Category Archives: musing

A Man Without A Smiling Face Should Not Open A Shop

Famous, and wise, Chinese proverb: a man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  It is very true, few people will continue to come into the shop of someone who is depressed or hostile.  Having nothing much to do with anything, I once had a less well-known piece of advice in a fortune cookie, perhaps no less profound:  laff alla time people think you crazy.

The mystery to me is how one keeps the smile on the face when the proverbial wolf is at the door, his cheeks full, ready to huff and puff and blow the whole thing to little pieces in the stink of wolf’s breath.

“My father had a great sense of humor, but he was such an unhappy man,” is something Kurt Vonnegut Jr. feared his children might say about him at the end.   Happiness is a talent like any other, I suppose, some people are good at it, some people not so good.  It is something worth cultivating– being grateful, and full of wonder, and optimistic.  Enjoying and appreciating the things and people you love.  There is a predisposition to melancholy, or pessimism, but happiness is probably like a muscle you can develop by constant use.   Let’s assume that happiness can be cultivated, for the moment. 

There are innate talents, sure, but the most exciting demonstrations of talent are given by those who love what they do and spend hours and hours doing it until they do it well.  Their love for the thing is expressed in the way they do it, and it’s an inspiring thing to see.  Many people have more innate drawing talent than I had as a boy, than I have now.  Few people, I think, love to draw as much as I always have.  Doing anything endlessly will make you better at it.  Not to say that some ability is not also involved, but the perpetual doing of a thing you love will make you better at it than someone who is able but doesn’t care.

“Oh, no,” you will say, “that’s not true.  There are geniuses who can do with little practice what a less talented person could not do in a lifetime.”    Well, let me entertain that dispiriting cavil for a second, before I get back to practicing my fucking shopkeeper’s smile in the mirror.

I met one person in my life who is, without any doubt or qualification, a genius.  We went to high school together, this very bright and original kid and I, and his musical talent was off the charts.  So much so that his destiny seemed clear at 15.  I could tell you a couple of great stories about this kid’s talent, and what he grew to compose, arrange, improvise, perform, the many instruments he plays virtuosically, but there could be no question, comparing him even to other great musicians, that his talent is of another level.  Frank Burrows is the guy’s name, you can look him up on youTube.

We had another friend, a prodigiously talented musician who, like Frank, played for hours a day and lived to play music.   These guys played together in bands, prodded each other’s musical growth and invention.  Both have their eccentricities, to be sure, and both endured traumatic childhoods.  As brilliant as David was, Frank was in an otherworldly category in terms of the grace with which he assimilated musical ideas that inspired him.  I have the feeling it always embarrassed Frank when I singled him out as a genius.  No offense intended, my man.

David taught me most of what I know of music theory and chord voicings on guitar.  He was an often brutal master, hard on himself and just as hard on me, though I had a small fraction of his talent.  There are some who consider me a decent musician now, but I am nowhere near being able, after playing for more than 40 years, to do what either of these guys was able to do in high school.  Anyway, David’s main pedagogic tools were derision, scorn, sarcasm and a certain ruthless pursuit of perfection that’s hard to describe.   I took abuse from him while I was learning, eventually learned that it is never a good idea to take abuse from anyone, no matter what else might come along with it.

I recall, years later, trying to fake some jazz with David who responded in his inimitable withering way that I would never be more than a journeyman.   I’d heard an echo of this comment from a keyboard player friend of mine who disparagingly told me “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a keyboard player.”  There are people I could fool in that regard, but apparently this chap is not among them.  I’m no virtuoso, but I can play a little piano when I need to.

Anyway, we fast forward a few decades.  I record a catchy little piano and acoustic guitar vamp, leaving lots of space.  I send it to Frank and to another fantastically talented musician friend and ask each of them to overdub some parts on it for a friend who is dying.   (I have another track to make for a friend who is currently dying of a rare and relentless disease, but that time the dying friend was a composite of people I’d lost, was losing and part of myself).  My friend Paul played a haunting and beautiful fretless guitar improvisation over the top, I can hear it in my head now as I type.  

Frank, to my great surprise and delight, spent probably forty hours producing a symphonic masterpiece out of the track.  He added a dozen or more parts, harmonized it in ten different ways, on twenty instruments, wrote a brilliant intro and an unforgettable outtro.  I told you above, the man is a genius, was born that way, but he’s also spent well beyond the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell prescribed for becoming a master.  To this day, I still can’t get over what Frank was able to create out of that simple two chord vamp.

I sent it to David, who was impressed with the composition.  And this brilliant composer and harsh teacher– and this is why I have rolled out this long, tedious story– emailed me to say he was unable to tell which of us, the genius or the journeyman, had played which of the several guitar or keyboard parts.  A moment of great, long-delayed satisfaction was had.

So the point is, even a hack, with enough love of something and enough dedication to practicing it, may eventually play a few notes that will be indistinguishable from notes struck by a genius.  

Similarly, this strained, cracking smile I am practicing now can be molded, with enough true desire to do so, into a sincere and radiant grin that will attract customers to my cobwebbed shop.   I am betting the shop on it, my friends.

Support Our Troops

Once in a while I get an email from an old friend, a patriotic and conservative woman, that shows some aspect of the military and asks people to forward it to support our troops.   We have, after a rancorous period, agreed to avoid discussion of politics, but once in a while she sends me one that provokes a response, which I try to make as measured and non-argumentative as possible.

The other day it was an email with three photos.  A small group of Marines in full dress uniform,  in the open cargo hold of a commercial airliner, draping an immaculate American flag over a coffin.  Above them were passengers looking out the windows.  The narration stated that they watched this in silent respect and waited for the coffin to be removed, showing respect for the troops in a long moment that none of them will ever forget.   It’s unclear from the photo how the passengers above could have possibly had a view of something that was happening inside a hatch in the round bottom of the plane while their small windows looked out on to the tarmac.

The second photo was of a woman on a mattress in front of the flag draped coffin of another Marine, her dead husband.  Her face was illuminated by a laptop that was playing her husband’s favorite music the night before his funeral.  The Marine honor guard standing at attention by the coffin stayed through the night, at the woman’s request, watching her sleep as the Marines honored their fallen comrade.

The third photo showed a military man pinning something to the tiny chest of a young boy who had recently lost his father in war.  Under that was a long piece about the majority of Americans silently supporting our troops and wearing blue every Friday to quietly and firmly show that support.  God was also brought in, and our faith in God and our love and respect for the young men who give their lives in defense of our liberty.

My first thought was to let it pass, just an email.  Then I wrote and sent this:

Sure, I’ll wear blue every Friday, but I’ve got to say, there’s something here that mystifies me.  These brave young men who are sent to fight and die in wars politicians cannot explain— how do we support them by honoring them in death exactly?

 
Are we to ask no questions about why they are placed in harm’s way in the first place?  Isn’t truly supporting our troops first and foremost  a matter of only asking them to sacrifice life and limb in defense of our country?  I realize some Americans made billions on the war in Iraq, and I suppose nobody can discount that, but how do we support our troops by sending them to die, suffer traumatic brain injuries, amputations, dozens of plastic surgeries to reconstruct destroyed faces, in aggressive “pre-emptive” wars of choice waged for dubious reasons at best?  Was a single American death in Vietnam justified?  In Iraq?
 
I really don’t get it.  How God could possibly be involved in this ritual sacrifice of honest American boys mystifies me too.  I wonder if “support our troops” would be the patriotic mantra if Obama sent some of America’s most idealistic and bravest young people to die somewhere for reasons he could not explain, beyond slogans like “freedom is on the march” or “smoke them out” or based on what turned out to be misinformation, cynical distortions of shaky intelligence or outright lies.  WMD?  uh, no.  Ties to Bin Laden?  uh, not really.   Freedom!
 
I hate Woodrow Wilson for drumming up American enthusiasm for the senseless slaughter that was WW I.   Beyond the fact that American bankers would have lost the equivalent of billions in today’s dollars had Germany won, no explanation for America’s entry to that war makes the slightest sense.  Do we honor the thousands slaughtered in that war by draping their coffins with flags and saying they died heroically defending American freedom?   Or do we honor our troops by making sure they never are called on to spill every drop of their blood defending the profits of banks, oil companies or defense contractors?  I vote for the latter way of supporting and honoring them.

The times that try men’s souls

These are them.  But I’ll take just one small immediate snap shot, since I don’t have much time, trying though what little time I have at the moment may be.

If you find yourself waking up as a slave, having slept poorly, dreading the wake-up hours too early, stomach filled with acid, do not despair.  You will be tempted, as I am, having slept poorly, needing a few hours more sleep, alternating coffee to wake up and Tums for the acid, to cry out.   No need for that.  It won’t help you anyway.  This is a day you have to remember that your soul is no slave, and your dream of freedom will keep you moving forward, that an isolated trying day does not a trying lot make.  Even a string of such days does not mean the end of your dreams.

Sure as this drenching thunderstorm that is hovering over the area for the next 48 hours, sure as the wildly unreasonable  demands you will be asked to meet as soon as you arrive soaked and shivering, doubled over, trying to catch your breath.  Take it to the bank that today’s beating will end, you will recover, things will be fine and your food will taste good again and the sloshing of acid in your nervous stomach will be a distant memory, if that. 

Do not worry about any of this.  Do you see me worrying?

Torture– drop the word casually, it means little

People who know me, who’ve been to this untidy, dilapidated place where I live, would all agree I have many more important things to do right now than stew about politics.   I know it is a symptom of something else, but I can’t clear my throat sometimes.  There are things that stick there like poisoned steel wool, irritating to no end.   So let me try to pump this one up, like a cat with a hairball, and get on with my life today.  

President Change You Can Believe In (you can also believe in the tooth fairy or the patriotism of men willing to torture suspects– so he’s not really misleading anyone)  casually spoke the word “torture” the other day, I heard the sound bite.  He admitted explicitly, for the first time, that our great nation had descended to torture in the so-called War on Terror.  Torture was committed in secret, in our names, against people who are abstractions. It was authorized and justified, under a changed name, in secret memos, with surprisingly little legal support, that were authored by Bush Administration lawyers, one now a federal judge for life, the other a tenured professor of constitutional law at Berkeley.

It’s not like there were witnesses as actual people we know were hung by their arms for hours at a time, forced to soil themselves, stripped naked, kept in freezing cold or boiling hot cells, kept awake for days at a time, kept in airless cells too small for them, thrown against walls (harmless, just to get their attention!) shaken, punched, slapped, kicked, water-boarded.   Some of these people were guilty as hell, even if many were not.  At any rate, full disclosure, agents of We The People tortured people, we’re not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.  There’s no point prosecuting anyone, heck, we’d probably have to prosecute ourselves too, which would suck!  In addition to posing an uncomfortable conflict of interest.

It was as shocking hearing the president finally say “torture” as it was hearing the word “poverty” come out of his mouth for the first time in public during his second inauguration.  I heard it like this “we murdered some people, frankly, we did,  in cold blood and without any real legal defense for our actions.  We also engaged in systematic rape, of men and women, some admittedly quite young, and other atrocities.  We killed babies, and old women, we broke down doors and beat up and sometimes slaughtered people in far away lands who had nothing to do with terrorism.   We grabbed people in airports that we sent to savage regimes to be tortured and found out only years later that many of them were innocent.  Guilty as charged.  These things are terrible, unforgivable, and we abhor them to our core.  I say, not without some personal sadness, that as a practical matter we will never hold anyone accountable in any way for any of these policies.  We made sure that our contractors are immune from prosecution, and we sure as hell are not going to prosecute the wealthy and powerful men who created the secret torture program.  Get over it, America.”

“After all, we are wealthy beyond counting, as a nation, but 21 million of our children go to bed hungry every night, is that not in some ways a greater national shame than torturing people we don’t even know?    We have neighborhoods where the death rate is as high as in third world nations engaged in civil wars.  Shit happens, people.  I say these things not because I will hold anyone accountable for crimes we committed in the past, for the crimes we continue to commit or for a system that allows the wealthiest to increase their wealth beyond the wildest imaginings of the greediest while children, by the million, are asked to eat shit and die.  I mention these things only because I am a man of conscience and an expert in constitutional law.  If you think it is easy to be an expert in constitutional law, think again.  I challenge you, for example, to find the three discreet phrases buried in that succinct document that formed the constitutional basis for human slavery and its strict legal protection for almost a hundred years.”

“We do some very bad things, I will admit.  Most of these terrible things we keep secret.  You have 1,000 channels of TV programming to distract you, a fantastic network of professional sports where some of the greatest athletes in the world compete for your enjoyment, many fake news channels, a hundred Darwinian contests, scripted reality TV shows with colorful people in many cases even dumber than you are.  You have great stores full of wonderful products and you can buy anything you like on-line, from the comfort of your favorite chair.  You have everything you need, unless you’re really poor, or working class, in which case you may feel left out of the American Dream.  I pity you, I really do, it’s really a great dream.”

“But I must also point out that I will be very, very strict with anyone who tries to make public things that the public must not know.  If the U.S. military has a digital video of an American helicopter crew getting permission to gun down unarmed Iraqi civilians who come to try to rescue other civilians shot down by that same American helicopter crew, that is their business.  The military knows best how to deal with these things, it has been doing so for over two hundred years.  Things like this are classified for a reason and anyone who releases such information is a traitor and enemy of the state worthy of death.  And guess what?  As we’ve already shown, we no longer need to even accuse you of a specific crime or have any kind of due process before we take you out with a flying remote control death machine.  Thank you for listening and God bless these United States of America.”

“Oh, and one more thing.  Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a shady character out of the Iran-Contra scandal and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Reagan, was pitching a data mining system that could be used to keep tabs on the activities of conspiracies to undermine America.   It could be used, for example, to get the names of everyone opposed to a specific government policy, the phone numbers of everyone involved in street protests or petitions, those subscribing to internet lists or those organizing for any purpose that might run counter to the best interests of America as defined in secret by unaccountable persons.  I am not at liberty to say if the NSA data mining program recently revealed by a traitor worthy of death, a reckless and dangerous young man named Edward Snowden, is that same program Poindexter was peddling or not.  Does it make any difference to you?  God bless America.”

“And goodnight, Gracie.” 

Invitation to Writers

I invite anyone reading these words to take this quick challenge:  

choose something that makes your heart beat stronger.  Write it down, explain in a sentence why you love it, then run with it.  Let it take you where it wants.

Say music is the passion, the beat, bap! with the right note laid thickly against it, there’s nothing to compare.   We call things “like music” in order to convey ineffable levels of grace and delight.   Without music, just noise.  Music sweet music, soothing savage breast and beast alike.  On the wings of a song, every desire anyone ever had.   Without music, no dance, and gone, most grace.

Or take, say, logic.  My passion is logic, so needed in a world of competitive noise, senseless violence and a troubled dance for human connection — to clear a path through the chaos for a moment’s relief.  Once I’ve grasped the logic of something at least I’m no longer perplexed about the cause.  Take Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  We’ll use that for a thought experiment:

Assume I tell you the same story one hundred times, the same beginning, great excitement over unlimited potential, same middle, everything going fine but something nagging, inevitable as death, same treacherous cataclysmic ending.  Identical in each story are my actions, virtually interchangeable the other person’s actions.   That I take pains to weave this seamless chronicle of betrayal would tell you the larger story of my life.  

You can predict that these repeated experiences with disappointment, the tremendously built-up hopes always dashed in a close variation on the same cruel theme, will leave a person more susceptible to bitterness than the average person.  Here’s a hypothetical to flex between your back teeth:  a possible cause of compulsively repeated painful behavior. 

Imagine the case of character A_________.   A_________, the youngest child, is routinely ignored at the dinner table.  His older siblings hold forth, sometimes pick on him when the parents aren’t around, punish him when he squeals on them, his parents dote on the others, and often tell him to be quiet, wait his turn.  A kid in this situation may easily begin to feel starved for affectionate attention.  There are millions of people in A_________’s  basic situation, in every culture, on every continent.  

The random people they interact with will make all the difference in how their lives turn out.  A mother or father who is generous, calm, one who listens well, or that kind of grandparent, or best friend, or teacher, alleviates a lot of the child’s pain as the child grows up.  A parent who’s overwhelmed, angry, preoccupied will not do as good a job in this regard.  All parents are some fluctuating combination of these and other types.  

Unless A_________ gets some encouraging outside help, he will grow up convinced that basically people don’t care about him, perhaps nobody cares about anybody.  He can give you a million examples from his own life of why this is so, with ten irrefutable illustrations of each example.  A____   is like my father, perhaps, whipped in the face as an infant, somebody who may realize, after a lifetime angrily defending himself, that he never stood a chance in this world, that it wasn’t his fault.   Or a thousand gradations, from atrocity to inconvenience to tolerance and calm.

Maybe it’s a passion for interpersonal relationships.  Most readers and writers do what they do out of a desire to connect with others.  Words from my heart, through the light filter of my mind, into your eyes, back to me.  It’s magic – sending messages of power and complexity through symbols we’ve evolved to make units of meaning we call words.  Language is a miracle, created by that deepest human need, to love and be loved in return. To be understood, and cherished, by another, a yearning that goes all the way back to earliest animal consciousness.

That’s why babies are always so much cuter than their adults.  They are created to be lovable to their parents, so the parents will take care of the baby while it is helpless.  Babies of every species who are not as cute have tended not to survive and reproduce.  Intelligent design, wot.

So the invitation is open, and I hope you all will take it, and drop a line, or better still, leave a comment below this one. a comment others could feel free to add on to.  I am flooded by Zora’s oldest of human longings, to make myself known to another.  In cyberia, that takes on strange and mutated forms.  But hey, might as well dream. 

 

Only Time I’m Happy’s When I Play My Guitar

Cream had a song called NSU that contained this great bit:

driving in my car, smoking a cigar, only time I’m happy’s when I play my guitar

No idea what NSU stands for, but, dig it.  If I could spend most of my time playing my guitar I’d be a much happier camper, no doubt about it.  Yet, somehow, three days  sometimes pass when I don’t so much as pick up my guitar (though I sleep next to a tenor ukulele every night that Sekhnet’s not next to me– and it is rare that I don’t at least play the uke a little as I’m lying in bed).

What’s up wif dat not playing the guitar, though?

It’s not that I’m too busy cleaning up the mess on my desk, or kitchen table, or chair, or floor.   It’s not that I’m a workaholic rushing straight ahead in a crazed, glassy-eyed pursuit of greater income and success.   What the hell?   Why don’t I play the guitar three hours a day?  

One of the great mysteries of my mysterious life.

Freedom and Politics

My nephew had a good point to a teacher in Florida recently who was pressuring him to speak the words of the Pledge of Allegiance along with his 17 year-old classmates.   “What kind of pledge is it if you have to repeat it every day, year after year?  Once you make a pledge, you’ve pledged.  What kind of bogus, insecure pledge has to be repeated daily?”  The teacher’s reaction is unknown, though my nephew was excused from final exams because his grades were already too high to calculate.

$150,000,000 a year to keep the remaining 166 prisoners (of a total of 779 at one time incarcerated there) locked up at Guantanamo.   This includes 86 cleared for immediate release, people not currently charged with being anything like the worst of the worst, many charged with nothing.   Also at Gitmo is a group of 48 who are probably dangerous haters of our freedom, capable of exacting bloody revenge and even more motivated now than a decade ago when they were first grabbed.  

The problem with these dangerous haters is that they have been tortured by agents of our great democracy and so any trial or attempt to prosecute them would  bring what was done to them into the harsh light of public scrutiny.   So we can’t really try them, or release them.   They truly, truly hate us.

The president, quoted in June 10, 2013 TIME magazine: 

[History] will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it

An eloquent echo of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about how he trembled to consider the harsh punishment a just God would rightfully inflict on those, like him, who owned human beings as part of their personal wealth.

And, like our current eloquent president, Jefferson was instrumental in not ending the practice he deplored.  

Jefferson would have been just as tormented, I’m sure, by the innocent children killed in the targeted drone strikes the president continues to order.  He would have been as concerned about the 100 hunger strikers at Gitmo, 35 of whom are being restrained and force fed twice daily in what the UN Commission for Human Rights has condemned as a violation of international law.  The World Medical Association has declared doctor supervision of involuntary force-feeding unethical.   I suppose they would say the same of physicians who made sure prisoners were not accidentally killed while being subjected to a technique that made them experience drowning in a most visceral and convincing way.  In spite of our best efforts to keep these people alive, nine of them died in Gitmo.   Things happen during war.

I can hear the chorus of freedom loving Americans, and I understand.  Not our fault!  They hate our freedom!  And what about all those innocent people the terrorists they might well be associated with, or are at least sympathetic to, killed?  The UN, bah!  World Medical Association, foo!  How easy it is for the world to cast its judgments down on us, the hypocrites!

I also understand why the trial of Bradley Manning must be kept as quiet as possible.  He will be given a fair public trial, even if much of it will be in secret, and then convicted of betraying this great nation.   Manning disclosed some documents and videos that made the American military look very bad.   Such behavior must be punished harshly and publicly (even if the trial is not) to deter any other would be “light shiners” and people of “conscience”.  

What business was it of Manning’s if a helicopter crew laughed after killing some unarmed civilians in Baghdad, reacting like the machine guns and tiny humans sited in their scope were part of a video game?   Who is Manning to judge that Americans in harm’s way can’t blow off a little steam once in a while?  It’s not like plenty of other civilians weren’t being collateral damage while this particular, insignificant accidental killing of an unfortunately located Reuters camera crew and unarmed Iraqis coming to rescue wounded civilians happened.  The incident was marked classified for a very good reason– WE DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK BADLY OF AMERICA.

I heard recently from the author of a book about soldier misconduct in Vietnam that the My Lai Massacre, for which Lt. Calley, for his part in the slaughter of hundreds, was famously court-martialed (and eventually served 3 years under house arrest), was one of dozens, if not hundreds of such slaughters of Vietnamese villagers during the years that American soldiers fought an endless war against a popular underground army.  

American boys were subjected to terrible things in that war, by a merciless and cunning enemy, things nobody should ever see.  If a few of them snapped and murdered civilians from time to time, well, the Army considered that something we should take care of in-house.   It was taken care of, in all cases but My Lai, by classifying the reports.  And it worked, the accounts of these mass murders remained secret for 40 years or so.  

The author persevered and after a long, grim dance, got these classified reports of other massacres.   He visited the villages decades after the atrocities to interview those who remembered.  There were plenty of Vietnamese who remembered.  The author reports he was struck by the absence of hatred toward him as an American.  The survivors seemed grateful for the chance to tell an American their stories.  It took more than a year for the slaughter at My Lai to come to light, after some traitor or another made it public, after choking down the memory of it night after night, month after month.

It is amazing that the reports of these massacres that the author eventually read were not destroyed, as is routinely done now with compromising evidence (think air controller tapes from 9/11, secret non-sworn testimony given by president and vice president to the 9/11 Commission  that was not allowed to take notes or reveal what they’d said, video of detainee “enhanced interrogation” etc.).

Let us all be prudent, then, and patriotic, and wait 40 years or so before opening the can of worms that this private, entrusted with keeping classified information secret, prematurely and disloyally pried open.   To paraphrase Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of our highly successful overthrow of a brutal and secretive dictator in Iraq to build a free nation in the Middle East, a bulwark against hatred of American freedom and a beacon of democracy to a world mired in ignorance, superstition and poverty:  What we don’t know can’t hurt us.  Or, at least we won’t know what what we don’t know did to us, since we didn’t know it was even there, really.

Moment of Contentment

Many things are beyond human control.  My friend who surgeons have been cutting at and other oncologists have been pumping full of poisons in an attempt to prolong his life comes to mind.  Woke up one day with a mysterious lump on his backside.  Did you ever hear of soft tissue sarcoma?  I hadn’t.  It’s apparently rare.  The form he has is a rare form of a rare cancer.  They throw darts at a dart board to treat it.   After his first round of chemo the doctor was very serious.

“The tumor has doubled in size,” said the oncologist.  “I think we should try another chemo regime.”

“I think so too, doc” said my friend, sitting uncomfortably on what was left under him to sit on.  They’d told him they’d removed all the cancer when they cut out several pounds of his flesh.  They underestimated cancer’s craftiness.

Why do I type Moment of Contentment and launch right into this horrible story?   Partly my nature and partly to point out what it is.  In the midst of this death by a thousand cuts my friend can still laugh sometimes.  Needs to laugh, more than most.  He has always had a great and infectious laugh too, with a taste for slapstick, the bizarre and the not too drastic misfortunes of others.

When I had the headphones on last night, adding tracks to a mix with a tiny portable USB keyboard, and I’m playing drums, bass, electric piano, more percussion by hitting the small keys of a flat little keyboard that weighs a few ounces (and cost $50– the Korg nanokey 2, if you’re interested) I had a thought of my friend, a great musician who nimbly tickled the ivory with Fred Flintstone fingers and how this little keyboard might be the best present he could receive (assuming, of course, that the neurological damage produced by the chemo still allows him to play) .  

I’m talking about the moment of contentment where we are doing exactly what feels best to us.  The moment we wouldn’t change anything, or, like when writing here when we can change exactly and only what we don’t like and leave only what we do like.  

Not every moment of contentment produces something to share, there are things like letting a cool breeze blow across your face on a hot day, closing your eyes, with relief caressing your face.  There are all the little things we do that produce nothing but a moment of contentment.   These moments are nothing to sneeze at, especially given the world we live in today.

Now back to our regularly scheduled headaches…

10,000 Kicks

I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.

Peak Experience

We experience countless things each day.  A person with a great memory, which I am often reputed to have, might remember a few grains of these experiences.  Certain experiences are unforgettable, when they involve our senses directly.   This cuts both ways, great memories and terrible ones, both enduring.  But when things are exciting, fun and spontaneous they inspire us, they stick in our memory.  That is because these are the moments when we are most fully alive.

Your soul is on fire, poet, but there is nothing we can do for you but throw spears.

Peak experience is when you operate intuitively against the beat, chose notes and flavors that have not been tried before.   Seasoning a new dish with fresh herbs from the garden, a different combination, delicious.   Hitting the cowbell perfectly against the side of the beat.  The colors spread thickly in a perfect brushstroke gradient, that succulent array of sunset blues going dark.   The spatula of a hand, bending supplely against beats from the Indian Ocean.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please send me an email.   I will in turn send you a rhythm track to improvise to.   You can then send me the youTube link and I’ll add an animation to it.   These times are in many ways hellish times, but the technology is getting fucking amazing.