Jazz

It’s hard to overstate how much I hate jazz. Especially loud jazz. Right now there are four guys on stage trying to masturbate louder than each other. Star Trek’s Scottie could indiscriminately swap one of them with a randomly chosen jazzer from a different country, where they call them jazzers, and the aural assault would continue unabated with no one the wiser, least of all the drummer. The audience would applaud the avant garde rendition of Loud with a Side of Louder in G minor. So experimental!

I was just here last weekend, then sans jazzers, both times in the van, which is lately warping my sense of space. The van, not the jazz; via a weird haze of disconnectedness. Unmoored. Not adrift, but without a draft, indeterminate of route and sometimes destination. I occupy arbitrary space, in between times I don’t, absent the cyclical circadia of normal navigation. It’s a complex combination with my attempt at digital detoxification.

The moorings of the internet call gently like the calming slap of waves on the hull of a harbored boat. And I have listened less than I expected and more than I’ve wanted.

I’m doing OK with Facebook at least, engaging intentionally, in furtive spurts, trying to hide from my own perception. Next is news, the nexus of knowledge of the temporally tenuous. The implication of information NOW NOW NOW, sooner than soon, in time to react to the threat of the…

Well, OK that’s a pretty big threat isn’t it? That one, that you’re thinking of.

Threats are more dangerous when we can’t do anything about them. Not for what they do but what they do to us while we anticipate them. The worry about them, that’s the damage we do to ourselves. “Stop” I say to myself, and don’t listen. Much.

The jazzers have reinvaded the stage, analogous to some place that has been invaded a lot throughout history. I’m pretending not to have internet again, I’m hoping you pretend I said something clever.

That reminds me, strangely, of a character I played in a RPG once. Damn is it “an RPG” because it’s “an R” because R sounds like ARR which starts with a vowel, even though R isn’t a vowel? Or is it “a RPG” because the R is for Role (… Playing Game). Again I could look this up, or maybe another day I’d remember, or maybe I’m gonna make up my own damn rules, because rules are for followers. And players, when I’m running an RPG. I can even change the rule in mid-paragraph. Boom.

She was a Japanese women in the Crimean War, married to a Russian Colonel, knitting coded troop data into gifts sent home for her family, to regain the honor lost when her father sold opium to her townsfolk. At the start of the session she was reaping the vegetables from her garden in anticipation of escape before the encroaching invaders. When it was too late, and she realized a new regime was in power, she demurely offered “Vegetable?” to her next subject of observation, in service to her emperor, the invader with the gun.

A time traveler arrived an instant before her death, bullet hovering in the air in front of her face, her offer insufficiently ingratiating. On realizing time had stopped, except for her and the yet newer observee. “That’s a nice sword you have… Vegetable?”

I made her from random adjectives (female, 43, birth country, profession (con man, adjusted), dishonored, etc. At the end of the game, she betrayed her team, bringing the time travel device to her emperor’s feet and stranding them in the distant past.

Jazzers are jazzing and my friends have arrived, so this one’s getting posted without editing. At least they are all playing the same song.

Boom.