Sunday, bloody Sunday

So. Things are going well in general. Significant advances have been made towards studio set up. Two instruments are now fully wired into the mixing module, and I’m familiarising myself with all the possibilities.

Providing I keep the wiring neat I see no reason for cable spaghetti, which is sadly not the case with the desktop pc, which has always been a lost cause. Maybe one day I will replace the keyboard and mouse with blutooth versions… but that’s not a priority really. Performance wise I’m really pleased with the ten channel mixer I got, it is kinda perfect for just about any application I have in store for it.

Now I’m having lots of fun with the Donner b1 bass synth and Alesis-18 drum machine, which are now synched properly with Ableton Live 11’s midi clock and also each other, with the b1 as master and Alesis as the slave. I’m step sequencing bass parts in the b1 and live sequencing drum kit and percussion parts in the Alesis with no problems and I can control playback either from the b1 or from the PC with the keyboard spacebar. When I’ve hooked up the MPK mini mkII keyboard on a separate midi channel and routed the stereo audio output from Ableton into another two channels (left and right ins) on the mixer I’ll be in a position to start recording some chord sequences and melody lines, using the pads and sample loops of my choice. It’s very exciting. To have at my fingertips all this creative potential for the first time in years, but most importantly, to want to do something with it.

Healthwise I’m still not functioing at anything like full capacity. Huge long sleepy spells keep ambushing me and seem linked mysteriously to my metabolism. I eat a decent sized meal and then I’m gripped by sudden fatigue that can last for hours. I’m not, according to my home testing kit, diabetic. The only way I’ve found to stave off this sleepiness is to eat very scantily, but then I’m left wolfish and hungry and this is distracting. I’ve just taken delivery of some covid test kits and I’ll do a test soon just in case but the absence of other symptoms besides fatigue leads me to suspect that the results will be almost certainly negative. Which to my mind leaves an explanatory gap. What’s making me so tired? One likely answer is my pain meds—gabapentin and codeine, both of which can have soporific side-effects. This is kinda what my money’s on, really. It’s got to be the pain pills, which probably sit in my stomach partially digested until activated further by any meal I eat. It’s really the most plausible explanation. And if it is the right one, it leaves me with a catch-22 situation regarding solving the problem. To avoid sleepiness would mean reducing my dosage, and that entails pain. There would be a trade-off between pain and alertness on the one hand and comfort and drowsiness on the other. I would have to be careful tweaking the balance.

Politically, I’m still so outraged at the arrogance and exceptionalism of the State of Israel in its dealings in Palestine. After watching on-the-ground reports and reading about the experiences of Palestinians it’s somehow incredibly surreal to return to my own everyday life. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance involved: it’s like the horrendous suffering and death tolls I read and see happening in videos don’t belong in the same reality as my tinkering with musical equipment, cooking, cleaning and chatting with people. There is a really surreal atmosphere suffusing everything I do after being immersed in the constant struggle of the Palestinian people, an absurdity that reduces everything that might happen in the UK to the status of a mere shadow world, a set of toy issues drained of significance.

These are feelings of alienation, powerlessness, of being kept in a position of atomised and disorganised immiseration politically wherein all one can do is hope and pray, in a largely individual and privatised manner, that things improve. That those organised bodies with the potential for real political influence, the ICJ and the UN, are going to more effectively persuade every government to cease their complicity in the unlawful atrocities, ethnic cleansing, genocide and apartheid being commited by the Israeli State. That Israel will take note of its situation then as a rogue state, that the wider Jewish population will overpower the Zionist political organisation of Israel. That the next ceasefire will be permanent, and there will be no more goading into action or subterranean instrumentalisation of terrorism. That peace will finally descend on the holy land and a right to return will be established and honoured for the families of Palestine. It’s all I can do—pray for this, keep talking about it, amplify the message whenever there’s an opportunity using whatever little platform I can manage. Maybe this too is a little exhausting.