Metal Bands

Metal Bands

I am not terribly into metal but I have decided to put together a list of some interesting ones.

Chthonic

Taiwanese metal band 

https://chthonic.tw/en/

Babymetal

Japanese girl metal band

https://www.babymetal.com/en/

Crown the Empire

American metal core band

https://www.crowntheempire.net/

Pallbearer

American heavy metal band

https://www.pallbearerdoom.com/

Literature: Smoking in Solitude

I gave my following thoughts some embellishment; in other words, I lied about certain parts to make it more interesting from a writer's perspective. Still, it is true that I often find music to be directly linked to my train of thought. I wonder if most people find that to be true as well?

Solitude is nice. I was smoking a cigarette on my front porch while waiting for the water in my pot to boil. My headphones resonated with Trinah's "Every Day" while I exhald puffs of smoke. I really don't like smoking. That's why I had to drive home first and drink some caffeine first. I didn't have coffee at home so I had to do with tea. It's close enough to the lyrics and feel of the song.

At the moment, as I'm standing there quietly with the ember of the end lighting up in front of me, there's just the feeling of this moment as part of a larger picture. I'm part of a scene frozen in time. I thought of the scene in Waking Life where Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell were talking about the holy moment. Since I used to watch the movie about every other day I guess relating life to Waking Life still comes up pretty often in my mind.

David Jewell is definitely not the greatest poet alive, I couldn't help but think. Too much pretentious repetition, I thought pretentiously. Still, some of it can be oddly catchy which is why I glance over his stuff sometimes. Like "which way. this way. that way. left way. no right way. find a bright way. and then a night way". I have no idea what it means but maybe someone can rap it.

I tried it and decided that I sounded very lame. This is better left to bling bling professionals with too much money and time on their hands.

The ends of the stick were curling up like a wounded caterpillar. I mildly flicked it and watched absent-mindedly as the ashes fell down the railway onto the first floor. There was no one there so nobody yelled at me. The primary advantage of living upstairs is that gravity is typically on your side.

Half-way there and some ways more to go before all that's left would be smoke and ashes. Once this burns up, these thoughts would be burnt up with it. This moment is not eternal which is why my life is far from being a Haruki Murakami novel. I also don't interact with cats if I can help it and there's no weird metaphysics. His novels are ridiculously annoying in its melancholy but still oddly delicious in how it twists your mind. I'll have to switch to a different song like Space Cowboy's Falling Down with the Paradiso Girls to get my mind off of cats and metaphysics. Electropop has the consistent tendency to dropkick me in the head and knock me out into the real world. Wham!

Self-improvement: Balance of Thoughts on Time

I'm listening to some R&B while sipping on some green tea. My bedroom is tranquil and despite the time of the day has a feeling of permanent lethargy. It is an amazing ambience for reflection or slacking off but a terrible ambience for doing any real work. I use this thought to comfort myself on why I'm writing this instead of doing real work.

When I drive my mind naturally wanders, like yesterday when I daydreamed an epic story in my head for a good hour or so where a god had to do evil to ultimately achieve good but the heroes stayed ignorant of that until the end. There were some amazing graphic scenes and plenty of betrayals and unnecessary deaths. Let me digress no further. Before I jumped into this golden pit of illusions, I thought of an interesting psychological theory:

"Without a balance between thoughts on the past, present, and future, one can never be happy."

The amount of time one's mind dedicates to reflecting on the past, doing the present, and dreaming for the future should be in balance. For instance, if one excessively reflects on the past, one will be stuck in the mentality of past failures or past glories. This will likely cause the person to not like the present either due to regret of events that could not be changed or the seeming reality that the past is much better than the present. They may both be true but dwelling on it too much is harmful to one's mental stability.

Similarly, if one focuses on the present which is the "just do it" mentality, one can lose oneself in the daily reality of life. Where one came from and where one's going should not be ignored since otherwise one can wake up one morning and feel lost in the world. One has lost the meaning of one's life. Lastly, if one dreams too much on the future, one ends up doing nothing useful since the mind consistently dwells on fanciful daydreams.

So how do we find this balance between these thoughts? That depends on the individual since everyone is different. A systematic approach that may work is what I've been doing lately. Simply carry a notebook around with you and carry around a phone with an alarm. Set alarms for random times during the day. When the alarm sounds, write down three things: the time, what you're thinking, and how happy you are. At end of each day, you can take a look at your notebook and see a collage of snapshots of your thoughts during the day. You can repeat this for a week and observe the consistency of your thought inclinations.