In other news, I think I’m catching a summer cold.  This blows.  My throat’s killing me, and I’m coughing all over the place, but I’m NOT going to miss the Butterfly Boucher/Emilie Simon concert on Monday night.  They’re two of my favorites, and no lame-o summer cold is gonna stop me from seeing them.

The good news is that I did have a lovely dream this morning, and here it is.

* * * * *

I’m with a bunch of my friends, and we’re standing in a semi-circle, talking, in a beautiful, grassy park.  It’s a sunny day, and we’re all talking excitedly, and laughing, and having a great time.  We are quite the melting pot of ethnicities, including an older black man in his sixties, a young Japanese guy in his twenties, myself, two white married couples in their early thirties, and an Egyptian woman in her fifties.

I walk away from the group to refill my empty water bottle, and as I walk back, I pass a black couple in their fourties.  The woman gently puts her hand on my shoulder in order to catch my attention.  “I’m really impressed with your circle of friends,” she says.  “You all seem to be having such a lovely time.  Have you known each other long?”

“Actually, we haven’t,” I reply, and smile.  I gesture toward each member of the group in turn, and explain to her how I met each of them, or what I know about them, starting with the older black guy.  “He’s a musician I’ve played with, he’s a student and a writer, I just met them today, they used to live in my old apartment building, and she was in the coffee shop yesterday.”

The woman I’m talking with laughs, and says, “Wow, that’s quite a group.  I’d better let you get back to it.”

“Thanks,” I say.  “I hope to see you again sometime.”

“I’d like that,” she says, “very much.”

We do a sort of one-armed hug, and my hand gets caught in her purse, which is sort of perched on top of her shoulder.  A few things almost fall out, but I catch them.  “Oops,” I say.  “Do you want me to fix that stuff so it won’t fall out?”  She shrugs her shoulder, and everything settles.  “Oh.  Okay.  It looks like everything’s back to normal now.  See you around!”  I shake her husband’s hand and say, “Have a great day.”

I look over to see that my group of friends is starting to walk away and disperse, so I jog over to rejoin them.  We walk out of the park and up an old residential street, where the black man, the Japanese guy and one of the couples go their separate ways.  We all wave goodbye to each other.  The remaining couple, the Egyptian woman, and I walk a bit further up the street, until we come to a hundred-year-old apartment building.  I’ve seen it before, but I’ve never been inside.  It is made up of a handful of units, all in a row, each of which is funky and unusual.  The outside of the building is painted white with dark brown trim, and there are a couple of doors at street level.  The place is old and not particularly clean, but clearly it is well-loved by the people who live there.  It appears to be a kind of collective.  I peer into one of them, and see an open space with high ceilings, dark red wood floors, and a few chairs scattered around.  It looks like a dance studio, only without all the mirrors.  I notice that there’s a loft area for a bedroom, and stairs that go down in the corner, presumably for a living area.  “Wow, this place looks amazing,” I say to the couple.  “Are the other apartments this cool?”

“Yeah,” the wife says.  “They’re all different, though.  Ours is only one story.  This one’s three, and the others are either one or two.”  She points to a hand-drawn map on the wall that is a layout of the building that shows how to get to the door of each unit.   There is a hand-written list of “things to do” (recycling, weeding, touch-up painting, etc.) next to that, with a tenant’s name after each of the tasks.

“I applied for an apartment here a few years ago, actually,” I say, “but I found a cheaper place.  I always wanted to see the inside.”  I look back and forth between the couple and the woman, smiling mischievously.  “Any chance I could see your places?  No pressure.”  The Egyptian woman says, “Sure you can, in a few minutes.”  The wife also agrees, but they want a chance to clean up their place first.  I turn and gesture toward the coffee shop next door.  I ask the Egyptian woman, “Shall we?” and we walk together into the shop.

The inside of the coffee shop is as funky and cool as the apartment building.  Wood floors, dark brown leather chairs, bookshelves, and a battered upright piano decorate the place.  I walk over to the piano and play a few chords, very lightly, with my right hand.  The piano isn’t as sturdy as it looks, and it sways back and forth.  It seems to be there just for show, and isn’t really playable anymore.  I lean it a bit to the side, and the leaning dampens the strings, so the music stops.  I walk away from the piano to the counter, serve myself a cup of coffee from the drip machine, and then go over to sit across from the Egyptian woman in one of the comfortable chairs.

Suddenly some scratchy orchestral music starts to play, from what sounds like an antique phonograph.  I look across the room and see the black woman I’d met in the park, with a very interesting contraption on the table next to her.   I stand up, walk over to her and say, “What a pleasant surprise!  And what an interesting machine!  What is it?”

She gestures toward it and waves her hand in a motion for me to have a closer look.  I move my head down near it, and see that it is, in fact, very similar to a phonograph.  Instead of the big horn speaker, however, it has a beautiful wooden box with the speakers built into the sides, and it has a record-like mechanism that spins, with a needle in the record to create the background orchestra score, but there’s an intricate mechanism on top of the spinning record, made of gold, that plays a small grooved piece of wood (a tongue depressor or popsicle stick) by sliding it back and forth like a violin bow across an electrical pickup or some such thing, in order to create a violin sound.  “That’s absolutely ingenious,” I tell the woman, “and so fragile-looking.”

“I’ve had this since I was a little girl, but it’s older than I am,” she says.  “It belonged to my mother, and she got it when she was a little girl.”

“It’s beautiful; I love it,” I say.  “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

I straighten up and walk back to where the Egyptian woman is sitting.  “Well, are you ready?”  I ask her.  “Thanks so much for letting me see your place.  I really appreciate it.”  She stands up, and we walk out the door together, back into the warm sun.  We turn to go inside, and that’s when I wake up.

Interesting.

It was great to see them.  The last couple of times I’ve been up in Seattle, they had been in Portland, so our paths hadn’t crossed.  We do talk on the phone regularly, but it’s not the same, especially when a new baby is involved.  We went for brunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant called Azul, then went back to the house and just kinda hung out for a while.  They were packing for a trip, so I just stayed downstairs and played with Niece 1 and Niece 2 while Nephew was upstairs sleeping.

We all went our separate ways around 1:30, and since I had no agenda for the rest of the day, I decided to take a rest from driving and go sit in a park for a while.  Naturally I had to drive for quite a while to get to the park, but the plan was set.  I headed down to GasWorks Park, in the Fremont district.  That’s the short version of the story.  The long version is that there were two or three large festivals in Seattle that day, and traffic was nightmarish.  I also took a wrong turn and ended up going across the short bridge to Eastlake (I think. . .?) and hung out in a tiny little park along Lake Union for a while, exploring and walking through the neighborhood a bit before driving back across the bridge to Wallingford, which is a neighborhood that I could quite easily see myself living in.  By the time I got to GasWorks Park, I was ready to relax.  There was some sort of folk arts festival happening, so I was glad to have gotten there early enough to check it all out.

Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I was very glad I did.  There were lots of colorful costumes, great gypsy klezmer music, naked people (some painted, others not), belly dancers. . .

(Can I just take a minute here to say that the naked dancing guy had a surprisingly gigantic scrotum?  I rarely feel the need to mention things like that (mostly cause I don’t see many scrota!), but I mean, jeez.  You’d find it worth mentioning too, if you’d seen it.  I’m just saying.  The security guy finally made him wear pants, which he grudgingly put on, but kept pulling them down as low as they would go, showing fully half of his ass and barely concealing him in the front.  Yeesh.  Anyway. . .I don’t want to devote too much time to scrota; I feel that I’ve done enough already.  Moving on.)

. . .and, of course, the gas works itself.  This is one of the weirdest parks anywhere, and it’s in one of the most beautiful settings in all of Seattle.   It’s slightly sinister, utterly fascinating, and endlessly photogenic.

I seem to remember signs posted around the park that said things like, ‘Wash Your Hands After Touching Grass’ and ‘Do Not Lie On Grass; Please Use Blankets’ and things like that, but I couldn’t find any of those this time.   The city must have cleaned the place up a bit more since the last time I was there.  It’s been a few years.

Anyway,  the day was lovely, and I was glad to have had the extra time to spend in such a leisurely way.  I love Seattle, and every time I go, I toy with the idea of moving there.   Here’s the view from the park.  If you click on it, you’ll see that it’s full-size so that you can really get a sense of it.  It’d be amazing after dark too.

I don’t know that I’ll actually move there.  I have good things going for me here (not to mention extremely cheap rent), but I do love it, and I always come back and look at apartments on ListByCraig in various neighborhoods, trying to decide which area would suit me.

Le Sigh.  Je t’aime, EmeraldCity.

I left my bass in the car and walked inside to check the place out and say hi to BT.  He was there, naturally, getting the PA system all set up.  The drummer was also there, and it was my first time meeting him, since he was a fill-in guy that night as well.  In fact, it was BT’s first time playing a gig with him, which can be very telling about someone’s personality.

Usually during set-up, especially between new people, there’s a lot of conversation and chit-chat about all kinds of things, but this time there was a noticeable lack of conversation, with BT over on one side of the stage, turned away and working on something, and Drummer sort of sitting behind his kit, adjusting his cymbals and whatnot.  It was weird.  I broke the ice by asking the drummer about his drum kit, which was a beautiful, custom-made kit that was much too large for such a small place.  He had about a million different cymbals, too, which were sprawled out everywhere and left precious little room for BT and me.   I moved my monitor and microphone as far forward as I could, in order that I wouldn’t have two cymbals a foot from my head.

Finally it was time to start, and it turned out that the drummer didn’t have a good ‘feel’ at all.  I’m a competent enough bass player and musician that I can lock in with anybody, and I could not lock in with this guy.  His timing wasn’t solid, and he put in lots of unnecessary flourishes throughout every song.  Yeesh.

When we took a break, Drummer went to talk with a couple of his friends, and BT and I went outside to enjoy the cool breeze.  He told me that the first thing out of Drummer’s mouth when he arrived was, “You set everything up wrong.  It needs to be further over.”  He told me that he’d talked with Drummer about how much gear to bring, and Drummer assured him that he’d keep it small.  Drummer also brought this weird headphone mixer and effect thingy and tried to plug it in, and got angry with BT for not knowing how to use it.  This all went down right before I showed up, which explains the air of tension onstage.

Rule One of being a for-hire musician; never bite the hand that feeds you.  You don’t walk in and insult the person who hired you, and you certainly don’t want to be snippy with them if they don’t know how to use your personal equipment.  If you do decide to do those things, however, you’d better be a good enough player that your musicianship alone will hopefully redeem your behavior, because if you’re not, you won’t be called again, and worse yet, you will earn yourself a bad reputation around town.

Drummers are particularly prone to this sort of bravado.  This guy also grew up in Los Angeles, and he had what I like to call the L.A. Self-Promotion Syndrome.  Everyone I’ve ever met from L.A. has a particular way of talking about him- or herself.  They always seem to be trying to put themselves ahead of others, or to drop a name in just the right way; you get the idea.  It’s very peculiar and specific.  So you can imagine what a bravado-prone drummer, who’s also from L.A., is like.   Ugh.

We slogged through about four hours’ worth of songs, and I think three songs sounded good in that whole span of time.  We just had to laugh, but after a while, BT’s laugh reminded me of a sheet pulled over broken glass (a very memorable image from a very un-memorable Ayn Rand book).  There were three or four times we actually had to stop a song because it sounded so bad.  We got through the night, though, and at two-thirty in the morning, we finally got everything packed up and out of there.  Drummer gave me his business card and went on his way.  BT actually had a gig scheduled with him for the next day.  I don’t envy BT.  I crashed in his extra bedroom, in my sleeping bag on the floor, for about four hours, and then woke up at nine to meet my brother and his family for breakfast.  That’s a story for the next entry.

The thing that made this particular gig bearable, though, was a guy in the audience.  He requested songs like “Cocaine” and walked in front of the stage drunkenly appreciating us when we played his requests.  Then he started requesting songs by Sublime, which none of us knew.  “I’m from Long Beach,” he said, about fourteen times.  “I usually listen to gangsta rap, but after I saw Sublime, it made me realize that you guys [meaning musicians in general] can really play.”

“Well thanks, man,” BT said diplomatically.  “We’d sure play some Sublime if we knew any.  I’ll try and learn some for you by next time.”

“I’m from Long Beach,” the guy repeated, with significance.

“That’s cool,” Drummer said.  “I’m from L.A. too.”

“Yeah, man, so you know.  Sublime, man.  That’s where they’re from too.  You guys sure you don’t know any Sublime?”

This conversation happened three different times.  And for the record, why is someone who ‘normally listens to gangsta rap’ hanging out in an English-style bar, anyway?  Hilarious.

I’m really glad none of our friends were there to see that show.  The bar owner guy said, “Hey, guys, sorry there aren’t more people here for you.  Usually Friday nights are pretty crazy around here.   I don’t know what’s going on.”

“That’s okay,” I said, laughing and casting a glance over toward BT.  “Tonight that’s probably a good thing, at least as far as we’re concerned.”

Every once in a while you have gigs that just don’t work out.  It’s totally normal.  I look back on that show as being fun, though, if only for reasons other than it was supposed to have.  It certainly wasn’t stressful or anything.  We just laughed our way through train wreck after train wreck, which has its own special form of appeal.

And they say there is no fate, but there is; it’s what you create.  Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second.  Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born.  But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone (or something) to make it all right, and it never comes.  Or it seems to, but doesn’t, really.

And so you spend your time in vague regret, or vaguer hope, for something good to come along.  Something to make you feel connected; to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is, I’m so angry.  And the truth is, I’m so fucking sad.  And the truth is, I’ve been so fucking hurt for so fucking long, and for just as long have been pretending I’m OK.  Just to get along; just for - I don’t know why - maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to, or care about, mine.

Well, fuck everybody.

Amen.

–Synecdoche, New York

I’m posting the link to the article here because I want to be able to revisit it every so often, in the dark times, to renew my inspiration.  If you’re interested in music, and movies, and twentieth-century pop culture, I think you’ll appreciate this article.

Enjoy!

* * * * *

RockShowGirl and I join a game.  It’s a game that you only play when you’re asleep, and it manipulates your neural pathways to control your movements in the game.  She is asleep on the sofa; I am leaning on my arms on the front of an upright piano.  We shudder as we feel the game move inside us, starting with the paralysis of our muscles, the same way that the brain does when we are asleep.   I feel the game make its way through my arms, then my shoulders, and finally my brain.  A voice says, “Extend your primary finger.”

“Which one is that?”  I ask.

“The cute one,” RockShowGirl says.  I raise my first finger.

We are swirled through a kind of blackness, and then we’re in.

I am in college, studying music.  I’m on a break between classes, and I’m looking for a bathroom.  I don’t need to use it, but I just want to know where it’s located.   I walk all through the main buildings, and along the way I peek into two different teachers’ lounges, the main one upstairs and the smaller ancillary one in the basement.  I am surprised to see that there are magnum-sized bottles of wine alongside the coffee and soda machines in the main lounge, and a box of wine downstairs.

After I’m done with a class, I walk down the stairway from the upper level to ground level, and a volleyball comes bouncing down the stairs from behind me.  “Kick it,” a voice says.  I don’t, so a red-haired guy appears on the stairs in front of me, saying, “KickitkickitkickitkickitKICKITKICKIT.”  He multiplies his image many times, right before my eyes, and I realize he is a hallucination.  He is the creator of the game.   Careful not to speak out loud and attract attention to myself, since there are other students on the stairs as well, I think to him, “I’m not in the game right now.  This is life.”

“This is the game.  My game.  If you don’t like it, you can make your own.”  All of the images of him disappear, which leaves me and a handful of students at the bottom of the stairs.  The ball has disappeared as well.  I am beginning to be afraid.

I go to my next class.  There are two girls who stand and talk loudly to each other, telling stories and laughing, throughout the entire class period.  The professor sees them but goes on as if nothing is happening.  Many of us are annoyed.  After class is over, I walk with one of my friends, an attractive black woman who I’ve known from our years together in the music program.  “Wow, what was all that about?”  I ask her.

She laughs.  “I know.  Those two could have gotten away with murder in there, and the teacher wouldn’t have said a thing.  She’d probably have used them as characters for her next lecture.”

We walk down the stairs, which are suddenly completely filled with multiple visages of a single person.  He is taller than the red-haired man, and better-looking.  He’s extremely well-dressed, wearing a dark gray suit and paisley tie.  He seems to be the character that the game’s creator uses as a spokesperson.  He gives us an instruction, which we ignore and continue to talk with each other.  I can see by my friend’s facial expression that she has heard the voice too.  The creator appears, takes control of our bodies, and walks us like marionettes up and down the stairs a couple of times, very quickly, telling us that he can make us go wherever he wants us to go, and that we are powerless to do anything about it.  He smiles a Cheshire cat smile, and starts to disappear out of the top of my vision, at which point I woke up, lying on my stomach in the same position I’d been in at the piano in the beginning of the dream.

* * * * *

I was awake now, and I could see traces of the smile in the top corner of my eyes for two or three seconds after I woke up.  I rolled over to get the blood flowing in my arm, which had become a bit numb from lying in that strange position, and went back to sleep.

* * * * *

I am with my friend again.  We are in a music class this time, listening to Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in order to analyze it.  The professor is talking about how it’s the most difficult piece in the piano’s repertoire, and that Rachmaninoff was the only one who was technically proficient enough to play it, and that Rachmaninoff toured Europe for the last two decades of his life in order to play that demanding and theatrical piece.

After the class is over, we are talking and walking out the door of the music department and into the hallway, at the end of which a young guy passes us in the opposite direction, playing a French horn silently.  We smile to each other and comment on how serious the guy is about the French horn.  “That was really weird,” she says.  “Why does he even need to carry it around if he’s just going to practice fingerings?”

“Yeah, he could’ve done that in the air,” I reply.

My friend suddenly comes to an abrupt halt.  “Wait a minute,” she says, looking intently at a particular point in the corner of the stairway, which I know means that she is talking to the creator.  There are other students around us, and they are giving us strange looks.  The thought crosses my mind that these other students may be nothing more than projections made by the creator to make us feel like we’re a little bit crazy for communicating with him directly and breaking the illusion of the game.  My friend points back upstairs toward where we’d seen the guy playing the French horn.  “There was music, wasn’t there?  Just now.  You took it away, didn’t you?”   It seems that music makes the game players impervious to the demands of the creator, and my friend has realized it.

The face of the contemptuous spokesperson appears above us.  He gestures at the other students.  “Do you REALLY want to be one of these pathetic people all around you, who spend their time thinking about nothing but their trivial little thoughts?  And songs?”

“Yes,” both of us reply, “that’s exactly what we want.  We want to be ourselves.  We want to be human beings.  We want out of this game.”

The face of the spokesperson becomes the face of the creator.  “Tell that to the millions of people who are already here.  They’ve given up their lives in that world so that they can join me here in this one.  We’ve all seen enough anime to know that your spirit doesn’t need a body in order to stay alive.  Life is better here.”

I take my friend’s hand and lead her away, saying, “We’re happy as we are, thank you.”

This infuriates the creator, and his incarnations start to appear all around us.  The wind swirls and howls, and debris from buildings is launched into the air.  Parked cars slide a few inches along the pavement, and the ones that are moving are blown slightly off course by the gusts of wind.

We smile and walk obliviously, humming the melody from the Rachmaninoff piano concerto as we walk through it all, completely unaffected by the chaos.  We have won the game.