The life and times of Isaac Dust
Title track of an album I released in June of 2007. I had read a few weird books by Wilhelm Reich, watched a weird movie about him, then turned on my BR-864 Digital Studio and recorded whatever weirdness came to mind. Had to keep it weird for the video too, for the sake of consistency.
Incredibly, I had never heard this song before, despite being reasonably familiar with this “John” guy who wrote it. Discovering new old songs is fun. (Yes, I’m going to be making the most of this Covid-19 isolation by spending much of it playing around in Green Desk Studios (a.k.a. the extra bedroom in my house.)
Picking through the archives, I noticed that it was 14 years ago, almost to the day, that I started playing around with podcasting (“The Isaac Dust MySpace Broadcast”) and about 13 years since I uploaded my first sad song to YouTube (below). Funny how everything and nothing has changed. 13 years on and this song is still in the “unfinished” file, along with hundreds of other song snippets and 150 pages of a novel. Surely with 3 weeks off from work I can tie up the loose ends.
Skimming through the journal entries for the month of February, I’m amazed at how quickly the various things I attend to in a given month fade from mind and memory. I listen to podcast after podcast throughout the week, but however interesting an episode might be, I just follow up the next day with more information, and then more. There’s just no attentional bandwidth left with which to consider something in depth. Case in point, I heard somewhere today, on some podcast, that it’s better to “get to the bottom of things” than to “stay on top of things.” The Tim Ferriss Show. That was it. I was barely able to recall even that detail, and that’s from a two-hour podcast I listened to just today, while I was running some errands. I just keep listening, keep scrolling, keep staying on top of things. But never any real depth is plumbed. And it’s all self-imposed. All done from a stance of willful ignorance. I’m giving up the ghost, which is the dreadful, shameful thing I swore I would never do. But I’m doing it. All the recent focus on aging, on disease, on decline. I’ve listened and scrolled and thought myself into a rut, a bad groove. Time to bounce out, to break free. But first, sleep.
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Up at 1:oo am. Did some mindful movement (my version of yoga) in bed and it felt great. Drifting back to sleep I was thinking about how regular writing and creative output might be just the tonic I need right now. I love the idea of regular public output, but I’ve never found the requisite motivation to stick with it. I know it shouldn’t matter – the public output vs. private journaling – but there’s something about the perceived accountability, however imagined, that can galvanize my creative eye to pop open. Seeing my life and the world through that eye is intrinsically awesome, and I need some awesome right now.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I stumble and bumble my way into a moment of self-honesty in which I find myself giving less of a fuck.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, the Cancer Chronicles continue with an update following my visit to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I recount and reflect upon the latest twists and turns of my “journey” since being diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Happiness = Reality – Expectations. That’s what they say, and I think they might be right, so learning to calibrate expectations and hold them as lightly as possible continues to be a challenge.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I update my own health status, which includes a recent diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I talk my way through a worried mind as I wait for blood test results that will reveal whether or not I have cancer.
In this episode of the Head The Gong Podcast, I once again, for the second consecutive episode, phone it in, literally, by which I mean I recorded a series of random rants on my way to and from work, on my iPod Touch, which is kind of like a phone. Speaking of phones, it seems as if most of the human race has developed a bizarre, addictive relationship with them, surrendering to the algorithmic overlords our most precious resource – our attention.
