Little Boy Blue

Other than stopping smoking tobacco the next best thing i could have possibly done for my health was to buy the budget-breaking digital piano. It has a digital drum machine on it. It plays what it plays very precisely for as long as it has electricity supplied to it. I have no idea why that facet of it fascinates me. I expect humans to be humans and computers to be just that. What I do know fascinates me is dancing to these drum beats. Nobody is here watching me dance. That's an important part of this crazy dancing I'm doing. Nobody knows.

I remember learning to dance in high school. There was a chaperoned dance after all the ball games on Friday nights. In reflection, I guess I wasn't, and I'm still not a shy person as far as getting up and trying something new for the first time. I knew the girls liked boys who would ask them to dance. I liked girls. It didn't take a genius...

I'm also a big showoff. I like to attract attention to myself. I know exactly what to do with it. Most rabble rousers do. I've danced all my adult life for-the-other. Not here. Not now. Nobody knows. I dance for-myself. Sometimes after I get up and get to moving my feet I'll go outside my front door to the outside deck and dance out in the open.

I built another deck on the second floor, and there are sixteen 7" high steps that provide me with a fire escape from the upstairs. Sometime when I git jiggy I dance up and down those stairs like beating the band. That's why I say that buying this digital piano has been good for my health.

Some of these drum beats are real lively when it comes to dancing. The drum beat I have playing now is #094 RumbaFlamenco. I've been stuck on it for a couple of days. The rhythm has so many parts to it I can just pick out one that's easy to fall into and go from there. How fast or how slow the parts of the drum beat I attend to depends on how my old body feels about it.

I must have been waiting for somebody to come along to dance with. As if it took two to tango. That was rather stupid of me. I haven't wanted anybody around me for any reason for a while now. Much less somebody just so I'd get up and dance. It seems like since there's nobody around and I'm not dancing for-somebody, the entire movement of my body takes on the careactoristics it feels good about in the moment. If it wants to run up and down stairs... what choice have I?

One of the reasons I like this quantized, perfectly executed drum beat available to me at the touch of a button is to play my djembe drum with. My drumming is not anywhere near perfect because I'm a homo sapien, not a computer. It seems like for me (and you milage should vary if you have a modicum of self-respect) that it's the computer that's revealing my humanity to me in ever more exacting ways.

I naively thought in my early thirties that I must have been one of the world's best spellers of the English language. Can you spell s-p-e-l-l-c-h-e-c-k-e-r? Maybe I'm not as good a speller as I once thought, but the spellchecker only knows the correct way to spell compassion, not exhibit it. The one associated with this relentless text editor does it in real time while I'm typing.

Maybe I only thought I was sorta perfect ere now. How would I know? I didn't have digital perfection available to compare myself to. Such as a spellchecker software program. Cheap. I never thought computers would be this cheap ever before there was such a thing. But, even what I think is cheap now is gonna seem ridiculously expensive in even the very near future.

In some ways I like the way capitalism works. Lots of people would be perfectly willing for computers to stay the way they are now. Particularly the people and companies that have made billions of dollars doing it just the way they have so far. No blame. Like it or not, however, the fickle finger of fate moves on when some upstart fifteen year old sees a better way to do it or to not do it at all, and the old ways are just that. Hickory, dickory, dock...