HS Lordships
We had the last new teacher dinner tonight at HS Lordships in Berkeley. I got to the dining room late and ended up at a table with the gym teacher, Rick. He never stops talking! He looked like a football player in the off-season, a beefy white guy with fat fingers and a crew cut wearing black slacks and a green Tommy Bahama shirt. I panicked when I saw that I would have to sit with only him and his wife. He's also piebald. He has one brown eye and one half brown/half blue eye, like a marble. I sat next to his wife, a cute blond woman from Estonia. Rick was talking about corporal punishment and his wife said that in Estonia teachers make students kneel bare-kneed on dried peas for an entire class if they misbehave. Rick told a story about one of his senior students, a girl, stopping to talk to him while completely naked today during the senior streak. His wife pursed her lips and stopped talking.
I read an interview with Pat Metheney a few years ago in which he made an offhand remark that B flat minor is the saddest key. I'm trying to write a song in B flat minor that isn't sad. I don't know what it will be, just not sad. I want to record new songs, but I haven't come up with anything that sticks recently.
I don't want to go to sleep. I'd give up sleeping if it weren't for dreams, I'd much rather keep sitting here and listening to music, do you know what I mean? This morning I didn't want to wake up because of my dream. Adam and I were preparing to bike to the Nevada desert from my house in Wisconsin. The bike we were using had the Superman logo painted inside the wheels. I turned off my alarm to go back to the dream but I couldn't fall back to sleep.
I read an interview with Pat Metheney a few years ago in which he made an offhand remark that B flat minor is the saddest key. I'm trying to write a song in B flat minor that isn't sad. I don't know what it will be, just not sad. I want to record new songs, but I haven't come up with anything that sticks recently.
I don't want to go to sleep. I'd give up sleeping if it weren't for dreams, I'd much rather keep sitting here and listening to music, do you know what I mean? This morning I didn't want to wake up because of my dream. Adam and I were preparing to bike to the Nevada desert from my house in Wisconsin. The bike we were using had the Superman logo painted inside the wheels. I turned off my alarm to go back to the dream but I couldn't fall back to sleep.
posted by DB at 10:12 PM
3 Comments:
You there, in the middle of your mind, curled up into a ball but wide awake--I am awake like you, hearing the train that when it passes means it's almost morning, though the sky is dark, though the highway is quiet. You can follow the train in your mind, but your mind cannot follow the train from little town to little town to Boston, where in the dark the transactions happen--something poured, something filled, something dropped off, something taken--happen among the loud men at the wharf before their very first sign of dawn, and the train turns around. I wish our minds were like the train, passing once a night through the woods, fading out among the lights and termini, its load of oil or metal going some place they want it, returning in the morning, its mile-long belly not empty, not hungry; not the wharf, accepting train after train of junk from the provinces all night, the provinces where B flat minor gets manufactured, a throat that tries and tries to swallow dirt.
Dan
i would have liked to be there with you. at the dinner, that is. but, maybe in the dream too.
I like how you said, "the bike WE were using." I just assumed we were on separate bikes before you mentioned that. Going tandem is the only way to get to Nevada anyway.
PS-it took me about 4 full seconds before I realized that you weren't in fact referring to something I emailed you about, but that Lemonade is me. I got a chuckle out of that.
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