I would like to compose a tune with that title, “The Cripple’s Reel”. With some unusual time signature, such as 7/3 or something. Or, perhaps, being a reel, 19/8. I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking, Always the odd shite, Mig, because you don’t know enough about music to make something normal that’s interesting. To which I reply, What’s normal about being interesting? I mean, interesting about being normal? Unless the normality is merely a mask behind which nefarious or subversive intentions are implemented? That would be somewhat interesting.

I’ve been thinking about writing a clinical study on the interaction of muscle relaxants and Jameson Irish whiskey.

Abstract:

Large, mostly dark Gestalt appears to pursue two lighter, one reddish, one grey, and much faster shapes through a lime-green space, suggestive of infinite time/space.

See, this morning after Gamma left for school the kittens got into Gamma’s room and I, still a bit groggy from my “back pill” last night, was chasing them, in my usual black suit and tie, cursing like Harvey Keitel (I like to think) in a Quentin Tarantino film (Bad Vet, maybe). And the elusive little critters were diving between the bed and the trundle bed beneath it, and I would wait 30 seconds silently and, missing the attention they would climb back out, and I would chase them again, and they’d dive back under the bed. This went on for six minutes, or twelve tries, until I caught the female and tossed her out and closed the door. The male is easier to catch, generally, but by this time I was impatient, and my back was killing me from all the diving around, goddammit, so I endeavoured to make his trundlebed hiding place less comfy by sliding it back and forth with increasing velocity until he opted to join his sister in the hallway at which point all was calm again.

I have not combined back pills with whiskey since the first time due to the previously-mentioned (elsewhere) side effects which include falling down (due to excessive relaxation) and being treated well by my wife due to her mistaking me for a friend.

I have, besides this study, also been thinking about dementia, and two relatives directly affected, and how they are coping or not and also, as one does, at least if one has hypochondriac tendencies, wondering whether this dark hole haunting me has any connection to this.

You know the dark hole, right? Not really a hole, just this vast darkness in your mind? Or your meta-mind? This darkness back there, so dark it’s hard to say anything more about it but I’ll try? And you wonder if the names you forget, or switch, or the words you have trouble accessing, are somehow connected, and whether your pursuits, such as ballroom dancing, or music lessons, or artistic pursuits, or composition, are a good insurance policy against this, or useless.

Time will tell, I guess.

Also, fucking back, man.

At least I’ve been dreaming more lately. Great dreams, I am very grateful for dreams. Thanks! Two nights ago I was on a ship of some kind on a stormy nighttime sea, with a Danish singer of whom I am fond, and the ship was sinking, and maybe there was an airplane, and water was coming in, but the ship was very buoyant and my singer friend was reassuring me that this was entirely normal and the ship would not, in fact, sink, and that we would make it to Iceland just fine, or something. In the second dream that night I was pointing a plastic rocket launcher at a family about to escape in a helicopter, waiting for them to take off so that they would die in the crash when I shot them (they were bad guys) (there was also a cargo plane in this dream) when my alarm went off.

Last night: my wife walked into a wall in a seaside Japanese town (or so I was informed by a young man in the dream) and I was a spectator at a massage contest, and one of the masseuses and her friends had decided to massage me, when my alarm went off.

And so it goes.