Journal of the Plague Month

Years ago, after ignoring the required reading in my High School English class, I read Daniel Dafoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Long before I met up with a small community of musical theater talents at a show called 3,000 Miles Off Broadway at Gio's in Hollywood, I wanted to make a musical of the book. I saw it as the last confrontation between magic and science. Science won, but it was a fight.

I see many scenes from that book, which is a non-fiction reporting the tried to convince people there was a plague visitation in action, in the news every night. The denial, the hysteria, the required panic actions that were better than doing nothing... as if it was better to do something wrong than wait to see what would be effective.

Sometimes the hardest action is to sit still. It seems to be genetically encoded. DO! instead of just Be! It is harder to be a human being than a human doing.

So I continue to sit and wait for clarification through meditation and listening to news as it comes. My enforced isolation prior to this visitation has made me judgmental of people busy doing instead of sitting with the problem, meditation, distracting themselves with over-dramatization of smaller problems, instead of waiting for the proper action. But maybe that is just me feel more justified by assuming my action is the correct one. I may yet be proven wrong.

I am distracting myself with two primary actions. First is development of the PTSD video, which means structuring a whole series of videos for YouTube that will present the material from my Haunted Recovery series of classes, which I have now conducted for thirty cycles at the Healing-Transitions in Raleigh.

The second is organizing my personal collection of AA speakers. There are some other programs, like Al Anon and NA, represented, but the vast majority is from AA talks. I have been gathering them almost twenty years and find the duplicates are annoying and take up a lot of space. I'm trying to eliminated duplicates and keeping the best sound of any duplicates for preservation.

The sound problem is partially because the oldest recording were done with more primitive sound recording equipment, like hobbyist wax disks, wire recorders, and early tape recorders. And they were not archived well. Through the Open Source program Audacity, I can manipulate the old recording, eliminate hiss, eliminate clicks, adjust sound levels, equalization and otherwise make the old recordings more listenable.

The frustrating thing is that the simple names of the files can be different by a single character, but otherwise be 100% duplicates and take up unnecessary space on my hard disk(s).

I had said I had about 1600 recordings, but as I gathered everything together, I found it was more like 4500 individual MP3 files, some hidden in folders.

The real problem is the schema chosen to label the files over the years of recording and earlier electronic filing systems.

For example, the names:

• joeadams2006vent.mp3
• joe adams 2006 event.mp3
• joe_adams_2006_event.mp3
• joe a 2006 event.mp3
• joe a. event 2006.mp3
• joe.a.2006.event.mp3
• Joe A. 2006 event.mp3
• 2006 joe a. event.mp3
• event 2006 joe a.mp3
• and other variants, whims of the moment,

...all the same file.

Each was given a different name based on some whim of the moment, a space is better than an underscore or a period. Some of the files may have had previous attempts to improve the sound with various programs. Some may have had noise reduction encoding (like Dolby or MXR) at some point in the past but the translation back to improved sound is no longer available.

So I am spending my Plague Month to resort, relabel, and compare files to save the best quality sound of the duplicated files. And I am marking others to take through Audacity to improve the sound, later. When I am done I am thinking of uploading the entire collection to archive.org for the public to download. I had fantasies of selling copies but alcoholics are cheap and refuse to pay for anything, even when it takes time and material for them to possess. Taking time to download about 1,500 clean files will cost them time and energy, but they will spend that. So, under my intent to make these files available to someone who will get the benefit, without charge, is a new project. But it falls under the Media and Recovery aspects of my new week division*.

And it takes a minute.

This is the kind of thing I do with the time otherwise spent trying to come up with the cost of another bag of groceries. I still do not know if I will get a gummint check because I am not a worker. At least, I am not a paid worker.

One of my Patreon subscribers used a card that expired and Patreon will not tell me which person that is so I can go to them privately to ask for an update.

If I get my $1200 check, I will be quite happy and squander it on doctor's appointment co-pays, groceries, and maybe some new underwear (which I really like getting).

The Joe Week

At the risk of being redundant, I will tell you about the Joe week. I do not have any use for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and the other four because I do not have a work schedule. My Sunday class has, for several years, been the marker that gives me some sense of time passing. When that was removed, first by my own sickness, then by my problems with transportation, and now the great Confinement that has stopped such non-essential work as trying to help people not die from drugs or alcohol, I lost my sense of a week. 

So, a while back, I came up with my own week. I kept it at seven because it seems to be a good number for humans on this planet. I'm still not completely convinced I am one of those, but as a kindness to the natives, I developed my own week with focus for each day. It isn't a new day. Under the old system, Saturday was Wash Day, Sunday was Church Day, Monday was (whatever - scrub the floor, or hoe the garden or something, for previous generations. 

My days are now:

• Fiction Day - Tuesday, mostly, my books, plays, stories, etc.;
• Media Day - Friday, radio, these AA files, etc.;
• Non Fiction Day - Right now it is the Propaganda book;
• Promotion Day - Wednesday, maybe. Have to let people know what I'm up to, or why else would they try to buy it or support it?;
• RPG Day - Role Playing Games are tools for imagination and building that muscle is very important to me. Maybe others. Saturday made sense;
• Recovery Day - Sunday seems appropriate because my personal spiritual practice revolves around the new life offered to me through 12-Step Recovery. I know it isn't the only way, but it is my way and I am grateful for it. This day is about projects for 12-Step Recovery, like 3rd Edition Recovery Reader and these speaker files efforts, or my weekly classes up at the Healing Transitions shelter, which are now done on Zoom;

and on the seventh day, I rest. Not because it says so in the Bible, but because Alan Watts once aid, "It is good to set aside one seventh of your time to rest and recuperate, because, if you don't, it will save up and come after you, which will make you completely mad." I don't to go a bit red in Helsinki. So I take a day to rest and recuperate, R&R, just for some balance.

I feel free to put one project across several days, but juggle my time so I don't "harden" on any one area. The MP3 reorganization may fall under Recovery, Media, Non-Fiction and Joe Day for a week or two, and if it begins to pale in importance, it can still be once a week focus. 

I find mentally juggling projects is a great way to avoid "writer's block." I have had blocks that went on for years. The answer was an old vaudeville joke: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that." I stopped doing that and worked on something different. Something that gave me satisfaction. And then I could go back to the project where I had grown cold to find new heat. 

"When something is impossible, don't bother telling
the people already doing it." old Chinese saying

People give me criticism. "Why don't you just focus on one thing? Think of what you could do if you did that." Well what I have done has resulted in several series of class teaching others skills I have gained by experience, over may fields, over 300 radio shows, from weekly improve comedy to more structured and scripted shows, fully produced radio dramas, over two dozen stage plays (produced, and three of which released in recent years, but representing a bout 80 productions around the country), not to mention two novels, a collection of short stories, and a large body of 12-Step Recovery works (on which my name will not appear). Where are your books, plays, reports, classes, and contributions to long term recovery? It works for me. It is not for everyone.

I write. What I write about changes. It changes channel, it changes genres, it changes purpose... 

In 69 years on Earth (so far), the only thing that has always been the same is change.