at a hipster coffee shop where, new since my last visit, the place has a piano. a Sohmer. good brand. i don’t know how this place does so well that it can purchase things like that, so i’m guessing it’s a donation or some tax gambit. if i had the poise i would sit down and play the chopin etude op. 10/1 that i ripped through this morning and last night. i switched between that chopin and less strenuous ragtime pieces that were new to me. a strange back and forth to me but one which i imagine a casual overhearer would not regard.  i refer to the casual overhearer. that would be the neighbors and passers-by who live in or have reason to pass within earshot of my piano practices. when i play more i get comments. people seem to like it, but one fellow attempted a petition to have me evicted, and even suggested he would lobby some city council or community board to have musical instruments in apartment buildings banned. he was a vacuous blowhole in his pursuit which was (from what i am told) rebuffed in ways both polite and brusque. he was also making demands of the landlord, demanding that he make major renovations to his apartment, or something like that. i never got the details of his gripes but whilst talking to others of having me evicted he approached me to ask if i was satisfied with the wy the landlord deals with problems, such as plumbing and leaky ceilings and whatever else. i said i was fine with it all, though i do not demand perfection. i think this blowhole sensed an opening in my ambivalance about “perfection” but he gave up on me after several minutes of ornery, pointed questions.  ===== well, if switching from chopin to ragtime isn’t enough of a signal of bipolar tendency then maybe switching between this writing endeavor and the AlphaBetty saga video game is comparable.  ===== thinking about that conversation with Jim (not his real name) a few days ago. old friend/acquaintance from the neighborhood. good guy, i guess, but boy does he know how to bury a conversation in grandiosities. i asked if he’d heard that our mutual friend had died. he said that he talked to someone who had tolked to someone who was very close to her, and that this person said she had a weak heart. i did not contradicct this, but the girl did not have a bad heart. she overdosed on vodka and pills. i felt like telling him the truth would be akin to spreading bad gossip, even if the focus of said gossip is not around to suffer the indignities of its consequence. everyone at the funeral seemed to know what happened. the priest even addressed the issue of addiction, referring to “that hole in your soul” that we fill with alcohol and substances. without informing Jim of what really happened i noticed that familiar tendency toward brinksmanship and oneupsmanship when something like this happens. Jim was making himself sound like he knew everything and had inside sources, albeit second generation. Jim said he heard from Jose (not his real name, either) and that Jose had heard from an individual very close to the girl who died. in fact Jose heard about it on Facebook, probably from the same status update that informed me that something bad happened. i was not attempting to compete with Jim on any of this but when I told him Jose and I (among others) were at thhe funeral he backed off sounding like an authority on this matter, but not without adding that he remembered when the girl who died was new on the scene, establishing himself as a presence in the context of her passage. ===== aha, maybe paragraph breaks can be made to work.