Mar 3

the pattern grows clearer

i've been a big fan of zach burba and iji ever since i saw their kickstarter featuring zach dancing to his song drums from thunder in his room, singing to a banana. i can't prove it but i know it was real. that song and zach's iconic bouncy ball voice have captivated me ever since, and iji has never failed to capture my interest to this date. i love every single one of their albums. i think zach burba's songwriting is singularly brilliant - i can feel the warmth of zach's beautiful soul come out when he sings songs like friends forever, hard 2 wait, in motion, professional anything, just to name a few. just so massively underrated, but then their music belongs to the future utopia more than it does the present kali-hellia. when they came and played in my hometown of albuquerque, new mexico, i even got zach to sign my vinyl copy of yerself - ain't it just like me to get your self signed? they played in my friend xazziel's living room, jumping up and down on the couch. i remember the bass had a nice punchy snap. it was great.

the music is always inventive, kindhearted, full of whimsy and wonder, and that good new fashioned wild, free, let's get the band together and make this dang thing happen energy. iji is a safe space in this world so often occupied by wars and woes.

anyway, i was thinking about their song the pattern grows clearer off their dream-themed album bubble, as i was contemplating the pattern growing clearer in the wee small hours of the morning in my scorsbory tower, as i often do.

The lines will appear if you want them to
wait and let the pattern grow clearer
watch the pattern grow clearer it always do
shapes and new colors draw nearer as the
pattern grows clearer, the pattern grows clearer

i love how the lyrics in this first verse show (not tell) a fractalating pattern growing clearer in the form of the lyrics themselves.

here's a fun activity if you're bored:

go visit scorsby.us/numerology/ and calculate the scorsbian numerology of all the names of your friends and family, enemies and lovers. tabulate their peace, love, joy, and rrombo-composite numbers in a spreadsheet and look for the patterns. maybe you'll find nothing of note. maybe you'll realize that your sister and your best friend are prime. maybe the whole universe will start singing bass jam by iji. in my case, it felt like i had suddenly mapped out my own personal rosetta stone of relational understanding. is it fair to reduce a person to their rrombo-composite name number? would i be upset if you did it to me? no, not at all. it's 143, by the way.

i have a hunch it doesn't actually matter which magnifying glass you use to look at the pattern. in any case, the pattern grows clearer.

i decided to walk around spinning in circles, just to see if it would provoke a deeper awareness of the various spiraling behaviors in reality. sure enough, i suddenly opened my awareness to the spiraling wisterias growing out on my grandmother's porch, and found myself led to a spiral labyrinth drawn on an elementary school playground. as soon as i stepped into the center i was swept up in a spiraling toroidal field of love.

funny thing about spirals - if you look at a spiral from the top down, it just looks like a circle. from this vantage, every time you make a revolution, it would appear you're in the same place. but who knows where we are, anyway? the pattern grows clearer. i wonder where pretending to be a sine wave will lead me next.

i was thinking about ghosts and how there ought to be more friendly ghosts besides casper to write home about (introducing: ghostby!) maybe everyone i've never met on this planet is a ghost. by that standard we must be mostly surrounded by ghosts all our lives. the question is, can we really be sure there are eight billion ghosts haunting each other or is there just one? in truth, there just is. even still, it's fun imagining all the other rrombo-composite matching scorsbies walking and talking and breathing as we speak. does it matter if the pattern grows or shrinks, or is the pattern itself absolute clarity? maybe the most loving thing anyone could do is to let one's fellow scorsbys roam free, and smile at the thought that they are all living your life in parallel.

anyway, i don't know if i have a good wrapping up thing to say to close this out. why don't you just go listen to iji?