Joe’s Crab Shack, NYC, October 16, 2008, brunch

Published in the A Year in Repose: May 15, 2008-March 15, 2009, Journal

This morning I went to brunch at a crab bar on 5^th Avenue. It was late Sunday morning, and the two-piece jazz combo featured a bassist who played with his eyes closed, feeling the notes reverberate through his fingertips. Sitting beside him was a thin acoustic guitarist in a black leather blazer who was nodding out, sometimes even in the middle of his own solos. But it was perfect, it was sublimely beautiful, the bassist with his eyes closed, feeling the vibrations through his fingertips, and the guitarist leaning away from the tune, almost falling over, but with a near-perfect sense of timing catching up with the tune a little further down the road, dropping back in. And as I watched his head fall back, I could feel the pleasure rippling through his body and wondered why pills and drugs couldn’t be designed to make someone feel that way all the time. Why couldn’t someone—say someone with a terminal disease—stay in that state for the rest of their lives?  The drugs we experimented with in the Sixties, and even the ones in the Seventies, did deliver (and more) on their promises. Today, as never before, substances that were used to turn adolescents into shamans are as common as alcohol; and anyone, regardless of gender or age, can experiment time and time again without supervision.

I wondered if the guitarist in a crab bar on 5^th Avenue in New York City late Sunday morning was better or worse for nodding off in the middle of his solo. For me, I’ve tried to become as conscious as possible, but what good has it done me, really? Certainly I appreciate what’s passing as it’s passing, no regrets? Check. Occassionally I remember to see the whole movie—from beginning to end—and each individual moment as a point between the two? Check. I can sometimes remember that what happens next is a result of what I do now, and that where I’m most certain I’m probably most wrong. And that sometimes when I seem most wrong—even to myself—is when I’m most right. Okay. That the people I despise represent what I refuse to recognize in myself? Check. And sometimes I’m even able to see beyond my thoughts and emotions and plans and arguments and explanations into the emptiness they’re hiding from me. Okay, but the guitarist is, at least, getting paid.

Then a man, talking on a cellphone, enters the restaurant and walks up to the guitarist and sticks the cellphone in his face, asking him to play something for Eileen. When he realizes the guitarist isn’t responding—that something’s wrong and he’s probably feeling a little embarrassed because everyone in the restaurant is now staring at him as he’s clearly alarmed the bassist, who has taken a step backwards, he shouts “Hey, play something for Eileen,” and taps the guitarist on the nose with the cellphone. And the guitarist’s dreaming head snaps back, and even half a restaurant away I can feel the shock that shoots through him when he opens his eyes and sees a man waving something shiny in his face, and I realize there is something lost in being lost.