i think this result qualifies as weird.

there's some tests missing for my liver function, but those come back fine before. maybe i'll check again in a bit.

so, my ferritin has decreased from 12 to 9 to 6 over the last few weeks, indicating i am rapidly losing iron stores.

eating meat has not reversed the decline.

for now, my circulating iron is ok, but for how much longer? it seems like i'm running out. is that possible?

i may need to get to the er.

i think i should still be getting more than i need, even factoring in the walking. 

ugh.

i'm just sitting and waiting, i can't plan the rest of the week until i know the outcome.

dammit, i should have got him to check for a reticulocyte count. next time.

i talked to my doctor today and his best guess was celiac, but it doesn't really add up. 

as i await my blood test results, i'm left with another question - am i walking and biking my iron out? it's a real thing, apparently - you lose it in the balls of your feet, so cyclists and runners need even more iron than normal.

i got the test right away and should get the email any minute.

deathtokoalas

what he said ending about 24:00 was that he's trying to undo the divide and conquer of the ruling class in favour of building a class consciousness.

i consider glenn a right libertarian with leftist characteristics. and, this will come out over and over again when you prod him - he'll use lefty sort of language, but always ends up as a market libertarian in the end. it's maybe something akin to a moderate proudhonianism.

but he's right to point out that he sees himself as post-ideology, and that he's not going to hold himself to any particular theoretical framework.

===

deathtokoalas

i don't know anything about the trans person being referenced, but, as a trans person, i think it would be disingenuous to suggest there was anything disrespectful in this particular exchange. i get misgendered  all of the time, and it's generally not difficult to figure out whether it's being done with malice or not. conversely, you can often hear the dripping sarcasm underlying what i would consider to be a correct gendering. i'm going to run into a lot of pushback when is say this, but it really is all about context. on top of that, i would even refer to myself as a male in the timeframe that existed before i went on hormones, so referring to this person using female pronouns when discussing her existence as a female is not just fine but technically correct, imo. for all of these reasons, the existing social convention is to ask rather than to make assumptions. and, we're going to react on a spectrum that reflects our personalities - personally, unless i think you're intentionally doing it to get under my skin and piss me off, i'm likely to ignore it as inconsequential. because i don't give a fuck what you think, anyways...

====

deathtokoalas

i just want to put the chomsky thing into that little extra context though, because chomsky was, of course, at one time known for advancing the exact opposite argument - that we have a one-party system of corporate domination and it doesn't matter who wins. i'm not sure exactly when he switched that argument, but it seems to have been at some point during the (second) bush administration, and he cites some study that is a literature review (you can look it up) to back up the point. so, we're actually in the awkward position of citing chomsky for both sides of this debate. i'm going to actually flip the argument over on him and suggest that his study is dated. maybe there was some difference in the 80s and even the 90s, but there doesn't seem to even be a small difference anymore. and, it's even worth wondering if jill stein was right when she suggested that clinton might have even been worse than trump on a number of things, even as she might have been better on others. either way, it might be useful to ask for an update on that study whenever you see it cited.

al

Chomsky did that Mondale and Dukakis also. According to Arron Matte.

deathtokoalas

this is a direct quote from chomsky in 1988, and you can see that he doesn't think it matters much:

Sometimes. I tend to vote more at lower levels: school councils and so on. The reason is that there, you find some real choices. Quite often, it's going to make a difference to the schools whether X or Y gets in. As one goes up the ladder I tend, by and large, to vote less. At the presidential level, things rarely matter much. Sometimes I do vote in presidential elections - albeit holding my nose. For example, I think voting for Reagan made things somewhat worse than voting for, say, Carter or Mondale. Voting for Bush makes things slightly worse than voting for Dukakis.

These decisions are often extremely difficult to make. To tell you the truth, the first time I ever voted in a presidential election was 1964, and then I voted against Goldwater, because I thought a vote for Goldwater would mean a vote for escalating the war in Vietnam. I learned later that while the election was going on, Lyndon Johnson was sending emissaries to his friends like Lester Pearson, explaining to them how he was going to escalate the war in Vietnam in precisely the way he was denouncing Goldwater for talking about doing. Pearson approved, incidentally. He told Johnson he shouldn't use nuclear weapons; conventional bombing would suffice. That's the sort of thing you get the Nobel Peace Prize for.

In 1968, I just couldn't figure it out. I mean, the marginal difference between Nixon and Humphrey - I couldn't make a decision. The major issue, on which virtually everything else turned, was terminating the war in Indochina. My own guess was that Nixon would probably do it a bit faster than Humphrey, which in retrospect is probably correct. But I couldn't make a choice, so I didn't vote. And so it goes.

====

and, you can find myriad quotes from him where he describes the parties as interchangeable.

so, perhaps his thinking only evolved slightly from the 70s to the 00s, but it wasn't until kerry that he started actively backing democrats, using this lesser evils argument and citing this study that you can look up yourself.

i guess maybe his intuition that the democrats were a little bit better was always there, but he didn't actively make the point until he was armed with that study to do it with. and, if you pushed him in the 70s or 80s or 90s, he would have always ultimately pointed out that the differences are negligible.

the better the case i'm able to build, the more corrupt the reaction - that's what i'm realizing.

it actually seems like somebody came in here and tried to delete some files off some of my external drives. it's weird the way they did it, but they left this directory skeleton...

i back everything up. in multiple places. i don't think i'm missing anything.

regardless, it's unsettling to realize that the police are sneaking into your apartment and deleting your court documents, in an apparent attempt to eliminate evidence of their own corruption.

this appears to be a force that is going to go down shooting - they'll never admit anything, they'll take the lies and corruption to their graves.

my best suggestion with the stream is to get the volume on playback as high as you can get it, which may mean feeding into an amp at a middle volume. 

i'm listening to the stream from a chromebook feeding into a stereo receiver, and i'm having difficulties with it, myself. the frequencies i'm expecting just aren't there.

that track - boogeyman - is overwhelmingly harmonically complicated, and the mp3 will ruin it.

i don't want to upload high quality mixes to youtube. so, you'll have to take my word for it - the flacs are an entirely different piece of music.

as before, i have to save the blogs on the 90s laptop, which just can't deal with javascript. so it is slooooooow.

now that that's done, though, i need to reorganize my recording pc in a way that files the items. i largely didn't do that before, because i didn't have it set up. but, i do now.

today's post is inri020, and the last single from period 1.2.

=====

i intended this release to be a short single to house a vocal mix of this track, the reconstructed album mix and all of the historical versions. but, it really came back to life on me when i started mixing it. as i was mixing the track, i was cognizant of the fact that it is both the last release in this string of reconstructed singles and the oldest song that i have a recording of. i felt myself coming full circle. 

something that i think is actually unique to this track is that i wrote it while i was still living with my mom. that dates the track to when i was in grade 7, that is to 1993 or 1994. i was twelve or thirteen years old at the time and the lyrics very much reflect it. above all else, i felt it imperative that i maintain the innocence of the track. 

the track documents a routine that was actually very formative on how i perceive the world around me. when i was even younger, around ten or so, there was a nightly routine around sunset where my mom would yell at me to go lock the door before the boogeyman came in to get us. but, she'd be a little dramatic about it. kind of a... 

mom: shhh. do you hear that? 

me: it's getting dark, maybe it's... 

mom: it's the boogeyman! go run and lock the door before he comes in and gets us! 

so, i'd get up and run to the front door and lock it, peering out to make sure there was nobody there. 

i don't think i ever thought a boogeyman existed, but i didn't grow up in an affluent neighbourhood and i was well aware of the dangers of straying too far from home after night. i didn't understand much about drugs or gangs at the time, i just knew that sometimes people died of gunshot wounds outside and didn't want to be stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. it was legitimately important to block off entrance points. 

the run had a bit of a rush of adrenaline-based fear to it, because the hallway was dark. getting to the door and back could at times be a little scary. 

the fear was very real; i can still feel it, if i remember back to it. it would not begin to rise until i exited the living room, but would then escalate slowly until i got to the door - at which point it would suddenly spike. this would give me an extra boost of adrenaline to get back into the living room with. it was *always* the run back into the living room that was the scariest, because you never knew if they beat you to the door, and were just waiting for you to lock yourself in and then jump on you when you're cornered. 

i think that this daily experience probably underlies my heightened level of caution towards risk. i don't reject risk; i've taken a lot of risks over my life. but, i assess it pretty brutally. i seek out worst case scenarios; i plan around assumptions of failure, to ensure necessities are never interrupted for. what it taught me is that risk must be a consequence of security, and not in antagonism with it. 

the original demo version, recorded in 1996, is really the only track from the first cassette that can be salvaged without alteration, however accidentally. i was trying to create an eerie lullabye, a kind of banshee song. through the cumulative process of endless modifications over many months, it ended up sounding like an unfinished progressive rock song - or perhaps a campfire song for existential nihilists. but, what i captured without realizing it at the time was that i sound like the child that i was. for that reason, i consider this version of the track to capture it's essence more accurately than the 1998 or 1999 versions did. i wanted to recapture that essence and re-apply it to the final version. 

perhaps what happened with the initial recreation is understandable, in the context of what i've discovered about the track, in hindsight. at the end of 1997, i got a new four-track recorder for christmas. i had spent the entire fall programming on an ry30 that i was given to compensate for the loss of the drum kit. when you get new gear, it's first use is always experimental; i used this track as my training wheels in breaking in the new setup, and largely discarded the outcome. 

the track got dropped because i'd come to hate it because i thought of it as cutesy and childish. isn't that what happens when we enter our late teens? if i look back on the initial recording and claim it's essence is intrinsically connected with my age at the time of it's recording, does it not follow that i must have despised it as i sought to define myself in opposition to my child-self? 

indeed, it specifically was the vocals that i hated. so, i resolved to ruin them through deadpan and atonality and guitar effects. but, once i had done so, i did not like the outcome and rejected the track for the first record. when i recorded the vocals a second time in early 1999 to complete it for my second record, i merely toned down the concept of annihilating the cutesiness in the vocal delivery, leaving a result that is no more engaged and only arguably preferable. 

i may have been experimenting with the gear when i recorded the parts, but the tapes digitized very well for the reconstruction project in 2015. there's enough space in the track to allow the modern guitar & bass & synth plugins to function almost on a clean recording. the remix process allowed me to rediscover the eerie, psychedelic nature of the track and take it closer to it's intended conclusion of constructing a feeling of empty dread and uncertainty. 

on sequencing the instrumental remaster of the second record in late 2016, i decided that there was an excess of silence at the beginning of the track that needed to be cut off in order to place it into the proper flow of the record. so, i opened it up in cubase and cut the appropriate section of silence out. i was then distracted by something, and returned to the project unable to remember if i had actually cut the silence or not. in order to check, i re-imported the file. the logic is that if they are out of phase then the cut was made. this was the case, but i immediately made the connection, on playback, to the echo being representative of coming footsteps and sought to expand the idea further. 

this resulted in a series of remixes that take the track increasingly out of phase, along with increasing adornments, and then climax in manipulating the speed of the tape as a supplementary effect to increase the disorientation. these were arranged into a sequence of increasing, and then decreasing, complexity. 

before i went off on this tangent, i was planning on reconstructing a vocal mix with the reconstruction from tape as the base soundscape. but, all of a sudden, i now had a dozen versions to pick from. i decided that the best thing to do was to experiment. this led to me mixing several of the remixes together, which is the final instrumental out for the record. 

the vocal recordings i had from 1997 were unusable, so i had to redo them. but, this was an opportunity to regain the essence of the track by reintroducing a sense of innocence to the oppressive electronics and elusive guitars. my initial plan was to use a solitary voice, but i found that it did not mix well into the same frequency range as the interlock of stereo-spectrum guitars, so i instead recorded the track multiple times and set each recording to a different space in the spectrum. this creates a natural "chorus" effect on playback that blurs the frequency and better allows the vocals to compete with the guitars. i then thickened the chorus further by pitch-shifting it up an octave, which brought in the child-like innocence that i sought for the vocals. 

as i was redoing the vocal part, i rejected the track a final time. at 35, why was i singing vocals i wrote when i was 12? is this clinical? but, i followed through with it to close the circle. inri is forever done. 

initially written in 1993. first full recording in 1996. recreated in dec, 1997 and again in jan, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed on july 2, 2015. remixed on july 15, 2015. reconceptualized & remixed repeatedly over november & december, 2016. released & finalized on dec 13, 2016. as always, please use headphones. 

the album version of this track appears on my second record, inriched (inri021): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996, 1998, 1999, 2013, 2015, 2016). 

released january 15, 1999 

j - guitars, effects, bass, pick scrapes, drum kit, drum programming, digital wave editing, vocals, vocal relics, production