heisenbug | (no subject)

I don't feel like I've done very much that was creative lately (although hopefully I'll be doing some composing and/or recording when I get my new Presonus FireStudio), but today I discovered some stuff I did a long time ago. We were moving bookshelves around, which required us to take all the stuff off them, and tucked inside some sheet music was this story that I wrote in high school:

What Happens When Creativity is Forced

[Background: We had to write a "creative piece" every week; I wrote this longhand during a free period earlier the day it was due. My school had three teachers named Mr. Smith and two named Mrs. Peters, but nowhere was a Mr. Smith's classroom directly above a Mrs. Peters's classroom. The ceilings were covered in acoustic tiles, each of which had a grid of 1201 small holes. D-110 was the office where disciplinary matters were handled. I resisted the urge to edit this as I was typing it in.]

So I was sitting there in my reflectometry class, counting the holes in the ceiling-- the slow way, one at a time, no multiplication involved-- and I had gotten to about four million, eight hundred thousand and C (base thirty-seven). I had shoved them all into a pile at one corner of the ceiling and was moving each one as I counted it to the opposite edge. Mr. Smith was lecturing about the effects of rotational time displacement on the spleen and related body parts, and he was getting all worked up and excited about it, bobbing up and down and waving his tendrils about in his tank. Just when I was afraid his water might slop over the edge and start eating through the floor, right down into Mrs. Peters' room, a message arrived from the office, rolling in through the cubicle nearest the door. Mr. Smith grabbed it and unraveled it, and announced: "Al, they want you down in D-110." So I took the pass, grabbed my bag and my piano-- remembered to straighten out the holes-- and left without even bothering to open the door. I landed in the safety net on the first floor and hurried to the office, because I had heard rumors that they used Mongolian toothpick torture on people who weren't punctual.

"Mr. deL," the man said, his voice cracking with the stress of having to give me such horrible news, "It would appear that this morning you parked your car in the principal's fishbowl. As I'm sure you're aware, this crime carries a mandatory sentence of capital punishment."

"I didn't do it!" I protested. "My car's right here in my pocket, see?"

"You'll have to wait for your trial and tell that to St. Peter, son. Bare your upper right arm." I did and he gave me the lethal injection. Damn, I thought as I traversed the tunnel, I hate it when I die.

Pete greeted me at the gate in his usual way: "Oh, you again. Look, we'll have to put you over in Purgatory for a while; we've got a backlog of a few million trials. In the meantime, here are some forms to fill out."

He gave me the forms and a big U-Haul truck to carry them in, and sent me on my way. Look, I don't know if you've ever died before, but I can tell you this: all that waiting is nothing compared with the paperwork, and it gets worse every time. (Waiting is no problem when you've got all eternity to spare.) After I finished filling out the forms in my cheap little Purgatory apartment, I only had a few thousand years before my trial, so I sat down to count the holes in the ceiling. My room had an amazing resemblance to Mr. Smith's classrom at school. Anyway, my trial was pretty short: they had a giant six-dimensional replica of the entire space-time continuum, and I showed them where I put the car in my pocket, and someone else had parked in the fishbowl, so they immediately gave me an anti-lethal injection and let me go back to my original place-time. Mr. Smith was still talking, of course, and had barely noticed I was gone. But I had completely lost track of the holes in the ceiling.

[end of story]

And also a couple of doodles from around the same time:

And finally, some parody song lyrics from a couple years later:

After the Tone

[Sung to the tune of "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd. I actually recorded this with piano and put it on my answering machine in college. I recorded it straight into the machine, and later recorded over it, so the recording is, fortunately, lost.]

Hello...
There isn't anybody here
But if you leave a message
I'l call you back soon

There's no one home, this is a recording
Alan might be gone for days
Or he might just be taking a shower
Or talking to someone on the third floor

When I was a child
We didn't have answering machines
We had to call and call again
But thanks to Lechmere and the Panasonic Company
We don't have to suffer anymore

Lea. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . eave a message
After the tone.