"Got Any Nutmeg, Day-in?"
I stayed up well into the morning, listening/watching Leonard Bernstein's lecture series which was recorded in 1973 at Harvard -the university, not the town of about 3,000 in Massachusetts- where he lectured for what turned out to be about 7 hours.
I am only 3 hours into it, but, it was somewhat depressing the way he dissected Mozart's Symphony no. 40, and how he held it up as being a perfect composition, one in a million, but based his arguments upon such things as a passage where Wolfgang used every single note of the chromatic scale, except the tonic note.
The inclusion of the tonic note would seem to be a given, since it is the key that the piece was in.
But, I really think that Mozart was getting bored by the time he wrote his 40th symphony, and approached at a cerebral level the problem of: "let me see if I can use every single chromatic note, except the one that is the keynote! of the piece..." and he went about, using every device at his disposal, to include a lot of talent, to be sure and to apply his by then formidable knowledge.
It certainly wasn't the result of a simple and beautiful melody coming into his head at the sight of some twinkling stars that produced that perfect work.
And, I'm sure that it wasn't one which he wrote in one go, without needing to go back and fix anything -something he is famous for.
"Now, he is in the incomprehensible key of C sharp minor, how did he get here?!?" gushed Leonard.
"And, now F sharp minor...astounding!!"
Sidebar: Speaking Of Amazing:
I'm not sure if my not liking that particular symphony, even after having been lectured upon it, means that I don't understand music the way I might have thought I did, and if that depresses me, but that is how yesterday ended. On a G minor chord...
I probably only got about 6 hours of sleep, another red flag, before I was up drinking coffee in an attempt to make it to the plasma place early enough so that, after leaving there with the fifty bucks, I would be able to do some other things.
Then, it began raining. Of course it did. Right as I was stepping outside.
I have a huge umbrella, which I hate to take with me, because it becomes incredibly cumbersome when it's not raining, and if there is any sort of breeze at all, it makes riding the bike with it open and upright, downright dangerous.
I wound up waiting for the rain to subside and then ultimately just taking the umbrella with me, after the rain only slowed down some, realizing that nobody is going to just hand me fifty bucks, and that a bike ride through a thunderstorm might be the price I would have to pay.
I wound up on the very same 5:04 PM bus as I had the last time I went to the plasma place, the time I had vowed to make it there "earlier next time," because that had me leaving the place after it had closed, in the dark, and unable to go back to resolve any issues with money not appearing on the card, should that have been the case.
This time I was smart enough to set aside bus fare, so that, even if I found a huge smoking hole in the ground where the plasma place had once been, I would be able to get back home. This was a baby step for a self saboteur like myself.
This meant that I could skip stopping at Wal-Mart just to get cash back off the card for bus fare.
I proceeded directly to the stop, where I waited long enough for the next bus to convince me that I could have wandered around the aisles of Wal-Mart for a half hour, grabbing Harold's favorite cat food, and not lost any time. I had always assumed that buses were flying by outside while I was in there, as part of my punishment for having gotten so broke that I needed to use plasma money to get home.
I need to unravel this depressed feeling that I am having and try to trace it's roots.
Ammonia Thief
It's not just because someone stole a half bottle of ammonia from me, I'm hoping.
Some other resident apparently did just that.
I had set it down on the little shelf outside my door so I could manage unlocking it with my hands already busy with the big bag of clean clothes.
Then gotten busy with unpacking the stuff and hanging it around the apartment so it could finish drying. I was hoping that washing clothes in ammonia might keep mildew at bay, but wasn't taking any chances.
In the morning, the bottle more than half full of ammonia was gone.
The larger issue and the source of a more deep-seated unrest comes from knowing that these are the people that I am "stuck" living with.
I can only hope that, as they die off, they will be replaced with better people.
The residents there are just inveterate skeezers.
I once put a ten dollar bill into the change machine in the lobby, as it was the smallest bill that I had, plus, I figured that the 40 quarters I got would spend just like any other money. Most cashiers can deal with, say, up to a dozen quarters per purchase, I would guess.
And, wouldn't you know, after the ten dollars was sucked into the machine, and just as the quarters were about to start cascading down, the elevator doors flew open.
Out stepped "White Cloud," who has rarely spoken a word to me if it wasn't to skeeze, and who had exited the elevator with a slight sense of urgency -someone had probably sent him on a beer run, promising him one of the cans- but who noticeably broke his stride upon hearing the coins tingling in the dish.
He started to say something to me like "Geez, it sounds like you just hit the jackpot on one of the slot machines at Harrah's," or some other utterance intended only to draw me into conversation with him and set me up for the skeeze. I hate that. I have determined that I hate phonies as much as that Holden Caulfield character from J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher In The Rye," but I digress.
The fact that anything White Cloud sees, he will try to skeeze. He isn't craving the second of your Reese's Peanut Butter Cups until he sees them in your hand, and then he suddenly really, really want's one. They have become his favorite candy of all time, type of thing -makes me sick. I know this is because I was raised in a middle class family and all the other kids in the neighborhood basically had parents who provided all their needs, and skeezing just wasn't part of life.
I was actually reliving an experience that I had when I was about nineteen years old, and had joined the National Guard.
This had been so that I would have my education paid for by the government and would be able to choose to study music and English, rather than the "lucrative" disciplines that my dear old dad was willing to apply my college fund towards.
Little did I know that I was also stowing away for the apartment that I now enjoy, er, except for the having my ammonia stolen part...
I sure was thinking about Jesse James Mimms Jr., as I rode towards the plasma place.
It is often that I dwell upon some slight from the past when I am pedaling towards the place, beset with uncertainty over whether or not my blood protein would be high enough, or if there will be a huge smoking crater where the plasma place once stood. When I am totally broke is when I really hate skeezers and will re-play these little videos in my head.
Jesse James Mimms Jr. was in my National Guard battalion. He was literally from the other side of the tracks and was cut from a cloth that I had just never encountered throughout my middle class upbringing.
My dad had warned me, during a little pep talk that he had given me on the night before I shipped out for basic training, that I would meet people from all walks of life. He had basically been preparing me for the likes of a couple recruits who were putting new boots on their feet for the first time in their lives when they were lacing up the combat boots.
When we visited my grandmother in West Rutland, Vermont a few times a year as I was growing up, my attention was always drawn to a couple of miniature paintings that hung in the bedroom where I slept. The were probably copies of famous works by someone, but they each depicted a clown.
In one picture, the clown is smiling. In the other, the clown is frowning. The frowning one also had his pockets turned out to reveal that they were empty.
I came to see a resemblance to that clown, years later when I encountered Jesse James Mimms, and even inwardly called him "po boy Mimms."
He was always broke, never seemed to work, and, I wasn't astute enough to realize at the time, was skeezing me; being a buddy, who was always ready to share any joint that I lit up. I smoked weed for the first time when I was nineteen. Mimms had probably started stealing roaches from ashtrays, left there by whomever his mom was shacking up with at the time, at probably the age of nine.
It was all an education for me. But, the incident that I was recalling was a time that we wound up at my house. I had picked him up in my car, something that neither he nor his family had ever owned, and brought him there.
It was hard to guess what was going through his mind, as he was seeing for the first time everything that I had taken for granted my whole life.
Jesse was a mullatto. His portly, white mother had had a fling with some black guy who was long gone.
I had decided to grab a bowl of instant oatmeal, while we were there, grabbing my rolling papers or something, and I offered one to Jesse.
"Do you want some sugar or milk or something in it?" I innocently asked.
Yes, milk and sugar, sure.
Then Jesse James Mimms Jr. began a series of questions which I only later came to make sense out of.
"Got any cinnamon, Dan?" he drawled the name to sound like day-in; a large part of the reason that I switched to using Daniel as my name, to avoid being called day-in by anyone.
"Yeah, right here..."
"Got any honey, Day-in?"
"Yeah, it's a little crystallized, but..."
"Got any cocoa, Day-in?"
"Got any molasses, Day-in?"
"Got any caramel, Day-in?"
"Got any brown sugar, Day-in?"
"Got any vanilla, Day-in?"
"Got any strawberries, Day-in?"
After each request, I was able to quickly locate the items, from what I just figured was a well stocked, but nothing unusual, kitchen. My thoughts were more on, how could Jesse possibly like his oatmeal that way, I mean, nutmeg?
It was only later that I figured out that he was mocking me and what he saw as the opulence that lived in, just by virtue of my having been born into it. While he was the bastard mulatto child from across the tracks, and the frowning clown with his pockets turned inside out, but I just couldn't put two and two together.
He most certainly could have skipped the molasses, especially since it probably clashed a bit with the blueberries. If he hadn't been satisfied with the taste, he seemed pleased that he had taken full advantage of my naivety, and would probably wind up telling stories about the bowl of oatmeal to other derelicts, throwing in "They even had blueberries, ain't that some shit?!?" at one point, with the theme of his story centering around how unfair life was for his ilk.
So, there I was, gripping my handlebars a little extra tightly as a voice from the past echoed in my head: "Got any dates, Day-in?"
I wish my father had been a bit less politically correct and said: "I'm going to have to level with you, son, there are some piece of shit niggers in this world, and a lot of them wind up in the army where they put boots on their feet for the first time in their lives, be warned!"
So, how am I going to befriend someone like White Cloud? His whole skeeze stems from the fact that he has some kind of Native American blood in him, and we white people need to give him some recompense for how we abused his ancestors, out of whatever we have leftover after meting out to the blacks, that is.
I can imagine inviting him into my place, for a cup of coffee, and to be neighborly, and him looking around the place and asking me for whatever he saw. "Can I get some of this change off this table, I'm gonna need a beer later? Oh, you got Reese's cups, I love those, mind if I get one?" "Got any nutmeg, Day-in?".
It's possible that the maintenance guys sometimes lend things to residents like bottles of ammonia, and maybe when those residents are done with them, they return them, by leaving them outside their doors.
But, it's also possible that "they" know that I am from planet Jupiter and that ammonia is thus, very dear to me, and they took it just to spite me.
I bought another gallon of it, along with a 20 pound bag of kitty litter at the dollar store, where I had ridden to, after having gotten off the plasma bus.
I then forgot to load money onto my green American Express card so I could use it to pay seven dollars to join the Freelance Writer's Den. I could already be a member as I write this. The seven dollar offer is good for "this week only," with no indication of when the week started, or when it will end.
How could I forget something as important as a thing which might turn out to be a great move, and perhaps launch a career that I will enjoy much more than busking? Subconscious fear that I will join the writers group and then will learn that it is a dog eat dog world that pays even less than busking? Fear of having to cross one more thing off my list of "aspirations," off of which "composing like Mozart," has just been scratched?
Time to do some soul searching to see what is really bothering me....
I stayed up well into the morning, listening/watching Leonard Bernstein's lecture series which was recorded in 1973 at Harvard -the university, not the town of about 3,000 in Massachusetts- where he lectured for what turned out to be about 7 hours.
The inclusion of the tonic note would seem to be a given, since it is the key that the piece was in.
But, I really think that Mozart was getting bored by the time he wrote his 40th symphony, and approached at a cerebral level the problem of: "let me see if I can use every single chromatic note, except the one that is the keynote! of the piece..." and he went about, using every device at his disposal, to include a lot of talent, to be sure and to apply his by then formidable knowledge.
It certainly wasn't the result of a simple and beautiful melody coming into his head at the sight of some twinkling stars that produced that perfect work.
And, I'm sure that it wasn't one which he wrote in one go, without needing to go back and fix anything -something he is famous for.
"Now, he is in the incomprehensible key of C sharp minor, how did he get here?!?" gushed Leonard.
"And, now F sharp minor...astounding!!"
Sidebar: Speaking Of Amazing:
Below is a link, if it works, to something mind-blowing. It is Tanya Huang rapping, yes, that's right, rapping. Could THIS be what's depressing me?
https://www.facebook.com/100004798244704/videos/987612544742011/?t=0
Part of me want's to be encouraging, to send her a message, the gist of which would be, "Now you know how I feel, at times." It is definitely out of her comfort zone, but, I'm really not sure in what spirit the thing was done. Was she trying to show how hip she is to the hip hop scene? Or are the words to the rap actually intelligent and worthy of being performed? I'm going to have to check it out using headphones. She has more "balls" than I ever thought, though, I must say...
I'm not sure if my not liking that particular symphony, even after having been lectured upon it, means that I don't understand music the way I might have thought I did, and if that depresses me, but that is how yesterday ended. On a G minor chord...
 |
| Something to take away my blues? |
Then, it began raining. Of course it did. Right as I was stepping outside.
I have a huge umbrella, which I hate to take with me, because it becomes incredibly cumbersome when it's not raining, and if there is any sort of breeze at all, it makes riding the bike with it open and upright, downright dangerous.
I wound up waiting for the rain to subside and then ultimately just taking the umbrella with me, after the rain only slowed down some, realizing that nobody is going to just hand me fifty bucks, and that a bike ride through a thunderstorm might be the price I would have to pay.
I wound up on the very same 5:04 PM bus as I had the last time I went to the plasma place, the time I had vowed to make it there "earlier next time," because that had me leaving the place after it had closed, in the dark, and unable to go back to resolve any issues with money not appearing on the card, should that have been the case.
This time I was smart enough to set aside bus fare, so that, even if I found a huge smoking hole in the ground where the plasma place had once been, I would be able to get back home. This was a baby step for a self saboteur like myself.
This meant that I could skip stopping at Wal-Mart just to get cash back off the card for bus fare.
I proceeded directly to the stop, where I waited long enough for the next bus to convince me that I could have wandered around the aisles of Wal-Mart for a half hour, grabbing Harold's favorite cat food, and not lost any time. I had always assumed that buses were flying by outside while I was in there, as part of my punishment for having gotten so broke that I needed to use plasma money to get home.
I need to unravel this depressed feeling that I am having and try to trace it's roots.
Ammonia Thief
It's not just because someone stole a half bottle of ammonia from me, I'm hoping.
Some other resident apparently did just that.
I had set it down on the little shelf outside my door so I could manage unlocking it with my hands already busy with the big bag of clean clothes.
Then gotten busy with unpacking the stuff and hanging it around the apartment so it could finish drying. I was hoping that washing clothes in ammonia might keep mildew at bay, but wasn't taking any chances.
In the morning, the bottle more than half full of ammonia was gone.
The larger issue and the source of a more deep-seated unrest comes from knowing that these are the people that I am "stuck" living with.
I can only hope that, as they die off, they will be replaced with better people.
The residents there are just inveterate skeezers.
I once put a ten dollar bill into the change machine in the lobby, as it was the smallest bill that I had, plus, I figured that the 40 quarters I got would spend just like any other money. Most cashiers can deal with, say, up to a dozen quarters per purchase, I would guess.
And, wouldn't you know, after the ten dollars was sucked into the machine, and just as the quarters were about to start cascading down, the elevator doors flew open.
Out stepped "White Cloud," who has rarely spoken a word to me if it wasn't to skeeze, and who had exited the elevator with a slight sense of urgency -someone had probably sent him on a beer run, promising him one of the cans- but who noticeably broke his stride upon hearing the coins tingling in the dish.
He started to say something to me like "Geez, it sounds like you just hit the jackpot on one of the slot machines at Harrah's," or some other utterance intended only to draw me into conversation with him and set me up for the skeeze. I hate that. I have determined that I hate phonies as much as that Holden Caulfield character from J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher In The Rye," but I digress.
The fact that anything White Cloud sees, he will try to skeeze. He isn't craving the second of your Reese's Peanut Butter Cups until he sees them in your hand, and then he suddenly really, really want's one. They have become his favorite candy of all time, type of thing -makes me sick. I know this is because I was raised in a middle class family and all the other kids in the neighborhood basically had parents who provided all their needs, and skeezing just wasn't part of life.
I was actually reliving an experience that I had when I was about nineteen years old, and had joined the National Guard.
This had been so that I would have my education paid for by the government and would be able to choose to study music and English, rather than the "lucrative" disciplines that my dear old dad was willing to apply my college fund towards.
Little did I know that I was also stowing away for the apartment that I now enjoy, er, except for the having my ammonia stolen part...
I sure was thinking about Jesse James Mimms Jr., as I rode towards the plasma place.
It is often that I dwell upon some slight from the past when I am pedaling towards the place, beset with uncertainty over whether or not my blood protein would be high enough, or if there will be a huge smoking crater where the plasma place once stood. When I am totally broke is when I really hate skeezers and will re-play these little videos in my head.
Jesse James Mimms Jr. was in my National Guard battalion. He was literally from the other side of the tracks and was cut from a cloth that I had just never encountered throughout my middle class upbringing.
My dad had warned me, during a little pep talk that he had given me on the night before I shipped out for basic training, that I would meet people from all walks of life. He had basically been preparing me for the likes of a couple recruits who were putting new boots on their feet for the first time in their lives when they were lacing up the combat boots.
When we visited my grandmother in West Rutland, Vermont a few times a year as I was growing up, my attention was always drawn to a couple of miniature paintings that hung in the bedroom where I slept. The were probably copies of famous works by someone, but they each depicted a clown.
In one picture, the clown is smiling. In the other, the clown is frowning. The frowning one also had his pockets turned out to reveal that they were empty.
I came to see a resemblance to that clown, years later when I encountered Jesse James Mimms, and even inwardly called him "po boy Mimms."
He was always broke, never seemed to work, and, I wasn't astute enough to realize at the time, was skeezing me; being a buddy, who was always ready to share any joint that I lit up. I smoked weed for the first time when I was nineteen. Mimms had probably started stealing roaches from ashtrays, left there by whomever his mom was shacking up with at the time, at probably the age of nine.
It was all an education for me. But, the incident that I was recalling was a time that we wound up at my house. I had picked him up in my car, something that neither he nor his family had ever owned, and brought him there.
It was hard to guess what was going through his mind, as he was seeing for the first time everything that I had taken for granted my whole life.
Jesse was a mullatto. His portly, white mother had had a fling with some black guy who was long gone.
I had decided to grab a bowl of instant oatmeal, while we were there, grabbing my rolling papers or something, and I offered one to Jesse.
"Do you want some sugar or milk or something in it?" I innocently asked.
Yes, milk and sugar, sure.
Then Jesse James Mimms Jr. began a series of questions which I only later came to make sense out of.
"Got any cinnamon, Dan?" he drawled the name to sound like day-in; a large part of the reason that I switched to using Daniel as my name, to avoid being called day-in by anyone.
"Yeah, right here..."
"Got any honey, Day-in?"
"Yeah, it's a little crystallized, but..."
"Got any cocoa, Day-in?"
"Got any molasses, Day-in?"
"Got any caramel, Day-in?"
"Got any brown sugar, Day-in?"
"Got any vanilla, Day-in?"
"Got any strawberries, Day-in?"
After each request, I was able to quickly locate the items, from what I just figured was a well stocked, but nothing unusual, kitchen. My thoughts were more on, how could Jesse possibly like his oatmeal that way, I mean, nutmeg?
It was only later that I figured out that he was mocking me and what he saw as the opulence that lived in, just by virtue of my having been born into it. While he was the bastard mulatto child from across the tracks, and the frowning clown with his pockets turned inside out, but I just couldn't put two and two together.
He most certainly could have skipped the molasses, especially since it probably clashed a bit with the blueberries. If he hadn't been satisfied with the taste, he seemed pleased that he had taken full advantage of my naivety, and would probably wind up telling stories about the bowl of oatmeal to other derelicts, throwing in "They even had blueberries, ain't that some shit?!?" at one point, with the theme of his story centering around how unfair life was for his ilk.
So, there I was, gripping my handlebars a little extra tightly as a voice from the past echoed in my head: "Got any dates, Day-in?"
I wish my father had been a bit less politically correct and said: "I'm going to have to level with you, son, there are some piece of shit niggers in this world, and a lot of them wind up in the army where they put boots on their feet for the first time in their lives, be warned!"
So, how am I going to befriend someone like White Cloud? His whole skeeze stems from the fact that he has some kind of Native American blood in him, and we white people need to give him some recompense for how we abused his ancestors, out of whatever we have leftover after meting out to the blacks, that is.
I can imagine inviting him into my place, for a cup of coffee, and to be neighborly, and him looking around the place and asking me for whatever he saw. "Can I get some of this change off this table, I'm gonna need a beer later? Oh, you got Reese's cups, I love those, mind if I get one?" "Got any nutmeg, Day-in?".
It's possible that the maintenance guys sometimes lend things to residents like bottles of ammonia, and maybe when those residents are done with them, they return them, by leaving them outside their doors.
But, it's also possible that "they" know that I am from planet Jupiter and that ammonia is thus, very dear to me, and they took it just to spite me.
I bought another gallon of it, along with a 20 pound bag of kitty litter at the dollar store, where I had ridden to, after having gotten off the plasma bus.
I then forgot to load money onto my green American Express card so I could use it to pay seven dollars to join the Freelance Writer's Den. I could already be a member as I write this. The seven dollar offer is good for "this week only," with no indication of when the week started, or when it will end.
How could I forget something as important as a thing which might turn out to be a great move, and perhaps launch a career that I will enjoy much more than busking? Subconscious fear that I will join the writers group and then will learn that it is a dog eat dog world that pays even less than busking? Fear of having to cross one more thing off my list of "aspirations," off of which "composing like Mozart," has just been scratched?
Time to do some soul searching to see what is really bothering me....
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