It's very quiet out here today. No diesel engines reeking havoc with my ears. No giant bulldozers or road pans with that horrible backup beeper. It looks like it's gonna be a pretty normal day around here after all that noise about the airport mod going on.
I'm still getting some good figs from my tree. They usually fruit pretty heavy for a couple of weeks, and then if I'm lucky, a few stragglers get ripe late and provide a dwindling supply of figs for another couple of weeks. I went out to see what I could find this morning on my way to get a second cup of coffee and found some almost ripe figs. There were other figs there that were riper, but they were covered with green June bugs.
It's more than a little interesting to me that the figs have to be dripping honey ripe for the June bugs to gather for feasting. I like sharing them with the birds and bugs, but I gotta time it right, and get 'em just prior to their peaking, or it's Katy! Bar the door!
I've played games all my life. Writing this blog is a game to me. One of my current games is playing the scales on my digital piano. I love the fact that I don't have to tune it, just mash the Power button, wait a couple of seconds, and this Yamaha Portable Grand is ready to be impinged upon.
Rainey asked me why I bought this particular piano the other night. He brings his son by to play it while we talk. My answer was brief and to the point. I bought it because it had the full 88 keys and all 88 keys are balance-weighted just like the keyboard of a grand piano. Basically, I shopped and reviewed digital pianos for years as they developed. I already owned one of the first digital synthesizers. My present rig is mo' bettah. At least for my needs.
This digital piano is more than I actually need, but it had a built-in drum machine, man, that's the cat's meow. That's like owning a fairly new used car whose Cruise Control actually works, except that I bought the piano at Sam's Club where it was a demo, and they still charged me full price without the carton or any of the documentation. I already knew I could download that, and did. I haven't used it much though. There is one conspicuous black button that sets up the portable grand piano, and that's all I ever use.
I only got one idea of how I wanna do this. I intend to play the scales everyday until I get so familiar with every little nuance that can be found intuitively doing that routinely that I become contemptuous of following the rules. At that point, however, I'm aiming to be able to break the rules in any and every key extemporaneously with aplomb. That'll be the day...
I have these small moments occasionally where I can "see" the future. Just a few well-spaced or well-formed notes here and there. Most frequently exposed in the little runs piano players use for flourishes and segues between various movements. That's done virtually using scales. That's why I "hear" them in the clumsy stuff I do.
I think it's because it's gotten to the point now that I'm not ALWAYS clumsy. Most of the time, but on any given day I might experience one of those moments when time flies. I should end up about as good at making up stuff on the piano keyboard as I am at making up stuff on my computer keyboard. Hit the ground running. "Running like a dawg through the Everglades..."
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
