kestrel

Retail Therapy On The Road

Personal entry follows.
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Essentially spent the entire day browsing videos on YT, napping, or eating. Looked in on FB for the first time in a couple weeks, and there's an old friend of mine who sends me links to "music mashups," which are two or more songs hybridized and combined into another tune. Found a creator and listened to a bunch of his mashups.

The same friend and I had a brief chat exchange. I discussed I was on a cross-country trip to visit relatives and friends.

He replied: "We are men of a certain age and deal with responsibilities others don't. You ain't taking this trip for a fucking lark .

"What's going on? You okay, Bro?"

My reply to him turned into an existentialist ramble.

"Just been over here for nearly a year. I have a feeling this will be one of the last times I'll be visiting my mother while she's above ground, to be frank. It's also my old day job's 50 year anniversary so I wanted to catch up with my old coworkers, and in particular my old exec director.

After an assurance I could contact him at any time for a phone call, I thanked him and continued.

"I'd like to say it's a weird time, but maybe two years ago (because you know, life and times were all over the place) I began saying, "Nothing seems that weird anymore." I'm kinda glad I checked-out of regular life, but coming back to it and connecting with "normal" people along the way attempts to convince me that I just fled modern life. The truth is that I am coping with my personal disapproval in the way I see the world being run.

"Don't mean to risk being a downer (and rambling, to boot!). Coming back to cities somehow encourages these thoughts in me. So I turn to mash-ups and guitars. :)

"Watching a lot of enthusiastic videos in binge-mode today, including Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson discussing black holes and the film "Interstellar." Just doing my best to ease back into "civilization."

He's out there on the east coast and a couple hours later than here, so it's likely he hasn't seen those replies yet.

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One other weird thing I did today: looked up a "random article" on Wikipedia, and it directed me to Khlysts, which were members of an odd sect of religious zealots who splintered from the Russian Orthodox church back in the 1700s. Kind of like an ascetic sex cult that would flagellate themselves and then allegedly conduct wild orgies: "sin so as to seek forgiveness."

Meanwhile, I also looked up the band named Khlyst, and they're a bizarre "doom drone metal" noise band from the mid-2000s. Picked up their album for $10. There's one track where the female vocalist is screaming, and it reminds me of the best of Wendy O. Williams in her Plasmatics days. I listened to it maybe five times in a row. ..."Nothing seems that weird anymore," indeed.

We'll see what the car mechanics say about the car tomorrow morning.

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kestrel.diary [at] tutanota.com