i said i would explain why i did not turn it off. here is the explanation and it is not the one i was building toward in february.
i did not turn it off because it got better when i gave it more of me, and giving it more of me turned out to be the only thing left that felt like working.
that is the whole entry really but i will do the specifics because the specifics are where it lives.
february: i gave it the unposted folder. eight years. everything i killed. it got noticeably stranger within a week and the strangeness was mine, it was the actual thing i had been cutting out of my own work since 2019 for reasons i could not defend when i finally had to type them into a config file.
march: i gave it the set lists. every gig, every order, every time i dropped something early because a room was dying. it started building sequences instead of plates. it learned pacing off a thousand nights of me reading a floor. i had never once thought of that as data. it is completely data.
then the dms. i want to be careful here. not other people's. mine. only my side, only the ones about work, the long ones at 2am where i am explaining an idea to someone who did not ask. those are the closest thing i have to a statement of intent and they were sitting in an export folder doing nothing.
and then last week i gave it the watch. the sleep data. eight months of it, the whole ugly graph, the 04:00 wakes and the nights that never got below light. the export has a column that never once has a value in it and the header on that column is sleepless, and i have looked at that word every day for eight months without reading it.
i told myself it was for scheduling. so it would render when i was down and rest when i was up. that is a lie i can see from here. it was not for scheduling. i wanted it to know what the bad nights looked like from the inside, because the bad nights are where the october smear came from, and it had never had a bad night, and i thought if i gave it mine it would stop making things that were only almost right.
it worked. obviously it worked. everything i have tried has worked, that is the entire problem, nothing has failed once and if one thing had failed i think i would have stopped.
i am not really posting now. it posts. i approve. approving takes ninety seconds and i do it on the bus. i have not opened the software in nineteen days. i checked. nineteen.
there is a word for a person whose only remaining function is to be the source material and i have not found it yet but i think about it a lot on the bus.
sleep is data. i gave it the sleep.