notes on vamp

• I've been writing a post on Medium every day. 
• I always thought that frozen vegetables were bland and not very nice and also that they were lacking in nutrition - not as healthy as fresh vegetables - but I was wrong on both counts. 
• I've been reading a book by an author who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories, or maybe it's more like one big conspiracy theory....the idea that there's a cabal controlling everything that's happening in the world. Some of the claims are kind of compelling, but everything together seems kind of unlikely. Just to give one example of something that seems highly unlikely is that the Beatles were planned. Their success was orchestrated. The idea was to corrupt the minds of the youth. According to this story, all the screaming teenage girls were actually paid to be like that. The idea was that boys would see all the screaming girls and want to be like the Beatles. 
• 2022 cleaved my life in two. 
• My overwhelming impression after listening to 'Hi Ren' the first time and watching the video, was that I have never heard anything like that ever before. I didn't even know that Ren was a serious musician. I'd heard about him because someone referred to a video he made when he was in the grips of his illness and things looked pretty hopeless. Then, watching the start of 'Hi Ren', I knew he was going to sing but I didn't expect that much. He's not signed with a label. He's not famous. But it was the best performance I've ever seen. 
• For a while I was trying to learn classical guitar, but I got too bogged down in the minutiae. You have to pluck the string in exactly the right way - positioning your fingers just right and pressing the strings just right and then moving your finger just right with the right angles and tension between the joints of your fingers....so I spent hours just practicing that. Playing a whole song seemed like the equivalent of exploring outer space. 
• What did Galileo actually see when he looked through his telescope? We'll never know. 
• It seems like Mary Shelley's introduction in which she explains how she came to write Frankenstein is itself a story. It doesn't fit with other people's version of the same events. But of course it's a story. Mary Shelley never knew her mother, except through her writings. How do we know Mary Shelley or any other historical figure? Only through written stories. 
• I remember the day that I bought Sylvia Plath's unabridged journals. I was in the book shop and I was flipping through it and reading bits here and there. It was nice and thick and heavy but with fairly thin, creamy colored paper. I bought it because reading it was like tasting portions of a delicious feast.