I really should know better. Ten cups of coffee, even if you’ve eaten, will fragment time into little chunks of about three seconds, not easily connected to one another. Not the best mental state to be in for a concert, though it seems to have worked out. I’m sure I looked like a fidgeting monkey all through the Beethoven. Actually, it kind of surprises me how deeply encoded my bassoonifying skills are. I get different things out of the music depending on my mental state, but I don’t forget how to play. Thank God. Back in high school I would occasionally forget how to finger notes, usually from nervousness. When you’re in the middle of a solo, thinking about fingering just doesn’t work. They say it takes ten years to master anything, from a musical instrument to a language, and I think I just hit that mark about a year ago. I was just talking to a tenor saxophone player, Jason Davies, on Saturday about this strange 10 year apprenticeship the brain enforces on us. Once that’s over, he said, is when you can actually start playing music instead of trying to play an instrument.

After the concert I went over to Andro and Alex’s place and tried to calm myself by drinking whiskey. That worked, but the next morning, dear Lord was I in trouble. Not enough drink to get drunk, but after all that coffee I think I was just out of electrolytes. A glass of Gatorade fixed me up, but not before I spent an hour or so in a feverish state wondering how I was ever going to call all the people planning to come to the party that night to tell them I was dying. As it turned out I didn’t die, and even managed to make some yummy lentils (half green French, half red - one of my signature dishes, although now I learn from Sadie that it’s best to cook them separately, drain off the strange brown lentil juice that boils off the Frenchies, and then mix), goat brie polenta, and some kind of scary hummous with way too much tahini. Fun party. Sitting here at work with a real shortage of neurotransmitters, listening to Billie Holiday, and trying to motivate myself to finish a paper.

There’s so many ideas swimming around in my head now. I wonder if I can find a cheap cabin up in Bishop to rent for the month of January…