by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
On a much more surreal note, behzad.com is up and disfunctional. (Behzad being the fictional reality behind the character known as Consultimo.) I am really not sure, in this state of mind, what to make of this. I would rather not try to sleep, knowing, but it’s dark, and it’s raining heavily, and my eyelids are drooping precariously. I can only hope the nightmares pass me over.
Rodney | 11:10:00 PM [permalink]I let the world pass me by.
That’s why, for years, I didn’t want to know about anything. Today, I went to the library and browsed. Brought home a half-dozen books. Haven’t really read fiction for years—I get too wrapped up in it. My writing over the last few years has been painfully stiff. I just didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear, clock in, avoid everything, clock out. Of course, in the meantime, communication has gotten incrementally more pervasive—it was hard to get a handle on back when Usenet was everything and now it’s quite impossible to make one’s voice heard over the din, which only discouraged me more. It’s hard to establish one’s expertise when they’re a thousand people at a moment’s notice who have a better background than you. As Bart says, “Gotcha. Can’t win, don’t try.”
I do this for my own satisfaction of my own standards of quality, and I couldn’t win, so I didn’t try. It’s fun to play here with my record collection (one of the few underrepresented angles I can still spin with) and rant about things of temporal inconsequence, but it has so far been only that, and the occasional clue… off to page an available buddy…
I remember.
Rodney | 9:56:00 PM [permalink]The main difference between the architecture in Northeast Ohio and Bolton, Lancashire is that Bolton has architecture.
Caroline’s friend Tony asked me if I could taste any difference in the air—and I could, it was crisp and clean and invigorating. Everything was cleaner there, and they had weather.
I wanted to take pictures inside shops, which, thankfully, Caroline advised me out of, but the record stores were nirvana. The local Asda, which is roughly equivalent to Meijer/Super Target, had a better music section than most actual record stores I’ve been to in the Midwest United States. They also had biscuits and proper chocolate as far as they eye could see, alcoholic beverages in liter plastic bottles, and apples the size of coconuts. Even the signature American dessert, the apple pie, was better there (Florence, my mother-in-law, baked one for me!).
They also had hills. Northeast Ohio is very flat (in almost every conceivable sense of the word).
During our visit to Manchester for CDs and curry, Caroline spoke with someone she knew at Vinyl Exchange. When she told him she had moved to Cleveland, Ohio, he became very animated about Cleveland’s 1970s punk scene. I could see Michael Stanley’s heart exploding from a hemisphere away, and smiled. (Michael Stanley being the local stadium “rock” hack who everyone in Cleveland kowtowed to in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but couldn’t get arrested outside of Ohio.)
