Freeeday 28 January 2000

Pic of the day: "I think music actually directly corresponds to some of our standard brain waves..."
Somewhat jazzed-up screenshot from the RPG Daggerfall. This picture shows the Residence house band, in Grayidge, Tulune. (As shown on alt.games.daggerfall.)

Good thing it's Friday! I went home from work an hour early because I was hard pressed to stay awake enough to do anything useful. I fell asleep at the bus almost immediately, but as usual I woke before the bus arrived at its last stop, where I go off. At home I exchanged some e-mail, continued a play of Pharaoh, and fell asleep in my chair while my little Egyptian city happily continued its own life. I'm feeling better now.

I still can't really believe I wrote the stuff yesterday. I can almost hear the footsteps of readers marching away into the distance. And yet I have been deliberately vague, and intend to continue to be so in all "adult" matters. There are more graphic stuff in the Bible. I just might quote it, but I guess the relevant group of readers are gone already so there's really no point. That's just too bad. But you can only build a monument so high before you have to visit all corners of it.

And I do feel that I am building a monument, stone by stone, day by day. I do not have son or daughter to remember me. This is my crude attempt to upload something of me to the Internet, something that just might outlast me in some way.

I listened to this song at work today. It was from Leonard Cohen's CD "I'm your man", from the late 80es. I remember that I loved this song when this record was new. In fact I originally bought this record on casette, presumably I did not have a CD player yet. It's been a while. The particular song was "Take this waltz". It is a strange song: The lyrics are incoherent, fragmented, small pictures painted in words, held together by a few threads at best. The threads that I can see are Vienna (Wien) and love. And the recurring self-reference to "this waltz". And yet there is an underlying note of emotion that just nearly makes sense of it all.

Listening to it today, I felt the common ground with my own journal almost overwhelmingly ironic, given that it is so un-intentional. "And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there, and the moss." The moss, to my disturbed mind, represents long time passing. The self-reference is something you are looking at right now. And the beautiful conclusion to the song resonates strongly in my soul:
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it is yours now. It's all that there is.

Ironically, I can't dance at all. I cannot even learn to dance. Even though I love the sound of waltzes and some other dance types (especially the more classic ones), I am completely unable to move my body in rhythm with the music. It bites, but it has its good sides too. If I had been a passable dancer, there would have been tons of more temptations. Not being able to dance is like having big ears, thick glasses and being half bald at 21. You can get intimate with women, but they have to be really drunk.

Yes, I have actually danced with women, and yes, they were drunk. Nothing untoward happened, well nothing really impressive at least. It certainly was not habit forming. Then again, I was already a christian at the time. Christians don't mate with drunk women, or grope their mammalian outcroppings or such. Well, according to my handbook we don't. Your mileage may vary (but should not).

Women who can't dance (if any) don't have this problem (if problem it is). Just wiggle, and a man will fight the world for you. Use only as a last resort, though.

While I can't actually move to the music, I can still appreciate it. Music is one of my favorite pleasures, as you may already have noticed. Sometimes I use music as "canned mood". Music is uniquely effective at setting a mood, especially one that has been set before. When playing songs that I heard a decade ago, I can feel the mood of that time being restored to my brain as if by magic. I think music actually directly corresponds to some of our standard brain waves, and that this is the source of its power.

So, what do you think?