I don't know where to begin...It's been so long since I haven't written daylogs...

It's been real tough, because I had to overcome a lot of things; I've lost others and gained something else.

So, I guess I'd better start with the tip of the iceberg, huh?!

Yeah, let's get the show on the road !


I guess it all started with that night, when I asphyxiated your presence from my world, by closing a door, I had opened another...

Somehow I think I lost all competence to actually feel. It may sound odd, but I, somehow, developed this virtual veil around my soul, obstructing everything coming out, or getting in. This is some sort of defence mechanism spawned by my internal craftwork, keeping everything crystallized until I'm completely healed.

When is this going to happen - I don't know...

But I'll be here, waiting for my real life to begin, to once again delight in little bits of bliss.

Well, at least I managed to escape from My Monster's quelling. Or so I think...

I'll be here, waiting to redetect that girl who could light up a room with her cascades of laughter...

That little girl who had so much electricity flowing through, that her eyes seemed phosphorus beads, radiating pure joy.

Now, here stares a ghost of her former self. She's wondering wether she made the right choices following her supposed-wannabe job; she doubts wether all those years ago, she was ruled by her parents with an invisible remote control...She's begining to question what's the purpose of all things people are doing...

  • Why does she work hard?
  • Because she needs a steady good job with a nice wage.
  • But why?!?
  • Because she needs to provide material support for her family.
  • What family?
  • The one she's going to build, together with her future supposed-to-be beloved, IF she ever finds him, that is.
  • And then?
  • Then she'll...
  • What?! - She'll get up, go to work , come home, cook, wash, play with her children/just plain talk, see the husband, go to sleep. Repeat.
  • And that's it?!
  • Yes, and the family car, the summer & winter vacation, the dog...
  • And that's all?!
  • Yes, what else could there be!?
  • How about actually NOT triggering time, so it passes faster, until the day you die? How about actually LIVING? Climb a mountain, lose your breath over the world at your feet, go on a trip around the world to discover all the small things which make this world so damn beautiful ! Kiss the one you love, tell all the people you care about your feelings! Learn to play the musical instruments you always wanted to... Take those dancing lessons! Watch an aurora borealis, make love until time forgets its course, do something worth telling your grandchildren, make most of what you can out of every moment ! Who knows for how long you'll be able to put off those plans you had as a youngster...Dream, dare and DO ! Take another step out of your fake world!
    Skip school today, linger in bed until noon, grab your friends, go out and have fun. Shatter your daily routine once in a while!
    Call the office, say you're sick, pamper yourself and a friend, make a movie marathon all-day-long. Don't change your PJ's! Don't even get out of bed! Call your significant other, trick him/her to come asap and spend all day ravishing each other's bodies.
    Go on, smash those patterns you've been pretending to call life!

Oh, but it's so easy to simply write about these things that are happening...If it could be just as easy, as actually begining the actions needed. It's hard when you lost all your reasons, when all you can do is wait for Encontrer Le Temps Perdu.

So, here I am, waiting for my real life to begin; until then, my amnesiac state is driving on auto-pilot my poor - poor body. I believe it will happen, and if it tardies, I WILL make it happen! Because I refuse to live a randomly set life.

I conceived of the Bells after dismembering a telephone.

Telephones meant a lot to my family. Both my mother and my stepfather worked for AT&T's local Bell, SNET. Unlike the midcentury New York Bell, which was plagued with problems from bad service to clogged lines, from the Fifties through the Seventies Connecticut residents enjoyed some of the best telephone service on Earth. The telephone itself was a holy object: you didn't poke inside it, although I did quite a job on a just-like-real Western Electric toy phone once, you left it for the Western Electric Man who would come in, take away your old black rotary, and give you a spanking new phone in colors like Hot Line (dark red) and Coffee with Cream (beige). If your phone ailed, he'd do some kind of magic over it, and it would be healed.

So it was with some amusement that my mother found me reading about Captain Crunch and the boxes in the Nineties, and I felt a kind of homecoming, learning about UNIX and C from my good mentor Jim Simpson, who was one of the last of the Old Breed in SNET (heck, he hacked in a tailored suit, and yet revered Tolkien. Beat that.) I begged him for his lineman's handset. Now that my mother is dead and I don't know where Jimpson is, I'm learning UNIX and C in honest and for credit.

And it was with a degree of forbidden pleasure I took apart an olive Touch-Tone phone circa 1982, taken from a house that was having its fone service modernized. The only parts I could find to keep was the ringer and the handset. There just isn't that much out there on the web about gutting fones for fun as opposed to selling and updating older vintage ones, and until I learn more electronics there isn't much I can identify that might be of use, however, I'm still keeping the bits of the olive desk fone and the wall model.

For awhile I simply rang the little bells by perching them on sharpened pencils and hitting them with the eraser of a third pencil. Hitting them against each other, Tibetan-style, didn't work. They're tuned to the same notes as a doorbell (perhaps by design) and it seemed to me to be a fine set of bells for a wind or door chime, particularly for Headquarters. Accordingly, I bought a package of four wooden beads of a good size (I was looking for cork, but couldn't find any) as strikers and a length of jute stringing twine from Michael's, along with a large oval plywood finial. Overall, I paid less than $5.

After trial stringing the beads, it became clear that mere knots on a single line were not enough to hold them together: I needed more beads. Also, I began to think about the "look" of the project. Somehow, the idea of gutting a phone and making windchimes had a Dangerous Visions/Barbarella/Arcosanti/Dhalgren-era SF postapocalyptic sound and feel -- cinematically, you might hear the sound of a phone or doorbell ringing in a desolate city, which turns out to be a windchime outside a neo-primitive hut made of salvage and scrap, blowing against an overcast sky. Also, using beads with an earth-toned raku look would reference the Mid-Century design heritage of the phone they came from, and the jute twine I was using to string them. The two remaining beads I might use as strikers with another pair of bells, but I think they might make extremely good head and tail pieces, and my new set of design sketches will reflect that.

So far, the major engineering and design problems I foresee are:

  • Getting the weight of beads, etc., right. Too light and the assembly won't get enough momentum to ring the bells, too heavy and the thing won't swing.
  • Reshaping the oval into a more "teardrop" or "rolling triangle" shape. This is purely cosmetic, but would look more mid-century/neo-primitive than the more formal oval. Should this be done with a hacksaw blade or an X-acto knife? Also boring a hole for hanging with no drill available -- a paper punch might work, but I wouldn't want to split the wood.
  • Painting the finial. So far, I have some acrylic paints with a glossy finish. I might want to include other textures as well, but I'm saving that for after I've selected the beads.
  • Passing too many cords through the hole of the bell. So far I've passed one or two, but four might dampen the sound. (Small hard beads might stabilize the bells, but leave the large wooden beads to strike.) Additional cords would allow me to vary the space between the bells with macrame.
  • Determining the ideal length of the chime. A foot is too short, three feet is too long, probably between a foot and a half and two.
If this all works out well, I'll probably sell another one on Etsy, possibly with a little book describing all this!

Sky blue sky.
Lip's color, when dead.
Eye's color, when beautiful.
Ocean's color, when still.
Fading barely blue.

She has let her garments fall.
She is spotless, clear, pure, blue.
Invisibly defiled, the light shines through.
Her fingers run through the grass;
Combing it like hair.
Removing the dust and grime.
Freeing my lungs, clearing my mind.

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