A note at the bottom of the notebook page for the song "Rails" says it marked 228 days of songs written without a missed day, noting this as a "new continuity record." I don't know for certain since I stopped particularly keeping track of it (at this point I'm still making an indicator of missed days but I don't bother to add up days in a row and the weekly "weather reports" I used to post with a little visual key to where things were at is way hell and gone in the past and I don't imagine picking it up again. Maybe the whole little icon thing I cooked up for that isn't even working anymore in the old posting, little broken image icons. Nobody reads any of it so it's hard to get worked up).
But whatever, the point I left dangling up there is that I'm pretty sure this was the biggest continuity number I ever got to in the first or present project and again I find it difficult to imagine hitting anything like it again. I sort of routinely miss a day, mostly every week or two, mostly just outright forgetting to do it. I've never set any particular time for doing it or tried to build anything into my routine to remind me of the task. I think I've said it before but to a certain extent I like that I don't always remember to do this thing I've nevertheless been doing consistently for over 20 years (and after that prior test run of of two and three quarters years). It proves it's not just a mindless habit, whatever else it is or isn't. I still decide to do every day. Most every day.
From the beginning of the first project I decided against "hardcore" mode - the idea that if I missed a day the project would be over, or reset the Grand Count or something. The extent of time and to some degree the accompanying accumulation of raw song numbers was the point of the thing (actually the original point was to be a practice in service of generating material for a very very long defunct and vanished musical collaboration project but that's a whole other tale), and I knew I was just not the type to never miss a day no matter what. So what I landed on was that the project was that there would be a song for each day, and I'd endeavor to write them on their given days, but failing that just make them up as soon as possible. In the first project I actually wrote the missed days' songs in red ink, a popping visual signal. Second round for quite a while I decided to not even keep track, I'd just write them and who cared when. Then, early on in the second project, amidst a general discovery of the degree to which I'd underestimated how all-consuming being home all day everyday with a new baby was going to be, I got into a very deep hole of missed days, to the extent the whole premise started to seriously fray at the edges and I was thinking about ditching it almost daily. Some bloody minded persistence kept me scrabbling out of that deficit.
I eventually took up some casual and less visible techniques for tracking continuity, and slipping into such a backlog never happened again. Once or twice since I maybe got as much as three days behind, almost always it's just one and remedied next day. Though lately I have been... I don't know, I'm not exactly thinking about packing it in, but questioning the whole thing more than in a very long time, maybe ever. 20 years is a long time, enough time to go from anticipating middle age with some apprehension to contemplating old age with a kind of resigned acceptance. I don't by any means assume I'll be around in another 20 years. I mean obviously none of us know for sure we'll be around in a couple hours, but that existential apprehension is different from contemplating this business wrapping up without that necessitating any sort surprising misfortune or tragic surprise. A few years shy of the average, maybe, nothing newsworthy.
Of course it could be sooner than that and still solidly in the realm of natural causes. Not actually making it to the intended 10K mark of project two, due to literally not making it as a biological entity, feels like an ordinary enough possibility, frankly.
It's easy enough to knock off songs of the type I generate these days, but I have to confess, there hasn't been so much satisfaction in it for a while. The grim state of things in the world, the seeming inevitability of continued environmental chaos, of increased concentration of agency to an oligarchic neo-fuedalism. Continuity of what? Continuity for what?
Ugh, give up these interstitial meta-commentaries for Lent. And go knock out an early-afternoon's President's Day song. The current continuity count is nine days.
