As I mentioned yesterday, I was recalled to work to cover someone’s medical leave. The guy will likely return next Monday, but still, that’s a new contract, three days of full-time work that I have to deal with. Whenever a new contract starts, I can almost be sure of a couple of things: the previous night I will barely sleep, and the combination of anxiety and dread will wreck my guts. Well, last night I didn’t sleep a single fucking hour, and I got anxiety diarrhea. I had to hurry to the bathroom three times to empty myself out real good.

I wasn’t in the mood to handle hours of rolling around in bed while my brain cycled through myriad bad memories; instead, I decided to delve into fictional bad memories by rereading about half of my latest novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I had forgotten plenty of the specifics, which made me realize that, at least according to the same subconscious that urged me to write this story in the first place, the results are pretty good. Quite the haunting tale, wasn’t it.

Man, I wish I had spent significant time with someone like Izar Lizarraga in my youth. Not even fucking, just playing around and having fun. I was real close, but the sole person who resembled her, who also was interested in a relationship with me for whatever reason, well, it didn’t work, because I fucked it all up almost immediately. Last week I was feeling nostalgic enough about it that when I passed by her parents’ apartment building and I realized the front door was open, I hurried inside and checked the mail boxes. I hoped to recognize any of the last names. The issue about this one girl I regret not having known properly is that I only remember her name. I’ve completely forgotten her face due to my prosopagnosia. By now, assuming she’s still alive, she’s a thirty-nine-year-old woman, possibly married with kids. But still, I’d like to know what happened to her. Anyway, I didn’t recognize any of the last names in those mail boxes, so I assume they moved out some time ago. Fuck.

Last night, at four in the morning, two hours before I was supposed to wake up for work, I had the urge to grab my Gibson electric guitar, hook it up to my audio interface, and try to play Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” That opening riff is a bit tricky, particularly in my case when I hadn’t grabbed any of my guitars properly since 2021. I started imagining myself heading out to the woods with my acoustic to play for the squirrels and the birds and the occasional annoying humans, which I did for quite a while back in the day. The issue when you quit playing the guitar cold turkey is that when you pick it back up you aren’t remotely as skillful as you expect, and you’ve forgotten pretty much every song you knew. Playing an instrument requires regular practice, and a particular mindset that isn’t very compatible with stuff such as writing a novel; when I started working on my story We’re Fucked back in 2021, I felt that I couldn’t play the guitar in the meantime. I’m sort of a single-minded maniac: if I’m focused on a project, I can work at it for 16 hours a day, but don’t ask me to do anything else, even take care of myself.

I’m at work, damn near losing it due to insomnia. Between tasks, I managed to sneak in another entry of my On Writing series, which is a way of distillating the myriad notes I took many years ago, when I was addicted to books on writing (I was sure that if I gleaned enough wisdom from them, I would get published). Almost as soon as I finished writing that post, my brain told me: how about you extract the code to prompt large language models from your recent Python project and use it for a new project, wholly about building stories? Just imagine it: want to generate plot points? Press a button and the app would prompt a large language model, feeding it some previous data of yours like the characters you’ve created, your concept, your general notions or whatever, to generate an arbitrary number of possible plot points given whatever angle you want to work with. You have already created some character profiles? How about the AI generates twenty plot points that would attack those characters’ weak spots?

Such a new Python project doesn’t seem very compatible with my previous one, which is mainly about playing through a formless story instead of building one, but you could very much build a story with this new possible Python project, then use the created story to play through it in the app I’ve already made.

Creative projects I can work on: finishing my ongoing novel, editing my poems to self-publish them, producing more songs with Udio, remastering the songs I’ve already produced, picking up my guitar again, adding more features to the Python project I’ve been working on recently, creating this new Python project… I have things queued up for years.

I figured that I may as well upload to YouTube my remastered songs produced with Udio. Here are the three already up, all of them from the fourth volume of Odes to My Triceratops:

A glitch in Udio caused it to cut like a whole second of the opening of “Knife-Beard Dreams (psychedelia version)”, which I couldn’t fix by then, and it annoys me every time I listen to that song that I otherwise love.