I think I just experienced what it must be like to be a frustrated journalist, or writer of bit copy and pithy prose. You find yourself writing something that must be finished, contrary to your instincts and desires to do anything else. Maybe there is money at stake. Maybe there is some deadline or a family obligation. Whatever you would rather be doing you are instead in the galleys, writing and spending your time perfecting some piece of writing for professional level inspection.

Such was not the extreme where I just found myself, writing a piece I started last month and forgot about. I was not hating life over the toil, or loathing the task at hand. But I could see a little window open up into the worlds where that is true. Jobs performed as if one is doing time in prison. Tasks performed as if they are a penance.

Writing a silly piece for one of my sites I just kept thinking “This can’t take too much longer, right?” An hour passes, and the story is not finished. In fact, at the end of the hour I am looking toward expanding the story beyond the intended scope, which was reasonably narrow. I scale back that scope creep, to use a silly corporate term invoked when dealing with consultants who just wanted to stick to the framework of the RFP so their hourly pay did not deteriorate to $5.

So I think “I’ll just add a few pictures. That’s easy, right?” Nope. In the past I have been able to drag and drop photos onto WordPress, inserting them right onto the spot in the story where I wanted them. Not today. That did not work, as is consistent with the character of my life filled with shit that just does not work, or which is based on lies.

As the pictures laboriously trickle in through the more primitive means of individually uploading them through an upload form from the HTML 1 days I find myself giving up on hyperlinking key facts mentioned in the story to their citations. I don’t need to do that since nobody reads this shit closely enough to care about such fact-wringing. If anything it encourages a more active interest in the subject if it drives people to look things up and fact check for themselves. Maybe that is an SEO trend of which I am unaware: not linking but subtly encouraging readers to look it up, and find your other pages thereby. Some will doubtless choose their facts to suit their preconceptions. We all do it. It is the culture of lies that makes us who we are. If facts were truly facts there would be no discussion, no arguments.

Then I encounter one of the most aggravating bugs in all of computerdom, and indeed it goes back to the typewriter days. You accidentally leave the all caps button down, and look up to see that YoUR SENtENCeS ARE A SKyLINe ofmiXEd CasE capitOLitTIc NONsenSE. Oh how I hate when that happens. There is no universal way in computer text processing to choose that text and set it all to lower case. Or is there? It sounds like one of those problems the techies would just prefer to let us live with.

The extreme winds which blasted my face on the walk over here served as something of an antidote to the mounting aggravation and anxiety of this morning which extended into afternoon. The physical reaction to facing the wind, which felt like I was scaling a steep incline, I think gave physical gravitas to the aggravation, gave it something material (albeit the wind, the air, the invisible) against which to release itself.

Szymanowski on the Plex server, here at the 21st Street Library. Book on queue is “After Annie” by Michael Tucker. My first thought on seeing that title was, naturally enough, that this must be a survey of Woody Allen’s film œuvre after “Annie”, the one film Siskel and Ebert could fully agree on, and which both felt (at one point, at least) was possibly the greatest movie ever made. They felt this way in their early years as a team. I don’t know if that opinion changed in time.

“After Annie” is made available to the library by the generous support of the THOMAS & JEANNE ELMEZZI PRIVATE FOUNDATION. Did they just put stickers in their books and donate them to the library under the auspices of a false and non-existent “Foundation”? I could do that, right? Anyone could.

Aha, skepticism deflated, at least for now. They have a web site! What does not exhibit legitimacy other than a web site?

Aha, they appear to be real, with offices nearby on 23rd Street on what looks to be the same block or close to it as the Catherine Sheridan Houses.

Still, my current mindset gravitates toward the bullshit in this world. I saw some of it today, while writing that silly story for my silly web site. Too specific and wanky to go into, but suffice it to say that the world is made of lies, and that lies are what make the world go ’round.

The story of my mythical (i.e.: fabricated/lied) gig at the strip club is itself based on the foundation of lies that would have even made it possible. In the end maybe I should have filled my resumé with phony concert engagements, along with a handful of real ones. But in the end there was no way I could include the strip club on my resumé, even if it was the single most influential gig of my illustrious career. Hmm, hadn’t thought of that until now. In the end maybe those stripper girls hooked me up with piano playing jobs, linking me to their worlds of classical ballet and modern dance. That’s a story for you. Or is it? Must percolate.

…

Page 61 of “After Annie”: Ironically enough the characters in this book are smoking pot. Wouldn’t you know it, the smell of pot smoke is creeping through this library. It truly is, making me feel like capillaries are exploding and panic is arising. Did I bring the panic pills today? I don’t think I did. Might have to leave if this does not clear up soon. The smell is strong enough that it might linger in my shirt. Not that the smell is all that strong but my sensitivity to it is just that delicate, and that sensitivity has only gotten worse over time. I don’t like the stuff, never did.

Herbie takes the pipe, taps out the ash into the garbage and puts it in his pocket. “Maybe I should bring an extra pair of underwear. I hate walking around in moist shorts,” he says as they’re putting their coats on.

That dude is preaching to the choir as far where this individual reading his words is sitting. Moist shorts and being in the rain are enough to stoke my anxiety and dismay-at-being-alive to levels of urgent, metallic contortion.

Page 181 contains another reference to underwear. Perhaps underpants are a, you know, undercurrent to this book.

“He’s wearing his character’s underwear and it’s starting to smell.”

I do not even want to know what that is in reference to. Not going to bother with page 207. Might change the book rule so that I only do 61 if there is no 181, and forget about 207. Just stick to one page, not three. Yeah, I need rules like this.

No, really. I do. I seriously need rules in my life. Maybe I’ll enlist.

Mother once said she would commit suicide if I joined the military. It was in the Dodge Diplomat, I believe. I don’t know where we were going to or coming from but from behind the steering wheel she nervously adjusted her position in the seat, then made that comment. I do not remember the precise context but it was no doubt a reference to my father’s erstwhile attempts to convince me that what would be best for me was a career in the military. “They have a band there, you could play your piano” he added, late in the conversation.

The Army does in fact have an excellent band, though dad would not have known anything of their reputation save for what internal military types fed into their pamphlets. There is no shortage of great musicians who came out of the military ranks. That doesn’t mean I ever intended to be one of them.

Alright, the pot smoke is not letting up and it is making me feel SIIIIIIICK.

…

A few observations as I escaped the pot-smelling library. I might have enjoyed my presence there a little more had I noticed that a doppelgänger of Dimitri Shostakovich was seated right behind me. Spittin’ image, man. I could have run with that if the pot smoke served as a mind-lubricant and not a gut-churner.

More to the point, if I remember to look for it I will see if Channel 7 ABC TV has anything to report about that library today. As I left I saw an ambulance pulling up to the front door. A van from WABC Channel 7 TV had arrived moments earlier. The WABC van was possibly there as an ambulance chaser/police scanner eavesdropper. Or maybe the van was just there by coincidence, wrapping up its notes after doing a feature on the nearby ELMEZZI PRIVATE FOUNDATION and its mysteriously stickered books found at this and other AsLIC library branches. If so then maybe nothing truly newsworthy occurred at that library, save for my glorious arrival and ignominious departure.

But the smell of pot, well, maybe it was something else. The smell of DEATH, perhaps? No one at the library seemed alarmed about anything, though I believe I identified a security guard waiting at the door while the ambulance crew unfolded its wheelchair and other EMT paraphernalia. The library guard was making calm chitchat with someone else, so it looks like nothing major was afoot. But what of the pot smell? Did someone need weed to ease their pain? Or was I smelling something else, a new and unlabeled scent that, like pot, makes me ill?

I do love the smell of polecat.

…

Thinking, in a disjointed way, about this matter of listening to music while I write. It distracts at times, but also serves the purpose of complementing the work of these noise canceling headphones by further drowning out the noises of the uncancelable: Screaming babies, the cell phone announcers, the random spurts of noise that sometimes assume a physical form in the air around me.

(I’m not trying to sell you a set of headphones but these are pretty choice so far, at least up to my expectations: Sony MDR-1000X.)

If all music distracts to some extent then what should I play that might stimulate the thought process, or at least leave it to its own devices, unmolested?

Muzak?

I discovered Muzak when I was just out of the conservatory. I don’t know if it was the first sound of it or the first description of it but as soon as I understood what it was I thought that being the pianist for elevator and lobby music sounded like my thing. I wanted to be present and in the arena of working musicians, but I did not want to be noticed. Piano players at department stores and shopping malls had the dream jobs, I thought. All that prestidigitational industry going toward a productive end, possibly even reaching the heart and mind of at least one in the audience who had an appreciation for the music of Schubert, Chopin, and the rest. But Schubert and Chopin are not the stuff of Muzak, at least not in its native form. Famous melodies of these composers would have to be watered down and sapped up. I knew this, and embraced the possibility of leveraging 4 years at the conservatory into a cynical career of applying that training to its antithesis. And yet in so doing I felt I could reach a proper audience, albeit a new and as yet unarticulated one. They would hear my melodies and perhaps notice my cynical embellishments and think: “I should find the source of this music” or “I could do better than this” or “This guy speaks to my post-modern sense of polluting great music with superfluous filigree.”

I don’t know that I had a properly articulated æsthetic, but I didn’t think I needed one to at least get in the Muzak game.

Like most audition tapes I sent out back then, I was either rejected or ignored, I can’t remember which. I played plenty of background pianist gigs but never for Muzak.

My artistic invasion of Muzak could never have gotten far. Or if it did it might have gone too far, dumping on me a reputation I could never live down. Muzak is corporate music, the product of an aural bureaucracy. This insight may have informed ideas I had about corporate music, these ideas which arose during my 3 years at my first real job in New York at a company with countless layers of bureaucracy. First I imagined there would departments for every instrument of the orchestra, business units for every division (strings, brass, etc.), and executive level positions that guided the music from upstairs. It was important that the guidance of the music come from unseen people whose names were only known from organizational charts and mailing distribution lists. The meetings I attended or overheard while at corporate talked about supply chain management, distribution channels, plastic tube suppliers, etc. It was a cosmetics company, so talk of how chemicals and substances interacted with polyurethane and how gold lettering on a glass bottle might be rubbed off by a certain type of cardboard was the stuff of heated debate. Product developers constantly quizzed package engineers and scientists on the viability of their ideas, usually being told no, no, and no.

I imagined similar scenarios involving musicians who, holed away in their office towers, were handed down orders to make their instrument conform to upper management’s plan for an opera based on the life of Henry Winkler, or an oratorio which used text from poetry by Marilyn Monroe. The oboists might naturally present themselves as the obvious echo from the orchestra to the sweetness of Marilyn Monroe’s gentle flower. Bassoonists and the rarely heard but always aggressively self-promoting sackbut players would craft a scenario in which they linger as the ominously curdling drone under Henry Winkler as he jumped the shark.

That episode became famous for a lie: It was said, years after “Happy Days” had ended, that the episode in which Fonzie jumped the shark was the beginning of the end for that show, and that ratings promptly plunged. There is no factual basis to support this claim, but it remains as fact in the public discussion nonetheless. The bassoonists and sacbuttists knew this as well as anybody, and proposed that the company maintain this fundamental non-truth for the sake of the opera. There would be less joy in using the platform of the opera stage to studiously instruct the audience on what is fact and what is fiction, at least not in this isolated instance. That, after all, would be the stuff an entire opera on its own. Instead, the story of Henry Winkler could not be told without discussion of the Jumping the Shark episode’s assassination of the Happy Days series inserted as fact. The pesky detail of it not being true could be relegated to the opera’s program notes, or as footnotes to the libretto.

Thought of all this earlier while hearing (not really listening to) Sibelius’ 2nd Symphony. The second movement is among my favorite symphonic passages. Now I have moved ahead in time to Jethro Tull, whose sounds I know but whose music I cannot claim deep knowledge or understanding. There is always the flute, the somewhat frazzled yet self-assured voice, and the seemingly solitary bass guitarist who joins in with the rest on cadences and points of repetitious emphasis.

My sister tormented me with “Aqualung,” the Jethro Tull song with the immortal lines “Sitting on a park bench, Snot running down his nose…” I could not stand the sound of the word “snot.” This was a preview into a life in which snot is to me what rats were to the dude in 1984 and snakes to Indiana Jones. The famous story (famous to anyone reading this, perhaps) of my 3rd grade experience which prompted me to projectile vomit for the first and so far only time in my life. This happened at the site of a classmate who sneezed a blob of bright green snot into the palm of his right hand AND THEN DUMPED THE SNOT INTO HIS MOUTH AND SWALLOWED IT. That incident, believe it or snot, is never too far from my mind… 40 fucking years later.

Enter Jethro Tull into that childhood barf alarm. The sound of the word “SNOT” and the correspondingly putrid notion of some dude sitting on a park bench letting that stuff just pour out of his nose was something I had to shut out. It reminded me too much of the third grade projectile vomiting incident. So when my sister started singing that song I put on my childhood version of noise cancelling headphones by covering my ears with both hands and moaning an incoherent, inchoate “BLAAAAAAAAAAABLAAAAAAAAAH” noise.

It always made us laugh, but only after my sister stopped singing that awful song.

Thinking about it now I infer that I never listened to Jethro Tull much at all until now, probably not once for at least 30 years, on account of that SNOT song.

Certain moments of Jethro Tull sound like something out of Godspell, to wit the beginning and end and much in between of “Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square,” a song from the 1969 album Stand Up. The ending sounds like … aha, not Godspell but Billy Joel. Something from Songs in the Attic, can’t think of the song name but it’s an obvious resemblance. The Joel song ends with everyone going “na na na na na nana na na naaaa….” The Tull songs ends with what sounds like a small Broadway orchestra playing the same thing, nana-less.

Coming back to what I should hear while writing, to avoid distraction and let whatever benefit is to be derived from the music’s internals, I today lean toward jazz as the answer. Hah, JAZZ IS THE ANSWER. I hate to say it, because admonishing an entire genre of music to the backmost recesses of my creative mind so that it can thrive on the vapors of the music’s fumes does not sound so flattering or even respectful. But I think it is entirely so, if the use of cantus firmus as a means of generating musical or textual material remains as established and accepted a technique as it has for the past however many centuries. All things come from all things, dust from dust, there is nothing new under the sun.

These Jethro Tull songs sound like the stuff of troubadours, those small ensembles that went from town to town playing for tips and shelter.

This current song is about the life of a musician. He is writing about what he knows. His phone rings. He wants to go home to family, where no one can reach him by the telephone.

“Write what you know” is said to be the sage advice of all sage advisories for writers. I think of this when I see complaints that certain screenwriters and such who do this (write from their lives’ experiences) get dumped for not including enough people of color or not enough Hispanics or zero Egyptians. I don’t know if it was Woody Allen or Charles Schulz or both of those as well as others, but some writers of that vintage got shit from somewhere for not including enough blacks in their work. The response was simple: I write from my life experience, If Schulz knew only one black kid growing up then that reflects itself in the singular appearance of the one black character in all his thousands of frames. If Woody Allen grew up in a relatively sheltered Jewish community he probably saw very few blacks. Why would they write comics and scripts from experiences they never had with people they never knew?

Is it because we are expected to lie? Is everyone expected to sacrifice the truth or their particle of connection to real life experience to the interest of hypothetical inclusiveness?

…

Well, now I am shaking. Angry altercation with the angry landlord, who once again demanded that I move out. He said it was so he could gut the place and at least put in a new bathroom. He said the only way he could do that is if I moved out. Not if I went away for a week, or if he did what he was legally obligated to do under these circumstances and put me up somewhere for as long as it took to do the renovation. No, the only way to get anything done in my place is for me to move out. This altercation came about because I called to see if he had just entered my apartment. He had, to fix something about a leak from the upstairs bathroom. It was not my fault. How could a leak from the ceiling be my fault?  His first question, though, is in the gambit that he has always taken: Why didn’t you call me? I didn’t call because I was not there and I did not know there was a leak. This is the exact same dialogue we had soon after I moved in 18 years ago. A pipe over the kitchen exploded. I called within seconds. It was lucky I was there, as I was just heading out on a beautiful Saturday afternoon or maybe morning. He gets to my apartment. First thing he does is shake his fist in the air and yell at me, saying I should have called him sooner. Dude, I called within seconds of the pipe (or whatever it was) exploding. Seconds. Same exact scare tactic line of questioning this time: What time did you leave the apartment? This was like a prosecutor breaking a cardinal rule of questioning a defendant: You never ask a question you do not know the answer to. From this dubious beginning the landlord is  intending to make me guess at and maybe get wrong the exact time at which I left home. He wanted to trick me into saying not only had I left when the pipe started to leak, but that I knew it was leaking and I just did not want to deal — as if that even makes any sense. Who wouldn’t want their apartment to flood, right? I would not. I have a RAID on the floor and plenty of shit to think about should the place flood. But that is not the landlord’s logic. He is trying to trap me into saying that as soon as the first water started pouring from the ceiling got the hell out. We talked some more and I said something about how this is not the first time the ceiling in the bathroom has leaked. At this point I actually think we were still being congenial. He seizes on my remark about this not being the first time the ceiling has leaked to suggest that I had noticed recent leaks and not told him about them. He wanted again to trap me into what would amount to a lie by putting words into my mouth that said I knew the ceiling was troubled but I neglected to tell him. This is where the anger started building up, more in me than in him, because it was already there with him. I clarified  that I meant that the ceiling in the bathroom had leaked maybe 2 or 3 years earlier. I can’t remember how long but it was not any time recently. He took a minute or 2 to let that go. His opportunity to turn my words into what would be a lie had I actually spoken them slipped away. His logic is puny: “How can I fix the place if you don’t move out? Finding a new place is easy.” No, it is not easy to find a new place and to move out; and as you recall, when the pipe blew up those 2 or 3 years ago you were able to fix it just fine. Well, fine enough that it took 2 or 3 years for it to blow again.

Then he remembered the incident of a couple of weeks ago when something went wrong and I somehow ended up playing music too loud late at night. I still don’t know how that happened. First he said it was at midnight, now he says it was 1:30am. I don’t remember it all but I said I was sorry and that I think I set my alarm to go off at midnight but didn’t hear it because I was in the shower. I do list that as one of my theories as to what went crazy that night, because the Sangean radio has this bug about it where you think you are adjusting the volume but you are really setting the alarm clock — but I wouldn’t take it to court. So I don’t really have anything to refute except that I don’t believe anyone tried to contact me first, but I can’t take that to court either. So he says if anyone calls him again about me he’s calling the cops on me. At that I said thanks, and hung up on him.

Now I have the fear that he might call the cops on me in the middle of the night when there is no reason to do so.

All this over my bad idea of calling to be sure it was he who entered my apartment today and to see if there’d be any future need to do so again. I will just wait for him to let himself in again. I do not mind that, I trust the guy not to steal my shit, it’s not about that. I thought I was doing the right thing by seeing if there would be future needs to get in and when I needed to get out of the way. I should not have even called. Next time I will not. This is why I never do call him any more. My toilet could use some fixing, a doorknob could use replacement. But any time I call for stuff like this he just goes off one these senseless lines of questioning where he is trying to trick me into lying, and potentially using those lies against me in some kind of housing court.

Now I can sleep in peace. Not. Whenever I do move out of this combat zone my promise to myself is this: He’s not going to know about it until I’m gone. I’ll leave him him my PO Box address to return the deposit check, at his discretion, since he may not be obligated to do so if I just disappear into the night on him.

I might start the salvos by throwing a bunch of junk out tonight. That will get his hopes up. Haha…

I do not like this antagonism, living in fear of the angry landlord when all he can ask of a lowly tenant is to pay his fucking rent. But constantly trying to blame me for stuff that cannot possibly be my responsibility is pathetic.

It is also the anger thing. I do not speak that language. I managed to give a little bit better than I usually get from him this time, I think because we have had enough of these type of dialogues in the past that I have been able to educate myself on my rights and properly rehearse my responses to his illegal demands that I move out or pay more rent.

But enough of that. At the end of this nonse I have come to learn this about myself, albeit I guess I always knew: When someone gets angry and starts screaming and burying me in their disrespect I simply cannot speak their language. I give up and, when I can, I get out. In this situation I can only go so far as to give up.

…

That was an unwelcome intrusion on my writing day. Next time owner lets himself in, note to self: Do Not Call.