... but that's ok 'cos apparently only posterity is reading :)

mmm... good evening :)

everyone has gone away for a bit. hardly surprising really.

ok, so... just me talking here to myself here - yet another reconstruction of the ((very much) partial *1) music database is underway. (this time it's a whole new laptop... i was so fucking down/depressed for much of the (prolonged, two-element *2) summer that i neglected even to write about what happened to the previous one.) as before, it's a colossal pain in the arse. but it's also a chance to shed some complicated and heay baggage.

somehow by the time the last itunes crashed on me, i'd got more than 300 playlists on there, with very little overlap. it's not about the number of the actual files, which wasn't that much/many in fact, only about 10,500 till the fucker packed up on me... (to be fair the laptop had threatened to die several times already and was past its expected lifespan anyway.) that many playlists is just unmanageable. may even have been nearer 350 by the end of it, but in any case, for once i am (semi-)happy with the latest change to (what remains, partly just out of habit) my computerised music-manager of choice, and in trying to get to grips with the advantages of this new(fangled) add-to-up-next malarkey, i'm finding a use which i never got out of the old on-the-go-playlist thing (which i never did use at all, indeed.). it's a useful way to navigate that many albums, many of which just blur into each other if played en suite. which is sort of what i did before, for the most part. (seemed to work ok - in the short term..!)

i'm still at the stage where i haven't added back any braxton yet.
(or any jazz or creative/improvised music at all, in fact.)

might be next up, by the feel of it.

* ...

i may actually be insane...

... although, in the considered opinion of several psychiatrists (and still further related, lesser-qualified colleagues*1), i do not even qualify as mentally ill. it is all most perplexing and frustrating.

at age 44, it strikes me repeatedly that i am effectively mentally ill anyway, because i have become so emotionally unstable after decades of being placed under extreme stress - and have never fully succeeded in finding a route away from all that. there are ways and there are ways (and more latterly ways) of dealing with this, but inherent and/or habitual personal flaws or weaknesses tend to undermine the optimal use of any remedy, sooner or later.

...

aaaaaarrrgggghhhhhhhghghghghghghgh fucking hell

...

it's been a weird fucking summer. on the plus side, we have moved house at long last (six years overdue) and the family immediately feels much better as a result. mrs c in particular is just so much happier and nicer to be around. also more tolerant of me, therefore... so it all sounds very positive, except that alas, the negatives are really stacking up at the moment, apparently i still have a lot of unpaid debts which must be cleared or at least addressed before i can straightforwardly enjoy the move. not that i ever really do anything straightforwardly, but...well, you get the idea.

[- incidentally: much to my surprise, i return to the blog tonight for the first time in several months to find plenty of page hits going on. this was certainly not the case the last time i looked. now i really have no idea whether anyone is actually reading, or whether random webcrawlers are just rutting in my undergrowth, so to speak. curiouser and curiouser.]

 right then... this one was never going to be a long drawn-out affair. done and dusted

* v. comments


Postscript (2024): this has proven to be a bizarrely "popular" post, i.e. a lot of people have read it, and apparently it still attracts (odd smatterings of) attention. I suppose this needn't be too surprising, given the alarmist nature of the post title... anyway, I never actually was insane, although at the moment I wrote this, it had just genuinely occurred to me that I might be. All I was really experiencing was near-continuous stress and mental turmoil, self-treated with (extremely strong) ganja. Small wonder that my head got a bit mangled. [And yes... as subsequent events would bear out, things were going to get worse before they got better. But they did get better..!]