word piece, and therefore takes more illustrations--with how these things work sometimes--than many other pieces would. I hadn't seen the piece in some time, though it was a piece I worked on over a long time--it may have been executed over the span of, say, two years.

There I am looking at it yesterday, and I'm thinking it's like the best thing I've ever seen. And so much more than a film piece or a piece about this film and this director. It exists independent of film and director as its own work of art. For the person who has never seen Make Way for Tomorrow or never would. It was then that I determined I'd be using parts of this piece for some nonfiction prose offs.

With, for example, The Smart Set and Erica Levi Zelinger. It's very easy to expose someone for the bigot they are in these cases. Made me think about the notion of shooting fish in a barrel, which Mythbusters proved wasn't as easy as it sounds, but exposing someone like this is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel is said/believed to be. Also selected the art for a piece on the Beatles and Stan Brakhage.

There are probably many people who'd like to see the Chiefs fail to the Texans today, and nearly all Patriots fans who feel threatened by another team's historic success, or what could be historic success, or what might outdistance their team's historic success. I don't think Patriots fan have much to worry about in that regard. doing what the did for twenty years is going to be tough for anyone to match, if anyone ever does.

I'm not like this. I'd prefer to see the Chiefs and the Bills win, because that could be a dynamite AFC Championship game. And if the Bills are going to win the Super Bowl--and I still think it's the Chiefs--I'd like to see them take down Chiefs on the Chiefs' home field. That would be earning it, certainly.

I made that change (which I believe I mentioned a couple months or so ago) I had to make in "Idra"--just a clarifying clause. Changed two other words to one word. Regarding the former: I wanted to make it abundantly clear that the narrator of the story had not been up on a cross himself. At one point he starts talking generally about what it must be like to be crucified, both for the person up on the cross and with those below seeking something--insight into the next world, perhaps, in the final moments--from that person up on the cross.

You're always working for the reader. Sometimes it's best for the reader to have a puzzle, after a fashion; something to work out on their own. It doesn't necessarily have to be worked out, depending on the story; thinking matters through can be the point. The exercise; what something seems to be, what it may also not be, what it could also be. A certain openness, in other words, but an openness with designed parameters or parameter-refractions. It depends on the work.

That wasn't the case or intent here. So I just applied a clarifying clause--a sort of natural conversational turn--because I didn't want the bump, but rather unbroken readerly passage.

This is how you have to think when you're writing. You have to know what you're doing. You can't do what all of these godawful publishing system writers do.

Looking over it again reaffirmed for me that it must be for The Solution to the World's Problems: Surprising Tales of Relentless Joy. I've talked about that idea of not robbing one book to pay another, which I am on guard against. Something like "Idra" and the thoughts I can have--and have had--pertaining to it is what I was talking about with the above idea. I work on so many books at once, and if I have somewhat of a greater focus on one of them at the moment, I can start to think "This would be good here," because I'm really feeling it with that book, but I make sure that I'm aware the same thing is going to happen with another book and the thing in question should stay where it belongs, which is ideally a matter of being where it belongs.

That's a very good story, "Idra." I took it all in yesterday, with more time having passed now since its completion (barring these two tweaks), and it was like, "Damn." It's exquisitely clean, too, the math and music and the geometry and the engineering of the thing. And very easy to read, but there's so much in the story. The rhythms, the arc--bang on.

A story has a natural breathing pattern--a good story. Don't overlook the respiratory component of writing. "Idra" had been sent to the people at Image, the so-called literary journal of faith, this perfect story of singular invention about a husband and wife who take Christ down from the cross before he is dead. But that will be touched on again later in the exposing of the people there and their practices of discrimination.

I'll soon be addressing Neil Gaiman and the latest revelations about his raping ways. I've been planning on getting into him for a while. Here's the thing, though: You could do this with almost everyone in the publishing industry were you of a mind. If you hired a private investigator to see what any almost any of them are doing, this is what you'd find.

Almost without exception, these people are evil. There's not another way to put it. These are--again, with few exceptions--horrible human beings. They're all in bed with each other, and they often know what each other has done and is doing. That's why none of them speak out--because someone else could speak out against them. It's also in part why they do things for each other, but there's also a lot more happening with that.

Someone sent me some similar information about two people at The New Yorker. I simply haven't put it up yet because I don't have verification. It's not that I have doubt. I know these people for what they are.

Worked out something for a music book. It's a work that looks at ten extended recording engagements--in-concert residencies, in other words--that changed the history of American music, while defining aspects of American music. It has to be the right ten. There needs to be a progression from residency to residency. So while there were residencies I wanted to include, you can't make a determination based on your own predilections. The work comes first. The book. So I have my ten now. They go from the 1930s to the very end of 1969, and in them--and where we get to with the last of the ten--we see much of what would follow. And with the earliest of them, we see much of what had been, what was, if you will.

I have been gathering galore with the Grateful Dead Grabber. Previously, in order to download these soundboards on the archive, I'd crack open the developer's page, scroll through the code, find the individual tracks, and download them one by one into a folder. Now I just press a button on the main page for show and I get the whole thing. Four clicks and just like that I had the entire run from the Berkeley Community Theater in August 1972.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Dead's 1/17/68 show at the Carousel Ballroom, the tape of which provides the first live recorded example of "Dark Star." This, for me, is something like the first take of "A Day in the Life," which for a long time was the piece of music I most wanted to hear in the world. A snippet had come out--with George Martin talking over it--but that was a grail for me, and with the release of the Super Deluxe edition of Sgt. Pepper, that complete first take was at last in hand.

The "Dark Star" from 1/17/68 is an embryonic work. From these seeds will eventually grow the likes of the 4/8/72 Wembley "Dark Star" and so many others that, in my estimation, are about as high as musical achievement has gone in this world.

Listened to the Strokes' The Modern Age and a number of live radio sessions this morning: the Vaccines' on Jo Whiley from last year, Green Day on the BBC in 1994, the Jam's Peel session from October, 29, 1979. The Peel sessions were always so well engineered. They have as much of a signature sound--a signature quality, really--as what you got from the studios at Sun and Chess.

Also listened to John Peel playing the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" twice in a row in 1978, which I do periodically. His all-time favorite record and I don't blame him. Right before he plays it the first time he says, "What a treat." Indeed. And then after the second time, he says, "That is a mighty, mighty record." I agree.

I read this remark last year that "Teenage Kicks" wasn't the greatest song, it was simple, etc., but how simple is it? I'd say not very--within that song is a significant, fundamental swath of human experience. A big swath of a stage of life.

Worked on "By Water" and "Friendship Bracelet." I summarized the intention of the latter in speaking with someone yesterday. This is the thinking: I wanted to create a definitive work about bullying. A story for everyone who has ever been bullied and for everyone who has ever bullied someone. Both. And it so happens to be a ghost story, too. Some lines from what I was working on:

They stuck at it, day in, day out, making fun of Constance, which felt so important, though none of them would’ve been able to say why, including Doreen, who thought about it the most.

No day was complete for Doreen and the girls she wanted to be her friends—as if it didn’t count as part of their lives at all—unless they had ridiculed Constance and gotten her to cry. Or, better still, almost gotten her to cry, with the only reason that she didn’t being that she tried so hard not to, which caused her face to resemble metal with cracks starting to show, or as if someone was hitting it with a great big invisible hammer.

Constance didn’t have many friends, and then she didn’t have any. Her friends from before made off like they were escaping a burning building, only as quietly as possible like they didn’t want the flames to notice.

I mean, come on. Everyone else is over there, all congealed together in this mass of indistinguishablity, and then one other person--and it's exactly one--is over here, apart from it all, and the mucus-blobs of the mass resent that and want their pound of flesh. Not worth it. And it's ultimately not going to work out the way they want it to anyway. Better to be about the right things and get behind the right work. You end up looking a lot better. Among other things.

But yes, muscle. We end with what we began. I have a cover worked out for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. Now, this might become moot, based upon something else I have in mind, which I don't want to go into here--it pertains what occurred to me that time a few weeks ago as I was walking in the rain. Anyway, I went looking today for an image with which to work off for said design. And that image is a pink-ish cross section of of heart muscle under a microscope. Think of it as if it were colored pencil, with the title, subtilte, and my name then "written" into the image via erasure. Erased in with rounded letters.