Busy. Figures.
It was a cold and rainy July, during the global warming, and Trayvon’s killer just got off the hook. Been reading Dubliners. I can identify with the paralysis of society. Maybe the Internet will change all that.
Actually the Internet is going to change a whole bevy of things, if not the bevy itself. What the Hell is a bevy, anyway?
No one had predicted that there would come a time when knowledge could be dispersed and gathered to and from all the people of the earth, but we are approaching that time, so what once seemed dire and inevitable, will now have to go through a rewrite. A reframing. A new paradigm.
And what will happen when the dominant economic tokens of today are replaced by different values and value holders? I’ll call information.
Busy. Figures.
Well, maybe I will entertain you with my fake removable thumb thingy until information gets off the phone. We always have to keep moving. We don’t know how to stop. We are machines, asleep at the wheel, on autopilot most of the time, and rarely does a time come when all our chakras are ope’ and we are fully dope. Racing around on a piece of ground in your hometown, or up and down elevators, it’s all the fame. I mean same. Fame difference. Busy figures.
The prob with us 21st century writers is that there is just too much to write about, now that we have access to all the data, knowledge and wisdom. To deal and pare down, I create classes for myself. At the moment, I am taking classes in Python. I am also learning world languages, drum rudiments and paradiddles, all of which I want to convert into music and other pleasantries.
Take paradiddles and rudiments. Please. I want to convert what would normally be somewhat exclusively a drummer’s demesne, into use for keyboards, horns, voice or anything else, for that matter. For example, take the drumming sequence below. R means right hand or stick, and L means left hand or stick.
RLRR LRLL RLRR LRLL
Sounds a bit like “tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap”, in your mind’s ear, right?
Well now imagine it sounding like:
“Strum strum strum strum, strum strum strum strum, strum strum strum strum, strum strum strum strum.”
Much better, right? And those strums can be plucks, yawps, yodels, yells, yammering, or yawns, arranged ways your average musician friend might not yet have even considered, thus inching you one step closer to the cherished and prized gold star, which the teacher will proudly display to your peers, and the pier they are peeing from, in order that one’s idea of self-importance be even more inflated than it already is. But that is neither here nor there. The ego that is. Maya. The illusion we construct in order to keep us from confronting the fact that we are all both nothing and everything. Busy figures held in repose by our eternitude. That settling into what will certainly be a bumpy ride, both coming and going and staying. Hence the tripartite nature of duality. Being and becoming. The static self and the dynamic self. And the self beyond the self. On the shelf. Looking down. Shaking his or her head. As if to say with cummings
pity that poor beast manunkind,not
And cummings was nothing if not musical. And so we strum. Only not like a man pleasuring himself, but more like an artist who uses hundreds of colors, even at the point of the basic beat. So take heed from e.e. cummings, and apply paradiddles to your piano, and rudiments to your Rickenbacher.
“Um. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Damn! Scared me! I didn’t see you there!
“Well of course you didn’t see me. You were too busy peregrinating and pontificating into the ethersphere as if the gods themselves were listening.”
You doubt that they are?
“I doubt that they exist.”
Well la-di-da! Are we not all cocksure this morning.
Shutup. What was that about the paradiddles? I bought one the other day, and to shut him up, I let him out of the cage, and the idiot flew out the window, and I haven’t seen him since.
Were you practicing your accordion?
Well yeah, why?
They hate accordion music! Don’t you ever Google?
I never googled the musical taste of a paraclete.
You’re talking about a paraclete?
Whatever the damn things are called. Maybe it was paraquat.
You know. Those model cars are really cute and all, but you are 16 now. You must put away the toys, and car worship, and, well, glue. At least get some ventilation in that place. I mean, you are starting to sound like a drunk, and I know you don’t drink.
No, I’m not that stupid.
Well, don’t. Read what Jim Beckwourth says about it, if you ever get the hankering. He revealed how his native American friends were being reduced from eagles of the earth to possums of the earth, all at the hand and faucet where alcohol entered the body, and began slowly killing it. In some cases, so to speak, it was not that slow. Not slow at all. But for the seller, it was good business and escalating figures.
The percussive sound of horses riding wild across the prairie, back in the day, what quite a sound to behold. Paradiddles of power, control, yet harmony and counterpoint. Not today. From Jack to crack the triggers kept firing, and whinnying, and flashing black into the night. And dormant it lay until a Nuculus rose, in the form of an interweb, with tubes and facebooks and tweets, and broke them from their deadly addictions, and replaced it with the more life-affirming addiction called the Internet. And now everyone is too busy learning, sharing, and becoming interconnected to waste even a moment, on backwarding drink, hate or war.
But the wise are seldom too busy, and the too busy can seldom be wise. Oh, that’s good. Let me tell Zhoodah! Hold on.
Busy. Figures.