Today has been a rainy, dark Dagobavian murk. Very cold. All evening it has been snowing. During the night last night there are waves of rain and ice pellets clawing at our windows, rapping out avant-garde paradiddles on the outer sills’ sandstone. It is eerie, starting and stopping, hitting different windows in different rooms as the wind changes. I hear this sound before drifting off around 1am; when I wake up six hours later the sound is still out there, the weather still scratching to come in.

I work the online day job at the dining table today, facing away from any view of the outdoors. My habit recently is to keep a streaming-video traffic cam or restaurant cam open on the Dell, half-watching better weather elsewhere. I spy on clouds over the Florida Keys. I listen to weather on cams with audio. I eavesdrop on public places. The ceaseless ambient noise of touristy streets, oceanside restaurant patios, marina docks, all abuzz with people inhabiting their better weather, or humming with busy-working locals during morning slow spells. The cams’ video and audio quality are without exception bad, but this is good; it makes me feel a little less sketchily spylike. Figures in motion are glitchy blobs, borderline datamoshed. All sounds sing through a weird Vocoderized fog of pitched compression gargle. Usually I have real music on at the same time so it all kind of blends together. Something I can ignore.

It is basically Birdsong Radio with humans. I sit there at work and listen through headphones to soundtracks of unintelligible voices chattering and swelling and falling, the wah-wah of Peanuts grownups, an occasional scary/jolly mook-cackle or celebratory woo here and there. Cars and scooters trundle. Boats constantly roar or chug by. Every now and then a plane Dopplers overhead, or maybe those are boats too. Breezes sometimes buffet the cam mics, making them rustle and boom. Many noises that I cannot identify never stop. Mostly it is just a lot of nothing-ish background texture, better-weather white noise. A long, layered, multi-part weather-murmur. (Of course it is undesirable when the audio picks up actual music, restaurant jukeboxes, bad bar stage acts howling acoustic cover tunes, etc.) This is still probably all kind of creepy and ant-farmy, right? Fallen world or no? Forgive me.