Dispatches from an unclear mind

The Guitar Lesson

Okay then, let’s begin by learning a chord. We’ll start with the A chord because it’s relatively easy to play. First, take your index finger and place it just behind the second fret of your D string.

No, your left hand. On the D string. It’s the third string from the top.

Yes, I know D is the fourth letter in the alphabet, but the strings aren’t arranged in alphabetical order.

Yes, it might be a good idea if they were.

Just behind the second fret. The frets are those silver metal things going across the neck of your guitar.

Yes, I suppose there are a lot of new words to learn.

No, just behind the second fret. That’s the third fret. Now you’re on the G string. The D string, just behind the second fret.

Look, see my finger? Put your finger where mine is.

No, I didn’t mean put your finger on top of mine, I meant put your finger on YOUR guitar where mine is on MY guitar. Yes, I can see that would be a little confusing..

No, just BEHIND the fret, not on it. Now you’re on the E string. Third string down, the D string. No, not the third fret, just behind the second fret.

Push down a little with your finger tip. Yes, it will feel uncomfortable to start with but you’ll get used to it. No, the D string, second fret. Now pluck the string. No, that doesn’t sound very good does it? But you’ve moved your finger again. The SECOND fret, just behind the fret bar. No, the D string.

Yes, that is an interesting thought. We’re starting on the D string even though we’re making an A chord because A chords have three notes in them, A, E and C#. Yes, I know there’s no D in there, that’s why we need to put our finger on the D string, to change it’s note to an E. No, we’re not learning an E chord. Remember the A chord has an E note in it? Yes, it IS confusing. Could we just get back to the second fret of the D string? No, I’m not getting cross. Second fret. Just behind the fret bar. Third string. Now pluck it.

Look, you just moved your finger again. What on earth is wrong with you? Second fret, third string. No, not third fret second string. The D string. Yes, I know D is not A. Look, I just explained all this.

Put your finger on the D string at the second fret. Good grief, the D string! Was your brain deprived of oxygen at birth? The D string, the third string. No, not third from the bottom! From the top! Put your finger there. No, your left hand you idiot! Your index finger. Yes, the one you point with. No, it’s not rude if you’re playing guitar. Seriously, are you having some kind of mental breakdown? The second fret. Look at your fat little finger! It’s on the fifth fret of E string! I said the D string, the second fret. Look where my finger is. See it? It’s on the end of my hand on the guitar fretboard, you moron. No, my left hand. God! Did someone bring you here? I hope you didn’t drive. Time’s up.

Flies

I’m an Australian. I live in a regional town. I live on the outskirts of said town in a semi-rural environment. It’s very picturesque; open fields, green grass lazily waving in the breeze, gnarled old fence posts, beautiful old farmhouses. Horses. Cattle.

And consequently, flies.

I hate flies. Flies spoil everything. Flies could almost convince me that there used to be an Eden where somebody did something awful and nature fell from perfection. The Fall. Right there at the Fall, following Adam and Even from the garden, were the first flies. That flaming sword the angel held was the first fly zapper.

Flies are like evil incarnate. They begin life as maggots for goodness sake! There’s a clue. Living on death and decay before they grow wings to spread disease and filth. They are the evangelical host of evil. What do they call Satan? Lord of the flies. I rest my case.

Venture outside in the summer time around here. Flies want to commit suicide by diving into your mouth. They fly up your nose. They buzz in your ear. Flies are persistent. There’s that one fly who latches on to you, who follows you wherever you go, flitting about your ears and hairline. That fly has become your greatest fan and that’s sad. It’s like ‘Misery’ with the part of Kathy Bates being played by an invertebrate.

We must appear immense, lumbering creatures to flies. They must know we’re dangerous. One good smack of a gigantic hand and they’re paste. Why then do they do it? Why do they flirt with death, acrobatically dodging the futile swipes. They’re like brave, little fighter pilots up against their own personal King Kong. No wonder Kong was angry.

Flies are creatures of nature. I get that. So why don’t they want to live outside? Horses don’t want to come in to my house through an open window. Flies are desperate to gain entry. They line up in queues. I’m sure some enterprising fly is selling tickets, promising fly paradise. Then, when they do get inside, the first thing they want to do is go back outside, banging their little ugly heads against the window glass and swearing loudly in their secret fly language demanding a refund.

Flies are lazy. They have no jobs, nor do they want one. They can fly (of course) but they’d rather ride around on your back. Flies don’t care where you’re going. They’ll fit in. They don’t care. Bees are busy. Bees have things to do. Flies laugh at bees. Suckers.

I sometimes wonder what flies think if they get trapped in your car for a while and then you let them out the window. They must be billions of fly miles from their homes and families but do they care? I have never seen a depressed fly. Flies are immune to ennui. Flies are immune to loss. Flies know no bonds of family or society. There are no fly equivalents of pyramids or Bach concertos. Flies would probably sell drugs if they could carry them.

I keep telling you. Flies are evil. I hate flies.

Science Marches On

Science has been the most spectacular success story of human endeavour. It is the most reliable way of gaining an increasingly accurate view of our physical universe. Science has led us from the darkness of fear and superstition into the sunshine of testable knowledge. Look how far we have come. Into our future what wonders await us?

Science, like everything else, began with the Greeks who were very selfish and wanted to invent everything before relaxing for three thousand years. I don’t blame them. They must have been exhausted. Shortly after Democritus created the universe by inventing atoms, they were off. Pythagoras invented the triangle which came in handy for the Egyptians and their pyramid projects. Before Pythagoras, Egyptian ‘pyramids’ were mostly shapeless heaps of stones piled with abandon one upon another. Eratosthenes demonstrated the Earth was round by measuring shadows down a well. He even calculated a surprisingly accurate circumference. Map makers, who could only draw on flat papyrus sheets naturally objected and the knowledge was hidden and then lost as the pants it was hidden in were inadvertently sent to the dry-cleaners. Aristotle invented everything else although most of it was wrong.

After the Greeks, Science took a few hundred years off to recuperate. Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and replaced it with sun. Of course, this made lots of people angry since they had to reprint all their stationery with new addresses. Galileo used the newly discovered telescope, which up to that point had only be used to peek into ladies dressing rooms, to gaze at the sky. He discovered the moons of Jupiter and craters on the moon. For some reason, this convinced him Copernicus was right. The Pope disagreed and in the spirit of polite intellectual discourse threatened Galileo with torture and had him confined to house arrest for the rest of his life. Six hundred years later another Pope apologised to Galileo but Galileo was unimpressed busy as he was with being dead.

Then came Isaac Newton who invented everything else worthwhile and used up all the science for the next four hundred years. Among his inventions were light, gravity, apples, waves, calculus and rainbows. He also invented his three laws of motion of which most people vaguely remember one.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists were despondent believing that Newton had ruined everything by discovering all there was to know. Albert Einstein happily showed Newton to be incorrect about some things and the game was on again. Einstein discovered that time was elastic and depended on whether you were at the dentist or the movies. Einstein discovered twins could be tricky and should never be separated on rocket voyages. Black holes showed up but nobody is really sure when since they were invisible.

Meanwhile, Charles Darwin invented apes and discovered that we belonged to that family of creatures and were nothing special. The other apes were not amused by this and demonstrated their displeasure by becoming extinct whenever they could.

Now, scientists continue to be busy at work, inventing and discovering, and pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge by publishing papers in journals nobody reads and teaching undergraduates who want to know how this will help them become millionaires.

The Following Morning

Brian Heliotrope was woken from a deep sleep by the gentle sound of rain falling on a tin roof. He was momentarily confused since he knew he was sleeping outside. Opening his eyes, he saw the stars in the clear night sky shining down unblinking, uncaring and merciless, like galactic tax auditors. Once again he contemplated the vicissitudes of life. He thought about steak too. How far could his fall from grace take him? Would he need to change trains? Where was his hat?

He turned towards the sound that had awakened him. It was just another wino on fire, the cheery blaze making flickering shadows on the brick wall behind him. Look, a rabbit, and now a duck. What talent!

Brian despaired. His talents had deserted him along with his second pair of pants. Now he could only shuffle along the hard streets, occasionally breaking into a soft shoe routine, the stares of passers-by squeezing his spleen. How his life had changed, all in that fateful moment when he had chosen salad instead of vegetables. Who could have known? Brian remembered that the past was another country. He thought it might be Sweden. His life had turned grey and dull and he made a mental note to clean his glasses. Next he made a mental note to buy a new mental notepad. This one was nearly full.

All hope was gone. It took the 3:19 to Central and made him pay for the ticket. It had demanded a window seat. Left to his own devices, Brian had sold his devices to buy his meagre daily supply of ink cartridges. Some day he would have a printer of his own. It was good to have goals. It was better to have breakfast.

Breakfast! There was a thought to conjure with. Of course it was better to have a tall hat with a false bottom and a pair of trained doves to conjure with but Brian had so far only amassed the false bottom. He felt certain that his fortunes must turn soon otherwise they would hit the ocean and explode. Everyday had become an exercise in endurance, another twenty four hour period to live through on the road to a new and better life, one in which he owned a dog named Rex who could fetch his slippers and read him the paper. Day after day he soldiered on. There were frequent nights in there too, mixed up in some unfathomable rhythm. If only he could make sense of it all. What good was yogurt? Who had invented swimming?

Brian sighed. The first grey streaks of dawn appeared in the sky, which was nice, because the day before they had appeared in a paper bag blowing carelessly down the street. The sweet smell of another slow meltdown beckoned. Brian climbed clumsily to his feet, checked they weren’t someone else’s feet, and stumbled off to face another day.

The Orchestra

The modern orchestra owes its origins to our distant ancestors. Small groups of hunter gatherers scouring the shoreline for meager food sources would occasionally come across the enormous skeleton of a stranded whale picked clean by sea birds. Fascinated, they would climb all over the bones, rapping here and there with their clubs. The cacophony thus produced was oddly pleasing to their ears. (It is a little known fact that whale skeletons are tuned in F sharp.) In their primitive tongue ‘Orca’ (for ‘whale’) gave rise to our ‘orchestra’, for a group of people engaged in making noise in a co-operative manner on the corpse of a sea mammal.

Since those times, of course, whales have almost completely disappeared from the orchestra having found more lucrative employ in the opera as baritones. Distant echoes of that time can still be seen in the xylophone with its clear resemblance to rib bones.

The orchestra is divided into sections, each of which pays its own cab fare. There is the wing section, home of the ducks and geese. In winter entire pieces must be struck from the repertoire as this section tends to migrate. The wind section is so named for obvious reasons. First and second baboon are particularly prone to punctuating Strauss waltzes with noisy blasts owing to their all fruit diet. The smell dissipates slowly, but not before rendering patrons in the stalls unconscious. The percussion section bears closest resemblance to our ancestors on that distant shore. Often clothed in animal skins, they continue in a tradition often handed down from father to dog of striking anything stationary with a stick, or possibly two.

At the forefront of the orchestra stands the conductor. He wants to make sure that they have all paid their fare and to assign sleeping compartments. He sweeps the air majestically with his baton but none of the orchestra see him. They are too busy reading their music or making bets. The music swells. The conductor swells. He had seafood and regrets it now. Small fires break out amidst the violins. Bravely the orchestra pushes on. The horns sound. There is a traffic jam and they don’t want to be late for the ending of the piece. The music is climbing to a crescendo where it can get a better look. The triumphant final chord rings out. It sends for a pizza. The concert is over. The conductor bows. The orchestra bows. The audience bows. Everyone is so polite here.

As the patrons file out, they know they have participated in a cultural practice as old as time, or at least Uncle Phillip. Their duty to society paid, they can once again face the light unashamed. They have been to the orchestra.

The Hard Case

I leaned back in my chair with my feet on the desk and poured myself another scotch. It was a little early in the day for the breakfast of champions but I needed all the help I could get. My one man detective agency wasn’t faring too well. In the last three weeks the only cases I had were the cases of scotch whose last inhabitant was sitting on the desk in front of me. It was half empty. I’m that kind of guy.

The intercom twerped. It used to buzz but we couldn’t afford the buzz anymore and had to send the it back by registered mail. My secretary, Miss Dulcet, spoke. As usual the sound of her voice rearranged my pants.

‘Sam, you have a new client waiting to see you.’ That was a sentence I wasn’t expecting to hear, but then again ‘Your camel has stolen my watch’ was another sentence I wasn’t expecting to hear and I didn’t. So much for philosophy.

‘Shoo them in, Angel, shoo them in.’

A vision stepped into the room. It was followed by the most beautiful woman I had ever seen swathed in a heady cloud of blossoms and spice. That fragrance told a story. I think it was the one about two Jewish tailors and a lion. My heart played a bossa nova and my liver played bongos on my diaphragm. She moved sinuously up to my desk, her hips telegraphing an invitation in sign language that would have seen her jailed in five states. Her hips could have been harnessed to power New Jersey homes for a week. She sat. I wished she’d used the chair. She showed a shapely expanse of thigh. It was a shame it wasn’t hers.

‘Where did you find that?’ I asked her.

‘It came by post just this morning,’ she said. Her voice sounded like angels eating roast beef. ‘I’m just so frightened, oh I do hope you can help me, Mr Shakespeare.’ She started to cry.

‘Now, now, Angel,’ I calmed her, ‘We’ll sort it out. You’d better start in the middle, I bore easily.’

The story was simple enough. It was the same story told for thousands of years wherever men, women and poultry gather. It was a story of passion. It was a story of love. It was a story that featured marsupials. We all know how that goes. I knew that before long I’d be in the thick of it. I hoped to one day finally be in the thin of it, but that day was a long way away. This was going to be a tough case.

A Beginner’s Guide to Philosophy

Want to appear intelligent but in a vague, unfocussed sense? Want to impress girls at parties by questioning their existence? Want to be unemployable? Philosophy just may be for you. In the past, philosophy has been the province of highly trained professionals fully insured by their guild against existential crises. Now, by virtue of a deregulated uncertainty market, you too can speculate about the nature of knowledge and meaning.

Socrates. Socrates was a pest. He went to the market and engaged folk in conversations where he pretended to know nothing and quickly demonstrated everyone else knew nothing too. Surprisingly, this did not make him popular. Socrates was put on trial and executed which is at least better than being executed and then put on trial but not by much. We only know about Socrates because Plato wrote about him. He is undoubtedly the most famous philosophical pest in history. Fame is good. Being executed, not so much. Let’s call it a nil all draw.

Plato wrote lots. We still have his writings today. Plato’s shopping lists fetch quite a sum at auction. Aristotle wrote lots too. Unlike Socrates Aristotle did not pretend he knew nothing. He took the opposite tack and pretended to know everything. Aristotle wrote natural science without actually doing any. He wrote about testicles a lot, how many different species had and what diseases they cured if you ate them under a full moon on slices of dung. He was uniformly wrong, but he must have had quite a laugh out of watching people try his insane remedies.

The Greeks then gave up philosophy and turned into Romans. No one knows why but is was quite a shock. The Romans turned into Christians and ceased immediately to be interesting. The remnants of the Roman empire played bingo and fought the Vandals, probably because about this time canned paint became readily available. Christian philosophers called Scholastics lived in monasteries and proved that God existed and that He didn’t like you much. The most famous of these, Thomas Aquinas, wrote really thick books which people then, just as now, pretended to read.

After this period, philosophy gets more and more confusing while at the same time managing to be completely boring. Nobody knows who said what and why they thought about this crazy stuff. It’s hardly surprising then that in the twentieth century philosophers like Satre got very depressed and realised that their whole field of study was absurd and unlikely to rival the sex appeal of rock and roll, or even accounting.

Nowadays, philosophers mostly discuss whether what they are discussing has any meaning in discussions about discussions that can drag on for weeks until nobody knows what ‘is’ means and everyone is wearing someone else’s shirt. Philosophers doubt the existence of their hats and ham sandwiches and occasionally get paid for it by passing tourists who feel a little pity.

You too can join this elite band on the frontiers of human knowledge. Apply now.

Why Humanity is Doomed

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings but things aren’t looking too good for our species. We showed such promise. We tamed the beasts and farmed the soil, we started civilizations, built pyramids, constructed aqueducts, navigated around the world with a shoelace and a dead rat, created works of art so magnificent that their impact has lasted centuries, cured diseases, created vaccines, democracy, music, theatre and licorice. Not too shabby.

Look at us now. I do. I observe people. I see the signs, portents of doom and disaster everywhere. You can too. You don’t have to have visions of fire and blood. No mushrooms need light your way. You don’t have to enter into trances and communicate with Uncle Syd who, after death, has apparently developed a prose style best described as florid. No, you can go to the shopping mall.

The shopping mall, that temple of the modern age, that air conditioned cathedral of mediocrity, is humanity writ large. It’s the best we can do, and that is sad. It’s where we want to be, and thank God, we can be there on Sundays too. Watch how people behave in it. Look, everyone has mobile phones, and they’re all out. The mere present, the here and now, is no longer enough. People walk through crowds, texting, and because they cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, they slow down while they’re engrossed in their texting. Some even come to a complete stop, oblivious to the teeming flow. Some bounce off walls. Some bounce off other people. The texting must go on.

Look at the standard shopping mall walking style. Your body some time ago received a message that you wanted to walk in a particular direction. Your body is not all that smart but it tries hard to follow orders, rather like labrador puppy. Meanwhile your eyes have become distracted by something not actually in the direction you’re walking. No part of the brain is involved in any of these operations. Look, shiny! Thus you proceed, walking in one direction, with your head turned in another. You know this isn’t going to end well. It doesn’t. More bouncing ensues.

The devil is real and lives in shopping malls. I’ve seen him posses countless children. They scream, they whine, they puke, they squirm. They decide a crowded space covered on all sides by glass is the perfect place to run like a maniac with their eyes closed. If we allowed the natural forces of human evolution to still be at work these are the children who would run off a cliff, and we would mourn, but only briefly. Here, they just bounce. Then the devil takes them again. Parents find that any semblance of the discipline they normally possess has disappeared in a sulfurous cloud of demonic mischief-making.

Observe the people in a mall. Can these poor specimens be related to the Mozarts, the Einsteins, the Grouchos? What greatness can we expect from them? Nero fiddled while Rome burned. We order coffee, with sprinkles.

Cigarettes

We all know it. Cigarettes are evil. They give people cancer, and often in disgusting ways. Strike that, if cancer gets you, it’s always in a disgusting way. Nobody ever gets cancer and thinks ‘Hm, that’s stylish.’ No, cigarettes are bad. We didn’t know it once and in our ignorance we smoked. They tried to hide it from us but we found out in the end. Truth and justice prevail. So why is it that after forty years I still feel like a smoke sometimes?

My father smoked. A lot. He smoked Kool menthols because he was a cool kind of guy. He got very sick in his forties and gave up overnight. Strong willpower. I flirted with smoking in my university days. I think I bought two packs. They were Kools, of course. Since then I’ve had cigars, maybe two a year. There was another brief passage early in my twenties when I tried to appear academic and urbane and smoked a pipe. Of them all, it was the pipe tobacco that actually tasted and smelt good. But it was never really about taste at all, was it?

Smoking was a life accessory, a signal of your style as clear as your choice of clothes. The way you smoked communicated exactly what kind of man you were, and from a distance. Now, you walk up to people and you shake their hand and you have really no idea until they open their mouths whether they’re going to be an idiot or not. Well, maybe clothes still give you some clue. But if you saw a man across a room, elegantly balancing his cigarette between the index and middle fingers of his left hand, wreathed in artistic tendrils of blue and grey, left eye ever so slightly closed, you knew this guy was cool. He could pick up his scotch glass in his cigarette hand, take a sip, and still not set his nose hair on fire. And this is before we’d all even heard of multitasking.

There were so many images you could create of yourself with a cigarette. You could be Frank Sinatra, the broken hearted guy nursing his scotch, smoke making lazy trails up towards the ceiling. Bruised but not beaten. You could be Humphrey Bogart, cigarette dangling impossibly from your lower lip as you plotted getting even. You could be Joe Elegant, left arm resting on your elbow, cigarette level with the top of your head, like a beacon announcing your class. You could light your cigarette with a match. You’re an old fashioned, straight forward kind of guy, dependable when the going gets rough or you have to invade a country. You could use a lighter. Be careful though. If the lighter is too showy you lose prestige points for trying to hard. On the other hand, God forbid that you use a plastic disposable lighter. If you don’t care that much about yourself, why should anyone else?

To light two cigarettes and pass one to a woman, that was class, that was romance. Apparently they weren’t too concerned about saliva borne diseases then. Who cares? It looked great. For men, looking great, especially to women, has always taken precedence over mere safety concerns. When you were smoking with a woman, all that communication was taking place. Those visible sighs. The long pensive inhale as you consider her words. The stream of smoke from your nostrils as you respond decisively. ‘Cheque, please.’

A Gentleman’s Code

There’s a great song by Harold Arlen with lyrics by Johnny Mercer called ‘One for my baby’. It was a signature Frank Sinatra tune. Frank walks into a bar, overcoat slug over his right shoulder, tie a little loose, hat sitting back slightly on his head. He’s been to a few bars on this particular night and he’s not at his best. The room is nearly empty, a barman and a piano player. I hope the piano player is being paid a lot to be in that empty bar at 3am. Frank walks up to the bar, the barman pours him a straight whiskey, and Frank lights a cigarette. He smokes, he sips. The single forlorn piano begins to play that bluesy Arlen melody. Then he sings the song.

‘It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place
Except you and me.
So set ‘em up Joe
I’ve got a little story
You ought to know.’

There it is. A vignette of a man bereft. Broken hearted. He’s lost his love. We don’t know how but we know he feels bad. Here are two men in the early morning hours. One talking, one listening. It’s all been said before but never with this kind of tired and brutal eloquence. Now you might think this might be the time where a man might have some harsh things to say about that woman. It’s just us two guys. We’ve both been here before. No one’s going to know. We can let off a little steam, tell a few secrets, make her look bad. Not in Johnny Mercer’s world. Not in Frank’s world.

‘I could tell you a lot
But it’s not in a gentleman’s code’

A gentleman’s code. I’d like to be the kind of man who has a gentleman’s code. Reading about Frank I doubt he really had a gentleman’s code. I don’t know enough about Johnny to know whether he did or not. As a songwriter though he knew it. I’d like to think Johnny did have a gentleman’s code. If it’s an illusion, so be it. Some illusions are worth having if they give you something to aim for.

Here’s a man in total defeat but he still holds on to something. He’s still a man. He still has a kind wounded and battered stylishness that we can’t help but find attractive. He still has his code. There are rules of engagement in this warfare and the deepest loss is not defeat but giving up the rules. This is the last fading glow, a disappearing vision of men as tattered knights bound by their code of chivalry. This is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. It’s the torch song. It’s the wee small hours of the morning. It’s Philip Marlow. It’s Sam Spade. A man’s supposed to do something.

I know, I know, it wasn’t how life really worked. It was a polite fiction, a thin layer of courtesy and style laid over the raw edges of real life. It’s gone now. We don’t pretend any more. We hold no more illusions. Great, isn’t it?