Scared of Chaka

This band was the real deal. SOC songs just hit you. You don't think about them, ponder their larger meaning, or break into discussion groups to cut through their subtext. Their lyrics are often unintelligible, but that doesn't matter...it's about the sound and the feel.

The rough-around-the-edges garage-y production suits SOC perfectly. Instead of hearing songs laboriously perfected by cut-and-paste studio patchwork, you hear the unrefined sound of rock n' roll being made. Of course, the songwriting is excellent - these are great little blasts of rockage - but it's the frenetic way the tunes are played and recorded that makes them hit so hard. It's nothing but a gut reaction.

In spite of (because of?) the fact that I engage in near-constant thinking (overthinking?) and contemplation, my musical taste has always tended towards the visceral and spontaneous. I'm going for a head-clearing walk after work. In this case, "head-clearing" = SOC on shuffle. Yeah, that's the stuff.

Roadfood last Friday

Who knew there was anything to eat in Buffalo besides chicken wings? The city's other signature food is a sandwich known locally as beef on weck. Roast beef sliced to order, as rare as you'd like, stacked high and served au jus on a kimmelweck roll, a uniquely savoury bun encrusted with coarse salt and infused with caraway seeds. Top it with a little sinus-clearing horseradish - delicious. I ate the shit out of mine.

Il dolce far niente

We live by schedules and clocks. Most of us have so much to do, we don't even notice the mechanical monotony of it all. For the majority of people, life is a series of to-do lists, a point-to-point linear existence, a systematic routine that enslaves us with its structure and predictability.

But we impose this order on ourselves. Time is a social construction.

Allen Bluedorn distinguishes between fungible time and epochal time. Fungible time is measured by interchangeable units. There is no qualitative differentiation between these units; one is the same as another. Most of our everyday tasks are structured around continuous fungible units - seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, etc. - organized into definite intervals that fill up a 24-hour day. The time defines the task. Epochal time, by contrast, is based on events. In epochal time, the "event defines the time." Time is not absolute but relational, linked to a person's internal rhythms and/or external social factors.

A person on fungible time wakes up at 7, eats lunch at 12, and goes to sleep at midnight. A person on epochal time sleeps when he is tired and eats when he is hungry. On fungible time, I stop blogging when it's time to go back to work. On epochal time, I stop blogging when I have nothing else to say.

Needless to say which I prefer. Events are all we really have to define ourselves. Our lives are just collections of events and experiences. But instead of living a series of events, most of us are making plans, biding time, and filling space.

We all have mundane, everyday tasks to which we must attend. I accept this...reluctantly. I value punctuality and efficiency, insofar as others require me to value them. I have adapted to the fungible model...because I had to.

It's only in the transient spaces in between all this trifling minutiae that I can listen to the dead air, to the sound of nothing, and appreciate ambiguity for what it really is: the freedom of open-endedness. I can welcome diversions, take risks, and, if I'm so inclined, ponder the incalcuable and reflect on what (if anything) really matters. I can embrace the natural disorder of things. Lots of people talk of "living in the moment", but the only ones who can truly do it are those who manage to free themselves from the shackles of fungible time.

So...while it undeniably feels great to cross things off that list and "get shit done", it's ultimately all about the down time. Because it's only when you're doing nothing that you're doing anything.