The Cacophony of Extended Family

Mynahs raising the roof. by sirtessa

The kite must be released soon.

Monday evening and the air hastens hence. by sirtessa

Evening, my train station, ambient noise

The birds haven't seen each other for hours and there is so much to tell. by sirtessa

(Hark! And awaken!) "-but not necessity, and-"

It can take minutes for my alarm clock to drill down through my dreams and the barricades of sleep. "Minutes" is plural, and not specific. "Minutes" could mean four, or forty (frequently, it means forty). When the radio (being my second alarm; I never hear the first ten minutes of obnoxious beeper alarm) finally registers as external and irritating, I do not wake. Instead, I'll ascend near the surface of waking, only close enough to have gross motor functions and slap the snooze button.

This generally goes on for an hour.

(Do not ask how early I set my alarm.)

Some people can leap out of bed right on waking. I'm not one of those people. My brain needs several run ups before it can work up the gumption to breach the surface and wake the fuck up.

This morning, I heard the radio within a minute. The music dove straight down like sugar-coated electricity, and my mind shot up, wild-eyed and quite awake, and I listened.

I thought it was bagpipes at first, but it was the war cry of the fiercely needless. Deep booming drums. Addictive stick rhythm. And then they started singing.

I was awake, so very awake, shocked to be so ambushed before the day had even started by something that tasted...like...

A feverish trawl of the Triple J forums with the only lyric the song had gave me treasure. The responsible party is kyü, a Sydney-based band, and the song itself, Pixiphony, is available for free download at Triple J Unearthed.

If it isn't rare enough to find a song that affects me so, I discovered another unexpected present; they're opening for Junip in January, a gig for which I already have a ticket.

Such fortune worries me. Bad things are going to happen in balance.

Suffice to say, I did not get back to sleep this morning.

unVampires, Doppelgängers and ______

A photo of Deb and I at the Freeze Frame Project last Saturday has surfaced. Murasaki Claire snapped this great shot demonstrating our product placement, food fellatio, and the fact that Deb is neither vampire nor ninja, and shows up just fine (provided you're looking straight at her).

What I most love about the photo is the guys gawking in the background. That's a pretty light example of what we were surrounded by for those five minutes. Even looming over Deb like that, the guy isn't nearly as obtrusive as some of the other curious souls to take a peek.

Checking @replies on twitter I found an online doppelgänger of mine, @sirtessai. Except, having had a gander at her site, I think it's apparent I am the doppelgänger, a leery reflection of someone quite gobsmackingly talented.

I'm cool being an echo of that.

Steve Burnett wrote this wonderful piece on the importance of silence;

We will pay for silence. For better soundproofing in walls, or lacking it we will rest less when we sleep. For more distance from high-density zones, creating longer commutes and increasing fuel consumption, and reducing the time we have by sacrificing it to the extended travel. For active noise canceling cellphones to talk with and headphones to listen to our overly compressed and distorted music on our portable music players and *still* have to pump up the volume until we reach the limits of our ear fatigue before we want to stop listening. For white noise and for nature sounds that become rarer and more exotic over time. For recordings of silence at the bottom of a well, in a cathedral, in the soon-to-become-misnamed Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia.

From Lake Baikal, With Love

There are degrees of insomnia, as any who've brushed with sleep deprivation well know. Sometimes sleep won't come because it (quite rightly) does not wish to inhabit a head full of stress and anxiety. Sometimes it won't come because you ate too much sugar during the day. Sometimes it won't come because you're not done thinking yet. Sometimes it won't come because you're not done crying yet. Sometimes it won't come because you (stupidly) read a scary book in bed and gave yourself the willies. Sometimes it just won't come, end of story.

For those cases in which the root of insomnia is purely thought related, I keep a well-stocked pile of munitions, each used with the sole purpose of distracting me long enough to calm the fuck down and get my unconscious on.

A movie generally does the trick, but occasionally I'm so worn out even the act of watching is asking too much effort of me. In those instances I fire off set of podcasts. They're not on my iPod. They live only on the laptop. No headphones, no visualizer, nothing to do with me. They read to me, and I do nothing.

Reading, in these instances, doesn't work. Ever. I spend a lot of my energy keeping other people's voices out of my head, for my own sanity. I suppose occasionally I go too far, and stagnate without external input, and the only cure is to have some outside voice feeding words in my ears that I couldn't have strung together myself, that have no source in my life. The differing presence of self lying in active reading requiring my mind's voice overlaying the prose and passive listening in which the narrative overlays my mind.

As a result, I've come to associate Jeff VanderMeer's story Logorrhea, as read by Jason Erik Jundberg, with extremes. It only comes out when I'm too far gone, and never fails to reel me back in. I hate and fear being in such a state, but if that means I'm granted permission to listen to the story, well then I kinda don't mind it. It wouldn't work as insomnia salvation if it wasn't an exceptional piece of work.

These are the things the masses do with your stories.

As of yeserday, Jeff VanderMeer's novelette Errata has been posted on Tor.com, as both eyes-only and podcast.

Given my irrational apprehensions, I opted for the podcast.

There's another form of insomnia, which I forgot to mention as usually I'm smart enough to avoid it: getting sucked into a story you love too much to voluntarily break free of.

I'm tired. Fuck you.

That was just fucking brilliant. It hops gaily between the absurd and the surreal, and I want to use the word 'subversive', yet I don't believe it is so tricksy and sneaky and fixated on revenge as to subvert. Why would it, when it can take off and do its own thing? Which is what it has done, and without apology.

There's also a penguin in it.

I ask Juliette for advice sometimes. “Juliette,” I say. “Is Ed for real? Is the Book for real? Is James for real? Is this really going to work? Or is it a form of madness?”

“I dunno,” Juliette says. “I’m just a penguin. But I can bring you some fish, if you’d like.”

This is why he's been my favourite author for years, and I stalk his publications like a stalking thing. I'll never fear of reading the same thing twice under different titles. I hope there's a dead tree version of this, as I don't particularly want to condemn it to 4am visits.

In some weird synchronicity, the two stories podcast revolve around Lake Baikal, the largest fresh-water body on Earth. I fear now that I can no longer dream of travelling to Syberia to visit the lake, as with every listen its character solidifies, and this fictional lake cannot exist if I stand on the shores of its reality.

And throughout it all, a question on the cellular level rising slowly in the communal, generational penguin mind: Why?

all you need to do is pay attention

Depressed? We can tell by your voice, academics say.

Dr Lech's computer program is scanning through the voice data, using pattern recognition techniques to seek telltale "harmonics" unique to a depressed person's voice. It can detect harmonics related to seven different emotions, including fear, excitement or anxiety...

Professor Allen said the research was at an early stage but showed great promise. "In clinical work, the voice is often one of the first things you notice (in depressed patients)," he said.

"I can tell with my patients on the phone, sometimes after only a few words, how they are going. You can hear a flatness, a tension coming through. The voice changes very dramatically when they are depressed."

Yes.

This is called listening.

I find it upsetting and a little disgusting that there is room for demand that such a voice-reading program exist. We're all creatures of conversation, even me, Little Miss Hermit Crab, have enough and sit through enough conversations in a day to understand that the dialogue is only part of the whole interaction. Facial inflection, louder body language, pauses for consideration, the words you choose, the words you don't choose, and how you say what you say make the whole. These things make a face to face conversation so much more meaningful than some quick IM of txt speak, and even a hand written letter.

We all read these things. All you need to do in order to understand them is pay attention.

No one should ever need a computer to tell them what is contained in another person's voice.

Her: Brother, you don't have a brother, you're an only child!
Me: I am?
Her: Do you have a brother?
Me: ...Yes?
Her: Really?
Me: No, I just made him up.
Her: You're very mysterious. Not much is known about you.
Me: That's because I'm an international woman of mystery.
Her: *eye roll*

Well...I thought it was funny.
This woman has worked with me for over two years. She should have at least eavesdropped that by now.
You know, if you want to know something about someone, all you have to do is listen.
And remember.

It's only insomnia if you're actually trying to sleep.

You know what Yoda said about trying. I'm not trying.

Around 2am I started listening to Lundberg's podcast of Vandermeer's Appogiatura. Lundberg reads well. He even does voices. Not enough people do voices. I'd read an earlier version of the story- no, that's misleading; I'd bashed my nightshift-addled mind against an earlier version, and lying there listening with a not-insomnia-because-I'm-not-trying-to-sleep-addled mind, I noted all the changes. They were only little, but they were right. Until the last segment, which was entirely new, and the story I thought I knew turned out to be entirely different and wonderful and not unlike having the carpet ripped out from beneath me, but instead of falling on my face and embarassing myself the wind caught me, took me for a tumble in the clouds and deposited me somewhere high and far from where I could see for miles and everything was clear.

But out there, somewhere, is the little story of dead arms and dirt I anticipated. Creepy and strange and now, disappeared. It will never be read out loud, sad little story.

I want to be read to. It isn't really something you can ask of other people, not without receiving a funny look and an extension of personal space. I should put out a personal ad, "wanted: reader. That is all." Or start a business, with a troupe of readers on call, to come to you whenever and where ever you may need a story read to you. Funny voices free of charge. Pillows supplied on request.

I think this is a sad little want.

Afterwards, I dreamed that I'd messed up history so badly, the history books on my shelves were spontaneously changing their titles and texts, as the history of the world wobbled about and tried to reassert itself.

I couldn't hear rain when I woke.

There are things you consciously give away when you move out. It's the things you didn't know you were losing that make you stop and wonder if maybe you made a mistake. Losing the sound of rain on a rusty old corrugated iron roof, for example.

You gain other things. Tiles, for example. Light globes, when dropped on a tiled floor, make the most spectacular, satisfying, comical 'pop!' noise this universe contains. I stood very still for 2, 3, 10 seconds, until I was sure I wasn't about to toss the second light globe on the floor just to hear it again.

Nothing in this soundscape drowns out the noise in my head. It roars, it mutters, it doesn't shut up. Come on, 4am, bring it. I'm not trying, I'm not afraid of you.

(I just don't like you.)