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.

Follow Where You Will

Part 1 of a short story I started writing a while ago.

“And if I don’t mean what I say

Don’t take me for a liar

I’m the Pied Piper, the rebel town crier

Follow me down to the sea

Follow where you will

Follow me to madness, let the water stand still”

Their song amused me. It was a madness of strings and passion; an angry little rant against the religious and political structures so stifling to the freedom of thought the lyricist so clearly believed in, dressed in the metaphorical guise of the tale of the poor residents of Hamelin.

I stepped back from the crowd, feeling their energy as they cheered, crowded around the stage that had been set-up in the corner of the small café. There was joy here, and perhaps some misunderstanding. Wordplay has always been a hallmark of the political, cleverly disguising the real messages in plain view. The nuances of the message were probably lost on half the group, absorbed and ignored as part of the musical experience, but music itself has always been a message. We speak in code to share what we mean with plausible deniability so as to avoid repercussions should the powers in charge decide they don’t like what we have to say.

I nodded to the barista/bartender as I stepped through the door and out into the summer night air. It was early by most standards, the bars and clubs were barely half an hour past opening for the night, but it was peaceful as far as my eye could see. The moon hung on the very cusp of being full, a fat, white, perfectly round maggot marring the perfect darkness of the night sky. As if from nowhere I pulled out my trusty pipe and played a soft little tune, echoing and playing with the song I’d so recently heard.

At my call, they stirred from their hiding places. Thousands of beady little eyes looked on from the shadows, drawn to the sound of my pipe. They knew this sound as surely as they knew the scent of the discarded sandwich in the dumpster behind the Starbucks. It was ingrained in their little rodent brains the way sweet-looking forest fauna instinctively know the song of the helpless princess as she waits for her prince charming whilst lost in their tree-filled home.

With a hop in my step and a half dance, we twirled our way down the urban streets as I led the unwitting rats somewhere far removed from their metropolitan love-nests. Who knew I’d still be in the business of pest control after all these years?