Aha, I forgot my book so I guess I’ll unzip the old keyboard and type into this box. I am at a coffee shop in a sunlight that makes it hard to see the screen. The book I forgot is the Elizabeth Bishop book I read fromt yesterday at the boneyard.

I am thinking how different my today might have been had I reacted differently to a mis-directed question. I walked into Socrates Sculpture Park and someone asked me “Audition?” I said “Huh?” and gestured that I didn’t know what the fuck, to which the man said sorry, you looked familiar. I mumbled “No problem” and went about my business — my vital, vital business — only to think that maybe I should have said “Audition? Sure, let’s do it.” I might then have been escorted to a stage or similar area, maybe handed a script, and you could now be talking to Judas in a fabulous new production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Or maybe the audition would have gone differently. Maybe they would ask “Where’s your tuba?” I would not have the wits about me to say wait, I thought this was auditioning to play pipe organ for the softball league. “There’s no pipe organ here,” they would say, and I would be offended.

Walking around today I imagined an interesting premise for a story. It’s based on something that actually happened to me once, a trivial incident which (like the JACKET REQUIRED meme) has lately stayed above the surface of my mind.

The incident was, briefly, this: I entered a room 5 or 6 steps behind a very beautiful woman who was known to many people in the room as unapproachably beautiful. I regarded her as such, and just to show that some things never change, I never found the nerve to talk to her.

Somehow, though, we ended up walking into the room at about the same time, in such a way that it looked like we were together. She entered the room first, then appeared to turn and look back at me as I entered the room, and we both just kept walking in morer or less the same direction. This passage was seen by several of my friends who were in the room at the time. They immediately concluded that we were together and that hey, Mark must have made his move on Danielle, good for him.

The thing is, I did not know Danielle was 5 steps ahead of me. The entrance to the building was very dark, and when I entered the room I remember seeing people I knew and saying hi to them. I never saw Danielle at all and would neverr have known she was there had others not approached me later and asked hey, what’s up with you two? I responded with a puzzled “what are you talking about?” and the story unraveled from there.

A minor incident, but one that stays with me for how it represents the random ways in which people are connected, even people who have all of nothing to do with each other.

So I imagined today a story about two people forever linked by a photograph, a non-doctored photograph which innocently makes these two people look like they know each other or are somehow involved. They do not know each other but when one of the people is involved in a girsly murder or a terrorist plot then all manner of conspiracy theories emerge, all of them diirected at the uninvolved bystander who, for the sake of the story’s narrative, might be me.

….

It is the next day. The above was written in glaring sunlight at an outdoor table of a coffee/smoothie shop on 35th Avenue near Steinway Street. This is coming from a familiar pub on Broadway.

I started writing into my 4-1/2″ x 3-1/4″ Inspira brand composition book, but I filled so many pages of that book last night that it feels weighted and forlorn, tired from receipt of the droning herd of words.

I was talking to myself about how nice it felt up at Calvary the other day. I have my spot to sit in and, at the boneyard, no one ever bothers me. Sometimes that is a good thing. If I think of myself at all I think this as a human who is content with himself no matter where he is, whether I am alone or among others. The company of others is no guarantee that loneliness or feelings of solitude will be quenched.

I know, though, that my cra=eative life would be richer with the steady company of others. I thrive on distraction, and the distraction of entertaining others around me would make me produce things all the time.

I used to be with a girl who liked to sit right next to me when I played piano. It wass straight out of a painting that we both knew, a painting of Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny sitting at the piano while he played. It’s a beautiful, corny, borderline kitsch painting that has Felix playing and smiling — blushing, even — as his sister rests her head on his shoulder.

“Felix and Friend” is, I believe, the name of the painting.

I and the girl who liked to re-create that pose didn’t last long enough, though the seating arrangement virtually always became too sexual too fast for me. Most girls I’ve dated have no interest in piano music, and I’ve dated a few women for more than a few months to find at the end that they had no memory of the fact that I even play the piano, I guess we hear what we want to hear, or else we do not hear what we do not need.

I have to stop typing now because the batteries on this keyboard are drying up.