• Good Zoom fortune: two good meetings and a therapy session in one day.
  • R.A.P. Ferreira’s virtual cafe promoting his upcoming album, bob’s son. So cool and inspiring.
  • Even more concrete grinding philosophy, if you can bear it:
    • The status of “cleaned” concrete versus “not cleaned” concrete is not binary. It takes dozens of passes, over minutes, to remove the mastic or whatever schmutz from a patch of floor. And even then you can’t really be sure that some trace of it doesn’t persist in the concrete’s porous surface. So concrete-grinding is a matter of pragmatic best-guessing. You grind until it looks clean enough.
    • Other things seem binary, like scraping paint off glass — the paint is there and then it’s gone — but those turn out to be matters of “clean enough,” too. If you took a microscope you’d seem some paint residue left behind. It seems everything physical is spectral, continuous, not perfect and discrete. (How strange is it that spectral, continuous matter can give rise to perfect, discrete things like digital objects? Though those get weird too sometimes, when the physical chips underpinning them behave in predictably unpredictable ways, as all physical things do.)
    • So the difference between concrete-grinding and binary-seeming processes like glass-scraping is not of category, but of degree: of time scale, and effort. Glass-scraping goes quickly, sometimes even in one pass. Concrete-grinding takes minutes on a particular patch before the desired result is achieved. Over a whole room, even longer.
    • If you didn’t know this, you might stop before the job was done, thinking that the process doesn’t work. So it’s important to approach a task with the right time scale in mind. Brushing my teeth: it seems to work in two minutes, but what if each tooth needed the attention of concrete?
    • (Sometimes you can’t see the floor, because the slurry of ground-up mastic is too thick, making the question of time scale more difficult. How do you know when you’ve reached “clean enough” when you have no visibility into the process, no feedback?)