Piano Museum

Alone at last... you... me... and a couple cans of compressed air. Are you ready to dust off these keys again? Yes, I have returned to these not so distant shores, but my entrance is announced less with the trumpeting fanfare for a homecoming hero, and more with the mournful dirge for a beached whale. Okay, okay — melodramatics are registering off the scale at the moment, so a mere two sentences into this endeavor (ah, sweet endurance), maybe a brief break is in order. You know how the saying goes: if you get tired, learn to rest, not quit.

Well, okay here goes — going to try something along the lines of Venus riding the gentle surf on her shell. Could I be feminine, delicately modest? It may be harder than the average, and it may beat slower than most, but I do have a heart, and right now it hurts more and more with each throb. But it still feels full and imbued with a natural lightness, as if I am a carefree dove gliding through the sky with a satisfied belly and an arrow through the chest.

Being at odds with oneself is not unusual; it cannot be, because everyone seems to agree that circumstances are never black and white. Life is lived inside those million shades of gray. And this is how we spend it... quibbling over where any given subject falls on the monochromatic spectrum that defines our world while escaping all definition itself. Whoops... let my guard down for an instant and I make a dive straight for that rabbit hole.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

On some lazy afternoon this week, I thought of this quote in relation to the pair of us. Suppose it is pretty plain which of us is which. There were times I envied you, or gag emulated you, but that may as well have been another lifetime. In fact, if that does not perfectly fit the description of another lifetime, I do not know what does. Envy and emulation had be replaced with something, and I chose an alternative I could not have described better myself:

You kind of serve to remind me of who I wish to be.

And suddenly it hits me with all of the vigor of an ACME anvil pregnant with satisfaction now years overdue, finally giving birth to it by pancaking that elusive goddamn roadrunner the way laws of physics had always intended: you have represented something different to me for such a long time now that I forgot how to treat you like a person.