silent soul song

11:49 PM 3/2/11

I went to the mountains of Colorado long ago. It was 1987. I went with the Gifted class for an Odyssey of the Mind competition. Keystone cops - that was the theme of our project. It didn't go very well. We were, like, 37th place. But I don't care. I saw Colorado.

I loved flying on the planes to get there. Just getting there was exciting. I loved traveling with a group of friends and we were all excited.

While researching my chronic fatigue, I read about negative ions. Negative ions make the air feel fresh, and they are in places like the mountains, the seashore, thunderstorms, and near creeks and streams and waterfalls.

I remember loving the cumulus clouds on a blue sky day with the wind blowing. I didn't know why. It was a cold front. Those were probably negative ions. I felt alive and I wanted to run out and do something. The weather in Colorado seemed like it was always that kind of day.

When we were there we all went for a walk, and it was an easy walk, up one of the mountains. We have some photos of us standing on a big rock, and there's one photo where I am standing knee-deep in snow with my hands raised up, palms towards me, my eyes and mouth wide open and smiling with a 'wow, this is amazing' look. I think I was 15 years old?

I loved the fresh air and blue skies. I felt like something wonderful was just over the next mountain. Then it turns out that Ayn Rand wrote 'Atlas Shrugged,' which, oh my gosh, I forgot - it's coming out in theaters on April 15th - finally! no more vaporware! - and Galt's Gulch is in Colorado. I hadn't read that book yet when I was there, but I still felt like an amazing, wonderful, secret, undiscovered world was just over the next mountain, and I felt this manic desire to do something huge and amazing and wonderful that would change the whole world, but I didn't know what it was or how to express it. It was a feeling.

I wanted to build something huge and enormous, something so big it could reach up to the sky, like into outer space, like a huge city, with towers and interconnected bridges between the towers and planes and flying machines going among them and a space station. That was how it made me feel. I had that kind of image to express the world I wanted to build. I thought of drawing cartoons of it, but it was too elaborate for me to draw - I was able to draw quick cartoons of animals and people, but not elaborate buildings. That was the city of Laicon Haitusta, on Darcon - that was the fantasy world I made after watching 'The Neverending Story' and getting the idea from Fantasia. Laicon Haitusta translated into 'most beautiful.' It was a glossolalia word.

I wanted to go to college in Colorado. I thought about it. I wanted to move there and live there. I decided to go to Shepherd College in West Virginia instead, because it was cheap, and I didn't want to waste a lot of mom and dad's money, because I wasn't sure what I wanted to study, and I already knew that I was having problems doing my homework, so I didn't want to risk large amounts of money - I had a feeling that I was going to drop out of college sooner or later. And I did. I fell into darkness and sickness, and here I am. I didn't finish school, and started having health problems around 1999 or so, which made it almost impossible to start or finish any long-term goals at all. I am all about unrealized potential.

I've spent the last decade researching a few important things. I researched health problems and learned about things like the Feingold Diet, the Weston Price diet, Roger Callahan's Thought Field Therapy (and also Emotional Freedom Techniques, a rip-off of TFT, so you can get it without paying for it). I learned about the problems caused by vaccines. I learned about chemical sensitivity. I learned about dental fillings.

I also had problems with getting laid off from jobs. I got hired into office jobs after starting there as a temp, but got laid off a while afterwards, and this happened more than once. So I researched something else: I read Ludwig von Mises, and Harry Browne, and other libertarians to find out why the economy goes through boom and bust cycles (and why office workers get laid off). I learned all about money and bookkeeping, so I could understand economics. I read Antal Fekete on the web. I learned about gold and silver. So that is what I have spent the last decade doing, while suffering from chronic fatigue and being unable to achieve the goals I wanted to achieve, or get a better job.

I learned about health and about money.

I wasn't joking. I'd love to have his children. How long does it take to sort through hundreds of mediocre people? To get to know them all and feel that none of them are quite what I want?

I got Propellerheads Reason, the music synthesizer program. Someone named 'Contraption' - I think he's on Soundclick.com - wrote a song that I still have on one of my scratched CDs - I need to burn a new one - called 'Yours Truly.' He used Reason to write that. That song has the best climax of any electronic song I've found - I haven't been able to search for music for a while, though, as I'm on dialup, and haven't had ... the spirit to go hunting for more music. It's as hard as hunting for people - there are millions of mediocre songs, songs that don't push the buttons in the right way, songs that don't give me goosebumps. It takes time to listen to them, to know right away in the first second that I won't like this song, and then to force myself to keep listening for a few more seconds just in case it gets better, only to find that no, it doesn't get better, and so, go on to the next song.

I wanted to learn to write a song like 'Yours Truly.' It wouldn't be exactly like that song, and in fact I wouldn't necessarily want to write everything in electronic music either - I would want to do acoustic instruments - but Reason is something I can use while sitting here in my bedroom, without paying anyone any money or learning to play any instruments. I really do like acoustic music better - I like its imperfections, the irregularities of rhythm, the richness of the sound - and while I'm at it, I can hear the difference between analog recordings and digital CDs, and it's true, CDs do suck. But they're convenient. (I was just reading an article about that recently.)

There are things that I want to do, and writing more songs is one of them. Every song is unique and when I write them they feel like my children, something I've created, and I'm getting to know them, and I must find the spirit of this particular song and be true to it, even if it's difficult or unfamiliar or strange somehow. My songs are not finished. There are lots of song fragments. This is something I really need to do. I've thought maybe I should post my unfinished song fragments on the web, except it's almost unbearable to do that. But I could. I'd have to fix one or two things on them.

I want the world to know my song, because no one can see it. I really do have a song. Chronic fatigue, and electronic harassment, takes that away from me, but it is still here and I am still alive.