straight

A day or so ago I embarked on what is intended to be the longest series within the Songs of Days, second iteration - titled "Endless Axis," its premise is that every song in a continuous series of 500 will be optimistic.  It's a little bit of a tall order for me as any brief perusal of the lyrics from pretty much any angle at all will quickly reveal.  I don't know, I embark on these things impulsively, write a number and decide I'm committed, though I've left a nascent series or two abandoned by the wayside... But generally I follow through.  I guess when the critical number is 10,000 (and nearly a third way through) the rest all seem relatively small in comparison.

If any series is going to crash and burn, though...

I pretty much gave up caffeine in the midst of making all sorts of changes in my habits geared toward trying to resolve persistent digestive problems that have plagued me since a child and gotten acutely worse a few years ago.  Altogether these changes have mostly worked wonderfully well but they have also rather stripped the last possibilities of self-indulgence out of my regimen; it has been many a year since I considered getting drunk or high to be any kind of a viable decision and certainly smoking cigarettes is a virulent pathology I scribed indelibly into my brain by becoming starkly addicted to them in my early teens - I can't and don't touch tobacco or nicotine in any form.

Caffeine, though, I viewed as more of just a hedge against tummy trouble but I tell you, I was in a restaurant with my wife and they didn't have decaf coffee so I ordered a cup of regular.  The waiter kept topping it up and I probably drank about three cups.

Almost immediate gastro consequences followed by 5 hours of near crippling depression and anxiety.  It seems at some point, in the midst of all my efforts at self-improvement, my psyche has become a surly beast that will not suffer anything but a scrupulously clean kennel.  So I guess this marks the beginning of an era for me as an absolute straight edge... how this will mesh with an effort at at least a tiny interlude of enforced optimism every day, I don't know.  We roll along...

the way that becomes a way

Sweet concluded a series of 81 songs based on the John C. H. Wu translation of the Tao Teh Ching. I continue to read the Tao regularly and find it to be an enduring enigma.  What I remember about these songs is that they were almost effortless to write, but in rereading them I find them... oh, underwhelming.  But perhaps it is just that they are mild, and flavourless... appealing to neither the eye nor to the ear.