Day spent eliminating stacks of paper, some of it has been sitting in place for years. I found a notebook with handwritten comments I wrote in 2008. It’s a sort of haunting to find words you wrote and thoughts you articulated when you have no memory whatsoever of recording them.it’s from a period when I treated my web sites more like a real job. I barely pay them any mind these days because doing so is a counterproductive waste of time. But back when traffic was good and I seemed to have a magic touch I kept running notes on what happened with the sites on given days Traffic used to alternate among sites. Dictionary site would get hammered one day, weather the next. dictionary still gets occasional bursts of a few thousands hits in a day but it’s rare. I just can’t do that work any more. The work got old a long time ago. I never imagined my little bullshit hobby sites would turn into my livelihood. Now the question becomes:What bullshit endeavor that I presently pursue will become my next livelihood?
The notebook isfrom when I first met Dave. I see where I commented on how he had been following my web sites since roughly the late 1990s before standing up in a bar in 2008, pointing at me and yelling “I THINK YOU’RE SORABJI!” I did not document that particular night, as it happened before I started writing in this notebook. I guess this notebook stops around the time I got blown up by Chinese hackers. That was 7-1/2 years ago and I think it’s only been the last year or so that I don’t feel the repurcussions of that incident with every single day. maybe only once a week, or even less.
Rummaging through old papers, some of them mine. I mean, stacks of phtocoopies and printouts of classical piano music are my main target for purging, but I’ve salvaged a handsome stack of music and other things that I wrote. Some of it dates back to high school, maybe even earlier.
A copy of a piano sonata written specially for me will be a welcome addition to the stack of papers leaving my domicile. I intend to leave it at the Salvation Army or someplace similar, the name of the composer prominently present on the cover along with rubber stamps of my name and web site address. I am not a spiteful or vindictive sort but the way that guy treated me is enough to make me feel that retribution has its merits. If word gets to him that his scores washed up at a thrift shop I hope he further learns that they had belonged to me and that I dicarded them. I honestly forgot he had written this sonata for me, and from browsing its pages I can see why I never took an interest in it. It looks like something a machine would have written.
I remember finding a stack of piano scores at The Strand bookstore. It was 1991. It was not uncommon to find used piano scores there but it was usually pretty elementary stuff, meaning materials used when you are first learning to play, or else pop music. This one time the scores were all the good stuff: Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, an Anton Rubinstein Concerto, Ravel Gaspard… Then I noticed a name either printed or hand-written on the first page of one of the books: Michael Fardink. I knew Michael briefly from a concert and a master class he conducted at the University of Tampa. He played Liszt’s “Norma” Fantasy, a piece that both and I my mother heard there for the first time. It became an instant and lasting favorite for both of us.
As I continued to puruse the stack of piano scores at The Strand it slowly dawned on me that Michael Fardink must have died. I would confirm this years later, when a global computer network known as the Internet became available, leading me to an image of his tombstone someplace way out in Western New York. I did not buy any of his scores that day, as I had no money for such things and I seem to remember thinking I already had copies of everything there that might have interested me.
Thinking of that incident today made me think that someone spotting all this paper I am leaving at a thrift shop might make them think I died. Hah. If that encourages someone to make contact with me then so much the better, I guess.
It is depressing in a way to consider the time and industry that went into generating all this paper. I printed from PDF scores for piano pieces that were over 100 pages in length, doing this mostly at the Time & Life building if I recall correctly. At least I didn’t burn too muh of my own printer resources, but it still seems gluttonous as hell when I never even learned to play certain of these piece. All 3 Ginastera sonatas, printed in full, the pages basically untouched since I printed them. I remember going in to the office on weekends just to print this stuff out, though i probably framed this with the delusion that I was doing something work-related. They are nicely-enough printed, so anyone who finds them at a Salvation Army and who has an interest in the scores should be pleasantly rewarded.
