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The Strangest Music I’ve Ever Made – The Oiloid Syrup Double Gem Story

It was winter.

I was living at my mom’s house in those days, out in the cornfields of Ohio. My bedroom was positioned so that rain would often beat directly against my window.

It was raining.

The rain was making such a pleasant sound, I decided I’d set my little voice recorder that I record music with next to the window.

But immediately after this, it felt like I should play some music. I had been very interested in lowercase music at the time, and I thought the rain and the sounds of me walking around and flipping switches would be interesting to hear. But as the moments passed, I was inspired to actually turn on an amp and play some guitar.

After a bit of playing around with pedals and my guitar, I kept the recording running while I did some cleaning up and sitting around.

This result was a little strange, but included vast swaths of very quiet, subtle sounds.

This is when things got weird.

In my editing software, I kept amplifying the quiet parts until what had been near silence was now quite loud. And all sorts of strange sounds emerged. Like the ghosts of robotic goblins or something. I was transfixed by this strangeness.

For song titles and the album name, I opened up a text-editor and just started randomly hitting keys. I looked for things which resembled words in the mess, and the final result was Oiloid Syrup Double Gem.

Part eight of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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Speculation of Bad Things to Come

I have a difficult to shake feeling of impending doom.

An unsaid but, let’s face it, common opinion: North Korea, Russia, and China, in as much that nations can be personified, do not have good intentions, at least not from the perspective of most other nations.

This is not to say they are fundamentally evil, or that there is no logic underlying their actions and apparent thoughts.

But that is what is actually troubling. These are not the actions of deranged people – they are deliberate plans, standing on logic which, while I do not agree with, accept to not be nonsense.

At the time of this writing:

  • Russia has been in the process of seizing Ukraine
  • North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons
  • Relations between China and Taiwan, as well as China and the United States, are deteriorating

Considered alone, these separate issues are troubling and even cause for alarm. But considering the ties between these nations, something much larger could be on the horizon.

None of these nations have expressed out-right disapproval of each other’s actions, none of these nations can truly rely on any nation but each other, to varying degrees, at least.

For the time being, that seems to be the only connection among them. But in the future, they may very well be seen as the prelude to a horrific, global conflict – assuming this conflict leaves anyone standing in the aftermath.

Part seven of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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The Alarm Bell is Blaring

The end of Roe v. Wade isn’t even the beginning.

Gerrymandering has put the Republican party in a position where it can win elections with a minority of votes. This minority is small enough that they can rely almost entirely on those susceptible to disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Those tactics may not work on everyone, but they don’t need it to.

The people overseeing elections are more and more driven by partisan motives than ensuring the stability of democracy. This, combined with gerrymandering and a fresh slate of voter-suppression laws, strongly favors unpopular Republicans winning elections. In my nearly 32 years alive, Republicans have won the popular vote for president exactly once.

The structure of the Electoral College and the Senate also grants unfair advantage to Republicans due to their dominance in small, rural, mostly white, low population states. The structure of these bodies, as well as the filibuster, were made with good intentions, but they have been corrupted. Rather than preventing tyranny of the majority, they have enabled a tyranny of the minority. Rather than ensure the Senate thoroughly debates before passing laws, they ensure gridlock.

The Supreme court is packed with partisan-motivated judges, marking the departure from that branch of government from pursuing their duties as intended in the Constitution. The court’s new purpose is to translate the far right’s ideology into law without being restrained by pesky public opinion.

Add to this the Republican party’s new fixation with authoritarianism and the result is the imminent end of democracy in the United States. There has already been one attempted coup with extremely limited repercussions for the leaders of it. All signs point to this becoming a larger problem.

More and more, it seems that two distinct nations are sharing one territory. Unless the ideological gap can be bridged and both groups can agree to live in the same reality, there is little hope for the future of this country. These issues run deep – deeper than can be resolved by expanding the Supreme Court or removing/reforming the filibuster. These problems are solvable, but require reaching some form of consensus. They requiring both groups (putting aside how the fact there are essentially only two groups is in itself a problem unforeseen by the Framers) to be able to agree to disagree about some things in order to do anything to improve the state of things in this nation.

Partisan solutions kick the can further down the road, just long enough for the opposing party to gain power and do the same thing. Each party views the other with fear as a malevolent threat to the continuity of the nation and their lives, and more and more, they see violence as being a justifiable retaliation. Blocking the other side becomes more important than objective improvement. Even if a large amount of this polarization is more emotional than policy driven, even if has more to do with people’s ideas of the other than the reality of the other, democracy still crumbles as a result.

Optimism is not inherently a bad thing, but if that is all people are counting on, consider the fact that it was primarily the optimistic Jews who did not flee Hitler’s Germany while it was possible. Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which hand fills up first.

When a smoke alarm goes off, it turns off shortly when it isn’t a serious fire. The democracy alarms have been blaring for years – it might be time to exit.

Part six of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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The early 2020’s have already poked a new hole in Federalist No. 10

James Madison argues two important points in this paper.

One is that in a so-called pure democracy, society “has no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” such as falling victim to populist strongmen or the oppression by a dominant party.

The other is that the solution to this issue lies in the representative government of a republic.

These papers played an important role in shaping the language of the United States Constitution. About 230 years later, on January 6, it was demonstrated that representative government is not a stalwart defense against “the mischiefs of faction.” The United States has developed a faction which is committed to strongman ideology, and the general factionalism attitude has left Congress more or less incapable of performing their duties.

Part five of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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In Defense of the Unquantifiable

Humanity has gained a lot through using the scientific method, but we must not allow hubris to reduce the whole of existence to what is quantifiable.

The subjective experience, inherent at the very least to humans, and possibly inherent to matter itself, does not lend itself entirely to measurement. Mental experiences may be correlated with brain activity, but, perhaps, the extent to which one causes the other may not be knowable.

Unfortunately, many things may not be knowable. Take a look at mathematics, particularly logic. While math is often taught as methods to solve problems involving numbers, at its core, it is built upon proofs, carried out by using axioms and inferences. As phrased by Gödel in his famous Incompleteness theorems, math is incomplete – in a consistent formal system, there are statements which cannot be proven nor disproven, including proving that the system is, in fact, consistent.

In other words, there are mathematical problems which can be clearly articulated which cannot be solved, at least not by using mathematical techniques. Logic and math being of the utmost importance in the realm of science leaves open the possibility that there exists scientific problems which can be articulated and not proven – that there more in the universe than conceivable to the human mind. Scientists, at least in part, already agree that the nature of reality we experience is constructed mentally – why assume that what we perceive is the fundamental truth?

To paraphrase the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the universe is not obligated to make sense to us. Everyday ideas, like time, might have more to do with how we as a species experience reality rather than being an actual aspect of it. A understanding of time without respect to human perception may exist, but it is an open question as to whether or not this is knowable. What else falls into this same category?

Simply put, we do not know what we do not know. Maybe someday, there will be a rigorous scientific understanding of luck, of “bad juju,” etc. Maybe someday, there will not be. Whether or not we have this rigorous understanding does not mean that these events do not occur, if nowhere else, in our minds.

Part Four of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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The Rock Hand

Iwate Prefecture, located in northern Japan, gets its name, at least supposedly, from a legend.

The kanji characters used to write Iwate are the ones for “rock” and “hand,” 岩手.

This is commonly agreed to come from a legend known as Oni no Tegata (鬼の手形, the demon’s handprint). This legend is associated with the Mitsuishi Shrine (三ツ石神社, three-stone shrine) in Morioka City, the prefectural capital.

The relatively small shrine, a bit removed from the beaten path, holds three large stones, said to have originated in an eruption of Mt. Iwate.

Mt. Iwate is a large, conical, fairly quiet volcano which commands the horizon of Morioka. In the historical era, the mountain has been very quiet, and if these boulders truly came from an eruption, then it was either in the late 1700s or late 1600s, neither of which, as far as I can find, document any enormous boulders being shot several dozen miles away – indicating that this assertion and foundation of this shrine predates the historical era. The ensuing legend mentions Morioka Castle, which was constructed in the early 1600s, adding further support that these boulders and shrine predate any known eruption of Mt. Iwate within the confines of recorded history. Of course, people have been living in the area for much longer than people have been writing about the area, and when they did write, they did not capture everything nor interpret things in the same manner as is done these days.

While discussing Shinto, kami/gods, and where they come from is beyond the scope of this writing, suffice to say that natural objects capable of astonishing people, whether they are large or “there’s just something about them,” are sometimes considered to be deities, or to house deities. This is the case with Mitsuishi Shrine, the three stones being considered to either be or be home to the deity Mitsuishi.

One of these stones bears the mark of a demon’s hand. Or at least, it used to.

Back when Morioka Castle was a full-on castle and not just the foundation and ruins of a castle, it, like many castles, had a town surrounding it. A demon known in Japanese as Rasetsu (羅刹, a dictionary will state this is the Japanese name for a rakshasa, a human-eating breed of demon of Hindu origin – however, none of the Japanese sources I consulted mentioned this and instead read as though Rasetsu was the name of a demon) was terrorizing the town.

The townspeople prayed to the god Mitsuishi for assistance. The god Mitsuishi then bound Rasetsu to the rocks, and agreed to release the demon on the condition that it never hassle the people again. To seal the deal, the demon left a handprint on one of the boulders. The demon Rasetsu then fled to Mt. Nansho. The ensuing celebration became known as the Sansa Odori festival, which Morioka is known for.

Most accounts of this legend stop here. However, this legend drew my attention first when I studied abroad in Morioka, and returned when I returned to live there after finishing college.

When I studied abroad, I visited this shrine. The third boulder is housed inside a building now to protect it from the elements. I could see the print, but it was weathered and faint enough that I could see it only after being told precisely where to look for it. Like seeing a shape in the clouds.

A few years later, when I lived there, a friend of mine told me that in her youth (she was in her late 30s or maybe early 40s at the time) the print could be clearly seen. As in, it was obvious where to look, and that it was clearly a handprint, a large one at that. In other words, it wasn’t the weathering of hundreds of years that was making the print fade – the fading had occurred not only within her lifetime, but within something like the past fifteen years.

Third installment of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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The Earth Does Not Belong To Humans

On what authority do humans claim dominion over this planet?

An influential part of the philosophy which politics and laws are built upon (particularly in the United States and similar places) are themselves built upon at least one false premise regarding the nature of property. The nature of conditional logic may lead them to “true” conclusions, as a true premise and false conclusion is the only way which the argument may be considered false, and yet, a false premise with a true conclusion does not make the argument valid (for example, ‘if two is odd, then four is even’).

Take a look at both Hobbes and Locke, commonly thought of as key thinkers in regard to American political thinking. While they may disagree over what the state of nature is, they do seem to agree that in one way or another, the planet was gifted by God to the first humans and thus primarily existing for the sake of humans to use. This is based on what is written in a theological text being used as a historical reference.

The claim simply has not aged well – we know now that Adam, the supposed first human, (to say nothing of this “God” fellow) absolutely did not exist. There was no “first” human, that is not how species evolve, and seeking to find a “first” human mistakes an incremental yet continuous change for one of discrete steps – it is examining the set of all real numbers through the lens of the set of all natural numbers, it misses literally infinite parts. of the process.

Their assumptions of the state of nature do not take into account the way of life and outlook of the planet of the hunter-gather communities, in which humans, in their known entirety, lived in without exception until about 12,000 years ago (the oldest known remains of a modern human is from about 300,000 years old, by the way).

One could read political philosophy and suppose the earth existing for human use is just a decided fact. The proposition that the planet exists explicitly for the purpose of human exploitation is not supported by anything which is not based squarely in mythology.

In other words, the authority of these ideas around the resources of this planet being free-for-taking comes primarily from theology, of which there is no actual proof, leaving the claim with no alternative justification. There is no place for unjustified authority.

If not humans, who does the planet belong to?

Simply put, it doesn’t belong to anyone or anything. Does it have to?

A plot of uncultivated land is not waste. Even considering things purely from the perspective of the impact on the human world, the world of insects and microorganisms is not absolutely distinct from the world of humans. The connection may not be obvious due to the scale of this ranging from things much to small to see with the naked eye to things much to large to directly perceive in their entirety. Trees, for instance, do not exist for the various things humans can make of them – humans and other land animals actually rely on the existence of trees and similar lifeforms to create what we deem a breathable atmosphere. Everyone can agree on that, however, it is the ecosystem of the soil which supports the tree; who knows what else is built upon it? The various ecosystems of the planet are connected, this much is known, how change in one area influences change in another is an observable phenomenon, but the implications of this are unclear.

In any case, seeing the earth as property or as a commodity, is not the only model for society nor is it the only perspective that one can take.

Second installment of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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Rushmore Retrospective

1998 was not the year of women. The fact that even the negative reviews of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore don’t mention how much of a creep the protagonist is is evidence of this.

Like, have you seen Rushmore lately? Like, any time since, say, 2017 (the year the #metoo movement became widely known seems to indicate the time when American media shifted to considering the radical possibility that women are full-fledged people, complete with all the complexities and complexes that makes someone “normal” )?

My girlfriend and I recently revisited this film. Both in our 30s, we recalled enjoying the film in the past, and settled in for what we thought would be the kind of idiosyncratic, colorful experience which Wes Anderson is known for.

It turns out, the premise of the film is, presumably, a nightmare for many women and a questionable playbook for men.

A woman, in her first year of being a widow, is stalked by a high school kid and his adult friend. That is, more or less, the plot of the film. The men lie, the men modulate their behaviors to try to win her. No one really is held accountable for their behavior.

I don’t think it is such a radical idea that people should not stalk one another. I don’t think it is such a radical idea to be true to yourself rather than to shape your identity to impress those around you. I don’t think it is such a radical idea that people be held accountable for their pathological actions, particularly when they involve harming others.

All that I’m really trying to say here is that the kid in Rushmore is a creep.

First installment of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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Nine Months of Non-Fiction

I’ve never done much non-fiction writing outside of a school or office setting. I’ll be trying out some different styles over the next nine months (or so), and gathering them all in this post.

Rushmore Retrospective

The Earth Does Not Belong to Humans

The Rock Hand

In Defense of the Unquantifiable

The early 2020’s have already poked a new hole in Federalist No. 10.

The Alarm Bell is Blaring

Speculation of Bad Things to Come

The Strangest Music I’ve Ever Made – The Oiloid Syrup Double Gem Story

The Most Obvious, Most Troubling Story that No One Seems to Acknowledge

And that is that! It took longer than nine months to write these stories, and frankly, I ready for a new experiment. It was fun writing some non-fiction, but the theme of the year was a bit more of a constraint than I enjoyed. Along with everything happening in life (moving, getting a day job, continuing to build pedals, working on my second novel, and getting married), it was difficult to keep to the schedule.

Here’s to what comes next.

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dreaming

Part twelve of Twelve Stories.

Hakon and Courtney share a glance and silently decide it has become more than appropriate to begin running, as whatever lies ahead is likely to be, if nothing else, better than drowning, and at the silent thought of drowning, Hakon remembers everything – his silent childhood, his missing patient’s delusions of a coming zombifying plague and his investigation into it which brought him to the mediation retreat with Courtney and Maryl and the others on the beach filled with black crabs, how a blood sample he had no knowledge of how to do anything with and retreating to a cave with Courtney was all he managed to accomplish in his attempt to combat this plague his delusional patient had tried to warn him of, how frail he was in the face of the very zombies he felt he alone was prepared to encounter, and how, in the midst of everything, a storm surge or something filled the cave and he saw images of flowers and ceilings, and the sound of his and Courtney’s wet running feet becomes softer and softer and his field of vision dimmer and dimmer and he feels the cold water deep in his lungs and all around as he finds himself still trapped in the very same storm surge with salt water stinging his eyes and Courtney unseen as he drifts into the sides of the cave which don’t even harbor the slightest pocket of air, unable to control his body and the feeling of pressure and cold finally ends and he feels as though he has just awoken from a decades-long dream, no longer a being bound by flesh and gravity to a long-cursed planet, but true freedom on a level he had never known, feeling awake and for the very first time, ready to begin the day.