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You can route audio like so many trains as they pass through the mic cable, to an old laptop with a semi-legally-obtained copy of Pro Tools, to a wav file, to an mp3 file, to an email sent to an old lover, who has married and has kids who play soccer at the park you used to cycle past on ambitious mornings.

If you're not paying attention, you might send a track to an output that does not exist, or, that leads nowhere. So the original signal is silent. But if you have already set up part of that track to go through say, a reverb effect, that reverb will continue getting a portion of the signal. so what comes through is a soft, beautified echo of something you can no longer hear.

'Satan and his legions' is a term I heard far too often as a child. Too delicate to watch a pg-13 but let the Sunday school teachers talk all they want about an invisible horde of demons, all of whom think of nothing but my destruction...

Perhaps they're the dark matter we hear so little repeated so often about. Only know it exists from the force it exerts on us. Makes up most of everything. The fundamental skeleton of the universe.

I can see the appeal of Lucifer's plan. If it was say, equivalent to the rest of nature's goings on, and Christ's agency akin to human self-consciousness and all its rich, interesting, but God-awful results.

So the return to childlike nature would be yes, a surrender to God, or an aligning of our will with his maybe, but also a reconciling with, or at least understanding of Satan who never wanted to part ways in the first place.

And that feels like a fitting yin yang thing. The perfection of a snake eating a mouse whole or something.

I love this

Sometimes when I start playing the piano, my daughter will drop what she's doing and start running in circles around the couch. Like this is her contribution to the performance. And when a song ends she takes a break just long enough to drink some milk, and then asks what's next on the set list.

Mom is the void,
Mostly ignored,
Unknowable life-imparting ways,
The baseball stadium of space between the golf ball-sized 'stuff'.
(Or is it merely mom getting restless, what we call stuff?)
Dad is the pattern, and also mom's child of course.
Look what I can do!
And void is form and form is void and all that

Sweeping

It's her melody,
This dried lakebed at twilight,
Red leaves on my porch

Lyrics to a song I may or may not write

I used to blow my nose with golden leaf 

While whining for something to eat

Now I scratch without that righteous pain

But with hope I'll find an honest vein

And follow that gold to its source 

Where I will want for nothing more

We displaced and desperate people of the high desert,
We sunburned and murderous pioneers,
We scrabbling, subduing, culture-confused saints,

Have learned to expect a harsh hand from the earth,
The sand-filled winds, Seven-month winters, constant drought warnings,

And we know there is virtue in weathering the dry cold, dry heat, dry springs,
Not a self-flagellation to assuage guilt (forwehavenonenorshouldwenorwillweever),
Just a beauty-in-adversity, refining fire, cold-hard-reality type of thing,

So that when a freak hurricane sends rain (real rain) inland from the west coast and we wake up to
Mist burning off in the rising sun, dampness and health that briefly revives the brown grass and
Creates the dew-covered, glistening effect we know only from vacations,

The intrusion of the outside world into our skin and nose and hair is a foreign feeling,
And tied up in some unformed idea of loss, or a sacrifice we didn't realize we keep choosing to make, or an ancestral home, or innocence bartered for independence, or a secret forest clearing we pictured as a child and that used to carry a... feeling... with it and why does it not anymore-

And the relief!  When the pores constrict again, mid-afternoon, and the skin is vulnerable only to the clean and negligible corrosion of wind and time