Apologies, faithful readers: I know how it feels to be stood up, and I never meant to disappear on you, and by now you have probably decamped from my schlockspot in search of someone who knows the meaning of committment. Serves me right for being such a flaky tease. But rest assured that this was not the original plan. I had big visions for this blog; it was supposed to be the hottest thing on the internet, the Platonic Ideal of self-absorbed twenty-something verbal vomit that all other self-absorbed twenty-something verbally vomitrocious blogging endeavors could only aspire to. Back in January, when I was home on vacation and testing the outer limits of boredom and inertia, I would lie on my bed staring at the light fixture dangling from the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, and ideas for new blog posts would bloom freely in my imagination like... polyps! yes, polyps on a mucus membrane, and these thought-polyps were scintillatingly clever and a smidge poignant and highly specific to my own life yet so masterfully executed that they would resonate with a universal readership. They demanded to be brought into this world; some serious polyp-actualization was in order. I sat down to make it happen, buzzy typing fingers at the ready, and what followed over the next few months was a series of valiant but ultimately aborted blogging efforts (I think that this condition has a name and it is Writer's Schlock). So in place of a coherent, unified entry, I give you this: shards, the Sparknotes version, the Blogs that Might Have Been.
First, I was going to write about that time when I was browsing the foreign language section of The Strand for a German phrase guide for my sister and then, boom, there was an used copy of that book that you love. That book, which I had also read (because I am always expanding my literary tastes, blah blah, but really I just wanted to understand you better, even from an oblique point of entry) -- there it was on the shelf, askew and out of place between two standard German dictionaries. It had the unmistakable quality of having been shoved there in haste, as though someone had been sitting in that corner for hours, nose buried in the edition, until a staff member gave this delinquent reader a death glare that said "Buy or GTFO," whereupon the reader wedged the book in the nearest shelf and fled the rapacious maw of capitalism. The longer I stood there staring at this aberrant paperback, the more I became convinced that not only had my imagined scenario taken place, but that the reader had in fact BEEN YOU, and that I was now occupying the exact same physical space that you had taken up at some earlier point in time to page through your old favorite. Such a situation was not even remotely probable. You lived far away. We weren't even speaking-- there had been a protracted silence, unfortunate but for the best, just one of those things that I had eventually come to terms with-- but in that instant I didn't care anymore, grabbed for my iPhone, was going to call you and tell you about the book because it was a SIGN. But then my phone battery was dead and that was a SIGN too, or at least it negated the chance that I might contact you at that very moment, so I left the bookstore with a collection of funky German dessert recipes from the '80s and took the long subway ride home, by which point my self-preservational instinct had decided to show up and bitch-slap my generosity of spirit, ensuring that the phone call went forever unmade.
I tried to write about this non-incident. It seemed rife with symbolic significance-- literature as a binding force between people, the connotative power of objects, unacted-upon possibility for resolution. Maybe I could even include a paragraph about how the whole thing never would have occurred if I had just done my shopping on Amazon, had found everything I needed algorithmically and not by foraging around in a physical space where other human beings could also leave evidence of themselves, where real objects could be incongruously shoved together so that some overly analytical, see-something-where-there's-nothing creature like myself could infer an elaborate narrative from their juxtaposition. But every sentence that I began to craft quickly choked to death on its own emo-ness and self-importance, and after a few tortuous attempts, I had become emotionally disengaged from the original situation anyway and saw no reason to document it. So I resolved to LIGHTEN UP, dammit, and moved on to my next idea.
In this hypothetical next post, I was going to index a number of my music-related dreams and nightmares, most of them riffs on the classic repressed neuroses of performing artists. For instance, there was the one dream where I was pushed onto the stage at Carnegie Hall and forced to sightread Beethoven's monstrous Hammerklavier sonata in front of all of the Important Musical Intelligentsia (and of COURSE this dream occurred on the night before my last Bleep U degree recital, and I woke up in a horrifying panic and it took me about fifteen minutes to remember that I was in fact only slated to perform the more modestly scaled Beethoven Op. 110 in a small university concert hall that day). There was also the dream, a few years earlier, where a spectral Johannes Brahms made a night visitation to my window like the Ghost of Jacob Marley and mournfully intoned that I had not studied my score enough and had not carried out his compositional intentions in performance. Guilt-tripped by a ghost Brahms! Oh SNAP! Then there was the dream where Artur Schnabel showed up at my apartment-- not so much as an apparition but black-and-white, staticky and flickering like a projection from an old movie-- and the Maestro convinced me to drop acid with him (I am apparently more freewheeling in dreamspace than I am in waking life) and we played through Beethoven's third concerto together, gloriously, and watched as the sound waves morphed into stunning patterns of color and light. And then there was my all-time favorite music dream, the one in which I discovered that the soundtrack to Disney's The Little Mermaid was closely based on Bach's St. John Passion-- Ursula sang material derived from the alto arias, Sebastian was the Evangelist-- and I presented these earth-shattering findings to the American Schmoozicological Society. I woke up still possessed by the idea, half-believing that some huge cryptic Dan Brown-esque cultural conspiracy had been revealed to me in my sleep; on arriving at school that day I asked Schmarvard Guy, a venerable Bach scholar, if my subconscious was actually onto something there. He gave me a searching look, as though trying to determine whether I was a pioneering visionary or a total crackpot, and then said, "The Little Mermaid?... You mean the Calypso cartoon movie with the sea creatures? Based on St. John? ... Is that true? Who knows. Maybe that's true. Actually, I kind of wish that were true."
I liked where this post was going. I was kind of rolling with it, venturing into psychoanalytic interpretations-- is Brahms representative of my father and have I disappointed him?-- and also Inception-esque philosophical inquiries-- if I have a drug trip within a dream, is it the same thing as a dream within a dream and do the same rules apply? But then my life was disrupted by a visit to Bleep U/ Shroomington to see Felix's graduating recital, and the whole prodigal daughter-goes-back-to-the-heartland sees-everyone-she-knows reassesses-her-formative-years tone of the trip seemed to necessitate an immediate blog entry, so I halted work on the music-dreams post and started to draft an account of the Great Bleep U Return Journey.
There was so much to write about that I hardly knew where to begin. My first instinct was to take a chronological approach. I could set the scene, describe how I waited at the gate for my flight at the NY airport and observed a group of lump-faced puppy-dog boys in suits who were trying to order beer off of the new touch-screen menus that had been installed in the terminal. As I listened to their conversation, they revealed themselves to be Schmindiana frat boys who had just interviewed for summer finance internships in the Big City and were now returning to Bleep U; in the past I might have been offended by their presence, but now I experienced a wave of affection at their antics (oh college days, the simple life, idyll, respite: I was almost home). If I wrote about being at the airport, then I would also have to include the flight, where I started to question the wisdom of making this trip at all-- would my cool, cultivated, citified persona crumble away on hitting the Midwestern atmosphere? Would I lose my critical distance, instantly regress to a sadly vulnerable and approval-seeking specimen? Anxieties began to stir somewhere in my lower esophagus. I distracted myself by thumbing through the SkyMall catalog and wondering who the fuck would ever pay ninety-five dollars for a replica of the Elder Wand or four hundred dollars for a make-your-own-soymilk machine (although the latter did come with a complimentary package of fresh soybeans-- hot damn, what a steal!) Finally I arrived in the cornfield state, spent the night with my wonderful friend Med Student Meg, took a deep breath and rode the shuttle bus to Shroomington.
Or was that whole expository section really necessary? I deleted it and started anew, at the actual point of arrival. Oh dear Shroomington, with its trees and clean air and little stone houses and sleepy students in sweatpants. The place embraced me as soon as I stepped off the bus, easy, familiar. To the concert hall to hear Felix, who had grown into a towering titan of the keyboard while I was away, then back to his house for the afterparty, which started slow with boxed wine and a few vaguely awkward conversations but hit its stride as soon as Teacher and Felix's dad showed up with some top-shelf liquor and started mixing cocktails for all. Before long Felix and I had accidentally kissed on camera in front of everyone, and Teacher was swooning over Felix's blonde bombshell of a mother, and a multi-generational group had formed in the kitchen to boisterously debate the merits and drawbacks of plastic surgery (emphasis was on boob jobs). It was a night to remember. And then I stayed for a few more days, wonderful days in which I had no obligations and could therefore treat Shroomington as a resort town. Which parts to include? Surely I had to write about seeing Schmarvard Guy, who took me to lunch at the supremely janky Chinese restaurant across the street from school that everybody secretly loves-- we sat there eating spicy string beans out of styrofoam boxes using plastic forks, and I told him about school at PUNY and he told me about his fabulous garage band that does covers of David Bowie and Procol Harum, and I made a mental note to try to be half as much of a badass by the time I reached middle age. And what other shenanigans warranted a retelling? Without a doubt I needed to recount the story of the impromptu latke dinner at Felix's house-- how Teacher and his son and I went on a quest for applesauce, which proved surprisingly hard to find, and as soon as we had finally tracked it down and were returning triumphantly with an extra-chunky variety, Felix called to tell us that the sour cream had somehow frozen in the refrigerator (it wanted to be extra-chunky too) and could we possibly double back to pick up a new carton? And after the Tale of the Latkes, maybe I'd have earned the right to wax nostalgic about some of the other little things, move in for the sentimental culmination, the core bleeding heart of the blog entry (there must be one, every time; it's a tenet of my blogular formula). This would probably include a description of the sublime coffee and pastries at Schitty Bakery and my joyous reunion with the staff, who all knew me well and still remembered my exact preferences (small hazelnut coffee in a glass mug, toasted everyseed bagel with goat cheese-chive schmear, and I'll be back later for a cinnamon sneagle or some carrot cake, you know it, and could you put on some Elton John?) And of course I would also have to end with a nod to the night that I walked along the quiet streets and looked at the lit-up windows of my old apartment complex and wondered who was there now, practicing and studying and worrying about the future, carrying on the music school way of life.
But then I was back in Schmanhattan and the city suddenly assaulted me with its frenetic overabundance, and I staggered from the onslaught of crackheads and overprivileged Millennials and camera-happy tourists and perpetually noisy neighbors and intimidating intellectual heavyweights, etcetera, and I had to seriously regroup and get a grip on myself, and writing about Shroomington seemed counterproductive because my visit had thrown into relief all of the beautiful details, the soft shadings and subtle intimacies that I had left behind, and if I dwelt on them too long then I would never be able to leave my apartment or face the squalid subterranean jungle of mass transit or go to school and seek advice from my current professors with whom I had not quite reached the spicy-string-bean-sharing level of comfort. So my Bleep U post languished with all the others, unrealized, trapped in Bloggatory.
Then my dog died-- Gypsy, our twelve-year-old dalmatian, our sweet spotted harlequin girl-- and it was expected, and of course this is the contractual agreement that every family enters into with pets, that their lives will flower and wither in a span that, to us, seems all too short. I thought I might eulogize her here in blogland, conjure up some memories of beach days or family trips, describe her funny doggy mannerisms. But every fragment that I evoked seemed garishly sentimental, rang false somehow, and I realized that it's because I haven't fully understood that she is gone yet: I haven't been back home to notice the missing sound of paws clicking on tile, the sharp happy bark when I walk in the front door, white hairs clinging to my dress pants. And then I thought that maybe it's a good thing that I'm in Schmanhattan now-- a place so numbing and fluorescent and self-referential that you can't even see the stars-- because it allows me to imagine that a new canine-shaped constellation might have appeared in the night sky since last I was home, up there just out of sight. And then I never finished that blog post either.
