The Blog

I write here when I have something to say.

2026-10-04

Ocotber! Scanner service, shitty landlord doors, etc.

It's October! I love October. Temperature is falling, and is now comfortable most of the time, in the mid 60s. The clouds cover the world and make everything a little more dim and washed out. The rain only adds to the effect. The autumn colors are showing in the trees. Everything is just a little more beautiful. Beautiful October, precursor to November, harbinger of winter.

The scanner, an Epson V350 Photo, is better than ever. I've disassembled it and cleaned the underside of the glass, and photographed the internal components. There's a general use manual AND a service manual for this. Wonderful. That hardly ever happens. Now that it doesn't have those smudges I can rescan some things that didn't come out right because of it, and scan some more important things that I want to turn out well. Like my old sketchbooks. I have been drawing again, as I say once every few years, but I think I mean it this time. I've started to enjoy it a little.

The doors in this house are not the original, because nothing is original except the frame. A "property development" company somewhere along the way gutted the place and replaced everything with plastic, and the ornaments with nothing, as is customary for land owner vultures. I did get a look at the original doors for the place. Large, solid, decorated wood, with the rectangular mortise locks that accept an older style key. Wish I had taken a picture. The current ones are generic fiberboard, and I spent a weekend fixing a bunch of them. Mostly this amounted to scraping paint away from the mechanism and some light lubrication. I like my doors to open and close without resistance. I have a bit of a thing with doors and locks, actually. I could make a whole page about them. My door, the door to my room, needed some material to be shaved back from the top hinge notch with a chisel, to make it shut without striking the frame. It is now square and very satisfying to operate.

2026-09-26

Everything has been stagnant recently. I have no resources to devote to the more complicated projects I've started. What I've done instead is look for smaller things I've been putting off. More time allocated to organization, culling and condensing stores of spare parts and random trinkets, doing some small maintenance tasks. I've been staring at this Linden clock on my desk for years, thinking I needed a part for it and a special tool, but I was able to get it running with things I had on hand. There are only so many things like that to do though, and it only took a single day. I don't know how to feel about this. Metaphorically I've been cleaning out hardened grease from my bearings, it has been good for me, but there's not much point to a machine that sits still forever.

Nothing I've done has felt like it was worth doing for a very long time. I keep moving from the momentum that I already had, but the movements are hollow and without purpose. I don't like the art that I make. I find it boring and pretty worthless. I am aware that when I am gone, everything that I care for will be destroyed or forgotten, and it will be like it never even happened in the first place. I can fix as many things as I want but as long as there is this undercurrent of loneliness and self-disinterest I don't think any of it will really matter.

2026-05-31

Coming back to this after a while, and reading back the blog is interesting. Every year I feel like a new person. I would recognize myself from last year, or three years ago, but I'm better now. I've lost a lot of the negativity I used to have as I've learned more about the world and myself.

A few days ago I went to Lowell again, this time with my friend. We went to some record stores and got some equipment and new music. Electronic LPs can be found for cheap in warehouses if you know where to look. This time around I got some shellac discs, some of them were pretty nice, one of them was Ella Fitzgerald singing Tea Leaves. Got an awesome trance record too. Natasha - Say it Baby. That's the original mix, but the remixes are crazy, listen to those too. Also a 10" LP with no label or sleeve that we spent some time figuring out. A friend of a friend found it, and it turned out to be a folk album from the 2000s. It's pretty nice! https://www.discogs.com/release/2434692-Larkin-Grimm-Time-Is-A-Spiral-02

I finally have a home copy setup, made of my beloved Dell Dimension I found on the road, an Epson photo scanner I got from a warehouse sale, and a Brother monochromatic printer from savers. Who needs color? I don't, for most things. I really wanted a printer for making j cards for bootlegs and mixtapes, so I guess I'll be making a bunch of black and white tapes, which is pretty cool. I've printed a lot of sheet music, too, and scanned some photos and album art. Next step is figuring out how to send print jobs via ethernet. Soon I'll make pages dedicated to these devices, I really love them.

2025-07-15

I went to Lowell, MA

I only saw a very small part of it, but it was incredible. I knew it had a history as a center of industry during the industrial revolution, but I assumed most of it would have been torn down. I was not prepared to stand in a square entirely surrounded by seemingly endless walls of red brick, green framed windows, and riveted iron. The city is like someone tore my wildest fantasies of Victorian industrial architecture out of my mind and pasted them into real life. I cannot put into words how vast they felt, and I couldn't capture it with any photos either. The sense of scale must be experienced in person. Just endless expanses of brick. And you turn the corner, only to see a larger, more ornate building. The cherry on top is the sky bridges, and while the wooden covers have long since rotted away, their iron skeletons are still beautiful and impressive. The only thing the place is missing is the endless thrum of steam engines and train wheels. But of course the buildings are quiet. I wouldn't expect any of that to still be around.

Of course some of it has been claimed by developers. While searching specific buildings online I found one that had been torn halfway down and built back up with a plastic facade. Redevelopments like this are depressing and alarmingly frequent in a system which prioritizes profit to real estate companies over any potential benefit to people who might want to use that space.

The historic society has done some incredible work in making sure this doesn't happen often. Most of these places have been converted to useful space for people to live and work. One, pictured above, bordered a canal, and had plenty of space in the wide street for the city to plant trees and build a walking path. It was a peaceful and beautiful place to be. At least one of the mills has been fully restored, textile looms and all. I will visit Lowell again, to see the mills, take pictures of what is left, and learn as much as I can about its history.

To my friend, who recommended I visit Lowell and knew I would love it, I owe you one.

2025-07-11

Yesterday I saw a piece of furniture someone left beside our house. People leave junk around here a lot. There has been a stripped out washing machine and a pile of scrap metal in our yard for a few months. This piece was a little different though, it was a wooden wardrobe, ornately carved, clearly very old. It had claw foot legs, fluted pillars framing the drawers, and decorative brass hardware. The wood was a rich color, and would have been very beautiful if someone had kept it polished. It was still beautiful in its own way.

I thought I would drag it over to the furniture store so it could be resold to someone who wanted it. But today I saw that someone had moved it onto the street, smashed the drawers so they could fit into trash bags, and tore apart the frame so it could not be repaired. I don't know what to think of this. It's hard not to see it as a reminder that no matter how much effort I put into saving something, it only takes one person a few minutes to negate all of it. It is so much easier to destroy than to create or preserve. And everything I care about will ultimately be thrown away, or burned, or lost, or destroyed in some random undignified way.

Despite this, I keep going, and keep trying to do whatever I can to archive and preserve anything I can get my hands on. It conflicts with the voice in my head that constantly tells me that nothing I do matters. But I don't really know what else to do.

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