Some more Silliness with the drum machine.

Another feature of GarageBand enables people who cannot make music to make music. You drag and drop a bunch of loops onto the canvas to make your song.

Here is a Premier morceau.

This morning I did a twelve-mile run, starting at 6:50 a.m., finishing in an hour and a half.

These last three weeks of training taper off to almost nothing right before the marathon. I also bought new shoes this morning, since my other pair no longer has any cushioning left.

Emma was more excited. She got a new bike. The bike is supposed to be for her birthday, but she is already out riding in the driveway.

She asked her mom to go for a ride with her. Nathalie’s far along the asymptotic tapering part of her training program. First she said she could not go because her bike’s not in good working order. Emma asked her whether she would go if I could fix her bike. Nathalie replied under her breath that she was sure she could find another excuse.

My brother Matt lent me his Ovation acoustic. Dad carried it over here. It got lost for a while at the Lyon airport, but made it here safe. So thanks, Dog.

GarageBand makes it easy to slap something together. So I stole an old idea of Dave’s that he came up with on a Cort Explorer for the intro and outro, an idea I had on the Strat using chords with several open strings. Added some drum machine to keep me in line, and a few notes of keyboard.

My fingers are still getting used to the action, so I just noodled on Matt’s guitar in the middle. The working title is Open Ovation.

If you went over to Thurston Howell lll on MySpace the last couple of weeks, you got a retrospective in memory of Darryle. Dave has some pictures of the man in action.

Up to the summer of 1993 Darryle, Dave, and I recorded a bunch of stuff, some good, some nonsense. This weekend I recorded a song, For Chester, in the style of the summer of 1993, the sort of thing Darryle and I might have come up with if we hadn’t had Dave’s ears to improve the sound, and if Darryle had had laryngitis so I had to sing.

It is sort of a throwback to music that was already old when we were young.

It has been a while now that I quit taking fluoxetine. For the first two months of the year I took half the initial dose, meaning only 10 mg/day. Recently some folks in Britain wrote up a study concluding that fluoxetine has no more effect statistically speaking than placebo.

I have not read the articles, but I doubt that the effect I got was entirely placebo. For several months my vicious mental circles broke, and I cannot recall losing control in anger. Today I am almost back to normal. I have also lost a little bit of weight, partly due to running more lately. Dad thought maybe fluoxetine encourages weight gain.

William Styron made it to age 81 after suffering from what sounded like worse depression than I have had, in the sense that his deep depression went on and on, whereas mine was only acute a few times. His sounded like the last few miles of a marathon for months.

The depression has not come back, but I lost control of my anger twice today, unfortunately at Tim. He is 10, so is still growing up. I hate even my own imperfections enough to want to eliminate the history of the universe in order to get rid of them. His imperfections of course seem even worse.

Nath says I should go back to the doctor and ask him for advice. If there is medicine that defuses anger, then it would probably be worth it. I cannot find any good use of being depressed and angry, and I am not trying to preserve my body or mind for anything.

This morning I ran the second and last 20-miler planned as part of training for the Annecy Marathon in April.

For the last 5 miles I was looking forward to finishing. That’s not good, since there are 6 more to go in the real run.

My pace was about 8-minute miles, so it took me 2:40 to complete the run. Perhaps I should try moving a bit faster. But this was the end of a 50-mile week, and work was tiring. So I had intended to take it easy.

In fact my legs are only a bit sore. The real problems are the runner’s equivalent of diaper rash, and a kind of structural complication that came from falling off my bike at reasonably high speed a couple of years ago. The diaper rash can no doubt be fixed with gel of some sort. The misaligned tail end probably not.

Early this morning, I woke up dreaming of maggots. The cat was meowing.

In the dream the decor was in at least three restaurants. All three displayed meats they served. The meat dishes were under wraps. All the meat was moving. The most unusual dish was fresh frog. Clearly discolored from decay, the frog was nevertheless twitching rhythmically.

The cat licked my chin. He probably considered his cat food from last night stale. After patting his head I thought I could feel fleas scampering along my arm.

Normally nothing remains after I wake up. Odd.

The acid rain washed away all the smog today. Beautiful mountains.

It looked as though I could see all the detail on the other side of the valley. The wind blew fiercely, too. That’s my kind of weather.

As Internet legend has it, some guy did start answering the spam about lengthening his penis, initially back in the late 90s. He was just a pimply-faced kid then. Back in the Go Go 90s, when you could get VC funding for ideas like toothpaste.com, spam startups passed around PowerPoint slides of this guy’s orders to show they had customers. As you can tell from the volume of this type of spam, lots of them raised enough money to keep going.

I was told somebody read on the Internet that some of the spam that guy answered actually resulted in him getting what he paid for. Deeply in debt from all he had spent, but yet maximally endowed, the poor guy almost got into the Guinness Book of World Records until the publisher decided they were a family-oriented business. He had gained so much length he has circulation problems. He needs a blood transfusion to get an erection.