Scratch Paper

The longer he remained alone, the more each sound jarred him.

Soon after his wife left with the children, he lost his voice. She still felt love for him, or for something he was. He missed her. But she could not bear to expose the children any longer to his paranoia. Frankly she could no longer bear his paranoia herself. She would wake up in the middle of the night to find him crouched in the corner, staring. The next morning he knew nothing about it.

He stopped writing online. Online he realized they could find his thoughts, bring the thoughts back to their laboratories for analysis. He began to write in paper notebooks that he kept in the safe. Although sinking further into paranoia, he trusted people in odd ways, leaving his car unlocked, his money, credit cards, passport out on the buffet with the door unlocked, even as he left for the day to work. Yet his notebooks, his recorded thoughts, he kept locked up.

As he wrote and his handwriting improved, he found himself talking less and less. In the end he lost his voice. His vocal cords had atrophied. He managed to lose weight. He could hardly bring himself to visit the supermarket. When he finally went he bought food that would not spoil, and vitamins, changing stores often to avoid discernable visit patterns. If he established a pattern, they would find out. Then they would add chemicals tracers to his food.

He toyed with the idea of digging up the front yard to reinstate the sceptic tank. He reasoned that by adding detergents he could prevent them from analyzing his wastes. Since he had begun to wash and shred his garbage, he hoped they could not determine directly what he had thrown out. Still they could easily analyze his sewage.

Alternatively he considered planting bamboo throughout the yard, but was afraid they could hide among the stalks, and set up equipment to film his actions and analyze him night and day.

She almost had him committed at one point, but the authorities did not see him as a danger. So they let him be. They can lock you up. But they would rather give you enough rope.

The silence did bring him one gift, though. He felt he could think in silence. He attempted to meditate, to bring more silence into his mind. He believed with enough silence he could uncover their deeper plans.

One piece of machinery lying around here at the house is an old 4-track analog cassette recorder. Over the holiday break, I struggled to record something worth listening to.

After 10 days of frustration – a small handful of uninterrupted blocks long enough to do anything constructive – I tried with the computer instead. On Linux, there is a multitracker called Ardour. The sounds I can make are much closer to what I get listening in the headphones. The sound itself is no problem.

The problem is trying to understand how to use Ardour without reading the manual carefully enough, or perhaps writing my own manual. Ardour’s sound patching works with Jack, another fine piece of software that I have not yet understood how to use properly.

At this point, I can get a click track, or I can get instrument sound. I cannot get both at the same time. Furthermore, I clearly do not know how to record a piece wherein each section has a different tempo. Probably what I ought to do is record each section separately. As soon as I can figure out how to patch in both the click and the sound at the same time, that may be the way to go.

The old dog, stumbling along under a sack of stones, the leash continually tugging him away from what smells so interesting… They end up throwing the old dog in the river. He goes down with a rope around his neck, a rope tied to a bag of heavy stones.