I think it is safe to say that my head is back on straight again. I still feel a little bit of pain here or there but I think that’s just normal weirdness from walking around for miles and miles with a bag that is too heavy. Yes, fans and foes alike, I fell down again and cracked my head. It was Monday. Last time it happened like this was probably about 3 years ago. I don’t clearly remember when it was, and more importantly I don’t remember how much time passed before I started feeling normal in the head again. This time there was blood, but not a whole lot. Another incident more recently, in which I posted a picture to the .MOBI of my face with blood curling down the side, was not as bad as it looked. It made me nauseous to look at, because blood is disgusting to me. But I felt fine. This time around I did not feel so fine. I could walk without trouble and my mental faculties seemed acute. Vision was fine. But when I coughed my head felt like it would explode, and there was just a permanent feeling of pain in all corners of my head. That is no longer the case.

It is not lost on me that accidents like this could fucking kill me. I could DIE, like the woman I never knew from Sunswick. I don’t know the details but what I do know is that she died and all anyone could say about what happened was that she fell down in the shower.

I am with Ronnie Hawkins on addressing fear or concerns about my sudden and unexpected demise:

“I turned 41.
I don’t mind dyin’.”

I have no responsibilities to speak of, no one whose life would be upended should I shuffle off that quart of oil… I mean mortal coil. That could all change on a dime, of course. But at the moment I do not see change happening.

O and I broke my ass, too. It wasn’t just my head. I hit my head first, then second, then I hit my assbone hard. I was having trouble standing up and sitting in the shower. Showering like an old person has been my routine of late. It felt like nausea was coming up from my buttocks, a nausea that could have brought this formidable tower of human being crumbling down. That, too, has passed. My butt is back to its glorious, righteous, PERFECT self. I would lament that FUCKING MISSIONARY STYLE might be difficult for a few more days but that’s not even a hypothetically possible scenario.

The body, someone told me, and as I have been repeating to myself every day since Monday, has a remarkable capacity to heal.

…

I am at Sunswick presently. As I type these words a small monument to that woman who died from falling in the shower sits on a shelf behind the bar. I noticed last week that the photograph of an older man I’ve seen here appeared next to that monument. I saw it and thought the old guy had died. In fact his picture was placed there as a joke, because he always sits at that spot at the bar. One of the bartenders put his picture there to freak him out, mix him up, FUCK WITH HIS HEAD. That’s what Hendrix said music does to you: “That shit fucks with your head.”

Speaking of Hendrix I just spent two hours at the piano, mostly with J.S. Bach but going out easy with a trifle by Cui. Thinking about Bach and all I can ever come up with is: How was someone like this even possible? The quantity if his output is itself a thing of awe but so is so much else about his life and work. Nobody like that could exist today. There is too much cult of celebrity, and Bach would doubtless have been given that treatment. But he was no celebrity. He was a respected Kapellmeister and man of the church. But his music was regarded as little more than what he had to do for his job. In his day he was considered a throwback, and not in a good way. His sons (also composers) made fun of him for his clinging to antiquated styles of counterpoint.

But let’s talk about that quantity of his output. He had such a strong command of his craft, and of the contrapuntal form, that much of his music just wrote itself.

lahlahblah…

I had my piano music coming through the LinkNYC machines today and yesterday. It was glorious. Actually it sounded kind of strained. But it was interesting anyway. To me, that is. Not to anyone else.

Was just reflecting on how different my life would be had I started out in East Texas and not the fabled Parc Lincoln. In 1990 I came dangerously close to doing just that, as I was very close to an offer from the folks at KTPB, a startup classical FM station in Kilgore. Kilgore was the birthplace of Van Cliburn, a fact which gave the station a certain panache in a part of the country that had limited exposure to or interest in classical music.

The station director made a longwinded deal of saying how close he’d come to going with me for the job. But he went with someone who had actual real world radio experience. I came from the realm of unsupervised college radio where no one had any real world experience. There was no Adult Supervision.

I actually believe the guy who said he wanted to hire me. That’s because a few years later the person they hired instead of me quit, and they contacted me again via my mother to see if I was still interested. At their request I made another demo tape. It must have been really bad because I never even heard back from them. I mean I know it was bad. I had not been in a studio for 3 years and the room I booked had gear I could not figure out. And my voice sounded bad. And you know, at that point I did not even want to job in an East Texas oil field anymore. I was more or less settled in at my first real job here, and felt like I was on my way to… something. I remember thinking I was making this demo tape as a courtesy, even as a nod to my mother, who acted like she had brokered this deal.

But I always kept a soft spot for KTPB. Just hard to imagine how different things would have turned out for me had I started out in life there, and not here. I would probably have been squashed like a bug by the everyday professional life of commercial radio, which would have been monotonously boring compared to the gratuitous world of college radio. I would have been fired. I would have returned to Tampa. From there I would have lied my way to New York as I did on that fine October day in 1990.

lalablah

…

The journey to the watchclock station was 4 hours of walking. I am sunburned. Feels good. The station is in about as random and obscure a spot as one could find in these 5 boroughs.

Getting too dark to type in here. Going to play Fishdom.