Monday, March 8th, 2021

I invite someone on Facebook to our afternoon prayers. He has been looking for people doing them in the area. He doesn’t show. That’s OK. I think some of the other invitations were closer to him. During the Mourner’s Kaddish, a soldier walks through twice in the same direction. I guess that he’s lost and in a loop. Someone we don’t know shows up at the back at the same time. He hasn’t come for the prayers but doesn’t want to disrupt them. He knows that we’re about a minute from the end. He stands quietly until it’s over. The power goes out in the building about an hour later. I lose about twenty minutes of work, but I can easily recreate it. The boss comes out of his office singing wedding music. He announces that the bride and groom are about to come down the aisle. This must refer to some tradition that I don’t know. As we stand around, a new worker asks me what kind of music I make. I try to describe the soundtrack that I’m working on now, with the layers of algorithmic improvisations and mixes of scrambled speech and found sounds. He says that he’s into the Rolling Stones. I surprise him by singing a bit of one of their more obscure songs, which I don’t think has ever been on an album. Later, he gets to talking with a programmer about Peter Hammill’s music. They’re both fans, but of different parts of his career. I only know one of his songs, though I knew what he sang on a Robert Fripp album. We talk about music for a while. When the lights come back on, we return to work.