I put on the shoes. I stretched and went outside. My body filled up with fire and energy. I was alive, invigorated, rejuvenated.

I am running again.

Over the past few days I’ve received a few compliments about the quality of writing in this journal. These came as a surprise, and I’m very gracious for the undeserved praise.

My first web site in 1994 had as its sub-header a famous quote by the late musician and philosopher, John Cage:

I used the same quote in 1996 when I began my Geocities site. I was rather fond of it, as it made me feel special. The clever reader will note that this phrase is no longer to be found in this journal.

Looking back, I see that I have misunderstood Cage. A t the very least he speaks differently to me now. What was once a license to be artistically arrogant is now an admonishment against that self same arrogance. What I say is, in the grand human scope, of no import. Only my confidence in my voice grants it value. Poetry, and all art, is separated from everything else we do only by the frame of meaning that we choose to place around it.

These days, I have replaced my arrogance that everything I produced was art with an almost reactionary belief that nothing I produce is automatically art. Art is not mine to define. I still take delight in creating things. I do it for the visceral joy of creation; if someone else finds it to be artistically appealing, I am pleased, but my act of creation does not imbue the status of art. I take pride in my work, but it is the humble pride of a craftsman.

One will note that my new sub-header is the first three worlds of the Aeneid of Virgil. It translates from the Latin to “Of arms and the man I sing.” I am the man, and the arms I wield are my wit and my intuition. But this life of mine is not a great work of epic poetry; the story is long, intricate and tedious; the outcome is uncertain. However, I do have something to say, and will sing this tale so long as I am able, and leave it to others to decide its merit.

I’m writing this on the subway on the way home, listening to Elvis Costello sing Burt Bacarach in the album Painted From Memory. For the past few days I’ve been craving to hear it, but I wasn’t quite motivated enough to search the local record stores for the possibility they’d have a five year old disc, and then pay $18 for it, considering I’ve already got a copy nestled away in storage.

Coincendentally, though, today was the day Apple unveiled it’s new music service. In a nutshell they offer downloads of songs at $0.99 a song or $9.99 a disc if there are more than 10 tracks. There are some restrictions, but not as many as in other online services. And it’s elegant and convenient. Eager to test it, I popped open iTunes, did a search for our Elvis, and a few moments later had everything happily transfering to my local computer, and soon Mr. Costello was crooning on my iPod Nice.

Apple has the one killer feature that other avenues have, for me, lacked; convenience. It’s surely possible to get music online for free, but it’s a game of cat and mouse, and if you’re looking for something odd, it can be very time consuming. It’s surely possible for me to order the disc, but it’s quite costly, and considering these days all I do is rip and encode the songs to hard drive and file the media away, a bit of a waste. This service is a good compromise, as I’m not at all disinclined to pay a reasonable amount.

There are some problems, to be sure. The main one being that selection is presently limited. I’d love to be able to pull up the complete works of Perotin or Buxtehüde as easily as I could those of U2, and such a service could be a boon to independent artists and labels; it would practically eliminate distribution costs. I’d like to know how much artists are getting from this scheme, and I’m not convinced that the rights management is going to be as seamless and unobstrusive as they claim. But, all in all, it’s a step in the right direction.

I can only dream that in a few years, when I wake up with a craving to hear an obscure work by Machaut, I can go online and be in motet heaven within minutes, a dollar poorer.

Testing continues. All but one bug is fixed, and I’m in a frenzy of regression testing.

Let me restate that. I’m in a very slow, viscous, sticky frenzy of regression testing. The energy is frantic, but what I’m actually doing is remarkably little, and even that is few and far between. I start up a test from one of dozens of application tests we have. These are designed to exercise specific features of the product, ensuring they work properly and fail gracefully when mishandled. I then wait, and then act once it’s finished, which can take anywhere from one to twenty minutes. This gives me time to sit at my desk and ponder, or catch up on paperwork, or something similar.

The problem I have generally with testing in this product is that often I’m called on to test things that I myself have written. This is akin to an author editing his own novel; sure, she’ll do a good job, but the author sees patterns, sees things in terms of chapters and paragraphs rather than in a string of words, and will overlook things that a trained editor won’t. Fortunately, regression testing is cold and distant and doesn’t involve poring over details with a fine toothed comb.

Not glamorous, testing, but very important. Fear of regression runs high here; the feeling is that at any moment, the slightest change could cause a rift in space-time. If we do not rigorously test everything, the terrorists have already won.

When the first thing one hears upon waking is the “Love Theme from Superman” arranged for the Lawrence Welk orchestra, all bets are off.

No matter when I seem to go to bed recently, I’m up somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30. This generally puts me in a ever-so-fuzzy state for the first hour or so, but suddenly the fog lifts and I begin to think cogently. Sometimes, I awake suddenly and completely, like a flash of satori. Regardless, the cold fact remains is that I am awake, far earlier than needs be.

Such waking until recently has been a rarity as of late, but historically isn’t too unusual. In college, there was an entire summer where, on Monday morning, I would involuntarily wake up at 4:45. What I started doing, instead of crying to the gods as to why I was awake before five, was to make a thermos of coffee, trundle off to a bench on campus, and listen to the birds wake up, and then watch the sun rise. Eventually this peculiar wrinkle in my sleep schedule fell away, and with it my mornings as an armchair Apollo.

When I am awake like this, these morning times become my secret time. Being a morning person isn’t as glamourous as a night person; there are no thrilling events that only take place at 7:15 am. Usually one is not regaled with witty anecdotes about “that one crazy morning back in ‘82.” The morning is a time for secrets, a time for listening and watching, and thinking. A time for coffee and birds and one’s own thoughts.

It seems to be a natural split; the evening belongs to the world of the extrovert, and the morning lies squarely within the demesne of the introvert. I can imagine Zeus, the night person, his activities and triumphs written across the sky, sitting groggy and bleary-eyed across the breakfast table with Poseidon, smiling inside, his secrets held deep beneath the sea.

Sadly, due to work and life consideration, I’m not always awake to enjoy my full powers as a factol of Morning in my own element. The world is not scheduled for the likes of me, and I have adjusted myself to this. Each night, I feel like an interloper in the world of the evening; while I can maintain a level of comfortable, I am not nearly as acute. Poseidon, roused from his own palace, dines with Gods on Olympus, and while he is a god still, he is not at home.

I’d like to think, however, that he does enjoy himself, and holds it safe in his immortal heart that no matter how things go, at the end of the day he can return to the solitude of the sea, and leave Zeus to clean up the mess.

Jeffrey’s Studio Desk. April, 2003

A desperate, damp note found lying on the ground. Davis Square, Somerville.

Yesterday I was informed that my company was going to be acquired by another, larger company in a few months. There were meetings; people wore suits and ties, and the smiles at the podium reflected against the worried expressions of the audience in some demented mockery of a mirror. The summary is that my job in limbo, and I could very likely be unemployed by August. While that’s not the best news ever, it makes sense from a financial standpoint, and even the worst case scenario for me is not catastrophic as say, Cthulhu rising from the depths and devouring all the souls of the living (as my wife suggested).

Artistically, this creates a lovely form for my employment. I joined the company close to the apex of the internet boom, and have lived through expansion, contraction, downsizing, and now acquisition, where our corporate identity will be stripped as we disintegrate and assimilate into a new culture. If Béla Bartók were to write a corporate plan, this would be it.

I admit I was caught by surprise. I don’t follow the corporate murmuring that traces the halls. My job is a fascinating one in many ways, but I savor the details and challenges of my job rather than the macro-scale focus on the organics of the company. I’m a happy foot-soldier in the war of technology.

The one thing that I did find a bit curious was the technological restructuring; how the new company was going to fit all of their products with ours, and move forward with a common purpose, drawing on the strengths of all of their previous work. That’s a daunting task, and requires a lot of thought and foresight. If handled properly, it can create a strong, healthy product line.

I myself have taken on a lot of responsibilities as of late. I have had performances, commissions, friendships and bonds. My life has expanded from the very contracted insular place it was just a few months ago to a pulsing, shifting organic network. I sometimes wonder if I have the mettle to navigate and thrive in this new world, if I will be able to honor my obligations with style and grace. I hope to let the sail of my emotion find wind in the myriad points goodness I have available to me, and hope that goodness will be genuine, lest I join my soon-to-be ex-CEO, smiling into a mirror of frowns.

There’s only one place in Somerville to go for quality origami paper, and that’s Tokai. When the paper urge strikes us, as it did yesterday, we stop off and grab some, then take dinner at a nearby Japanese shop in the food court.

Sitting close to us was a college-age couple. With a voice crossed between Peter Lorre and Igor, and a nervous, trailing laugh at the end of his sentences, he was trying very hard to impress her. He I can only describe as “Igor-Casanova.”

“Eeet ees the feerst geeft of maanee, eh he he he he…”

“Eeye kneew you would haaave fun, eh he he he he…”

And, my personal favorite, after his date ordered the miso ramen with extra pork:

“Sheee liiikes pork, eh eh he he he….”

After a number of noble attempts to refrain from spitting out broth, we paid our check and dashed off before he attempted to woo his love with a sonnet of Shakespeare or Petrarch.

As I walked into the lobby at the office this morning, Eddie the doorman looked me in the eye and said “Welcome back to work.”

That caused me to pause. Welcome back to work? I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Was I really so glad as to be here as to be welcomed?

Why not. With a lusty growl, I shouted “Yeah!”

“Rock on!” he yelled.

I got in a “Woo hooooo!” before the elevator closed.

Some things in life you can’t prepare for.

I look around at my life and think to myself “How did I get here?”

Well, I’m here, and I’m happy, so I think I’ll stay here and pretend I know what I’m doing.

This is perhaps the only point in my life I will be able to relate to one of the two episodes of Spongebob Squarepants I have seen. The other one dealt the metamorphosis of caterpillars, and shouldn’t be too relevant (though one can not be too sure these days).

The other episode of Spongebob found our hero making Crabby Patties. A customer complained that he hadn’t gotten his pickles and demanded his money back, but S.B. knew he put on the pickles. His confidence was shaken, and he went crazy. It turned out that the customer had been hiding the pickles under his tongue, so S.B. was in the clear the entire time.

The details are not really important, but due to an unintentional overlooking of a very important command line switch by QA, my ability to do my job was questioned, not least by myself.

I cannot get to serious testing until I sort out a build for our release engineer. Usually, I just run a script on our build machine, which is seemingly constructed of nothing but duct tape and voodoo magic.

And now the build machine is behaving very badly. By badly, I mean, files are being corrupted faster than cops of dubious moral character in gangster films, leaving me with a totally unusable end product. So what I’m doing is taking the law into my own hands and reconstructing the build environment on another box.

I hope I can kill the chicken at the right time in the install process. Where’s Dr. John when you need him?

Give a certain man too much coffee and too little food, and he starts gazing into the heart of things that do not need to be seen.

In marching bands, there is a state between standing still as a Buckingham Palace guard and prancing about the field. It’s called marking time; when you’re marking time you stand still and raise your feet up and down in time with the drums. It’s a way of saying “I’m not moving, but it’s my choice. I could be moving, but I choose not to. So there.”

I’m restless. I’ve been compulsively rearranging books in my shelves, moving furniture in the studio an inch this way, a foot that way. Not so much of a reorganization as small bursts of refactoring. I like my space, and I like the way it flows.

I’m introspective. Not in a big “what’s it all about then?” way, but like the furniture, I’ve been thinking about small things. Why did I put the Homer next to the Melville? What does that mean? Is the Invisible Hand of librarianship guiding my book placement? Today, I’m grouping books by like height, and if I have books that deviate in size, I start the largest book on the left-hand side. I have two bookshelves in this room at present; one is full of computer and mathematics books, the other comprised entirely of literature and history. Did I build a bookshelf for each hemisphere?

I’m not creative today; attempts at some simple composition ended up enough with such a lack inspiration that I’m beginning to suspect my muse is off cavorting with other composers!! I imagine some lucky fellow somewhere in New Jersey has had a flash of brilliance, and will compose a piece of grand magnificence. Had I known she were so fickle, I wouldn’t have begun the techno remix of “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles on Friday night. There is only myself to blame.

But! I’m cheerful. Well, perhaps not cheerful in an “O! What a Beautiful Morning” way. But not depressed, nor moody, nor disturbed. Today is a day for me not to fall into the tragic emotional feedback loop. Due to the delightful emotional temperament betwixt myself and mine wife, we have a particular problem, so eloquently stated by Yo La Tengo in “The Crying of Lot G:”

Sometimes I wonder why we have so much trouble
cheering each other up sometimes,
when one or the other of us is down.
Instead it’s like, when you’re in a bad mood
I look at you and I say, maybe she knows something
I don’t know, maybe I should be upset.

And I do get upset, or depressed, or what have you. It is clearly counterproductive if one’s emotional support crumbles along with one. But not today, no sirrah! I transcend my physiology! I am upbeat and positive! Today, I shuffle around the studio, twiddling knobs, rearranging books and asking myself silly questions about the meaning of sort order. I’m moving without moving. I could be moving, but I choose not to.

So there.