That was quite the month when all of my attention turned to my health, and I do mean all of my attention. There was no room for anything else but a keen focus on losing weight, controlling my diet, and tight monitoring of my diabetes. I put a hold on reading, the synthesizer, writing, and socializing as all I could see was imperative to deal with things related to my body before I lost that opportunity. That was until today.
Our day started with a visit with our friends Itay and Rotem, who just moved back from California after a two-year visit to the frenetic chaos of Los Angeles. It was two years ago back in August 2017, when they first invited Caroline and me to share some shakshuka shortly after they were married and just days before they moved to L.A. A year after they drove out west, we visited them in their tiny apartment, where once again, we joined them for more shakshuka (click here for that blog entry and remember to scroll down to the photo). And now here we are once again in Arizona in the new place Itay, Rotem, and little Liam are calling home, welcoming us to what is now a tradition, a meal of shakshuka. In case you don’t know what this dish is, it is popular in the Middle East and is made of tomatoes, peppers, and poached eggs. In Italy, it is known as Uova in Purgatorio or “Eggs in Purgatory,” with the eggs representing souls and the tomato mixture they are poached in, looking like the fires of hell.
Today is also of note because I am at the 30-day mark from when I went all-in on my diet, and now I need to break out of that singular focus and bring normal back into my life. Of course, there will still be an emphasis on diet as Caroline and I try to continue looking closely at the calories we are eating at each meal. To that end, we are making an act of convenience with our recent subscription to Green Chef, which will begin this Monday.
Green Chef is a meal kit delivery service focusing on Keto, Paleo, Vegetarian, and Balanced Diets using organic ingredients. I learned to cook for a family of eight, and I’ve never really been able to adjust my perspective on how much I should cook for Caroline, so I tend to lean towards larger concoctions. Over the past month, we’ve both been tracking our calories and now realize we are good with meals that are under 500 calories, and Green Chef fits that requirement. By supplying us with kits that are measured to provide just the amount of ingredients required to make dinner for two, I’m hoping to become accustomed to handling food amounts that don’t produce a ton of leftovers.
In the month leading up to my derailment, I was on a tangent, buying a bunch of new books to fill in some gaps in my knowledge. I can now start returning to this reading list that includes A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher, Sex and the Failed Absolute by Žižek, Slavoj (shipping soon), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou but all of this was mentioned back in my blog entry about my antilibrary.
On the synth side of things, I recently received the production version of Bionic Lester MKIII that I’ve been testing for Scott Jaeger of Industrial Music Electronics this summer. I’ve only made a cursory pass-over of the module that Scott modified at the last moment before going into production by adding a comb filter mode that was suggested at the 11th hour by a friend of his in Chicago while he was demoing it at Knobcon in early September. Read a great interview with Scott over at Perfect Circuit by clicking here.
Also coming up from Scott will be new test modules for Kermit that he describes as a modulation aid used primarily for LFO duties. In addition to that refresh, he’s promising an update to the Malgorithm module that acts as a bitcrusher. Ongoing work for Volkmire’s Inferno is progressing, with a promised new firmware for testing coming up soon. Scott recently demonstrated the finished Bionic Lester and a working prototype of Volkmire’s Inferno at Modular8 that you can watch by clicking here.
Months ago, I ordered a CV Tape Station from Xavier Gazon, but through a series of fortunate delays, I’m now receiving a greatly improved model that just cleared customs in New York after being stuck in Belgium with their customs office for nearly two weeks.
So while my reading list and need to play on the synthesizer are abundantly clear I’m at a loss of where my writing exercises will go. There’s a bit of a void in my head where ideas should be hanging out, but there doesn’t appear to be a thing in that space. Maybe a road trip is in order, as Caroline and I appear to be taking a pass on heading out over Thanksgiving this year. Without her and I traveling I might entertain the thought of heading north or northeast to somewhere like Bluff, Utah, or Cortez, Colorado.
Okay, the truth is I’d prefer Europe, but so would Caroline, so just hopping over for more of my life playing La Dolce Vita will have her confronting me with some Lucha Libre moves to wrestle that idea out of my head. One can dream.