Rhythm and Gravy

Jason, an old friend from Pittsburgh, got married in York, PA, last weekend, and flew me out to deejay his wedding reception. I’m not one to pass up a free trip to see old friends, so I hopped a plane to Pittsburgh on Friday and drove across PA with good friends Lisa and Rick. It took a whole day of flying and driving, so we barely had time to check in at the hotel, have four Yuenglings (sweet, sweet nectar of America’s Oldest Brewery), iron my DMC*, sleep for four hours, and set up the sound system at the reception hall before the wedding.

The wedding was short, sweet, and very Methodist. It worked — when it was over, the beautiful couple was much more married than before.

Then, as it turns out, I was charged with not only deejaying swing music for a five-hour reception, but emceeing as well. Also, it turns out that I’m extremely insecure about my microphone voice. So there I was, trying to hit “play” while announcing a wedding party and trying to get the phonetics to line up proper. I struggled through it, dances were had, speeches were made, glasses were ding-dinged, and that which had been given by various mamas was shook. The reception was over by 4pm, the bride and groom off to do married couple stuff, and we headed back to Pittsburgh. Rick is a tenor and baritone saxophone playing side man for several bands (including touring with the great, late, great Maynard Ferguson), and so is used to driving his ass all over for various gigs, which allowed me a blessed couple of hours of sleep, crammed into the backseat of a Honda Civic, drooling on my duffel bag.

For those not keeping track, at this point my lower back felt like somebody had implanted a joy buzzer soaked in distilled capsaicin between L5 and S1. But Lisa and Rick dropped me off at Nick and Kate’s place, and Nick and Kate fed me good scotch, took me to the Brillo Box, surrounded me with old friends, and Matt, Gil, Loring, Caroline, Clark, Mark, Jean Marie, and Tamar fed me East End beers and caught me up on their goings-on, and I was reminded that damned if I don’t knows me some awesome people.

Slept like a champ, and caught up with Jenny’s Dave and Dave’s Jenny over breakfast and flew home while Eli and Plax baby-faced their way to a Super Bowl title. Today, a quick 1,000 milligrams of the blue pill erased all memory of back pain, leaving nothing but a pretty sweet weekend trip behind.

• Dead Man’s Clothing, a.k.a. my suit from the thrift store.

Tonight, I decided to start organizing my CD collection. I unboxed everything, and found that Richard D. James was somehow nestled between Ella Fitzgerald and Blossom Dearie, an unlikely arrangement but you can’t fault his taste. I like to think that if she’d stayed with us for a while longer, Ella would have dug the Aphex Twin. My soul music collection seems somehow smaller than I remember, except for the Ray Charles: I don’t remember buying Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music, but I’m sure glad I did.

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don’t crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true of false, gleaned from one’s parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child’s exodus from the parental nest, sooner of later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants.

–David James Duncan, The River Why

Today, our founders were all out of town, leaving their desks completely unprotected.

I’ve started going back to judo practice. For now, I’m skipping the ろんどり (”rondori”, or sparring) because my shoulder is not 100% just yet, but even so I’m so out of shape that I feel nauseous most of the time.

Am hoping this goes away, as am annoying myself.

Anyway, the shower afterwards felt great. I find it easy to forget that enjoyment often comes from contrast. If I don’t work out, a shower is just a shower. If I wasn’t working hard, a vacation wouldn’t mean much. If I had never felt lonely, I wouldn’t appreciate much the nice things people sometimes say.

I have a friend who is doing her Ph.D. research on well-being, and I don’t pretend to understand her work but I do remember that she once told me about the result of a massive survey she helped with. They found that a sense of well-being was uncorrelated to the amount of enjoyment in one’s life, but was highly (inversely) correlated to toil and hardship.

I sometimes feel like I’m slowly but surely wearing myself down. But that’s okay, isn’t it?