The Death Rattle Of A Wino

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I went on quite a binge playing around on the piano yesterday afternoon and last night. I had the same problem last night I'm having this morning watching the Sunday morning news shows. Nothing on TV interests me much anymore. Instead of finding it entertaining it just irritates me. That's why I have to amuse myself with the ga-me-s I play allone. The "news" ain't news anymore, if it ever has been.

It's gotten to the point with me playing the major and minor chords on the piano daily is paying off for me a bit. Not a huge jump in skill levels, but fewer mistakes, and I'm starting to remember why I need to play the specific note with a specific finger as I go along. I also practice playing the 48 chord sequence I learned from the internet every day.

That's intriguing for me. I play the two note chords and speak the names of each of them outloud now. The grunt work I did to copy the notes from the internet on to a workbook full of empty staff lines took a lot longer than I originally thought it would. I kept messing up the design of how I needed to "see" the chords so that when I memorized them I wouldn't learn them wrong. Wrong according to whom? I can't imagine anybody will ever hear me play the piano. That's not why I'm doing this piano playing.

I can't rightly say for sure why I have kept trying to make this happen since childhood. It's something I should have done a long time ago, but I moved around too much. Pianos are not exactly known for portability. The digital piano I use now might be fairly portable for working around the country doing industrial construction work, as long as I kept a room by myself, but that was not always possible economically. It's still fairly unwieldy due to the fact that it's an 88-key style called it a "Yamaha Portable Grand".

I claim that learning to play the scales on the piano is the least I should have learned on a piano to give myself the confidence I needed to play music with other people. I should have learned to play the scales on the other instruments I play by memory. The idea of learning on the piano itself is basically because of the visualization factor of having the keyboard laid out right in front of me as a visionary tool for working out performance problems in my mind's eye. I started late. It took at least ten years to create a living zodiac in my psyche via a visualization ritual.

The big deal for me personally is just being able to play in any musical key for any reason at all. I detest the very idea of being limited to a few popular keys. I'd rather it be somebody else who is the spoil sport. I like being able to find the correct key for singing for different voices and not be stymied by being unable to go there. There are a lot of songs I never performed myself because I didn't know how to play in the key that had the notes my voice could comfortably reach.

Last night I was watching the music program on PBS called Austin City Limits. It's one of the programs on TV I still watch frequently. The performers was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I didn't feel nostalgic and started to change the station, but my piano was right in front of me between me and the TV set. I started tinkling around with the chords from the sequence I learned from the internet, when I realized one of the chords was the same one Tom Petty was playing, and I decided to see if I could find the other chords and follow along.

I did find the other chords. He was playing E minor using the pentatonic scale, and soon I realize I could play a few notes here and there. Not perfectly, of course, but not bad either. It was the first time I'd tried to play along with recorded music with the piano. That was pretty thrilling for me, so I didn't change TV stations. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers changed keys on the next song, and I rapidly found G minor on the keyboard and followed along the best I could. I come away knowing if I got one of Tom Petty's albums and worked at it incrementally, I could find something that would fit in with about any kind of music, and eventually, in about any key anybody wanted to play in.

Personally, being able to play along in every key a big deal for me. I'm not writing about playing brilliant solos, but contributing something that at least doesn't distract from a performer who could play lead. If I played with other people I'd prefer a support role.

It's my self-observation over the years of my own talents and abilities to contribute to group activities, is that I can get other people to perform at a higher level of skill than they previously thought they could. My personal goal is to accompany myself singing like I used to do with guitars and sec. A little late in the game, but better than never.

It's shocking to me presently that I'm writing about playing the piano at all, because I'm stunned I'm still playing any instrument at all. That's how bad the rheumatoid arthritis was not that long ago. I had a hard time wiping my own butt when I went to the bathroom. Typing these blog entries could be torture, and now I'm doing all those simple chores probably better than I have been able to do them for at least the last decade if not the last two or three decades.

Rheumatoid arthritis runs in my mother's family. I grew up hearing and seeing my Aunt Elizabeth deal with it. Eventually, she had all the joints in her hands surgically removed. The last time I saw her before she died at ninety years old she didn't know anybody and behaved (actually didn't behave or even move the whole visit).

My mother developed it later in life than her sister, but her hands looked tortured and writhed like snakes as if they had a twisted life of their own for years, and she lived to be ninety-three years old. When I was officially diagnosed a year or so ago, I had a very realistic image of how this could go. RA don't kill you. It does, in a lotta cases, seem to make some unfortunate souls wish they were dead.

Rattling on and on about how lucky I feel that these weird prescription drugs are working for me. They were not originally designed for arthritis, but for cancer and malaria patients. Of course, the side-effects can be devastating. The way I look at it, with the quality of life that's been restored to me, if the side-effects lead to an early grave instead of suffering the fate of a gnarly beast burdened with acute and ongoing pain, I'll take death in pill form with orange juice as a chaser any day over how things looked a year ago. What if I live?
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