when i look at my smartphone, there is some thing that wants me to assume that i am infinite; or maybe, at least, my thoughts are; at the very least, my posts are; at the absolute least, when i make art digitally, it is saved in the “cloud,” and this level of stratification of ideas is, well, seemingly infinite. and there is some faith in this pretend infinite–when i pick up my smartphone, it turns on 99% of the time, and when it doesn’t turn on, i plug it into a charger and it turns on, and when that doesn’t work i call at&t and they ship me a new one for a deal i can’t refuse and that one turns on 99% of the time. in the digitization of me, i have this enigmatic sense of a perfect stairstep, climbing ever higher, more perfect, and a more perfect faith in this notion that things just work.

the problem, is that nothing in reality ever, actually works this way–with perfect faith in a result. the world around us is far from infinite, and it rarely works the way we want it to; perhaps this is why relationships are so difficult, and social media is so alluring. when i garden, it takes 5 years for my peach tree to produce fruit, and some years it still doesn’t produce and there are a thousand reasons why. i bake a loaf of bread, it comes out flat, and not one thing about my process has changed.

last night, Steve and i were all geared up (literally) to record, when we realized the metronome was about 10bpm slower than we had initially recorded. turns out, one of the gears in the 1980s monster of a machine that we record on was not working properly, and so we couldn’t proceed with our artistically constrained “analogue-only” project. Steve apologized to me for a lost session, i apologized to Steve for jumping through philosophical hoops to make all of this work. and then we both realized, our failed experiment is one of the most exciting, human, and life-giving things we could be doing on a Friday night, and now we get to tinker with nuts and bolts and circuitry and metronomes and grease and tape, to keep working on our garden, on our loaf of bread, on our music. finite things are beautiful, like us–and sometimes making things with our hands reminds us of that. so we sat and talked about records.

our own fidelity eventually loses momentum and needs recalibration. how very human! how very beautiful! hurrah! three cheers for the reel to reel tension arm!