Updated to add headers, set aside two sections for deeper development and maybe even ease the flow. March 5.
Bloggers like Zoeeee, with her "belief that sand is actually a living 'thing', invented to annoy parents the entire world over just because it can," get away with very personal remarks about their loved ones and win awards for it.
Trouble with 'too many things'
 We know what she means about sand in one tale on what it is to have kids. Zoeeee was ambiguous about the exact nature of 'The Plague' (My Boyfriend is a Twat). Maybe it was just sand; no doubt she wishes to come back alive.
When I looked again Zoeeee had fled and perhaps even entrusted her Twat to Anna. You have to watch Anna. The next morning, Zoeee was a woman musician, whom I pinched in the Nick of time. Her place was then usurped by a man musician.
The sooner Anna's back home, so to speak, the safer we'll be, knowing more or less where we are with Zoeeee. Anna thinks "That's the way life is", which was what the wise old Tony gave as sufficient explanation of almost anything before he died last year.
 Now he's gone I can't put his mugshot in this mates' gallery, but the linguistically gifted Lee is here to link this world, where she lives in the same building as Tony did, to one where some people express themselves.
 Like the Kid, who often deals in poems and dark matter, Lee frequents two of my "realities".
If you click on her name, there are "TOO MANY things I like that are going on. This is not a good way to live, really, either. I've always had a tendency to spread myself a little thin, but the chaos?"
I'm coming to chaos.
When your mates become music
 Why am I posting pictures of friends, few of whom talk or write much about making music, on a site almost exclusively given over to women who sing and play instruments for a career?
I did the usual this morning afternoon before my neuron could fire up properly and engage the day with thought. Anyone who can draw cartoons and despatch her alter ego to interview the divine like Natalie can might have spotted a meditation bubble above my aura containing words about friends present ... and absent.
There are no men since I have no good photos of my male buddies, but the same goes for them and I shall tell you what it is. Whether they make music or have other creative gifts makes no odds to me, that's the thing. I like to hear their "music" anyway.
 Cindy may have woken up even later than me, being six time zones away, only to have a very nasty "Black Shadow" experience:
"Instinct had me leaping out of my chair, my heart beating wildly, the words holy fucking shit! flying out of my mouth."
The presence of mind she voices there in keeping the sacred and profane combined, as always they are, was considerable in the circumstances she blogs. Those are hardly good for anyone's inner harmony.
I might suggest she puts a record on.
Music's not the cure for everything, but often it helps. When our lives are shaken by unwelcome intrusions or otherwise rendered chaotic, they can be unintelligible, like white noise. Listening to organised sound, shaped into the appropriate music, is one way of unwinding and dispelling black shadows.
The problem with questions
 Most of us have plenty of dark shadows and can be prone to acquire more by asking too much. Another American Cindy ponders frequently, like the friend in New York who has called me one of 'The Quiet Ones' -- a description to raise a laugh in some quarters. The one on the left is being quiet herself right now. Click on her name for a blog entry dealing visually and succinctly with most questions.
On her site, there are moving words and songlines concerning Cindy's former musical partner, Craig. She's done something I've seen on just a few blogs, setting aside a whole category just for "listening".
I write slowly and shouldn't do it too long after 'The Witching Hour'.
I shan't apologise for some "shoegazing" -- the term given bands that do this on stage while their music dreams. The Liverpudlian Ladytron may assert during the magic released last October that "daylight is the enemy". Two girls and two boys, on their third and loveliest album, say all sorts of odd things and have beautiful dreams, but let them not distract me from my own.
Adrien Begrand can give you what he hears at PopMatters, where he knows Ladytron come across live:
"Audiences don't know whether to dance or stand looking like bored indie rock fans; even the band's song 'Playgirl' asks, 'Why are you dancing when you could be alone?'"
That's an easy one.
Take a look at some of my friends, reflect on yours and on yourself right down to the constantly dancing atoms and even tinier exchanges of matter and energy that constitute something big your mates call "you". But don't gaze up next at stars of which daylight is the enemy or anticipate a cosmic aspect to my meditation, which could dwarf us into warts on the back of a toad.
I wish to talk about penises.
Stealth in stillness at the centre
What mine likes is one answer to the dancing query. So is yours if you're a bloke. Women obviously have requirements also. I'm not giving you the long-awaited 'Body music (iii) dot dot dot' yet and I know: before I said it would be "(ii)". Stuff happens when I meditate. You've already had (ii) on February 12. Several weeks back, I rewrote 'What happened to my birthday suit?' and hung it here, where it belonged, all part of the music. So that became "(i)", minus prior distractions, apart from a girl with her back turned to us. This got done quietly. Long gone was the emotional stress I'd felt last October and there's more to good dancing.
 It's become a mindful life I want and cherish, like Kathryn, whose 'Just Stillness' and its poem by Laurel Dodge touch on the "stark, austere, beautiful, and reminiscent of Zen."
Kathryn visits Laurel at La Chambre d'Ecoute (more listening) because "she explores places I don't feel brave enough to pursue. Also because Bob is so gorgeous, and she captures his catness in all its variety.
I don't feel brave enough to pursue Kathryn everywhere; she is literally very well qualified to go on daily about wisdom. However, I am qualified to share "songlines" and thus conclude one of my regular weeks devoted to music by replacing a column that went off at half-cock.
Swapping a sign for 'songlines'
Everyone who encourages me to consider other people as "music", beyond wanting that for myself, saves me time. What's been said before in The Orchard now needs to go here. Down comes the 'Men at Work' sign I erected on February 21.
 "Women work all the time," that board said in the small print. "Men have to put up signs when they work."
I d like jokes with truth in them, but we men don't, not always. Music weeks become by definition "people weeks", with meditation. The columns that vanished at the end of my last music week because of an accident with synchronicity are back -- but for one here and two others in The Orchard -- where Ghyslaine made an appearance once it included a blog entry from 2003. It's absurd in March 2006, when we're a part of one another's lives again, to single out Ghyslaine as one of the teachers in mine, since that's true of everybody pictured here and others who can't be.
Music evidently has physical as well as psychic effects on us. Since October, several people have confirmed my view that the former can be very pronounced and important. The more I hear what some people say in their "music", the less inclined I am to broadcast their lives.
I've been more focussed on a task first presented by nearby friends, then one or two people I've yet to meet, including fellow bloggers. It's become part of the log's future, my role as a teacher acknowledged and accepted if I can identify sufficiently with others to hear myself in them and their voices in my own.
An entertaining idea as an ideal
In organising my ideas, I first thought to log a few somewhere discreet and retain the rest for an interactive opus on women and music, for which I can go on making notes until that becomes my occupation on retiring from my paid job several years hence.
This is no place to come for conventional criticism or regular reviews. That needs to be permanently clear, if a deterrent to people who don't enjoy the kind of columns I'm doing, like PopMatters. That place is a reassuring read for those with logghorhoea.
Good columns in webzines set standards that are a worthwhile challenge, like listening to the "music" of people and hearing well enough to be able to come up with "songlines".
People read the subtitle of the log, hear the way I talk about music and have asked if I know how to do the same for them. The answer is, "Yes, thanks to friends who have told me what they want music to do for them and asked me to deliver." The practice comes with no assumptions about what others already know about music.
It's a minor paradox, I suppose, that the time in life when we realise we may have plenty of experience usefully to share is once we know it's not so different from that of almost anyone else. All that matters then is what to do with it.
Two-way teaching tunes us in
Music is so rich an analogy for life, interaction is constant for anybody of a remotely spiritual disposition, which is most people. I don't want to get stuck with symbols and mixed up by metaphors when there's synchronicity between my own life and the music I enjoy at different times.
Teaching works both ways, of course. "Songlines" I devise and suggest personally to friends are not unisex, but the log began as a site about and for women musicians and is going to stay that way. It suffices to see what most music sites do to know why.
I said recently this site is one long love story. Before it got out of synch I told you how. If you remember, fine. If you missed it and like love stories, with all their twists and turns, you haven't lost out. A fortunate fellow, I look forward to putting it back, but yo do this now would be a bad idea. The log's dating system won't let me restore entries in context, even in The Orchard, where time matters least.
Never mind. My own dating system's slow and the story behind it has been a very long one. It's best you get it in manageable soundbites. Personal notes I make meanwhile are like Zoeee's sand, tiny grains in a living thing that gets absolutely everywhere! Deliberately to spread any here would be as daft as a man telling a woman why he's giving her a kiss. She knows why if he does and she wants it. It's because she's there.
2:06:26 AM 
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