The Sweet, Sweet Smell of Overdue Progress

Considering that this summer has been relentlessly hot enough to boil the balls off a mudskipper, it’s become a surprisingly productive one. This, my friend, is a towering achievement.

Being a creature made for autumn, winter, and in a pinch early spring, I am utterly done in by summer. It’s the bug-zapper to my moth. I become a smear under its grinding jackboot. And that’s before it crescendos with ragweed season. A/C? ’Tis but middling relief. It’s as if my entire metabolism changes, with a few good hours in the morning and the rest of the day trudging through a muzzy state somewhere between hibernation and lobotomy. All I want is a three-month sojourn at some cozy little outpost on Antarctica.

Ping-pong, top-loading VCRs, friendly dogs … what could go wrong?

And yet, I’ve laid the foundation to finally start delivering on certain promises that, umm, have dragged on way too long, for various reasons — good, bad, and chaotic neutral. Some I’ve already mentioned.

Here’s another: Because I’ve wanted to do things right, and make them scalable, set beneath a metaphorical roof expansive enough to cover anything I might reasonably expect to make or do in the future, the business structure really needed to be in place first. This was the sort of thing that I found unfamiliar enough, complicated enough, needing attention on enough different fronts, that it was easier to just keep researching options.

Green Light Go

As of a few days ago, I’m the founder, owner, and sole member of a newly established entity called Green Abbey LLC. Its EIN has been obtained, and an 8-page, 22-clause operating agreement is in place to make it all legitimate like. If something takes on a sufficient life of its own, I can file for a DBA, as needed. In the next weeks, no rush, I’ll be transferring into it the ownership of a few hundred bits of intellectual property, large and small.

Here’s the logo, mainly intended as a publishing imprint:

One logo. Two fonts. And a stupid number of Photoshop layers and masks.

There’s a lot of symbolism behind the name itself, as well as in the way it’s presented here, particularly with the ligature that binds the R and the B, to join the top and the bottom. To me, this is the World Tree, Yggdrasil, an Irminsul, the Axis Mundi. It grows and renews; its roots run deep.

This week I’m setting up the financial tendrils: bank account, credit card, PayPal, and so on. With those in place, the LLC, rather than myself, can be the account holder at places like Amazon, Kickstarter, and Bandcamp, and we can avoid one of those no-no behaviors that can get you in trouble: commingling of funds.

Wait … Bandcamp?

Right. It’s time. Oh, hey — another logo:

The sound of the universe devouring itself.

Ourokosm is a project that has consumed my earholes for quite some time now, since long before I knew what to call it. Its roots stretch back to when, just for fun, I composed and recorded a soundtrack to Whom the Gods Would Destroy. Call it, umm … cinematic Berlin-school-inflected deep-space/inner-space kosmische music…? Sure, why not.

A 28-minute EP is ready to go. An hourlong album is finished, and awaits mastering and cover art. Five tracks for another album have come together so far.

Why? Although Varg Vikernes is a person you feel skeevy about crediting for anything, I’ve never come across a better, more succinct way of putting it than an observation he had about why he first began making music as Burzum: that, via the music, he was striving to create another world he wanted to be in.

Gotta say, that resonates.

“Sometimes, at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.” — Ralphie, A Christmas Story

But Why Did 2025 Fall Apart, Too?

We’ll get there. First, it feels pertinent to share my favorite few lines from, not just a music blog, not just any blog of any kind, but maybe any post, ever:

Less than a week ago, I said to my lady something along the lines of, “Not to jinx it, but I can’t believe I haven’t gotten sick yet this winter.” Today, I am proud to tell you: I am a stupid, sick dumbass.

Now, dial the way-back machine to this time last year, bracketed by the months before and the months that followed…

• I’d slapped the sticky note graphics — New Edition in 2025 or Die Trying — on this site’s images of the titles I’ve been wanting to return to the market via a self-publishing entity.

• I finished a screenplay that, several months before, I’d been hired to write for a South American filmmaker. All the months of obsessive deep-dive story planning and structuring and Zoom meetings were paying off, and it ended up gelling beautifully.

• The half-on-delivery payment arrived in one of my accounts within days. Same as the half-on-signing. Just the way we like it.

• All was jubilation and confidence. This is the year. These next several months are when all these plans come together. I got back to reacquainting myself with this hydra-headed venture and resumed picking away at the behind-the-scenes minutiae, while working on more new stuff.

• Over the spring, I did a daily regimen called 75 Hard. Got through it on the first try, no restarts necessary. Came out of it feeling beyond great.

• The word of the day: Unstoppable.

• Last August: I did myself a hamstring tear that began at the left ischial tuberosity, a.k.a. the sit-bone. It’s always the left side with these things. I heard it, and an instant later hit the ground. You know you’ve done it right when, over the next few days, the back of your thigh takes on a vivid shade of bubonic purple.

• Hobbled, I could feel all those benefits of 75 Hard dissipating day by day.

• Last October: I followed this up with COVID. First time, actually. Somehow I’d managed to dodge it all through its first half decade. 

• The words of the day: “This bites major hose.” *

• Oh come on — really? This has even stolen my sense of taste?

And so, I am proud to tell you: I became a stupid, sick, injured dumbass.

The lung-crud lasted for two or three months. The fatigue overflowed into January. Capacities diminished, as they do, and as I knew they would. It wasn’t my first time down in this sort of steep-walled trough.

The trick is to not let gravity have the last word.

Because still we rise, still we climb, still we fight.

* Cannibal Rex, The Kill Riff, by David J. Schow

To err is human; to share, divine:

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