Keyboards

It seems I'm happiest when I'm sitting at a near 90-degree angle with my fingers sitting on keys. That is to say: typing (writing this, poetry (for which I have a newly rediscovered love/hate relationship with thanks to my poetry class), short stories, emails to friends, cover letters, resumes, scripts for radio segments...) and playing piano.

The funny thing is my fingers work in completely different ways in those two settings.

I type 100 words a minute, (90 on a day when I'm a little slow or my left hand is faster than my right, which happens once a week or so, and closer to 110 on a good day...and, incidentally, later at night. like right now, I'm typing closer to a 105-WPM pace. It could also be this new keyboard which sits very comfortably, though I would prefer a chair about 2 inches higher) which is faster than most everyone I know and has gained me the title of "Captain Transcription" at work for my ability to transcribe interviews at a pace of 2.5-3x real-time, which may not sound fast, but actually is.

Playing piano, I can play lines at around 100-120 BPM which is, well, slow by comparison to those around me. I have no chops. This confused my boss at work when I told him this. ("I can only imagine how you play piano with the speed of those fingers!" "Y'know Monk?" "Yeah..." "Imagine that, but more inside, more clusters, fewer lines, more silence, and slower whole-tone scales.")

Of course, you could argue that I get about the same keystrokes per minute with the two since I'm rarely hitting more than one key at a time at the computer (only exception to the one-at-a-time is the shift key) and am rarely hitting fewer than 3 notes at a time (and I've certainly done 10 or more...) on the piano.

And yet, I feel both incredibly self-confident and terribly inadequate at both. (I'm the rare over-confident, dare I say cocky, completely self-conscious self-hating artist. I'm simultaneously a gift to the world and a black hole sucking up the energy of those around me making all space around me devoid of value. Yeah; it doesn't make much sense to me, either.)

I'm like the shy stripper who says 'look at me' and 'look away' at the same time...

And I really need to work on my metaphors. (For those of you who are about to say 'but you used 'like', it's a simile!' similes are a kind of metaphor...)

I think where I meant to go with this is that I like to create. And as much as I like creating for those around me to enjoy, I enjoy creation for the sake of creation itself and for the journey I go on. The collection of journal entries and short stories that I have never shared with anyone is vast -- and at times, depressing -- but they weren't made for sharing, they were made for transforming.

And the improvisation sessions I've had at a piano when nobody else is home number in the weeks, not days or hours, and I always feel incredible after it's over and wish I could reproduce it when people are around -- or even when I have a tape-recorder on.

Yet if art were created only so it could be reproduced identically, then oral culture would not exist. Story-telling, fables, history, jazz, folk music, folk tales, and religion, would merely be figments of our imagination and memories of a distant past.

I guess with that in mind is how entries like this happen -- entires whose start and finish is connected through a thin thread that barely holds together, yet because it happened in real-time, one right after the other, it stays -- no editing, like the spoken word. Once it's out there, you can't go back and retrace your steps and make a new transition and a line of thought that makes sense.

Instead, you're stuck with this.

Circular art with the intent to transform -- yet it's left me right back where I started.

I guess I better quit while I'm only slightly behind...