Opened the current volume of Songs of Days: the Second Series (volume 17, "The Right Book") to discover with moderate surprise that I was a couple of days behind. Dashing off a couple of rather unstudied sketches I also briefly forgot that I was still quite early in on a fecklessly proposed 500 song series on the theme of optimism. I wrote two songs without an inkling of this in my head, remembered, went back to look them over and decided some tenuous thread of this theme had persisted, so maybe it has gotten ingrained in me somewhat, or then again maybe I'm just inferring things that aren't there under the influence of some sort of emotional pareidolia, it's a pretty vague theme anyway and I've been kneeing and elbowing its boundaries pretty hard as it is, and who knows, I may certainly have already forgotten it entirely in some past entry and filled one of these putatively optimistic songs with a pure stream of pitch black vitriol. I'm only 66 songs into it, and starting to remember that hey, 500 is actually a really big number... half the length of the original project for crying out loud.
Speaking of things that can be divided evenly by 3, the total number of songs proposed for this, the Second Series, is not one of them. At 10,000 the nearest integer to a third then is 3,333 which happens to be the song number I wrote today (after dusting up the backlog). Hitting this milestone is more than a little daunting. On one side that is a really large number of lyrics and I'm supposed to do this over again, twice? And then again, where has the time gone? I know the whole series is supposed to take around 27 years at which point I will not be by any stretch of anyone's definition a spring chicken (unless the Singularity comes along and makes 85 the new 27, in which case maybe the whole thing will just seem like a youthful indiscretion)... So if I'm a third of the way through it 9 years have got behind me, by God! Of course I know I started in 2005 and I know it's 2014 and I'm capable of subtraction in addition to division so I can't honestly call any of these numbers a "surprise". Artificial divisions of time.
But there it is. Song number 2.3333, entitled: Antumbra. Look for it on the Tower of Reproach... on June 18, 2020.
