the surest way i know to make time vanish is to sit and play the piano. i needed to blow a half hour this afternoon and all it took to make it seem like that period of time did not exist was to sit and plow through some Mozart sonatas. all that time vanished. i stood up from the piano like a time warp had just ended. i re-discovered this phenomenon a few weeks ago, maybe longer. all i di dwas sit and play through some piano music and i was baffled to look up at find that 3 hours had evaporated. 3 hours of this life. 3 hours of any life. 3 hours of the human experience, 3 hours of sunlight, 3 hours of taxis driving around the boroughs, of nuns running bald through vatican halls, of new holes poked through old walls by hourless strangers. this helps explain what happened to my youth. that is where it went. i remmeber piano lessons at times. a friend from school and i shared the same teacher for a few years and we both agreed earlier this year that neither of us could remmeber much of what happened in those lessons. for me the breakthroughs came at summer music festivals and in college, but my path through grade school am dhigh school makes it hard for me to believe i ever made it into a major conservatory. alas, none of it matters now, little of it ever did.
i watched Kramer vs. Kramer, forgetting how lovely it was, and trying now to identify the filming locations. i saw that film when it was new and I lived in Tampa but if i ever thought of that movie since then i would have forgotten that it was set in New York City. there is th efamous Central Park scene of the 7-year-old running to Merryl Streep but other than that i would have forgotten that it was filmed here. they lived on the upper east side of manhattan, probably in the east 70s or 80s, in an apartment that looked like a compartment in a rocket ship. the salaries quoted in the film brought down, i think. they could have written the script using percentages or vagaries and not the exact amounts of money made by the characters. dustin hoffmann made $28,200 by the end of the film. meryl streep was making $31,000. those salaries today might get you a room with 15 of your closest friend but in the 70s it evidently set up you with a respectible livelihood. my first real job in new york got me $26,000 to start, and in about a year i was blasted off to $35,000, a move which the HR Director at the time compared to winning the lottery. nonsense, i think, nonsense, i thought, then as now. raises are one of the oddest benchmarks of success among the corporata, signaling little actual increased moneys. even with that relatively stratospheric leap i felt i was not making much more money each week, and of course over the years i came to conclude that corporate salary was just not worth it compared to the time-vacuum that parallels. by the end of corporate is made what would seem to be an enviable salary but i envy it not now.
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writing sonnets… harder than i realized. it takes concentration. more. more.
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