Up betimes with the Morning Star.  6:00 a.m. is still dark here in Paradise.  But there won't always be a Morning Star--Venus or Mercury, whichever it is; for such is the Inconstancy of Heaven--then, with no Harbinger in the East to fix on when I wake for my final night's pee, how will I know to rise half an hour before prima lux to take my Adderall and make my morning coffee?  I worry.   

And, O Beloved Transcendental Self (how near are we ever to things that threaten Thee with dissolution!), I confess, I found yesterday online, and listened to, the first few bars of the redoubted Berg violin concerto--and (what I'm confessing is) it wasn't too bad; not too atonal, is what I guess I mean.  But actually to sit down now and listen to the whole thing--and be persuaded to bear and hear patiently Wozzeck, Lulu, and the final vile, bitter dregs of other Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern?--When Hell freezes over!  No way!  Ever!  Thus far have I been seduced towards the Modernist Heterodoxy by the treachery of a false friend (Ethan Mordden, in his Guide to Orchestral Music), but at the Edge of the Abyss (having tossed a pebble into it, just to see if there were any Monsters down there) I have recoiled, and now stand firm against all further transgression.   Come scoglio, my mind is, henceforth and forever, adamantly, closed.  Which, I admit, it has never successfully been before (being ever the dupe of Beauty, Good Humour, and Fairness)--But how likely is it that I will ever again come upon a balanced, favorable exposition of musical serialism, theory and practice, like what Ethan Mordden came upon me unawares with, and be tempted again just to check it out?  Not likely, I should think. The woods are not exactly crawling with apologists of dodecaphony.   Or perhaps that depends on which neck of the woods you hang out in.  In my woods actually, they're thick as vipers underfoot--along with trendy French Deconstructionist Mythologs, post-Freudians, and snob-idolaters of Peggy Guggenheim.   You have to watch where you step.