This blog entry begins in the unlikely year of 1862. When I get bored, I sometimes work on personal projects, like music CDs. In 1862, the epic poem "Goblin Market" was published. It was brought to my attention in an old issue of Playboy or something that my grandparents had. It was dated before I was born. I don't know why they had it. A few years after reading about it, I found the old poem online. Man it's long. So began the task I challenged myself of putting it to music. Like almost all my projects I had before, I quit about halfway into it, distracted by other things. A year ago, I had found what I had done on my website for some reason. I sometimes keep odd things on my website for storage.

So I downloaded it, because the computer it was on had died. And I continued working on it. I made it into a MIDI. I record the MIDI in Audacity and me reciting the poems (to the music, it's like singing, but I can't sing, so I talk-sing) with an audio recorder and then I blend them together. So I finished the whole thing. It is 42 minutes long. I was going to put in on a CD, but I realized that if I did, I would have 37 minutes of unused storage on it. I went to work on an epic poem of my own, which - like most of my stuff - is strange and silly.

It is called "Floyd, the Can of Spam From Northern Idaho." The name Floyd was chosen long before George Floyd. I just thought it was an interesting name. It is about a can of Spam that grew arms and legs and a head and was walking around. So I finished my own composition and it was 37 minutes long. I put it on the same CD as "Goblin Market" and titled it "Tales of Whimsical Fantasy" and burned myself a copy of it. Right now it is sitting on a pile of SNES games I have on my desk.

Last night I began to work on a CD called "Tales of Whimsical Fantasy 2" and its first song called "The Adventures of Steve, a Hair On Top of Bob's Head". While Floyd had 16 or so parts to it, I worked on part 1 of this new song. It takes up 2 minutes' worth of music. This song is about a hair. I was inspired by this hair I had in my mouth that got there for some unknown reason. After getting it out of my mouth and throwing it away, I wondered about what would happen to it. (I think about weird stuff like this.) The epic story begins when a baby was born and began to grow hair on its head (like most babies.) I want it to be at least 40 minutes long like "Goblin Market" was.

That and waiting for that phone call, and working on Pineapple for the Atari 7800 is what I have been doing lately. I have been going to sleep at about 7 p.m. and waking up at 7 a.m. consistently for almost a week now. After I finished part 1 of that song, it was about 6 p.m., so I thought I had better get started trying to go to sleep since it takes at least a half-hour to finally fall asleep. I got up at 7 this morning. I have been awake for about an hour so far today. And then I finished typing this blog entry.