Minuet - Bach

Reading over the posts I left behind this summer and I can detect a change in my voice, my mind. So many questions from only months ago, possiblities, that I've either answered or altered; or, perhaps most appropriately, simply replaced. A childish mind will turn to noble ambition...Young love will become deep affection...The clear water's surface reflects growth...

When Beatrice and Karfilov visited me at work last week I was in a rotten mood. When Beatrice proceeded to pry into my oyster of a guitar-playing career, I was not a little terse with him. The opportunity to plant a little grain of sand, something to polish into a genuine pearl, has since passed: regardless, I fear most of our relationship will remain dangerously built on an eroding hillside of ifs and somedays. No more, I'm not going to exist in the radius of Beatrice's fantasy anymore. I don't live with him and I'm only obliged to see him when he makes the effort to visit Philadelphia.

He's building a recording studio in his parents' basement, with his parents' money. When he asked how my hand was coming along I told him that it wasn't and that I needed people to play with if I want any chance of improving. He suggested I jump into open-mike night at the Cube; it's a familiar, accomodating location (by virtue of my own labors, not his) and provides an atmosphere for the blossoming performer, especially because, on many Sunday nights, there are more people on stage than there are at the bar. I told him to do the same and his reaction mirrored mine. He attempted a joke at his own playing surpassing mine, and years of let-down feelings finally began to spill out. Beatrice, we had three years and a basement to be something. It means more to me than you, I have no doubt about it.

But, it felt good to finally tell him off for his own time wasting. I've determined that Beatrice will be the same person in five years that he is now, confident of the ends and still struggling to even grasp the realm of the means. Still sure that, some where down the line, he'll launch his attempt on the world, once he's gathered all of the salty pieces to do his dirty work for him. I'm sorry, Beatrice, but I've spent nearly a year and a half on Something Else complaining about you.

And with that, you've been written out. Time for more interesting characters.

I've been in contact with Army, my exgirlfriend whose occupation I've not disguised too cleverly. I would like to see her again, someday, and if I'm reading her messages as she's intended them it may well be a shame that she's married. But we hardly know each other any more, and I'm only beginning to figure myself out, anyhow. I mention this because Verde found me online yesterday while I was indulging in an Evony riff on Facebook (Rojo is playing now, as well); and, I'm getting strong signals from one of the new girls at work (two, as a matter of fact, but the other is young), and I surrender to the fact that La Playa del Cochinero, whom I respect, has an indiscrete crush on her. What's a conscious son-of-a-bitch to do? I thought my days of stabbing friends and equals in the back were over, not merely preambulatory. I'd finish the thought with, "Oh well," but that seems a little preemptive and a little more presumptuous.

I'll admit I was hoping for something introspective or relavatory to come out of today's session and it just isn't happening. I've accomplished almost everything I laid out in the last post, however, so I'll make some new bullets to load up and fire.

The Revolver Method. Might be on to something there.

On a final thought, I was kidnapped Monday night, by aliens, who infiltrated my body in the clever forms of sleeplessness and alcohol; they took me away, performed their tests and procedures, wiped my memory of the whole affair, and returned me to earth within the hour. I know that twenty or thirty minutes lapsed between the kidnapping and my reinstatement, because I remember being at the bar, and then waking up as Aja walked me home: I wasn't drunk (I fried two beautiful eggs as soon as she got me upstairs, perfectly sober). I was very cold, however, and wet, and rewired in such a way that the boot-up process took two blocks' worth of time for me to remember who and what I was, and what everything around me was, the shapes and shadows of dark buildings at one in the morning under the soggy tungsten wash of high street lamps, and where we were, that stretch of avenue that I walk almost every day, but couldn't recognize regardless, and how the rain was and why the cold meant. If a dentist has ever put you under and you wake up without teeth, wondering how you got ten feet down the hall and why you can't feel anything in your mouth, you've probably been kidnapped, too.