I guess I haven’t used this keyboard in a while. It was buried so deep in my coat pocket I had to work to get it out. It was under a wad of napkins, some business cards, and some glossy postcard-size fliers for places I’ve been through lately.

And pens. For some reason that pocket was stuffed with pens. Red, blue, black, and green. These are pens I bought in a moment of imagining I would make good on my lifelong goal of transcribing Bach’s Wall-Tempered Clavier. That project would require a multi-colored array of pens, for to distinguish the individual voices of the fugues.

I quickly came to the conclusion that Bach’s fugal writing is not the best vehicle for learning how to write fugues. That is not a new or unique insight. A certain type of musicologist has long complained that Bach never wrote a perfect fugue, and that the physical dexterity and spiritual riches Bach felt lived in contrpuntal music resulted in music whose structural freedoms made fundamental theoretical study almost pointless.

So for me to continue the transcription project would be for the purposes of servitude and worship. Maybe “worship” is too strong a word, but transcribing anyone’s music for purposes other than familiarizing yourself with it comes close to servitude and evokes images of monks transcribing the Bible with calligraphy pens and being forced to start from the beginning if, at page 3,982, they forget to capitalize the G in God.

….

I am at a dive bar, seats filled entirely by old men and people like me on their way to becoming sad old men sitting alone at bars.

Nothing much has been happening lately. I noticed a sharp pain in my chest a few weeks ago and have lately noticed it again. It wouldn’t seem serious enough to be angina, but I’ve been so lazy lately that some evils could be blubbering up from these innards.

I read once that Horowitz did not like eating in public restaurants because music was usually played at such places. Music — especially live music — disturbed his innards. I don’t know how severe that condition was (he was evidently able to deal with it enough to eat at public places as often as anyone might) but I have experienced the same thing. There is a certain turning of the gut that accompanies my experience of music and great oratory, as well as most creative efforts. Not to be crude (who, me?) but taking a dump can have the effect of vacating (hah) my creative energies and ideas. There is something about tension (or accumulation) in my lower tracts that seems to be connected to creative energies.

Accumulation. Man, I just can not talk about shitting without everything sounding like a pun of some sort.

Someone here is doing crossword puzzles, writing answers into a giant book of puzzles. Coincidental to the above ruminations on my turgid innards I find that the very sight of an crossword puzzle grid stirs something in my gut the same way I imagine Horowitz’s gut spun when hearing a string quartet play over his steak dinner. I experience similar sensations of anticipation and hunger when I see a blank piece of paper or a blank page in a notebook. The seemingly infinite possibilities lingering in the platform of a blank surface has astonished me since childhood.

Daggumit, I have to take a dump.

….

Hokay, it’s an hour or so later and II am still at the sad old man bar. The real old timers have gone home (or wherever) and it’s just me and another middle-aged loser on our shared path to oblivion.

The police appear to be raiding the bar across the street. Siren lights flail fear into this place as the guns and clubs are wielded at the other place.

I knew a kid in grade school who claimed he could identify sirens. He claimed he could identify a Berlin siren from hearing it for a split second, and after 3 or 4 seconds he claimed he could tell you what type of crisis to which the police car or ambulance was headed.

I never quizzed him on this, but his claims of siren prodigy occasionally surface in my obviously idle mind. I imagine the Siren Master at work, reclining, smoking a pipe, casually but authoritatively telling the tale behind a range of seemingly cacophonous siren sound samples.

“It’s a Tokyo ambulance headed to the home of an elderly nun who tripped over a power strip.”

“It’s a Detroit police car, There was a disturbance at one of the chopshops.”

“Do you hear that dull dripping noise in that siren? That’s an Israeli police cab responding to a possible terrorist attack.”

One siren sound provokes a stern frown and sadness from the siren prodigy.

“That one’s coming for me.”