8.23.25 - LAST ENTRY IN A COOL NOTEBOOK

Saturday 8.21.25

KCMO

Dear Bug Zappers, Bite Scratchers, and Tick Whisperers,

Saturday AM and I am up at 6:30 with 8 hours of sleep, feels good.  Earlier this summer I got a CPAP machine to manage moderate apnea, and this has improved sleep quality a great deal. I even took it on vacation, which felt super lame, but I was glad I did.  I have also cut out almost all sweets.  In withdrawal, my sweet tooth was picking up 80’s speed metal radio from Lithuania but that died down.

I am reading Diary of An Invasion by Andrey Kurkov--it is a good book about survival (all kinds). I look forward to reading more of his books--you can find a couple at Deep Vellum Press, a non-profit publisher run on the same model as the amazing Copper Canyon Press.  In today’s world, are small publishers the new punk rock record labels?

I am a big fan of libraries and music libraries.  One way you can get your neck above the digital flood is to go to your local library and browse the cd stacks.  I found one called Haitian Suite: The Music of Franz Casseus.  It’s beautiful, and  the music buyer at the library deserves a $10,000 gift certificate to their favorite coffee shop.  I have been working on a short essay about what to do with my cd collection.  It has shrunk and will continue to shrink, but may grown again, I am not sure.

Anything that unplugs us from the online vampire-verse has merit.  Live music being the most profound return to Planet Earth, in terms of music.  CD’s have lost the mystique they had, and are now more like tokens of respect and practicality between listener and artist.  Vinyl on a good stereo sounds great, but CD’s really do sound good too.  It’s all the bullshit about how special they are that has died a hard death.

I look forward to a trip to the brush and yard debris drop-off today.  I love going down the the east bottoms and driving along the river, on top of the levy.