it’s good to see new stuff from you, a.k.a.
man-who-is-responsible-for-the-phrase-‘crazier-than-you’-being-stuck-in-vari
ous-
nooks-and-cranies-of-my-head-for-the-past-half-year-and-turning-up-when-i’d-
least-expect-it-such-as-while-waiting-in-line-
at-the-bank-drivethru-window-or-while-shaving-my-legs.

maybe it’s not really your responsibility, though, since you didn’t cast
some sort of voodoo hex on me that compelled me to keep checking and
rechecking your ‘read these stories’ page almost daily since LAST AUGUST
hoping to see something besides ‘crazier than you’ at the top of the list.
after about the third month of this obsessive check/recheck stuff i started
to think i saw that phrase actually grinning at me, kind of like it was
talking *about* me, like, “jeeeezus woman, nobody is CRAZIER THAN YOU,
checking this page over and over for an update. some of us have more
important things to do than obsess over webpages so why don’t you stop
checking and rechecking and go find something useful to do.” yep, she’s
crazy all right.

anyway i’m glad you’re writing again and i hope it lasts. the web is
comprised, now, of millions upon millions of pages or so i hear tell yet i
am hardpressed any given day, night, midmorning, afternoon, etc to find

anything that holds my interest very long at all. but maybe that’s a more
telling indictment against me than the web et al.

i wanted to tell you i get what you mean about longing to be around people
who share a very specific interest or passion…. yet at the same time i
wonder if you realize that some of us who are relatively sorabji-ignorant
still take significant pleasure in hearing you detail your own
sorabji-related fascination? not that the knowledge of others taking
pleasure in your longing should make you feel any better or in any way ease
said longing…. and anyway it’s not that i (speaking for myself – but i bet
i’m not the only one of your readers who feels this way) take pleasure in
your longing… it’s just the way you write about these things. for that
matter, in truth it’s not just the sorabji thing, it’s any time you write
about whatever you’ve been practicing at a given time, or what you’ve been
listening to lately … there’s that patented markthomas ‘feel’ to
everything you write, of course, but the piano stuff is just incredible to
read. it feels utterly alive, i don’t quite know how else to say the way it
comes across on this end of things. somehow the intensity of feeling – i’m
trying not to use the word ‘passion’ because it’s been a horrific long day
for me and i don’t think i can muster whatever it takes to use it without
sounding trite, not that what i *am* mustering is any better – comes across.
it’s just a true, real pleasure to read. you did another entry months and
months ago, talking at some length about what you’d been practicing (i think
it was liszt) and it such a wonderful thing, just beautiful. i didn’t write

you about that one, probably because i couldn’t think then, either, of
exactly what i should say beyond ‘i really like when you write stuff like
that,’ which sounds almost, but not quite, crazier than you.

ha.

well – anyway, good to see you back.