Last night, my mind was all horns punctuated by drums, fast hi-hat, and quickening bass. I was trying to read poetry and kept hearing the song “We Six” by Paul Chambers. I had to look the song up in my library to get the title. It’s fast and crazy and starts a little cacophonous before settling in to each musician taking their turn. The music played – for real this time, not just in my head. I closed my eyes for a second and could imagine a club dark and the low hum of voices, chatter, conversations. This sometimes happens when I try to read. I get overloaded with images and situations not my own but easily imagined. Or I’m reminded of situations entirely my own but not yet explored. The lines “and I was sitting in the dark / on the edge of the bed / at five o’clock in the morning” reminded me of winter in Philadelphia. I woke at 5 every morning, quietly dressed, kissed goodbye and made my way down the stairs, past the dog, out the door in to a cold, still, and sleeping city. I could see the man that stood at the bus stop near the Parkway, his breath rising in the dark – or the gas station across Fairmount where a woman stands under the bright white lights bundled against the frost, her windows freshly scraped waiting for the pump to click off.
I don’t listen to much Jazz anymore. I wasn’t planning on listening to Jazz. It all felt so erudite: red wine, Paul Chambers, a book of poetry. This is not how I usually spend my evenings – behaving professorially. Usually I scroll Facebook and Twitter, refresh google news, text with friends.
That was before the woman from T-Mobile called. I’m switching carriers and getting a new phone. I’ve been on a mini spending spree lately. I dropped some money on getting my car fixed, bought a treadmill, and am getting a new phone. I’ve been bitching about the car, the lack of exercise, and (maybe not in writing) the fact that my headphones don’t always work, my phone toggles on and off between silent and not silent mode, and my phone battery dies quickly. I decided to do something about these annoyances. Maybe the flurry of productivity/activity is what triggered the sensation of jazz – a busy start before all of the instruments fall in to place.
A few days ago, someone commented on my post about hiking. There was a link that I didn’t want to test and an email address I didn’t pursue. Very few – I mean very few – people read my blog. Pretty much the only person who has ever commented was a jilted ex-boyfriend of my ex-fiancee. He left quite a few comments before disappearing. I think most of what he was writing was in an attempt to communicate with her. It worked – she eventually sent an email to the two of us. Then she disappeared too. I can’t rule out that this comment was from him… I like a good riddle, so I dug a little. The comment was a quote from Goethe. Admittedly, I’m not smart enough to recognize a Goethe quote, but I am smart enough to google it. I haven’t read any Goethe – though back in my day as a book editor, I edited a few volumes of essays about him. The jilted boyfriend doesn’t strike me as the type to quote Goethe… and honestly, it wasn’t the quote that made it feel riddle-like. After the quote the visitor wrote Mercedes Ryan Barbour – which I assumed was the name of the person leaving the comment – a reasonable assumption. Google to the rescue (again). The top hits were the LinkedIn page of a guy by the name of Ryan Barbour associated with Mercedes Benz in Nashville (where both the ex-fiancee and the jilted boyfriend live). Suddenly, the comment had intrigue. A potential rabbit hole. Is this a new beau? Is this the old beau mentioning a new beau as breadcrumb… for me? for him to find me? Diabolical.
A little more googling and I came across a comment on a different website: “Thank you ever so for you article. Really thank you! Really Cool. Mercedes Ryan Barbour” While decidedly less literary and also less intriguing, I started to like the idea of a random bot or person who picks a different site every night on which to post a comment. I began to imagine the nightly routine – that half-hour before dinner or maybe twenty minutes before bed. It’s like the dunkin’ guy who had to make the donuts, but this person has to post a comment. There weren’t enough random comments attributed to this name to support the theory of someone’s unusual habit, but my mind was off on different stories – concocting a life of someone in the interwebs, perhaps part of an Eastern European gang of hackers – the type of guys who break into the house in tight black clothing and drop a ferret in the bath tub with you a la Big Lebowski.
That was the jazz of thoughts racing and zipping. The boom bop and zoom zip of an evening that never really got past a few poems before interruptions sent me in wildly different directions. And sometimes, that chaos falls in to order and the day or evening takes shape. What I remember of Goethe:
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”