The Weekend Draws Nigh

Greetings Gentle Readers.
Days seem to flow into one another in some ceaseless susurration of train crossing signals, emergency vehicle sirens, and diesel engine rumblings.  Life is lived in six hour blocks - from one dose of medication to the next.  Haven't slept for more than four continuous hours in weeks, with a couple of exceptions, and those had very poor consequences.
Going to try and meet my own expectations and try and bang out something at least once a day, so here are the songs in chronological order that played while I managed to shower myself:

• If You Leave - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
• Bang and Blame - R.E.M.
• Ask the Lonely - Journey
• Isiimela - Ladysmith Black Mambazo
• How Many Roads - Big Sugar

If anyone can stitch together some kind of coherent meaning from this Rorschach blot of randomness, I'm open to theories.  Of course, I also don't know how to translate "Isiimela."  I'm assuming that it's Zulu, but it might also be Xhosa.  Speaking neither language fluently, I cannot say.

Headed to bed now, but I will mention that the world is a poorer place without Dave Semenko, legend among hockey-playing tough guys.  As a child that identified closely with Chris Makepeace's character in "My Bodyguard," Dave Semenko represented the Adam Baldwin solution to bullying.  As Wayne Gretzky was etching his legacy into the edifices of sports history, Semenko was his grim-faced shield-bearer.  Not flashy, stylish, ambitious, loud, or extroverted, he was the quiet presence that played deterrent so that others could shine.  It is always sad when one buries a protector.
That's as much as I can do tonight.
Good night England and the colonies.
—mARKUS

172.0.0.1 Bound

Greetings gentle readers.
Have been told that I am a complete invalid now that my spine has packed it in, and am basically a house-bound valetudinarian.  Despite the enormous dosages of medication, I'm going to try and keep the cerebral neurons firing by pecking out a few words a day.  My theory is that there is always a synchronicity to events and a narrative that can be enforced on any randomized data.  I've picked five topics about which I can type every day.  If I'm cogent enough, perhaps I'll hit all five.  If I'm unlucky, I'll miss the whole day.  So, on a good day, one may expect to read:

1. Musical Playlist - If I can make it through a shower, and still be conscious afterwards, I'll try to remember what songs were playing on my random bathroom music generator.  They may be important.  Who knows?  I remember walking out of the shower a few weeks ago as the song "Manchester" by the Beautiful South was playing, and a message had popped up on my Facebook feed on my bedroom computer monitor about a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert.  Coincidence?  Who knows.  Worth looking at the kind of tunes a person needs in order to be truly hygienic.
2. Stream of Consciousness - there's a great bit in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" where Dupin is able to determine a person's entire train of thoughts based upon sensory input.  I'll try and map as many of these trips as I can and see if anyone can derive a logic from the sequence.
3. Rant - This needs no explanation.  As someone who cannot ambulate or properly care for himself, I obviously have a lot of barely-suppressed frustration, anger, rage, and bile that require venting all over some poor unsuspecting person, thing, or concept.  I've already got Jimmy Fallon in my sights.
4. In Memoriam - Everyone knows that 2016 was an awful year for celebrities, particularly those of the post-baby boomer generation.  Prince, David Bowie, William Peter Blatty, Gene Wilder, Alan Thicke, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Mohammed Ali, Florence Henderson, William Christopher, and many others succumbed to death's icy embrace.  Have to say that Abe Vigoda surprised me, though.  Anyway, if I notice anyone of note has shuffled off this mortal coil, I'll try to make some sort of flippant or irreverent remark.
5. Films - When I run out of books to read, or find myself trapped in a bizarre position in my couch, I watch films.  Most of them are on specialty cable channels with low budgets, so they tend to have a couple of things in common - they have been released in the past couple of decades; and those that released them are now either bankrupt, shrieking interminably in horror, drooling on themselves next to an alleyway dumpster, or all of the above.  "Extortion," a film that somehow managed to snare Danny Glover into its cast is just such a cinematic abomination.  If I can find the time or the energy to describe them, I will.

Right.  That's me done.  Until my next post, goodnight England and the Colonies.
—mARKUS