Pied Piper

If you look closely, there's a Racheloons
lurking in the background.

Oh Hamelin town, suffering of a folly of your own creation. You have to pay the piper, for he is a vengeful traveler. Broken hospitality to the wayward wanderer bodes ill for your already feeble reputation. He will take your children, but who is really playing the pipe? Take that and smoke it.

Who betrances us so unwilling that we would walk and wander a-way without cause or care?

This way, that way, here-a-ways and there-a-ways; it does not matter. Like the checked cloth we call the pied, they are all the same. Nothing is new but that in the now because there will always be a future that looks at this past.

Echoes of his melody ripple like Eros' missed targets on the Naiads' pool. He has the Sirens' song captured.

Moths to the flame we pound our heads on the wall in time to his 6/8 beat.

Even you, village elders, swoon to his haunting, tempted and taunted.

I'm not going to be enchanting anyone with my pipe playing, not by a long shot, but earlier this summer I made an intention to learn an instrument. I am determined to hold myself to that intention.

The next obvious question was what kind of instrument should I try to learn? I'm poor and essentially alone for most of this summer, I needed something simple and cheap that I could teach myself. Autodidactism FTW!

Then, in the same conversation with my friend Jonathan where he offered to teach me guitar should I acquire one, I realized exactly what I should learn to play: the pipe, tin whistle, penny whistle. I've always had a fascination with the story of Hamelin, and the song by Seattle band, the Senate, hasn't helped with that either.

So I dug up the little, bamboo pipe my aunt bought me in Thailand (Vietnam?), found some fingering charts and melodies online, and proceeded to start playing. I'm a little squeaky and I have trouble with the higher notes, but I'm determined.

Gratuitious butt shot!

It's helpful that I don’t drive and chose an instrument that's easily portable.

While I'm walking, I find myself playing simple scales, trying to play, from memory, whatever tunes I can remember. Hot cross buns and the intro lines to Disney's Part of Your World.

I'm not going to be performing with this. It's not about that. Learning an instrument is an exercise in self-improvement and self-discipline. How long can I keep this up? Can I really devote myself to becoming good at this? I want to. And even if I don't, I'm not proving myself to anyone else. This is all about me.

It's funny, too that I find myself gesturing and gesticulating wildly with pipe in hand. It becomes an extension of my hand, almost like a magic wand. I laugh at myself, but secretly pretend it is a magic wand disguised as a musical instrument.

I can have fun with this.

A Poem is an Act of Creation

Dance With Me
We are all searching.
We are all dancing,
left 2, 3, right 2, 3.
Circling and gasping as life burns through us.
Celebrate it and rejoice.
Show the world what it means to move.
You are not beholden to anyone except yourself,
so expand. Grow.
Like the Christian god said, "Let there be light."
Let it shine forth so I can see it.
Let it spread.
Let it be what it was always meant to be.
Ten million candles glow with the light of a forest fire.
If we each to our own selves be true I hate to be the one person standing in the way.

I want to write a letter

I want to write a letter to a friend of mine. He lives in Canada and I haven't seen him since we met: it's been almost two years. We met at a summer camp and while we've both returned to the camp, it's been different sessions so we haven't seen each other. Somehow though we're still in contact.

I've made plenty of other camp friends over the years of course, but I haven't consistently stayed in as close contact with pretty much anybody else except this one, crazy redhead I met on a bus to Leavenworth in July of 2007. I'm a pro-penpaller, but very few people have the same drive towards stamps and letters that I do, so it most always ends up being very one-sided conversations. Which, now that I think about it, has been the case here as well. I've only received one physical reply from Gabe, but where I send letters, he emails or Facebooks me so there's still the transmission of ideas.

The point I'm getting to is that we were talking about this the other night, and letters really are something that you treasure.

He said something that really made me think as well. It's mind boggling to think that someone's hand wrote the words you're reading and then traveled however many miles to get to you. Sure it's amazing that you can send the same amount of information in under 5 minutes, but the fact that the wrinkled piece of paper you hold in your hands traveled all that way to get to you makes it so much more special.

With how little we physically write anymore - I know plenty of college students who complain about cramped hands right after finals/midterms - taking the time to actually write a letter shows you care above and beyond. It conveys something about your personality by lacking the impersonal uniformity of type.

So the imperfections make us special and make the people we interact with feel better about it.

So then, what of perfection? Often, it takes so much more effort, but it lacks the personality, and it's the personality that enables us to connect. And like the hokey pokey, that's what it's all about.