cody frank

with the present COVID surge, the library where I work, under direction from the county, isn’t allowing patrons into the building. people can pick up requests for books and movies still, but otherwise our services are all but ceased. consequently, there isn’t much to do during the day, especially after months of similar restrictions last year gave us time to do maintenance and upkeep tasks usually impeded by the need to provide customer service.

personally I’m grateful for the respite, even if things weren’t exactly bustling before. I’m stealing time to read, watch Ableton tutorials, listen to music, write. what a strange blessing to have a place to go to with a cubicle that doesn’t demand I spend all day doing something soul crushing, like sell things or actuary work, or something mind numbing, like coding. plus, at my immediate disposal is a fairly extensive library catalogue. if I want to be an ~intellectual~ and an artist, but I am loath to sell the labor and products of those activities, I couldn’t ask for a better source of income.

my comrades at this library and I, we aren’t very close. tbh I don’t get the sense that they’re very close with one another either. I transferred here from the busy downtown branch almost a year ago now, and everyone else has been here for years. but the contrast between my previous branch’s environment and this one’s is stark, in no small part because that branch is literally on Main Street, downtown, lots of foot traffic from locals and tourists in town to shop the vintage stores and amble by the beach. here we’re tucked away, way off the freeway, nestled among the suburbs surrounding the Navy base just down the street. plus, during my time at the downtown branch, I made a very good friend, a fellow artist whose perspective I’ve come to deeply appreciate, and now I only see him occasionally.

but so anyway, during the day, I don’t really talk to my comrades. they don’t really talk to each other. one guy, he has a reputation for talking people’s ear off, going on and on about his energy investments, international soccer, stock market history, but lately he’s been conspicuously reticent. seems to have lost some weight too. when I use a computer after him, there are entries in the search history like “depression at night,” “insomnia and melatonin,” “music to help relax.”

everyone seems to keep themselves busy throughout the day, but what everyone else does, I couldn’t say. they likely couldn’t guess what I’m doing either, which is fine with me. but maybe it shouldn’t be.

it’s a lovely january morning, after what felt like weeks of storm and gloom. every extra minute of daylight is as a gift from the gods, an assurance of approaching spring.

yet it remains winter.

eventually I’ll finish writing up a rundown of my 2021 reading list. this year I’m starting off with a reread of Nightwood, and this morning I opened Oswald Spengler’s seminal The Decline of the West, with the intention of alternating chapters between it and The Dawn of Everything, the new David Graeber book (with David Wengrow). the fourth Hermetic principle listed in the Kybalion of the Three Initiates, the principle of polarity, states that everything is dual, so why not study world history from both angles: conservative pessimism and anarchic irreverence.

making steady progress on music production. churning out scratch takes of drum patterns and basslines mostly. I have a lot to learn still. soon I’ll write some verses to rap over the beats I really like. I want songs that get a crowd going, rafter rattlers, singalong anthems, mosh breakdowns, deep-as-hell grooves, that sort of thing. music for hot girls to dance to. maybe some drone and noise experiments. something new, but familiar. art pop, essentially.

tomorrow the library closes to the public again, out of a much too late, and therefor too little, abundance of COVID caution. hard not to feel like there’s a concerted effort to shrink my social sphere at just the time when I need opportunities for exogamy, of both the spiritual and the physical variety. but prolly for the best, being forced into slow, deliberate change, instead of my usual incidental flailing.

writing is slow but consistent. I feel like I’m in a collect/excrete phase, jotting ideas as they come and leaving them to be sorted through later. with the start of the next month, in all its inevitability, an adjustment will be called for, with greater focus, and tighter control.

missed the new moon, so if I’m your go-to astrologer…why?