K and I started rewatching Dark on Netflix this weekend. This show! It's so amazing I can hardly put it into words, however it's also the hardest chronology I've ever tried to keep track of. I don't consider this a flaw; other than a few wee casting issues I have - like how many old guys with white hair and beards do we need? - I think Dark is a stunningly complex piece of work, and I'm happy to watch and re-watch it, discuss and contemplate it. I think the show is worth it, and it feels good to watch it with K - who is really into it - and entertain each other with our theories.
Also, Ben Frost popped on my musical radar via Wire magazine back in 2009 with his album By The Throat, and although I hadn't kept up with him much after that, I was thrilled to see him doing the music for Dark. I was also thrilled to learn, just now, that the main title theme isn't Frost but Apparat, an artist I'm criminally unfamiliar with considering how much I love his collaboration with Modeselektor, Moderat.
As I suspected, my brain completely clicked with Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel, and I read almost half the book yesterday while rounding out my last day home in bed, letting the fading tendrils of whatever bug I inherited late last week leave my body and prepare me for returning to a full day of work today.
Playlist from 1/06:
Belong - October Language (on repeat, for three hours)
Card of the day:
Actually two cards today, because while I was shuffling the deck the Eight of Cups popped out at me. So, an eight and a nine, so a sequence that moves from laziness to strength. Well, that actually just describes my return to work, where despite being a bit gun-shy about rough, physical exertion after 3 days in bed and some insane pain in my lower half, I actually just worked harder in the last hour and a half than I have in a while. So yes, moving from doing nothing, to being strong enough to just get what needs to be done, done.
Also, switched into HIGH gear on the writing yesterday and worked for almost three hours. Made MAJOR headway. The end is in sight; next round will be to run each chapter through Grammarly, then read it out loud to K.
Starting the day with The Wire Tapper #23, specifically at the moment a track called "Sevilla Una Maravilla. I wanted to embed this here, as per the norm, however the track is not on youtube and the information provided on the liner notes of the disc point in the direction of a warm circuit.com, I'm guessing a label, which is no longer operative, due to the fact that if you click that link you'll see the domain is up for sale. First another track, the subsequent one on the disc, which I really quite like:
Not finding the warmcircuit or Windup track brings to mind the idea that in this 'high speed age', things appear and disappear quickly, and amazingly almost without track. The Wire Tapper disc itself is a free anthology that would accompany Wire magazine back when I bought it ravenously every month or other month - can't quite remember the schedule - circa 2009/2010. I stopped simply because of the mounting financial issues that culminated with my personal apocalypse in 2015, and the fact that I stopped working at Borders and they went out of business in 2011. Sure I could have subscribed, even felt guilty sometimes that I didn't, as Wire is a truly, completely independent magazine, owned and operated by the staff, who bought the publication out from its former publisher sometime in the mid-to-late 00s. It's still available, and what's more it's available online here, every issue ever for the 2.50 lbs a month (a new concern of mine is space - I just had to throw almost all my old issues away in the move).
Playlist from yesterday:
Singles - OST
Preoccupations - New Material
Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin I
Sepultura - Rise
My Bloody Valentine - MBV (Vinyl)
The Soft Moon - Eponymous
Black Sabbath - Sabotage (Vinyl)
The Dead Boys - We Have Come for Your Children (Vinyl)
Angelo Badalamenti/David Lynch - Twin Peaks Archive
Card of the day:
From the Grimoire: "Indicates trouble earlier on that is now revealed/healed. Rest/recuperation. Find the high ground to gain perspective."
Okay, this is of particular interest to me, as today's pull appears to answer directly an insight I had upon waking this morning. If you've keep up with this page you know I've been pulling The Fool a lot lately. This has had me wondering if I'm on more of a 'journey' than I originally assumed, something more than an allusion to my move, now 90% complete. So why still pulling The Fool? Well, there are other interpretations, but that's not it. I hang with my gut on these, and my gut says journey. At the same time, in my everyday life, I've noticed over the last few days, specifically since the move, my eye sight has become horrendous. For example, yesterday at dusk I drove the five minutes to the nearby beer palace for a sixer, and had such a hard time with my night vision that I returned home essentially terrified that I'm going blind. Dramatic? Maybe, but I've begun fearing degeneration due to my Sarcoidosis, a disease I am currently treating with a first six-week salvo of Prednisone, but one that is known to affect the eyes. I've apparently had Sarcoidosis for a long time, possibly over ten years, and because of repeated missed diagnosis by medical professional fools, it was not until I was somewhat dramatically thrown in a local hospital's quarantine area for three days last spring that someone finally figured out what was wrong with me. Well, no, it wasn't at the hospital they figured it out, it was later, when I was first introduced to my current Pulmonologist, who is fantastic. So if I'm finally treating it, shouldn't any symptoms be diminishing, not escalating?
This is the question...
For the record it's not just at dusk or in the dark that my eyesight bothers me, and it's not consistent. I drove to work in the dark yesterday morning without incident, and yet my daylight drive home yesterday was a massive strain. Even over the weekend, Saturday specifically, the day after the move, I had moments of confusion and stress due to not seeing properly in broad daylight. So with all this mounting, I woke up pre-alarm this morning, and the first thought in my head was about what The Fool is trying to tell me. And I thought, "hey, my eyes feel better - maybe I'm just exhausted." Normally I nap at least once a week, but I haven't had that luxury since at least a week before the move. And even if I stay up late, I generally do not sleep in. So I wake up and the first thing I think is, "Maybe my eyes are a symptom of being exhausted?" and then I pull the Two of Swords and, to reiterate for effect, "Indicates trouble earlier on that is now revealed/healed. Rest/recuperation. Find the high ground to gain perspective."
Not sure at this point how the "Find the high ground..." might factor in, if at all, but I think the rest speaks for itself. And I realize that, whether it's a case of 'if you've convinced yourself, that's great' or not, pulling a card a day and making the effort to reengage with my Thoth deck and the Tarot/Jungian system in general has had a similar turn of results as my dream journaling/meditation experiments from 2015 - the more you engage, the more the results become exponentially interwoven in your daily life and, eventually USEFUL.
