Returning to Nothing Regularly Scheduled.

You might have noticed, for all that I spent more than a decade as a more-or-less full-time music writer, I haven't written about music very much here. That will come, I'm pretty sure. But towards the end of my Reader tenure, I was badly burned out, still going on every week out of a sheer dogged determination to keep going and not much else. Well, OK, there was guilt and anxiety too. I have to be honest and admit that I don't even listen to music every day anymore.

When I do, though, it's good again. For the most part.

I'm in recovery from something, alright. Or growing into something new. So I leave you with this thought from "Or All the Seas With Oysters" by the late Avram Davidson:

***

"Maybe they're a different kind of life-form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of elements in the air. You know what safety pins are--these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa-forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they're not. Oscar, they're not, not really, not really, not..."

He began to cry into his hands. Oscar looked at him. He shook his head.

After a minute, Ferd controlled himself somewhat. He snuffled. "All these bicycles the cops find, and they hold them waiting for owners to show up, and then we buy them at the sale because no owners show up because there aren't any, and the same with the ones the kids are always trying to sell us, and they say they just found them, and they really did because they were never made in a factory. They grew. They grow. You smash them and throw them away, they regenerate."

Oscar turned to someone who wasn't there and waggled his head. "Hoo boy," he said. Then, to Ferd: "You mean one day there's a safety pin the next day instead there's a coat hanger?"

Ferd said, "One day there's a cocoon; the next day there's a moth. One day there's an egg; the next day there's a chicken. But with...these it doesn't happen out in the open daylight where you can see it. But at night, Oscar--at night you can hear it happening. All the little noises in the night-time, Oscar--"