Nova Ahead 3

Time is going sideways; my leg is back in action, and I’m running in the morning, but it’s so dark again. It was lighter and now it’s dark; not really sure what is going on. It was quiet in my immediate vicinity as I moved up the hill and onto the dam, but I could hear the semi trucks barreling down 101 like waves crashing from the bed of a beach house. When I was a kid I would lay awake at night hearing my own blood rushing through my body, my heart thumping in the stillness, and it truly terrified me. I knew that my nightmares could dance to that rhythm and I felt like I would never fall asleep; of course I would eventually, and when I awoke, the fear was just a weird shadow that I couldn’t really make out anymore. The sound of the trucks reminded me of this, no motion, but underneath it all, an uncaring, objective machinery churling and smashing the seconds away. Jazz resonates with me because it feels and sounds like a proper processing of this human awareness. Transcending so many levels of understanding and the clatter of both our skeleton bodies and our invisible consciousness, turning that confusion and insanity into a wondrous quilt, almost knitting itself while simultaneously being draped onto the sturdy rack of chords and keys, into the arms of ensemble creativity. Like most other gigantic feelings, it shot me back into the past.

My best friend and I used to work at Foodee’s, and we lived in an apartment upstairs, making pizzas and retelling our favorite episodes featuring the Huxtable Family. As employees, we loathed preparing the lunch buffet spread and would often workshop our own pizza recipes, directly rejecting the scales and precise directions on which the franchise relied to maintain consistency. It was not uncommon to roll in shirtless or shoeless to grab a pie to accompany RBI Baseball, the Nintendo game which doubled as our longform expression of love for one another. That apartment was an uncanny moment in time, as I guess almost anything would be, if plucked out of a particular narrative. I was thinking about it because Steve Cady lived across the hall from us I think, and he is going to be playing bass during our first evening of jazz, as part of the David Michael Ross Quartet, along with Josh Evans on piano and Jody Bregler on drums. Having grown up obsessing about places like the Village Vanguard, I am particularly excited about the future of jazz at Nova Arts; from tasteful standards to esoteric searching to screaming into the cosmos, it will all find a place here. I’m thrilled at the prospect of being in Keene, seeing live jazz on the stage at Brewbakers, and reacclimating myself to what that feels like as a living breathing adult. I haven’t seen David play guitar in a long time, and I know that he won’t disappoint, especially with such a great group of players.

Back when I was just a kid, we were always interested in recreating this time that was memorialized in movies, restructuring the moments in music, fashion, and how we carried ourselves. We’d put on three piece Salvation Army suits and go hear a group at Mango’s (now Margaritas), play cards at a table on the sidewalk, ride the stoop hard. In retrospect, I’m constantly relieved that there wasn’t really an internet at that time; no evidence of youthful embarrassments and naive life exploration. Riding out the expiring night, smoking a cigarette and looking at the moon, imagining what that looks like framed for a shot; holding a mirror in front of a mirror and trying to follow the reflections deeper and deeper until it’s impossible to recognize anything. I can’t quite pinpoint precisely when I woke up into a more self-aware kind of brain space, and I’m still not sure that it is better than just clomping through, but all of these cutbacks and trails blazed lit up when I read Jenny Slate’s book, Little Weirds. Sending a letter to a person that you know from movies and television and from “being famous” is not a thing that is really possible anymore, or at least it doesn’t seem like it is. So here is a letter that I am not sending to her, but also at the same time, sending to you: 

Dear Jenny Slate, I have just finished your book, Little Weirds, and I thought it felt like a fairly direct line into your heart, inasmuch as you were allowing folks in. More importantly, it made me feel capable of love, and the most like a human being that I have felt in awhile. I realized this while I was sobbing on my couch near the end of the book, in the sun, while my dog made low strange crunching noises. I’ve always appreciated how artists (writers, actors, musicians, etc) are all sort of collectively chipping away at this great vein that connects humanity from the beginning of our brains remembering things presumably right into a great eye-dilating vanishing point. I know I am not the first person to say things like this at you, and that I won’t be the last, but I felt like I needed to call attention to the fact that you swung a mighty axe here, and I think you broke right through to a mysterious, pleasant-smelling sludge that happens to be moving freely through us all, but that due to potential stains or unfamiliar sounds, is often kept in the basement. I could continue and enumerate all of the ways that your words resonated, and in all honesty, harmonized with my own experiences, but I think that just saying that I could is probably plenty. I can be a lot, and you certainly don’t need to be subjected to that. So, thank you for writing the book, and I have to tell you, I hope that you write another.

As I’m wrapping up this latest epistle, the sun is finally rising, or I’m pretty sure it is; the sky looks a little like a hypercolor tee shirt, and I can see things outside. Even though I have no business feeling hopeful, I have to tell you that I am. This book (and others like it I’m sure) are just waiting to make you remember not only your humanity, but your distinct and perfect youness. There are people moving around the Earth who will at some point in the future, all join together on a stage and lift a similar singularity up for anyone willing to listen, in fact, one of the David Michael Ross Quartet may be near you right now.