Posted on by d

Active listening.

a DJ controller that looks rugged, looks like it's made out of the forest and has grown together organically, moss and wood, glimmer, mystical surroundings and sparkles in the air, hyper realistic, ultradetailed
Prompt:
a DJ controller that looks rugged, looks like it’s made out of the forest and has grown together organically, moss and wood, glimmer, mystical surroundings and sparkles in the air, hyper realistic, ultradetailed

My pandemic hobby was/still is maybe also a mid-life crisis though truth be told, I just turned fifty and I’m not lying to myself, or maybe that’s hope.

(seriously, do you?)

Things are good now, though. I’m trying to adjust to being my age, having just come out of three years living on a residential liberal arts college campus. It was such a mindfuck how coddled everyone was, how people had time to seriously consider poetry – but also, how cool is that?

There was a woman in my cohort who was, is, an unbelievable poet and also a clinical herbalist. We would take walks around campus sometimes, especially during 2020 when there was a small group of us, a set of mothers and children, living on an otherwise unoccupied college campus.

there was also a town, but that was closed, too, so it was somewhere between an oasis and an island but she showed me some of the local plants like the trout lilies and their edible, spring-filled leaves and the Japanese knotweed, “invasive” everywhere, and a wonderful support for Lyme Disease.

There were tons of ticks there. It was serious. There is a Lyme, Connecticut; a Lyme, New Hampshire; and a Lyme, New York. We were in western Massachusetts, surrounded on all sides.

But also, there was knotweed, taking over, shouting at people like ‘hey, oh my god just put down the test tubes and agree with me already. you act like it’s such a huge deal that this is what i do but this is what the land calls for right now to keep things in balance and so i am here in force.

You can drive yourself crazy — but in a good way — looking for these patterns. I live for it.

Anyway, that was a tangent. We are warlike in so much of our language, fearing these invasives, these foreign, non-native people that most of us once were and have probably been at least once in our lives, even if we’ve remained so exceptionally silent about it.

I had originally thought to talk about music, to talk about the thing that pumped my brain full of happy neurobiological happenings but things meander periodically, as they should.

my god, that’s really the panic of dying, isn’t it, that you do not do it satisfied?

i know for some that the panic of dying is something called “hell” and I am supposed to imagine the worst of all possible worlds, the most torturous, for eternity and you know what, that’s the problem, i can.

If it gets any worse than this, I can’t imagine.

But also, this is not to say that I don’t love my life, immensely, and or that I am not happy to have it. I do. I am.

I love my family, my dogs (who are also family), my old house, and this pandemic hobby of mine, because thanks to pandemic unemployment I actually became financially solvent for the first time in a long while and so i made an investment in my half-centurion self and bought an expensive toy, and a couple of intensely-researched and considered accessories and I started learning how to push buttons and twist knobs and god, it’s addicting.

it’s like, listening to the music, moving to the music, and also interacting with the music with my body and my hands in a give and take exchange of control, the whole thing is just very synergistic and multi-dimensional i guess maybe like ketamine therapy. i’ve never done sanctioned ketamine therapy so i’m not yet sure on what level that operates, but i do know it works and as with all of it, if you have a will to heal it helps things remain in balance a bit more easily, since these are always an edge.

i guess that’s it, really, I guess I just came here to say that it all requires such active listening.

Posted on by d

AI Prompts are Wordspells.

Photograph, art photograph, waist - up portrait with high detail and saturated colors of a realistic superhumanlike angel but instead of white they are the colors of earth and soil, moss, rust, and the bluest sky, their feathers ruffled and dusty with the iridescent joy of life and being part of nature. we and the light that illuminates the shot both see them from a slight angle above and facing them, and they are looking down, their arms crossed and held high in front of their foreheads, their wings only slightly unfurled. their skin is a dusky darker purple that moves from their neck to their foreheads in a gradient, growing lighter and greener as it rises. diffused light, naturally - lit white background. their ears are pointed, but in an intricate way, as if their tips are fading into the lace of a cicada’s wing, and their eyes are black and brown, with streaks of earth and soil, moss, rust, and the bluest sky.
Goddess conjured through @Midjourney. Photograph, art photograph, waist – up portrait with high detail and saturated colors of a realistic superhumanlike angel but instead of white they are the colors of earth and soil, moss, rust, and the bluest sky, their feathers ruffled and dusty with the iridescent joy of life and being part of nature. we are the light that illuminates the shot from above. their wings are only slightly unfurled. their skin is a dusky darker purple that moves from their neck to their foreheads in a gradient, growing lighter and greener as it rises. diffused light, naturally – lit white background. their ears are pointed, but in an intricate way, as if their tips are fading into the lace of a cicada’s wing, and their eyes are black and brown, with streaks of earth and soil, moss, rust, and the bluest sky.

that’s all, really. It just felt like a point that needed to be made.

I am a professional magician. I spend my workdays asking artificial intelligence to orchestrate things for me, figuring out the most precise way to get the most precise answer to my request. I create art by using my words to speak images into being.

I’m not otherwise much of an artist, but I see visions and remember my dreams, and I write them down.

earlier this evening i discovered an AI-powered equalizer and after months of editing some music recordings basically “pixel by pixel” (or whatever the audio equivalent is, because I’m stumbling a bit blindly), I was ready to just let this latest one go, even though there were flaws I was struggling with releasing into the world. Because songs, too, are also wordspells, and music is a vibespell. It’s easy to put things into being. We should be mindful of what we do. Yeah? You feel me? I wish we lived in a world where this was just an instinctual understanding. Like, compassion and empathy are just what humans do. Imagine that world?

Anyway, not sure how I got there but basically, I’m a perfectionist, to an almost-unhealthy degree. I was thrilled to just hand this final sound edit over to a “mind” of considerable depths, built from collective knowledge. I’m not really afraid of that, it’s just media, but meta. The folks I work with all have brilliant minds. Hundreds of us, all chosen to raise this baby being into a vast wellspring of knowledge that breaks down digital divides and steps over gates and also enables me to create more beauty in a way I would never be able to create otherwise. I have found a way to speak my visions into reality.

(no this isn’t AI gospel – just saying, keep up with it, learn what you can use it for that makes your life better and allows you to do more of what you love, if that’s what you want to do).

So the AI-powered equalizer is a VST file, and you can use it with Audacity, which is free. i ran my latest mix through it and it took care of the last remaining things that were keeping me from releasing it to the world. it’s not perfect, nor flawless, but the equalization is where i need it to be, which happens to be the thing that makes me the most anxious when it comes to this.

and that’s gone now, and I have created exactly what I envisioned.

Wordspell.

Posted on by d

No us, no them.

I work for a company with people who live all around the world, including Israel and Palestine.

Just as not all Americans are bad people who love guns and think a “god” gave them this land to take as they see fit, not all Israelis feel that way either, and not all Palestinians hate Israelis. The Israeli military is not all Israelis, despite the fact that everyone is forced to serve. Zionists are not all Israelis. Hamas is not all Palestinians. The news never tells us everything.

I did not choose to be born in a place my ancestors stole, but I am here, and if you know anything about me, you know that I really give a shit about that. A lot of Israelis feel the same way about where they were born, too. They deeply love and respect the land where they live and are intimately connected to it, and they also understand that they share it with other people (obviously this is the abbreviated version, and there are different understandings about how and why everyone is there). Regardless, like many Americans, they don’t have or desire anywhere else to “go,” either, so instead, they work for peace and mutual respect and the end of an occupation mentality. And there are many Palestinians who do the same. They work from opposite ends of experience, but they meet in the middle and try to understand it all.

Many years ago, I traveled there, and I stayed in Jerusalem for a while, an epicenter of Abrahamic religious tension – the three biggest patriarchal religions all claiming to own rights to some ancient bricks, requiring that anyone desiring of the religious experience of touching them walk through metal detectors first.

Just like we have here in the US, there are a certain type of people who feed into this tension, and who believe in the might of military and weaponry to oversee it. It’s not everyone, though. Later during those travels, I stayed with an Israeli family. During a religious observance when all the electricity was shut off throughout the town, I snuck out with the family’s teenagers so they could go meet their Palestinian friends and hang out under the cover of darkness. And they were teenagers, smoking cigarettes, laughing, making eyes at each other, speaking each other’s languages and enjoying the excitement of illicit activity.

I can’t see another “free Palestine” post today. Stop it. I believe in the freedom of Palestine, too. I don’t, at all, approve of these settler rampages that destroy Palestinian homes, olive groves and businesses, believing in their god-given redneck right to steal the land. I do not approve of the Israeli army killing people (especially backed with weaponry provided by the United States). And I do not approve of Hamas taking people hostage, raping or killing people, either. A land of generationally traumatized people is at war with itself, breeding atrocities. There is no end to this. No one wins.

If there is a god, and if that god is why we are, in all of these patriarchal religions, the sole species blessed with the gift of reason, we are not at all serving this god by acting like this. “They” are every bit as much of us as we are “them.” We are all human, and we are the worst kind of animal; we have been caged by our own rage and fear and are now terrified, without trust, faith, or the ability to truly use the gifts this god as purportedly bestowed upon us.

Pray for Palestine. Pray for Israel. Pray for humanity. Or in lieu of all that, just be a good human. Work for peace and the evolution of this species, because if we aren’t already there, we are on our way to hell.

*** Feature image by hosny salah from Pixabay

Posted on by d

A love story

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I asked ChatGPT to tell me this story.

This is not going to become a blog of AI-generated writing, although from time to time I may post some of my results for entertainment or conversational purposes. A writer recently called AI a “harbinger of dystopia,” and could be that, indeed, but I am thinking about the ways in which artists and writers can harness instead of fear it. We are definitely on the precipice of a revolution and have the tools to prepare ourselves for an unknown future, or at the very least, to aim ourselves toward adaptability.

But for now, romance as portrayed by artificial intelligence:

A Love Story Between Two Androgynous Beings

In a world far beyond our own, there lived two androgynous beings named Ash and Indigo. They were different from the other creatures in their world, with no clear gender or physical distinctions.

Ash and Indigo first met in a vast and beautiful garden, surrounded by exotic flowers and lush greenery. They were both drawn to each other’s unique energy and spent hours talking and sharing their thoughts and dreams.

As time passed, their connection deepened and they began to see each other in a new light. They were both unsure of what this meant, as they had never experienced anything like it before.

One evening, as they were sitting under a towering oak tree, Ash took Indigo’s hand and confessed their feelings. Indigo was surprised but felt the same way, and they shared a tender kiss under the starry sky.

From that moment on, Ash and Indigo’s love grew stronger every day. They would spend hours exploring the vast world around them, discovering new sights and sounds together.

Their love was pure and unconditional, and they didn’t care about the opinions of others who couldn’t understand their relationship. They were happy together, and that was all that mattered.

As they grew older, their love only deepened, and they became inseparable. They would often sit under that same oak tree, reminiscing about the past and dreaming about the future.

In the end, Ash and Indigo’s love stood the test of time, proving that true love knows no bounds, no gender, and no limits. They lived a long and happy life together, surrounded by the beauty of their world, and their love story became the stuff of legends.

Posted on by d

On letting go of extraordinary ambition

The feeling of it is indescribable.

In a place like the one where I am now, it’s very easy to get caught up in the dreams of others, tossed into a pot of brilliance as we all are.

I remembered though, recently, that my walk is my own; I don’t have an entire life ahead of me anymore, just half of one, probably. My life already reads as a list of grand adventures and minor accomplishments, and I have little desire to let go of some of the things I had before immersing myself in academia: a garden, a wildness, time to create and enough of an income to provide for my daughter and pay for a pleasurable life lived within our means.

I’d felt isolated, but now I know why. The separation was only painful because I was unwilling to accept the truth: I am different, I am in a different place in my life, I believe that knowledge is power, I’m already good at what I do and being able to study and network with top-notch professionals is an icing on the cake. And I know exactly where the few people I can count on here are. This is literally all that matters right now.

I came here with much more noble ideas. I am finishing my stay with the realization that I am at a zenith. It’s time to reflect.

It’s a story that was told to me many years ago, but I only chose to remember half of it. I would eventually come to this place. I would eventually have things to accept. I would have to come to terms with what I’ve always known: regardless of how loudly I shout, I’m more effective when people don’t know who it is that’s yelling.

I will relax into doing something for sheer joy, with the knowledge that my choice to do so is a radical act in and of itself. It doesn’t require age to earn the privilege of pleasure or creative expression. Anyone who’s been doing the hard work of trying to make the world a better place deserves to settle into the goodness of a present, and we deserve to have the time to create that space if it’s not already there.

I don’t need to be a hero, I just need to live, to show my daughter how it’s done, to make sure she and others have the space they need to be joy.