I’m always searching for music to listen to while I’m writing, because I can’t think and fall into the right kind of trance to dump my subconscious onto pages when extreme death metal is screaming away in the foreground. Classical music puts me to sleep, and jazz is jazz, so it’s hard to precisely nail it. I do like ambient music, as long as it isn’t too passive, and doesn’t veer off into the Yanni-esque new age shlock. All points south of classic Eno can be good, but that specific sound doesn’t imprint my brand of writing exactly the way I need it, so I’ve been looking for more.

Dark ambient, for better or worse, is closer to what I like. It contains a texture that provides a good underlying current for my work, and blocks out everything around me, yet doesn’t invade my mind in a way that would turn it in the wrong direction. Dark ambient removes from the equation the type of music a hippy-dippy acupuncturist would play in his office, which is good. The main problem with dark ambient is that it’s impossible to find a straight answer as to what it is. Ask ten people what ten bands constitute death metal, and you will get twelve highly contested answers. Dark ambient is the same. It shares distant borders with Krautrock and experimental music, and I don’t know enough about it to give you a defined answer as to who the main players are. (Maybe you should tell me.) I can tell you about a specific band I like, though.

Sleep Research Facility, the working name of Glasgow musician Kevin Doherty, has released five albums of essentially beatless dark ambient music, along different themes. The one thing in common is a dark, textured soundscape, usually without musical elements, or maybe with long, sustained chords. The name of the band relates to the work’s lack of any elements that would disturb sleep. That’s a slight peeve of mine, because it’s difficult for me to listen to dark ambient that contains extreme screeching, loud noise, and distorted shrieking voices. It’s hard to get in a trance state to work when interrupted with those elements. I’m not saying they don’t have artistic merit within a composition, and I can enjoy listening to them for the sake of listening to them, but when looking for functional music, it’s an issue.

Another challenge with creating any ambient music is having a central theme or “gimmick” or some set of tracks for the train to roll down. SRF seems to do this well, in the choice of conceptual framework. The prime example, and a good starting point, is the album Nostromo. This is a nearly 70-minute album that was inspired by the ship from the movie Alien. The album details a walkthrough of the ship from Ridley Scott’s scifi/horror movie, starting in the A-Deck, while the crew is in suspended animation, hurtling through space back to Earth. Scott meticulously detailed the ship, not as a sterile, futuristic vessel, but as a beaten, worn, working man’s craft, like a battle-damaged oil platform in the middle of the ocean. But when the crew is in stasis, prior to the computer waking them, there’s a certain calm, or anticipation in the vessel.

Nostromo starts in the A-Deck of the ship, presenting a deep-bass flow of sound, with slight electrical static and drifting sounds of machinery. It’s not like the harsh industrial sounds of the cyberpunk-influenced electronic genres of the mid-90s (I’m thinking the mechanical sounds of, say, the interstitial tracks of early Fear Factory, or even the earlier sounds of something like Front 242. (and sorry for the horrible reference points. This is very far outside my wheelhouse of musical knowledge, trying to learn here.)) Anyway, the dozen-minute tracks drift deeper into the ship, as the sounds and textures become more refined. The entire album is very dream-like and drifts seamlessly through the ship. The 2007 release contains a bonus track named “Narcissus,” which was the lifeboat escape pod of the Nostromo, which contains similar elements, although it is texturally different. You could imagine Ripley putting herself in stasis and drifting back to earth during the final track.

I listened to Nostromo constantly when I was writing He. I’d sit down to write every day, start the album on repeat, and keep it as a constant soundscape. I do this a lot when writing; for Atmospheres, I listened to the Sleep album Dopesmoker every day for at least a year. It’s not exactly ambient, but it’s an easy album to fall into.

So what album do I use for the next book? More importantly, what is the next book? Still working on that.

Anyway, check out more about SRF at their home page: http://www.resonance-net.com

I recently found myself back at The Big Fun Glossary, which was a point of obsession a dozen years ago. It is the story of a college-aged punk rock slacker and his band of friends living in an old farmhouse in rural Virginia in the mid-90s, told in a wikipedia-type A to Z glossary. As a person who left college in 1995 and knocked around a farm state for my formative years, I took great interest in this, and ended up ripping off the entire idea, using the rough hosted wiki software on his site to start brain-dumping my own entries into a bunch of topics. This became The NecroKonicon.

I worked on The NecroKonicon on and off for about four years, although it was really more like a sudden burst of new writing, a few years of tweaks, and then a push to freeze the topics and push it into a paper book. The book itself didn’t sell at all (or, you could say it sold as well as any of my other books.) But I got a lot of comments and mails about it. And the people who started the Bloomington wiki at Bloomingpedia.org claim my site was one of their inspirations to get their own site going.

At some point, I moved all the topics to this site and made it a bunch of static HTML pages. After the book came out, I eventually pulled the site, partly because I didn’t want to potentially undercut book sales (dumb), but there were other reasons.

Now, I sometimes wonder what I should do with the site. I sometimes think about doing more work on it: updating pages, getting better pictures, adding new topics. Or maybe the “underside” of the site needs to be changed, like moved to some wiki software, or maybe like a blog platform.

There are a few things that make me waver on doing anything with this:

• A project like this is open-ended. Any time the glossary went off my radar, I’d get a (usually angry) email from someone, demanding correction of a topic. People love to do this. Certain people really love to do this, to a fault. It finally got to the point where I said the thing was frozen, and I would still get angered corrections. How did these people ever deal with print books? Did they write angry letters to Webster saying “NO IT’S COLOUR NOT COLOR YOU PIECE OF SHIT.”

• I think the culture of the internet and privacy and googling one’s own name has changed a lot between 2002 and today. Many times, when I added a person’s first and last name to the glossary, I would be the only search result on the internet for their name. Most of the time, these people never noticed. But now, everyone googles for their ex-girlfriend or high school friend, and everyone is on Facebook (or was). And some people get really offended when they find out they’re online. I hated receiving takedown requests from people, partly because I felt bad about hurting or offending them, but also because it usually meant I was “friends” with them in my head, or still remembered them, and they were not friends with me, or wanted no part in the project, or felt violated, or whatever. Also, having a person involved in multiple entries, then having to backtrack and edit them out or change their name to L________ diminished the work somehow.

• The idea of doing a “straight” project like this takes away from the amount of effort I can focus on my “main” writing, and there are only so many hours in the day.

• I feel like I can rehash the past only so much, and need to move on. I can’t be a person thinking “hey, remember 1992?” constantly. I know people who are like this, and it disturbs me on some level. I can’t fully explain it, but being stuck in the past bothers me. I need to be creating, not dredging.

But… it still calls to me. I often think about some way of turning these old entries into some sort of fiction book, or using the framework for making a hypertext book, or something.

The other possibility is something I started doing a long time ago, I think in the first year or two of this blog (then called a “journal,” because the term blog did not exist.) At that time, I’d hard-coded in a glossary of terms, maybe because I had Infinite Jest stuck in my head, or wanted to use hypertext more. I wanted to have the ability to mention “414 Mitchell” and then go to a popup or page that contained a definition and stories about the place I lived in Bloomington for two years. But I coded this by hand, and it was a huge pain in the ass.

I’ve thought about this more, and like the idea of using Wordpress shortcodes, like so a term surrounded in brackets becomes a link to a section of the web site with a bunch of pages of terms — or something. I need to think about this more. And it’s obviously something that’s a time-sink, so maybe I shouldn’t.

1. Turkey + Cheddar Cracker Stackers
2. Turkey + American Cracker Stackers
3. Pizza with Pepperoni
4. Nachos, Cheese Dip + Salsa
5. Extra Cheesy Pizza
6. Mini Hot Dogs (only if heated)
7. Ham + American Cracker Stackers
8. Chicken Dunks
9. Pizza Kabobbles
10. Turkey + Cheddar Lower Fat Cracker Stackers
11. Mini Burgers
12. Light Bologna + American Cracker Stackers
13. Any of the ones without juice
14. Any of the ones with the bullshit 100% juice instead of Capri Sun

• I had an awful WordPerfect 5.1 flashback, just for a second. I was trying to explain some HTML formatting in an email, and my mind flipped back to the days of helping some old guy in the library un-fuck his endless maze of bold and italic codes in a blue-screened document. It almost made me want to get a copy of DOSbox and a pirated image of the install disks and try to run it. Almost.
• I have been trying to walk every day for the last few months. I use a Fitbit to track my steps, and try to get 10,000 steps a day. But I usually walk right after writing, at like 5
  , and now it’s getting darker earlier, and I am not sure what I will do about that. Also, at the end of the month, DST happens, and it will be dark at 5
  , and I will be screwed. Or maybe I get a little headlamp. And body armor.
• I listen to podcasts while walking, but I’ve been getting frustrated with it, mostly because when I listen to comedian podcasts (Maron, Rogan, etc) it makes me compare my career (or lack thereof) to theirs, or wonder why I’m not doing something more, or wish I was writing for TV when I was 27, or whatever. I know that’s stupid, but I always have a major depression after finishing a book, until I talk myself down and ignore everything and get another project going, and that’s definitely the case right now.
• I became briefly obsessed with the Atari 520 ST yesterday, which is stupid. I find the Amiga/Atari rivalry fascinating in retrospect. I wanted an Amiga something horrible around 1990, and was saving pennies to get an A500, which was mostly obsolete at that point, but the idea of any other computer was so out of reach then, because a typical PC cost about two grand, but Monkey Ward sold the A500 for $500.
• I had to use the 520 ST the next year, when I took C335, which was the assemblers/machine language class. We booted off a floppy, straight into something called the Gulam shell, instead of using the GEM windows environment. (This always reminded me of goulash.) The course was tough, but the computers were worse. You were dealing with a straight-up Motorola 68000 CPU, which was wonderful for ML programming. But the machines were pieces of shit, horribly obsolete. Every time you saved to floppy, you crossed your fingers and held your breath and prayed to ten different gods that the damn thing would work, and 30% of the time, it didn’t. I read that the typical Atari ST maintenance procedure was to drop the machine and reseat the chips, which explains why they magically started working when we’d beat the hell out of the machine at 3AM because code written on one computer wouldn’t compile on the one next to it.
• I started reading Blood Meridian last night, which has been enjoyable so far, not for the story, but for the craft. It’s difficult to read, but wonderful. And it’s frustrating, because I wish I could write ten percent as good as him.
• I keep reading blog posts about how RSS is dead and not needed, and it makes me sad, because I wish everything and everyone used RSS. The big argument against it is “well, people use twitter” which makes no sense to me. I do have a plugin that tweets my posts, but I want a simple way to read all the posts I have not read on a blog, and keep track of it. Sorry if this sounds too Andy Rooney, but I love RSS.
• Fuck Goodreads for not keeping my bulleted lists from my RSS when these blog posts show up there. I’d complain, but I don’t even know how.
• I ate four fake chicken sliders and I think I need to go to bed or get my stomach pumped, maybe both.

Here are the various rabbit holes that have lured me lately, in lieu of actually writing:

• Watching aircraft disaster videos. I found a POV video of an F-16 that had a bird strike at takeoff, and the pilot had to immediately turn around and make a no-power landing. That led to a whole series of dead-stick landings of military planes, half of which involved ejecting while on the ground. Those videos are always weird, because the video continues, and you either see it cut out, or the plane overshoots the runway and ends up in the field, and you get a view of the grass at like a 37-degree angle while the air traffic controllers are yelling at the emergency crews on the radios.
• That somehow led to reading way too much about the B-1 and F/B-111 (ejectable crew capsule instead of seats) which led to reading about the future replacement bombers that will supplant the B-1/B-2/B-52 someday (or not.) And that led to sitting on google maps, looking at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, which has something like 4400 old bombers and fighters stored in the desert, waiting to die.
• Genie the feral child is a good one. She was raised in isolation until she was 14, because her dad was nuts. When the authorities got involved, she was developmentally a one-year-old, and never acquired a language. She became quite the object of study, which raised a furor ethics-wise, and she ended up in foster care and abused, before basically vanishing from view. Heartbreaking and bizarre.
• And then once you get on Bizarrepedia, you’ll wake up seven days later, deep into a hole reading about serial killers or UFO abductions. I ended up getting way stuck in a trail of reading about conspiracies that the Adam kid who got abducted in Florida in the 80s either never got taken, and that was some other kid’s severed head, or Jeff Dahmer did the kidnapping.
• The viral news of a series of K-Mart in-store muzak tapes appearing on archive.org sent me on a long dig looking for any more Montgomery Ward stuff from when I worked there in 1987-1993. The Muzak tapes there were actual capitol-M Muzak, and I think used some weird cart system where the tapes were rented and returned as part of the service, so good luck ever finding them. But that got me into an extended labelscar/deadmall search, which is never good.
• The Breitspurbahn. I don’t know how the hell I drifted there - I think I wrote some throwaway line about Nazi narrow-gauge rail. That led to researching Deutsche Reichsbahn and the WW2-era aspirations of a large rail network. The Big H had a crazed idea about having a rail system with a 3-meter gauge, like double the width of conventional trains. So they’d have these gigantic high-speed trains that would be big enough to have swimming pools and theaters, like a modern cruise ship going 300km/h from Berlin to Moscow. They never got past models and drawings. And of course, I went to the DR museum in Nuremberg last year, and probably walked right past all these original models, because everything was in German and I wasn’t paying attention, and now I need to go back and take pictures of this shit, because I’m mentally ill.

Anyway. I really should be writing, but can’t get started on the next thing.