For some reason am thinking of a joke I heard a year or so ago, the source of this joke I can not remember.
Q: What’s the difference between a pop musician and a jazz musician?
A: A pop musician plays 3 chords for 1,000 people, a jazz musician plays 1,000 chords for 3 people.
I must have thought of that today while listening to Coltrane almost play some standards.
I registered my car in NY state today, and got my first ever NY state license plates. Whoopee. I was C662 at the Herald Square DMV, and I was in and out of there in about 40 minutes. The seats, which I remember from when II had to transfer the title of the car to me earlier this year, are like church pews. The individual behind the counter who processed my paperwork exhibited a withering disdain for all comers, so II did not take his superior attitude too seriously.
That sort of thing used to bother me, and it still does in the case of knowledgeable people who hog their knowledge like greedy misers, dispensing it only when the opportunity to do so can be accompanied by cynical condescension.
On the other hand II guess it could be said that all questions are stuupid these days, since the answer to virtually any question is to Google it, this approach confirming the role of information aggregators as market movers and even cultural commentators and spokespeople (hah, I almost said spookspeople… This keyboard keeps wanting to repeat letters.).
Being aloof about one’s knowledge can, in most circumstances, come with the risk that your knowledgge can easily be gained aby someone else. Your ideas can be re-purposed, and today’s infinite bandwidth offers the perfect platform on which everything can become cliché. I think that anything that can be digitized can and will inevitably become cliché.
I believe that human consciousness will, in my lifetime, become a digital product, capable of being uploaded to a P2P network and subject to arbitrary growth and development in a yet-to-be-developed network environment in which data moves about like the chaos of atoms colliding in the air. I think that the network of the brain and the nervous system (and thus of human consciousness) will be found to be replicatable, and a bridge between this inferior vessel of the body and the substance of our consciousness will be built.
But I’m just talking on instinct. I have no inside information on what the cloners are doing to transmute consciousness into a P2P Or other type of network petri dish resource. Though I do imagine that this new life form will start itself as what we now call a virus.
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So an
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That was interesting. As I started typing “So anway” up there I got a tap on the shoulder from an old friend who saw me here and said hi. I was unawaree she had moved to Massachusetts to live with her new husband on a farm. Cows, horses, chickens, roosters, and hogs. And a llama.
I think the last time I saw Susan was here at this place a year or so ago. I also think I was sitting here on this spot when I saw her throuugh the glass next to me. There is a glass separator between this seat and the seats to my right, and she was there with some other people. I should find what I said about that near-encounter (we did not speak that night as we did tonight) because I seem to remember having thoughts about it.
Thoughts. What does that mean? What are those.
I am reaching that age where any and all of my potential “interests” are getting married or becoming otherwise inaccessible. I’ve seen or heard from 3 or 4 women ini the last few months who have footnotes in my mind attached to them. Footnotes saying something, not necessarily articulatel, like “there’s one who got away.”
Or is it I who got away? Not likely. I’m the permanently single man sitting here at the bar pecking into his cell phone contemplating or at least imagineering (coincidental to this monologue) an affair with a woman who is not legally married but might as well be. I did something like that in the late 1990s. A married woman came to my apartment morning after early morning. She initiated every single encounter, and I thought it was just sex, and that the anchor of her marriage removed any possibility for emotional rupture.
Was I ever wrong.
But I don’t want to talk about that. I am all about my new license plates. The first three letters are EKW. I sometimes walk the streets of New York engaging in my favorite road trip game of imagining what the 3-letter bits on license plates might mean in the context of a personals ad. SWF =, of course, single white female. CBL = Christian Black Lady? hey, why not. So my random 3 letters, EKW, with the demanding K and E, might be better suitied to generalities and not personals ads.
Esoteric Kitty Whiskers.
Electric Kitchen Widget.
Energizing Kellogg’s Wheaties.
Exotic Krakatoa Watcher
Egyptian Killing Wagon.
Yes, that is it. My Lincoln Town Car is an Egyptian Killing Wagon. That is perfectly appropriate. If ever there was a case of someone whose car did not match their personality I think my Lincoln Town Car and me would be it. So why not turn said Town Car into an exotic and invincible talisman, capable of murderous road trips in and only in Egypt?
