Song Without Music

für Elise Claudia

My biggest regret in life -- apart from wishing I'd spelled "recognize" correctly in the 8th grade spelling bee ... I'd have taken State!!  To this day, I think about that brain fart moment when I dropped the g, and puttered out "r-e-c-o-n-i-z-e" ... and the judge then, pausing significantly, completely ignoring me, turning to my opponent and intoning, "Recognize?".

... My opponent remembering the goddamn g!  Spelling "recognize" CORRECTLY, and setting off my lifelong descent into failure.

"Needless to say, you failed" ... my driving instructor also intoned to me, several years later, as I dinged a parked car while parallel parking.  I didn't get my license that day, my first try, at sixteen, and my piss-poor, abyss-diving life drove downward ...

Brother Theodore on Letterman:  all angsty pangsty, acting like he just burped up from hell.  Dark chords were struck, a bond was born, his shtick of torment, mine as well ...

-- but where was I?  Failure ... Regret!

The (second) biggest regret of my life is that I can't play an instrument.  Bopping sub tactilely, digging "the" jazz, doesn't qualify me as a Soundcloud "creator".  House all piano-less, tuneless fingers ... notes and tones just heard, unplayed.  Oh, would I spoke the languages of nature (plants) and music!  I can only see and hear ... Appreciate.

But not create.

And then, that one who got away.  You know who you are (Claudia) ... You 'got' me, understsood my Drang, my Sturm, und stood beside me.  You, who laughed at my suggestions, my sad efforts at suggestiveness ... You laughing, tousled hair and bird-like visage, made my losing less ...

Could we have played things differently?  If I blew notes, instead of all that air when we togethered??

Would we each be part of One, still?  How I wonder where you went!

But I digress ...

The parking meter's hungry.  I can ill-afford another ticket ... Traipsing out to feed her and I trip upon my laces, sprung undone because the shoes are cheap, like a bed in a hostel instead of a suite.

It's raining, as I'm on the street ... Getting up 'cause a cop on his beat comes to greet me.  Otherwise, I'd die here ("lie" or "lay"?) and just forget you.  But I can't forget you, Claudia!  Feel you playing still, my instrument ... You taught me all the things I could've kept, to keep in time, you mine ... but me, I tuned them out, and we ...

Our concert's over.

Now I try my best to solo, but I can't create the music!

No, the biggest regret of my life -- beyond the lack of talent and the 8th grade spelling contest -- is that blue, I note our lost motif and recoGnize it won't repeat ...

Death (of) Comedy

In the foolish, early days of April, the offensive, 'there is no there there' coverage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 became subsumed (at last!) ... though sadly, by yet another American gun massacre.

The latest Fort Hood shooter, apparently miffed because he was told "no" about something, and catapulted into infamy on April 2nd of this year, is not even the most recent entry on this terrible "list of rampage killers" (also check out the workplace edition!) ... admittedly -- tragically -- in the words of Wikipedia's editors, "an incomplete list, which may NEVER be able to satisfy (!) particular standards for completeness (WTF!?!)" (... emphases mine).

Oh, and David Letterman announced his retirement.

A few sad doorknobs unhinge and fall off of life's frame, and late night television shuffles again ... Ah, normalcy!  A relief!  Welcome respite!  from wild-eyed theories, internet queries, emotions and directionless everything regarding the lost airplane ... from search efforts to public statements to misplaced anger ...

Directionless.  No pride or shame (a flight simulator??) ...

No happy landing.

I was thinking this on a trip last week ... At the airport, an announcement in accented but unbroken English:

"Do not let your baggage out of your sight.  If a stranger approaches you, and asks you to watch or hold baggage, or you are asked to carry an item or gift, you should not comply.  You should report all suspicious activity to uniformed personnel or the airport police."

I was struck by the innocence of this entreaty.  Simple strangers bearing gifts ... One should tell the police ... How 20th century!

It's high time the world's airports scale up their public service announcements to reflect the potentials of this day and age:

"If your plane disappears or falls out of the sky, or you see a passenger punching a flight attendant (or vice versa!) -- or a group of histrionics annoying other passengers -- please use your cell phone camera to share."

* * * 

Olympic Darkness

"Nur Kinder und einfache Leute tragen lebhafte Farben." - Goethe

Only children and simpletons wear bright colors ...

February is the new April ... and in the black first days of this winterest month, I have been virtually stunned into silence.

First, there was a transit nightmare, as getting to and from the "Big Game" did not go (at all) as planned for tens of thousands of frustrated football fans, and millions of inconvenienced "New Yorkers".

Across the river that same Super Sunday -- actually in New York -- Philip Seymour Hoffman died, ingloriously, with a needle hanging out of his arm.  Hollywood couldn't have scripted a more evocative image of a heroin overdose.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman was an addict ... He died a junkie's death.

Also that same day, flying in the face of his own misguided logic that in some small way, an exit by overdose might be a good thing -- its transmitted "message" perhaps being taken to heart, as opposed to being ignored or simply not received at all by other nodding junkies suddenly waking up, saying, "You know what?  Philip Seymour Hoffman died.  Let me quit." --

Sadly, it's unlikely that this became the case anywhere.  Philip Seymour Hoffman just died.  Ingloriously.

But I was going to say, also on the same day that he died, that un-Super Sunday, there were considerably more drug overdoses than PSH once babbled to Aaron Sorkin lives would be "saved" in the event that one of those two suffered a fatal overdose ...

No, Phil:  your stupid and preventable death did not lead to "10 people who were about to" die, not dying.  You took a drug you knew could kill you, and it did.

That's what happened.  That's the message you left behind.  A message of despair, not hope.  In no way was it a "positive" thing.

It's going to take many decades -- and vast adjustments in profit motive, economies of scale and, most dauntingly, demand fueling supply -- for any acceptance of responsibility, let alone global behavioral shifts or awakenings of consciousness concerning illicit drug use, to occur.  If I were an addict, your sad death wouldn't do it for me, Big Guy (Sorry to be telling you this too late).

Thank God for the comic relief of Russia!  Between the knee-knocking toilets (and "no fishing"!! signs), the piss-colored tap water, the stray dogs, the unfinished hotel rooms, the nonetheless pride at a 'job well done' in Sochi, and the costumed police choir busting into "Get Lucky" ... I giggle aloud at my bushy-browed brethren, and my S-K-Y swells and bursts with delight ...

And then I read about Woody Allen.

Woody has long been a hero of mine ... His obnoxious Upper East Side phase notwithstanding, I think, and have always believed, the guy's comic gold.  When I was younger and trying to win friends, impress girls or dismiss various teachers, I'd absorb the absurdities of Without Feathers, for example, or Getting Even ...and too often spit them back out whole, unexpurgated.  Completely ripped off, at times word for word ...

I was really a loser!  But I thought Woody Allen was a genius ... and though I no longer plagiarize him, I still think he is.

All of which leads up to the new best thing I've ever read by Woody Allen, his matter-of-fact, supposedly (hopefully!) final response to the resurfaced claims by his daughter that she was sexually abused by him twenty years ago.  These disturbing and serious allegations were investigated at the time and found unsubstantiated.  No criminal charges were ever filed, and the matter became closed ... until somehow, it wasn't anymore.

Now it should be.  Together, with the wastedly talented Philip Seymour Hoffman, may things rest in peace.

Freundlichkeit (Human) Kindness

"(L)ife in itself is a chain of rainy days ... I think I'll go for a walk with my umbrella" - Sun-Young Park

'Kickin' it old school', as the kids say ... pen and an actual notebook, loaded with paper, not apps and icons, in hand ...

There's something to be said for people-watching -- Leute beobachten (or Schadenfreude, as the case may be) -- or spying, as the good people of the Gärtnerplatz in Munich keep saying.

A sort of equivalent to New York's Union Square, der Gärtnerplatz -- minus the nodding junkies, the smelly nutters, the ridiculous "protests" ... the homeless with pent-up, directionless anger ... directed toward themselves, at bottom; but then, at white people, black people, chess winners and losers ... People with hair, and wearing glasses.  Or not.

At the world and everyone, every thing in it.

... unlike Union Square, in fact.

Der Gärtnerplatz is not unpleasant.

November wird hundsmiserabel, I think rudimentally to myself - like I'd think to myself forty years ago, when English was a new language.  Then twenty years ago, when I first visited Munich, I instantly felt that I'd spend some time here.  Relatively quiet and small, i.e., liveable, compared to the ugly, pretentious slut, Berlin and that clenched New York pretender, Frankfurt.

"Franky-Boy!  Mr. Albert Sinatra!" the DJ'd announce giddily ... and the bar would erupt in a marble-mouthed chorus - like a room full of stroke victims, shouting heavily accented, tone-deaf English:  Ist!  Op!  Zum!  Du!  New-York, New-YORK!!! ... 

"Franky-Boy!  Albert Sinatra!" the DJ'd cry, and the Weissbiers would hoist to the sky and I'd sigh, and just know I at least had to try and get back here!

"Polizei!  Hilfe!  Polizei!"  A night cry ...

I slip out the door of my terrible pension, across from the station, and go down to see.

There's a guy on the ground, with a boot in his back:  "Release me!" the guy's yelling up, in English, to a man in green, one of Bavaria's Finest.  "Bullenschweine!" (the guy's switched to German) ... "Sofort!" he shouts to the boot in his back (and the cop's deaf ears).  "Release me!" he Englishes again, "Immediately!"

The Bavarian cop presses down in a Schuhplattler.

"Free sex!  She was giving him free sex!" the guy yelps.

And nobody is really quite sure what that means.

The next night, I spy the guy, Larry, rolling (for he'd had a chair, and been unceremoniously dumped from it the night before by the 'man in green', one of Bavaria's Finest) through the Gärtnerplatz.

I ask him what happened:  what he'd done, and why he was being arrested?

"Wasn't me," he avows.

"Yes it was," I avow back.

He asks me to wheel his chair "just up the street".

Well, I'm not sure what to do, really.  'Kindness breaks no bones', as they say here ... but I don't have time to be wheeling Larry!  The German autumn night is young, and I'm supposed to be meeting meine Frau ... Meine Frau ist stinksauer auf me mow ... er, now ... and I was going to bring her some Blumen flowers.

Eenie meenie meine Frau ...

Can't be wheeling Larry now!  But he's an American, like me, in Paris ... Larry, Gene Kelly and I ... start pushing, his weird German wheelchair across the Gärtnerplatz.

"That's it," he grunts, "just up here."  We get to the steps of the Staatstheater, and I start thinking Larry might have a date too.  Gonna meet up his love for a night at the opera ... but no.  Larry asks me to hang a right.

Then another ... We go around again ... Twenty minutes or so later, we're back at the steps of the Staatstheater!

So, "This is where we part, my friend ... "

"Oh, I'm your friend now," the strange(r) Larry snaps.

I leave him, sitting in his chair as it begins to rain, again, in autumn Munich ... ein Sauwetter!

Not getting better!

November wird hundsmiserabel ...

"The Shadow", ©Jeff Glovsky

September...Auf Deutsch

My Old Lady

As we head into the holiday season, warmth and good cheer shrink and shrivel like leaves in me.  Misanthropy takes root and hold ...

I was taking a bus the other night, an overnight trip of about five hours.  As I'm climbing aboard, struggling with "carry-ons" that should have been checked and stowed underneath, a young couple is trying to sit together.

I dive for the only remaining bank of two empty seats and throw myself and my sad baggage into it ... then start flexing and hoisting, and shoving and spinning, and trying in vain to get at least one of my bags to fit into an overhead luggage bin.

It's not happening, and after several long, frustrated moments of grunting and carrying on in the bus aisle like Curly from the Three Stooges, I give up and resignedly take my bag -- which had become wedged in the luggage bin, half in and half out, so I couldn't pull it out without the help of an old lady whose foot I'd stepped on -- off the bus to check it below (which, again, I know, I should have done in the first place!).

I get back on-board, and the young couple trying to sit together, is now sitting together in my bank of seats!  Not only, but they've slid my duffel bag off the window seat I'd planned to use and sleep in during the overnight trip, and put it on the floor ... and then, ever so subtly, with their four feet, slid it out into the aisle for me!

"Man, would you mind -- it's just me and my girlfriend, this is a five hour trip.  Do you mind if we sit together?  There's an empty seat ... "  He gestures toward the old lady - alternately scowling and beaming at me, and quietly singing hymns to herself.

"No," I say.  Just like that, just the one syllable.  "No."

Well, that one syllable was enough to drive the packed bus into emotion!  A chorus of "Why?" and "C'mon man!" and "...wrong with you?" split the night bus, and I ended up sleeping beside the old lady.

“Ahole”, ©Jeff Glovsky