Mist Net

The Big Picture

2011-10-25T11:00:49Z

Well, hello there. I haven't blogged in months, because I haven't had much to say. (You're welcome.) I've been quiet in part because I lost a friend a while back, and to the extent possible I dropped out of life for a while.

If you live long enough, you learn that grief leaches away slowly, day by day, at a pace of its own choosing. You wake up in the small hours, think about things, decide you're not going to be able to go back to sleep, and go down and make coffee, pretending as if you were getting up to go fishing or something. That's what I did this morning. And it was trash day, so I took the recycling bin out to the curb, and I looked up for a moment, and saw Orion. There was no moon out, and the stars shone brightly, and I stood there for quite some time. Then I went in, put on more coffee, and went upstairs for a book I hadn't looked at in years—a book about the constellations.

I opened the book to the appropriate chart for the time and season, and started going back and forth—outside to gaze at the stars, looking for patterns, then back in to pore over the chart. Until last night I only knew three constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades. But somehow, this morning the stars began to tell me their names. That star to the east of Orion's foot was Procyon, part of Canis Minor, and upwards from it were Castor and Pollux, part of Gemini. There was Regulus, there was Aldebaran, and over there to the west, Jupiter was blazing in Aries.

The writer T.H. White once said that one of the best remedies for sorrow is to learn something new. I learned something new this morning, and I want to build on that. If I wake up sad again, I'll go out and look at the stars, learning new ones, building on what I've learned before. Besides, I think another remedy for sadness is to see the big picture. It doesn't restore any particular thing you've lost, but looking at the big picture can sometimes give you some peace, I've found. And there's no bigger picture than the night sky.

Ad Copy I Really Did Read. Really.

2011-04-04T20:23:11Z

It was this: "Snoring is a silent killer."

The Things that Aren't Caesar's

2011-03-23T05:39:01Z

Everyone has to think really hard about practical, necessary stuff, right? Like oxygen—you've got to have it, it's uncomfortable to go without it for more than about a minute, after a few minutes you'll pass out, brain damage arrives not long after that, and death soon after. So oxygen, put that on the list. Water, you'll be in trouble if you go without it for more than a day or two or three. Food you can do without longer, but not indefinitely.

It gets fuzzy after that. Shelter? People manage without formal arrangements. Not comfortably, but they manage. Money, love, friends, intoxicants, television, flossing your teeth—there are people who manage. Again, not comfortably, but you can get by.

And then there are other things, less tangible things, that seem to matter too, and the question is how to strike a balance. Beauty, mystery, awe, meaning—on some level, we seem to find them important too, and people ruin their own lives and other people's too—think religious wars—about it. Where to find those things, and how much effort in the search? It's hard to say. I find a good dose of them in music, art, literature, nature and such, but it does take up time that could be alternatively applied to making money and so forth. But I've had periods where I starved myself of the intangibles and did myself substantial harm.

So hard to strike that balance. All I can say is that this morning, I was taking out the garbage, rolling the container to the edge of the alley so the truck could pick it up. I was doing that in the dark, because the truck comes early enough and I had to write a newspaper story by 8 a.m. We just had Daylight Savings Time kick in, so if you're about much before 7 a.m., it'll be dark. The moon, coming off its perigee victory tour, was noticeably off full—waning gibbous, if you want to know—but still bright. However, it was not as bright as the two streetlights on the alley that flanked it on either side. I'm not against streetlights, exactly, there are compelling reasons to have them, but they do drown out the stars. I was walking back to the house, and wondered if the moon could compete, so I held up a finger and looked at the shadows on my shed. There were two distinct ones thrown by the streetlights, but between them was a fainter one, fainter but distinct, certainly. That shadow was cast by the moon, I thought. You could probably measure and assign a number to the extent to which it held its own. And of course, if those harsh, practical lights weren't there, you could wait a bit, and with the moon so near full, pretty soon you could see quite clearly, by all means well enough to get around just fine, by its light.

Since I was already predisposed to think that our spirit side presents us with some sort of necessity—not as keenly insistent or immediate, but still there—I thought it was some kind of metaphor. And then I trudged up the stairs and wrote my newspaper story, for which I'll be paid money. I need that money. But I'm still glad to have seen that shadow, glad and reassured. I still don't know precisely how to divide my efforts, how to get the right balance, maybe. But the moon matters in there somehow, I think, at least for your humble servant. So! Maybe a bit of music now, before bedtime, since one must rest for the next day's efforts. You need to sleep, and you need to dream. Strange world, no? Good night, at any rate.

Eating It Anyway

2011-03-15T13:26:14Z

Once in the misty depths of the past I was hanging out in a college friend's kitchen and she mentioned that she was a vegetarian. As a devout carnivore, I felt I had to give her a hard time about it. "Suppose," I said, pointing to a box of spaghetti she was holding, "you found out that the wheat that was made from had a consciousness, had hopes and fears and all that? What would you do?"

She grinned. "I'd eat it anyway," she said.

Now here's the thing—I was joking. I don't think wheat has consciousness and hopes and fears. I just had oats for breakfast and I don't think there's a mother oat plant somewhere crying her eyes out over her murdered children. I do eat meat, and actually I have some moral qualms about that. About vegetables, not so much.

But it seems there's at least one person in the world sensitive enough to not see this as a joke. A writer for the New York Times wrote an essay in which she says that she gave up meat for a while and got to thinking about whether it's OK to eat plants either, because like animals, plants strive to stay alive and move around and so forth. Then she suggests that maybe someday we'll overcome our blindness about this, the way we decided generations ago it was wrong to view people of another race as inferior and exploitable as slaves and so forth. Maybe it's a joke, but if so, she pretends to be serious all the way through and concludes thusly:

My efforts to forgo meat didn’t last more than a couple of years. Still, I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of us. Will we have trouble explaining to them why we killed animals or perhaps even plants for food? And if so, what on Earth will we be eating?

OK, two admissions here—I can't predict the future, and I may be an insensitive brute. That said, maybe future generations will slowly give up eating meat. But I'm pretty sure we'll still eat plants. The argument that they strive to keep existing just won't wash. Every object in the universe strives to hold itself together and maintain its integrity—the wastebasket under my desk, the Rock of Gibraltar, the nucleus of an atom, the ferryboats that go between Manhattan and Staten Island. I think the chances that our great-grandchildren will have the slightest moral qualm about eating plants are astrally remote, but if they do, I'm pretty sure they'll eat plants anyway.

Snow Shooting

2011-02-04T12:16:42Z

One of the fun things about winter—it's winter, where I live—is that you wake up and everything, literally everything, in the world outside is completely different from how it was when you went to sleep. That wooden chair in the neighbor's yard?

It's very different from the day before. And the snow then starts telling stories—a bird walked here, a deer there, a skier crossed this hill, the neighbor got in his car and drove away, whatever.

And then sometimes the snow tells bizarre stories that aren't even true, or that were true once, years ago, in the Alps, but even that once was amazingly unlikely. Long story short, I'm practicing the piano, take a moment's break, look out at the sidewalk, and see a face half-buried in the snow. Eyes, nose, one ear emerging from the ice, it was all there, the way they found the previously mentioned Otzi the Iceman in the mountains. It was one of those strange moments that pull you up short, like when Scrooge saw Marley's face in the door knocker. People complain about the snow, but that seems wrong to me, when it works so hard and so successfully to entertain. Yes, you have to shovel it away, and walk carefully when it's slippery, but I think that's a small enough price to pay.

Marketing Fail: Using Corpses to Sell Food

2010-12-28T19:42:32Z

The other night the cupboard was pretty bare and I was down to two choices: make turkey hash, or use a box of pasta a friend had given me. The pasta is made from einkorn, which according to the box was the first kind of wheat to be cultivated. "Our interest in this most ancient grain was inspired by the discovery of Otzi in the Italian Alps, a Bronze Age man perfectly preserved in a glacier for over 5,000 years," the box read. "Scientists determined his final meal included einkorn."

Actually they capitalized "einkorn" throughout, even though it's a common noun, because Marketing People often Capitalize Words they think are Important to the Client. Anyway, as you'll recall, Otzi is also known as the Iceman, and upon his discovery in 1991 he was very, very dead and looked it. He was twisting his arm around, as if he were about to cough in his shoulder, and didn't look comfortable to begin with. He was quite dessicated. And he was approximately the color of a rotisserie chicken, and just as shiny. This looks more appetizing on the chicken than it does on Otzi, take my word for it.

Long story short, I had the turkey hash that night. The box says the pasta tastes really good, is high in thiamine (also capitalized) and has an oxygen radical absorbence capacity that's twice that of whole durum wheat. Those are fine things to say if you want to persuade a person to eat einkorn. But saying that a corpse ate einkorn, even a celebrity corpse, tends to put me off my feed, to be honest, and when you talk about scientists determining the corpse's last meal I think about autopsies, and by then my appetite has shrunk to a point and disappeared. They didn't have a picture of Otzi on the box, which is good, but not mentioning him at all would have been even better. There are no hard and fast rules in life—except, I don't know, maybe in metallurgy or like that—but I think this case study suggests that dessicated corpses are not what you want to associate your product with if the product is food. I mentioned this at a family gathering and when I mentioned the einkorn-as-final-meal part, my brother-in-law asked, "Did it kill him?" Scientists have determined he was shot with an arrow, cut with knives, and hit on the head. The einkorn is not considered a suspect. But really, you don't even want the question to come up.

For Free

2010-10-05T11:33:56Z

There are amusing animals—ducks come to mind—and there are amusing words, words I just like, and one of them is "busker." You've probably seen a busker, even if you didn't know it—buskers are musicians who stand on the street to perform. They usually have a hat or guitar case open in front of them, and people put in money if they're so moved. Most buskers aren't that great, frankly, but sometimes you can be amazed. I saw a very cool gypsy-klezmer band called Gadji-Gadjo playing on the street in Montreal once, and years before, also in Montreal, I saw a group of Andean pan-pipe players in traditional costumes. I don't want to listen to that for hours on end, but they were interestingly alien—when you see a group of colorfully garbed Peruvians piping away on a city street, you feel like they might as well have dropped from the moon, and you can't help but check it out for a minute. Then there was the time in Washington that I heard a kid on the street playing drums on those white plastic containers they use for construction materials and the like, and he was really good too. You just have to listen for a few seconds, and sometimes you'll be surprised at the music you can hear for free.

Joni Mitchell was a busker once, before she was famous. Can you imagine? You're walking down the street in Toronto, and here's this young woman on the sidewalk playing guitar and singing, and she just happens to be one of the greatest artists of her generation. Maybe she wasn't then what she would become; maybe she was mostly a kid who sang and played folk songs better than average. But maybe she already had that enchanting poetry in her, and it was there, on the street, not a commodity, but a phenomenon before you, as mysterious and magical as the northern lights.

Or maybe not. They did an experiment a few years ago—the Washington Post sent the famous violinist Joshua Bell into a subway station to play and see if anyone would stop and listen. Few people did, and the columnist Gene Weingarten reacted by basically saying people are pigs. Me, I pretty much think people are pigs too, but I'd be willing to give them a pass on the Joshua Bell in the subway question. Of 1,097 people, seven stopped to listen, and one recognized him. First of all, most people aren't that crazy about classical music. Second, there's a smaller percentage that have a good enough ear to tell an outstanding player from a merely competent one. Seven out of 1,097 isn't bad, actually. It's more than I'd have guessed. And third, a subway station is, by definition, a place you go the hell away from as quickly as you can. Very few people go there ready to be enchanted and you can hardly blame them for that.

All this is a lengthy preamble to the latest news—I suppose that I'm a busker myself, now. I offered my services playing piano in front of one of my town's art galleries during October's First Friday art stroll. And when I told the bass player in the trio about it, he wanted to busk too, and when the drummer heard he signed up as well. So the other night we lugged our stuff in front of the gallery, strung all the wires, and started playing. For a joke, I put the bass case in front of the drums, opened it, and threw a few bills in.

There weren't as many people out that night as there sometimes are, because the local creek was flooding, but there were enough. The evening was crisply cool, pleasantly autumnal, with clear skies that went from blue to indigo to black as we played. Passersby would come into our sphere and their faces would light up—not, I think, because we're so awesome, but at least in part because you just don't hear jazz much on the street or anywhere, really, these days. Also, there was another busker up the street singing and playing guitar who served as a foil for us and made us sound good by comparison. He had a powerful public-address system, certainly, but his sense of pitch and his taste in music were much weaker. He sang songs by Journey and the Monkees, for Christ's sake, in a way that hurried people down the sidewalk to where we were, sort of like the beaters who chase the tiger toward the hunter's elephant.

At any rate, people would smile, stop, applaud, say nice things, and in several instances they dropped a dollar on the velvet lining of the bass case. Each time I looked over at the drummer, who happens to be an architect, grinning and shaking my head at how funny and strange life is, with strangers dropping a dollar in front of three middle-aged men with houses and day jobs and all, but that's busking, isn't it? They aren't paying you a dollar so much as they're paying you a sincere compliment, and even if we thought it was funny we thought it was awfully nice, too. People who were dining al fresco across the street strolled over to say they liked the music, and again, we were flattered.

And a singer the bass player knew stopped by to see us, and she sang some tunes with us and was great, which just made it all the better. It struck me how she was singing on the sidewalk, for free, simply because she liked to sing and was good at it. It was refreshing—it's the kind of thing that makes you think the human race isn't entirely awful.

The folks at the gallery kept sending us glasses of wine to keep our spirits up, and when we were done and packed up, we divided up the dollars we'd earned and then retired to a bar to eat and drink and have a convivial time. We had fun, everyone agreed. And we felt, if not exactly paid, certainly well enough compensated. I just may be a busker again some time. I probably won't play in the subway, or in the lobby of a burning building, say, but if you pick your time and place—I'm talking to you, Mr. Weingarten—people can, in fact, be pretty appreciative.

Blade Inflation

2010-09-22T23:00:29Z

The other day I read a very serious article in the very serious magazine The Atlantic Monthly about a very serious problem, the likelihood that Iran will have nuclear weapons sometime soon. I can't solve that problem, I'm afraid. Wish I could, but I can't. The problem I did solve doesn't quite rise to that level of seriousness, but it was a vexing one nonetheless. I made a note to myself the other day to buy razor blades, and when I went to the store, I found that a package of 10 Gillette Sensor blades would cost nearly 18 dollars. This seemed outrageous. It's a bit of plastic with another couple of bits of steel in it, made by slaves in China. I would conservatively estimate the markup as a billion percent.

So I looked at the racks. You could get dual-edge Wilkinson blades that fit Atra and Trac II razors for a much more reasonable price. But you couldn't find razor handles that would accommodate them, so no joy there. Worse, clearly the trend is away from two-blade razors like the Sensor toward blade inflation—four- and five-blade razors that probably give you a nice clean shave, but the Sensor did too and unless the five-blader means you don't have to shave for a week, I don't see that we're further forward. Enough!

I briefly wondered if people were selling used Atra or Trac II razors on Ebay, then shook off the unappetizing image. It turns out that you can use the inexpensive dual-edge Atra blades with the currently available Gillette Vector handle, available online although not in the three stores I went to. This solves the problem of the dual-edged razor blade that costs $1.80 and the four- or five-edged model that goes for $2.50 or so—solves it temporarily, at least. I can't solve the problem of a nuclear Iran and I don't think I can permanently solve the problem of blade inflation but on the second thing I'm at least trying. And you have to at least try, right?

Sunshine and Flowers

2010-09-13T15:43:20Z

A new friend who knows I do photography wrote to me to get over to a field near my house where 400,000 sunflowers were in their fullest glory. And the first morning I was free, I dragged my groggy self over there and felt well rewarded—sure enough, the sunflowers flowed out over the fields until they were quite literally out of sight.

The retreating glaciers that created the field had been inconsiderate enough to do so in a way that prevented me from showing one flower up close with the rest of the mass swooping dramatically away, but I did the best I could. A cooperative bee posed next to one flower, so that's the image I chose to slap up here.

It was only when I thought about it days later that I realized I'd gotten some decent pictures but had missed an opportunity anyway. There were a number of other people there—several of them professional photographers, and a whole photography class of some sort. And for a moment I thought of them as competition, the way you hate to see other fisherpersons at a stream you'd prefer to fish alone. But when I thought about it later, I decided I was glad they were there, and wished I had taken their pictures, because they were part of the story too.

I don't know—I look at the news stories that crowd their way onto my computer screen, and I think sometimes that the world seems to be full of tawdry celebrity gossip, mindless, hate-driven sloganeering, and little else. So it's refreshing to know that a few gentle souls will take some time to gaze at a field of sunflowers. As a race, people do wonderful things and horrible things in what seems to be equal measure, and taking time to gaze at a swathe of blazing yellow because it'll be gone in a few weeks is one of the wonderful things we do. I also like that we, at least some of us, look into canyons and listen to symphonies and learn to name the constellations. Beauty and awe, you know? Good stuff.

And then I further thought about it, and realized that although I think direct experiences are better than media experiences, I have to admit that this new friend is one of those modern friends you make before you've actually met in real life, if you ever do. She has a very cool blog and we seem to have some interests, attitudes and experiences in common. But if it weren't for our hyper-mediated world, I might not have met her yet in any fashion. But I did, which is nice.

And that's all, really. A field of sunflowers, and some of the thoughts you might think about them.

Unlikely Artist

2010-09-01T14:39:23Z

About a year ago, I sat sunk in gloom, staring moodily at the far wall in my living room. Never mind why, multiple reasons, but at that moment I focused on a picture of an apple hanging on the wall. I'd taken it a couple of years before, liked it, and printed it out on a desktop printer. That night, I decided I wanted the damn thing properly printed and framed. I wanted it big, hanging on my wall, daily evidence that occasionally I did something worth doing.

When I got it framed, the gallery owner said I should put it out as a limited-edition print, and that I should do a similar series, and maybe it could be a show. That didn't seem quite real to me—as much as I've always liked photography and the visual arts in general, I've never even dreamed of doing things in the fine-arts world. But I was pleased and flattered, and flirted with the idea that I had some real artistic talent lurking untapped in me. And just for fun, at least in the beginning, I fooled around some more, and a picture of pears in particular turned out well, so I got that framed too. And the gallery owner said put together 10 or 20 like it and we'd do an exhibit in a year or so.

And the show is happening in two days. I still don't quite believe it. I just don't see myself as an artist, really. But I'd better learn how to, I think, or I'm going to be standing around at the reception smiling abstractedly to myself like a mental patient at how funny life can be. From that one evening a year ago, alone and depressed, what comes? An evening two days from now in which your honored servant will kinda sorta be the center of attention in a room full of light and warmth, people coming and going, wine and cheese, all that. Very, very strange, the way things happen, don't you think?

Subconscious Scriptwriter

2010-08-22T15:17:39Z

First of all, I've always said that people's dreams are always boring to other people—"I dreamed I was in this gondola like in Venice, you know, going through this long cave, and I turned and looked and the gondolier was my grandfather and blah blah blah"—it just doesn't work. That said, let me tell you about this one dream I had the other night. I dreamed I was kind of witnessing the investigation of a brutal murder (life's been stressful lately, by the way) and at one point the murderer is at the police station under the mistaken impression that he's just being questioned. He's one of those brutal murderers who are also so stupid that it becomes a kind of touching innocence. In his case, he's too stupid to realize that the prosecutors have a slam-dunk circumstantial case against him. He's fidgeting in the chair he's handcuffed to, and he says, "I want to go home now." And this one prosecutor is shuffling through some papers and says, not even looking at him, "You are home." I thought that was actually a pretty good snippet of cop-show-style hard-bitten irony for a person to write when he was literally asleep. Sort of wish I could do it consistently while I was awake, and I imagine my creditors would be happy about that too, come to think of it.

UFO WTF

2010-08-14T14:41:05Z

I hate to break my long blogging silence with criticism of the media and my family on this lovely late-summer day (temps in the low 70s in mid-morning, thank you whatever gods may be) but sheesh and double sheesh. I was at a family dinner and people start up about UFOs. These are not stupid people in raw IQ terms, but if they've won any prizes lately for critical thinking, logic, or skepticism I haven't been informed. The subject of UFOs came up, and to be perfectly frank, I take two letter grades off my estimate of a person's intellect if I hear any references made to this subject. I can't take seriously the idea that vehicles from other solar systems are flitting around the earth like fireflies and have done so for thousands of years, generally avoiding contact but somehow we manage to see them occasionally, to what I suppose must be their embarrassed surprise, the way you might accidentally barge in on an undressed person when you're staying with friends at a beach house. Presumably they don't want to talk to us, right? Because they would if they could, right? (Well, except the one time when they landed and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids. The Egyptians didn't mention it because they wanted the credit for building the pyramids themselves.) And yet these creatures who have the technology to cross the vast distances of interstellar space in vehicles that are regularly described as behaving in ways that are unrestricted by Newtonian physics are nevertheless bumblers who get spotted by us all the time. Saw you, space boy! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! You're it!

Let's just say this does not, to me, add up. And yet my own mother was nattering on about how the British government released documents about an encounter with a UFO that Churchill ordered covered up. This was all over the news. Well folks, I checked it out. What the documents reveal, if they reveal anything at all, is this:

A letter claiming Winston Churchill ordered a 50 year cover-up of a wartime encounter
between a UFO and a RAF bomber over the English coastline in the later stages of The
Second World War was investigated by MoD in 1999. No written record of the incident
was found; papers can be found at DEFE 24/2013 (p205-209, p273-77)

I further found the letter was from a son of a pilot or something. People write letters and make claims about all kinds of fun stuff all the time. How did the media play it? Here's one fairly typical example: Headline: UFO files: Winston Churchill 'feared panic' over Second World War RAF incident. Subhead: Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public "panic" and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.

I wish I could joke about this, but to be honest, it's not really very funny. It's the media equivalent of Chinese food products that are poisonous. Buyers shouldn't have to beware quite that much. My mom now believes that Churchill covered up a UFO incident. The conversation moved on from UFOs to the Big Bang theory—I should mention that none of my family, including and especially me, has any background in physics—and I'd like to tell you what was said but suddenly, on this bright and sunny day, I'm feeling very depressed.

The Kernel Wasn't the Only Thing Panicking

2010-07-26T18:50:37Z

So here's what happened—about a month ago I gave up on my liquid-damaged keyboard, got a new one, found I had to install the software to get certain keys to work, and as soon as I installed it boom—no computer. It crashed every time I started it, a form of crashing called a "kernel panic." In hundreds of starts I got to the desktop twice, and then all hope ended.

What's that? Was I backed up completely?

No.

Are you?

All right then.

Anyway, I yell at the keyboard manufacturer for a session or two and then take it into the shop. Young man pops the back off and points. Several of the capacitors had this beige cheesy substance coming of of them. They might as well have been brains oozing out, because it meant the logic board was gone. But why, I wailed, did the catastrophic failure happen exactly when I installed the new software?

The young guy looked straight at me. "Coincidence," he said. And with a sinking heart, I realized he was right. It just wasn't a stupid glitchy problem, like corrupted startup software, it was a serious hardware problem and my whole computing world, which is basically my career, was in jeopardy.

They spent three weeks trying to fix it, and in the end they couldn't. While that was going on, my laptop suddenly died. Hard drive on that one. No computers. Dead in the water. I had to go to the library to get my e-mail. I couldn't show clients the work I was doing for them or get the images printed for a fast-approaching art gallery show or do one damn thing to further my flagging fortunes. It was kinda depressing, if you really want to know.

But I got a new drive in the laptop, and put the hard drive from the desktop in a doohickey called an "external enclosure" that enabled the laptop to read it. I'm most of the way back (and totally backed up, it goes without saying) except for certain technical things I won't bore you with. Long story short, uh, hi! I'm back. This has been a pain to deal with. If there's an organization that goes around and lets backup slackers tell their sad stories, the way the Salvation Army has former drunks as speakers, I'd like to sign up.

Better Late Than Never Department: Playing Jazz in Public

2010-06-22T01:22:26Z

You can ask anyone—I'm not one of these people that talks about living your dreams or following your bliss or any of that. Many of the dreams we dream are stupid dreams that will never come true, and much of the bliss we follow is a butterfly bliss that will dance ahead of us, effortlessly eluding our childish grasp, until we wise up enough to realize that bliss comes when it comes and doesn't much like pursuit, actually.

And yet.

And yet.

A few decades ago, a friend came back from his freshperson year at college with a bunch of jazz records. We were both crazy about music, and this was a revelation. I listened and listened and listened, and by the time I was 20 I was convinced I had to learn jazz piano. And I put my best effort into it. I took lessons and listened and practiced and studied and when I got out of college I joined commercial bands so I could justify practicing more. The drummer in the first band was the friend who got me hooked in the first place. I did that for three years. But in the end I saw that I wasn't ever going to be the jazz pianist I wanted to be. And I didn't like the professional musician life, the Top 40, the clubs that smelled like stale beer and cigarettes when you took your gear in the afternoon before the job. Everyone wanted to believe that I loved it, because that's the mythology, but actually I didn't love it. "I play bad music for bad money for bad people," I would tell them. And at the end of three years in the business, I quit the whole thing.

I played with people every now and then, but after a while I discovered the newspaper business, and then magazines, and photography too, and that suited me better, really. I still had the piano, but I played only now and then, sometimes only once every couple of months. And that went on for, well, a few decades. The vinyl albums sunk further and further back in the closet, and music mattered less and less.

And then a few years ago I went to a party and ran into a guy I had worked for years before. We got friendly, and it turned out he had been a bass player with a successful rock band in the 80s, and he was interested in playing jazz now and then. Just casually, no big deal. So why not? We got together a couple of times, enjoyed it, made it a regular thing. We started playing for parties he and his wife had. We started thinking more seriously about it, researching tunes we wanted to play, talking about technique, inviting other musician friends to sit in.

Then a drummer came by to play with us, and we liked him and it seemed mutual, so that became a regular thing. The drummer started egging us on to play for the public, and we started considering the idea, not without some trepidation. And then the bass player sagely decided that the way to make jazz connect with the public was to have a singer. So he advertised on Craigslist, and got an answer, and this nice person who sang very well and was good at lining up jobs started singing with us.

And then she signed us up for a set at a little ad-hoc jazz festival in Philadelphia.

This set me off on months of feverish practice. It seemed far off when it first was arranged. Surely, I thought, I could bootstrap myself to the point where the one set would be no big deal. But we all have demons, don't we? I've discovered that. Every single person I've ever met is walking around with demons inside. My own demons said I wasn't good enough and would have stage fright that would make this a disaster and who did I think I was, anyway, wanting to play jazz in public.

I told the demons they could take a flying, basically. I practiced and practiced. I went to open-mike events and played. I was nearly hallucinating with nervousness the first time, somewhat better the next, a little better the next.

And then the big day.

Was I nervous, when the time came? Yes, folks, I was nervous. I played very tentatively, until the end, when we played the big rousing fast number. By then I knew it was in the bag, so I played aggressively for that one last tune. And that was as good as it could have been. I couldn't have played with masterful confidence this first time, it simply wasn't a realistic goal. But I kept it together, played pretty much the right chords at the right times, held my own. It wasn't a disaster. It was actually, at times, a lot of fun. I'd grin at the other players, making a point of enjoying the whole thing.I was making music, pretty good music, with my friends. Occasionally I would risk a glimpse at the audience, especially when they were clapping. It was like looking down when you're climbing a mountain, but looking down is where the thrill comes from.

So finally we hit the last big chord for the finish, and we were done. No humiliation, no disaster. Just a sense of jumping a big hurdle, and landing safely. "I'll take that," I said to the drummer, as I stood up. And then I packed up my gear, just like back in the day, and went and got a free beer that pretty much amounted to my pay for the occasion, and sat and listened to another band play. They were really good. I enjoyed their music. But I also enjoyed the idea that I'd taken a risk, but done the work beforehand and maintained the right attitudes and handled the fear well enough. I'd played piano in a jazz trio for the better part of an hour, in front of an audience, and lived to tell the tale. It wasn't perfect. But I hadn't let my friends down. And that matters, folks. That matters.

So we'll build on this. I'll play jazz in public more, and better. That youthful dream will get fulfilled, if it be Allah's will. Better late than never, no doubt about it.

I don't know what this means about dreams in general. But I know one thing—if you want to play an instrument, or learn to draw or paint, or do anything at all, if there's anything that you think you could care about, give it some effort. And give it some time. Maybe you'll only learn how hard it is to do that particular thing. At the very least, that makes you appreciate people who are accomplished in the field. But maybe you'll get somewhere yourself. You won't know if you don't try. I can tell you that it feels good, getting something accomplished. Getting the work done, playing your parts, not letting your friends down. Putting a little more good music out there. Brightening people's afternoon on a hot day in the city. I can remember, you know, the days so long ago when the conviction came on me more and more that I wanted to play jazz on the piano. And yesterday, I did. It was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.

Good to Know

2010-06-17T22:14:50Z

I've gone past this sign numerous times and tried to figure out what the rationale for it is, and in the end I've just decided that the sign is doing what I've done myself on countless occasions—it announced its name, got nervous because it didn't know what to say next, and just blurted out something absurdly obvious. It has a certain awkward charm, actually, for a laundromat sign.