2003-10-27 - 9:24 a.m.

jeanie made a machine to extract songs directly from a person's head.
"everyone is a musician" she said.

it was quite simple really, reverse headphones and a recording device equipped with a hack (codename 'seduction') to break through the hardened callus sitting on the lining of the skull.

she daydreamed of it so frequently she realized the callus must exist, and jeanie liked puns so she named it the "sound barrier" (it became a dictionary definition under "sound barrier, noun, three" and is wholly attributed to her). the sound barrier is what prevents people from making sense of personal melodies outside their heads, a thing more pronounced for some people than others.

we already knew what computer programmers sound like (or wish they did), so the machine was plugged into movie directors and soccer players and small children (and the big ones too).

(mostly at first it was a novelty act (or an atrocity), and a lot of people got mad because they thought the big square machine thing was either a nasty fake or a disturbing cheat, but even they were curious to try it)

everything was put onto vinyl.

at about 7 pm, marcus thought to put the big reverse headphones (large, they were, like giant cinnamon buns) onto cats and other inanimate objects (his cats are very lazy, you see).

cats make the oddest symphonies when linked together, rocks make songs that sound suprisingly like wilco, i guess they'll have to sue each other one day.

jeanie hoped to make millions, but really she made millions of terrible but singularly heartbreaking songs, each one a critical failure, kind of like drawings in MS Paint. people preferred more crafted songs in the long term, less burroughs more d.h. lawrence.

i suppose the whole thing made people feel uncomfortable and unnecessarily noisy.