I’d call myself a humble transcriptionist. In the small hours, when the rest of you are asleep, I get to work with my tools, creating what amounts to elaborate notes from an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with various unseen, unnamed forces of nature. The tone and timbre of the discourse varies: sometimes it’s quiet gin-n-sympathy; sometimes it’s incendiary arguments; still other times it’s a vain back-n-forth attempt to map some difficult or unknowable thing. Every shape and color conspires to assemble some picture of what being alive on this planet looks like from where I stand.