Around Here

F irst loves are heartbreakers, aren’t they. Has anybody gotten past one unscathed? But then I sometimes  look back at love I’ve taken for granted, or worse, discarded, and think “what was I thinking?” I  suspect that if I could go back to the same circumstances and frame of mind I’d remember “oh yeah...  that’s what I was thinking.” I was going to say that Justin and NYU were long before we met, forgetting how richly compressed  those times were: in reality there were only a handful of years separating what seems several narrative  lifetimes apart. We were busy little shits, weren't we! And every lane in NY was the fast lane. Our  circles intersected both proximally and intimately, each in its own season. Bill once told me he  considered you nearly perfect boyfriend material. I had to agree. I always thought of us as pals, despite your nomadic ways. I knew you could never be tamed, and I  was OK with that. I sensed and accepted your restlessness....

I wrote this piece about ten years ago, when I was immersed in one of my random spells of music. Well, nothing was actually written; it was improvised on keyboard and recorded using a digital music application. I used the EMU Proteus and Yamaha TG100 synthesizers. Yeah, I have too much talent for my own good. That's what my high school English teacher told me forty years ago. Fortunately I have very little ambition so there was never much for the "coming too easily" to undermine. The structure of the piece, despite its density, exotic contours and effects, is an elongated 12-bar blues in G. Primary instrumentation is a basic drum kit with sand blocks and maraca, bass, rhythm guitar, piano, and pan flute, plus an assortment of semi-musical creatures lurking in the night. Astute listeners may notice the little five-shake maraca accent that occasionally appears in the rhythm section. It was lifted from the Arabian Dance in The Nutcracker, as was the shift from minor to major...

A blogger I admire recently described his soul, in his customarily vivid style, as a square meter of tarmac with a dead squirrel on it. I thought he was describing mine. The popular idea that while our bodies may be feral, moth-eaten, and doomed, they nevertheless house souls that are competent, gorgeous, and intact, strikes me as wishful thinking. I think I’d prefer that eternal life, (in which, like Van and Ada, I mutely and shyly believe), includes a new soul to go with my new body. I may not have lost mine entirely, but I’m pretty sure I’ve chipped off a few choice pieces in exchange for another day of safe passage in this fascinating but “evil and multicolored” world. But what can be created can be restored. My hope for the year to come is that the road kill gets cleared away, and a wildflower or two grows up, undisturbed, through the tarmac.