Ftrain, by Paul Ford

A strange thing my brain does now: I get onto a train or walk down a street and I'm slightly perplexed that I don't know the people I'm seeing. They all look familiar. But then I realize: I've lived here 30 years, I take this route every day, and so that makes sense: Everyone, statistically, remains a stranger. But nonetheless I keep looking around. Who's that? Do I know them? Did I work for them? Or did they work for me?

In the immediate neighborhood of my house, or right outside the office, I might see a familiar face—but each location is a tiny puddle of light in the great shadowy map. It's a world full of strangers.

For a while I thought my brain was slowing down but I think instead it's just compressing things, putting them together in its strange brain way. You meet thousands of people over years. It's just normal and accretive when you live and work in a giant city. They come through your house for parties or through your office for work events. And you multiply that by years. All those faces and names get stored away. Eventually your brain fills up and needs to compress the database. And as a result individual examples collapse into archetypes: Pudgy dads in sweaters, middle-aged moms in cool overalls, sons and daughters in their pajama-style clothing. Then I look around in the city, and I see those archetypes everywhere, and they feel so familiar. I don't know who anyone is, but they all look like people I've met.

I wonder if this is normal. My guess is it is. It's probably why some dads—the non-angry dads, with normal regrets—end up getting quite sweet starting in their 50s, glad to talk to everyone, asking a kid about his Pokémon or listening to someone explain what it's like to work at the bank, or letting someone tell them about pilates. It's not because we're becoming more gentle, it's just that we're no longer as good at seeing the edges of people and a lot of the time we don't have any idea who's talking to us. We stop seeing what's different about the individual and instead start seeing what unifies them. And we like it.

What a mess. It had been two weeks. I'd practiced but not steadily. Hands like spiral-cut hams. Fingers like hard-boiled eggs. Not playing, flapping. I forgot one of my lesson books. I wanted to cancel so bad. I wanted a good excuse, a terrible illness, a broken limb, plague. I have bad excuses. I keep having that strong-pour evening cocktail. Just one but still. I've stopped getting downstairs to say goodbye to my son as he goes off to school, so I don't have the 20 minutes of morning quiet. I went to do a blood draw in the morning, right before the lesson. I didn't have my coffee as a result, since I'd been fasting. So I was extra groggy. These all went through my head and I mumbled them. But the truth is I just didn't practice very well. I half-practiced and I felt like a dipshit. I had this tiny little fantasy it would all come together. But it didn't. There's only one way to fix it. I hate piano. I chose this.

New York is buried under snow, the State of the Union is going on, I'm rattling with anxiety as emails pile up, and I need to practice piano.

I have, in the manner of the true dilettante, secreted keyboards about the house. I'm a huge nerd, I needed something to fill my brain, I did well in life, and so I have a genuinely glorious little studio, bundles of wires running thick as a large man's wrist, modules, keyboards. It requires constant configuration. I would trade the kingdom of heaven for that one perfect knob. Anyway. One day I will have a small hut in the woods with no Internet and a decrepit piano that I will watch YouTube videos to learn to tune, and spend two years really learning, truly intuiting, probably with psilocybin assistance, the deep and Pythagorean complexities inherent in the equal temperament tones of the C major scale, or as I prefer to call them, the big naturals.

So I turn from this computer to the heavy, glorified MIDI controller to my right, made by a really kind of wonderful French brand, and I go through my pieces.

A miracle this week—I played the first part of the first Bach Minuet for the five or six thousandth time, and my left hand was in steady communication with my right hand. And there I was in the middle. Guys! I said. I didn't know you'd ever met! They said nothing.

All progress feels like a miracle. The State of the Union is probably still going as I type this. But over here a tiny, infinitesimal bit of progress. Something getting better. Don't knock it.

Across the hall my wife prints whistles on a 3D printer. Different music.

My left hand is normally a lumbering, grumbling donkey clambering up a mountain path, dragged along by my bouncy, energetic right hand. Piano teachers call this the Onan conundrum. But tonight they were dancing together like witches around a fire. Eventually I ran out of measures and reverted to failure mode, but now I know how it should feel. My teacher likes to say that your hands are in a band, which—I've never been in a band, he's been in so many, it's a normal thing for him. I wish I understood.

I bought, in Philadelphia, at this huge bookstore with a cat that I can't remember the name of (store/cat), the Norton Anthology of Western Music or whatever, in two volumes, and I gotta tell you, now that I can read music (both clefs!) the idea of picking up some song from 1250 and just plinking it out, it's a delight. So tonight I learned “Robins m'aime,” a French song by the 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle. I need to work on my sight reading and why not be medieval? But also it's magical. Over time language becomes inscrutable. Accents fade. Countries come and go. But a dude writes a song for Marion to sing about her guy Robin, and I can just pick that up, read the notes, and it's back in the world, the same song.

Robin bought me a surcote grand
Of scarlet cloth fine and bonny
Gown and kirtle gay as any.
I will have it!

A song about a man treating you right. Like a million such today. Do I despair that consciousness doesn't evolve? Yes! See the psilocybin meditations on tone. Éliane Radigue just passed, and my god. Imagine hearing Trilogie de Mort in your head, having that there, in your brain, then making it real. What a freaking consciousness that was. If you don't know it book three hours of your life, because you are about to learn what communicating with aliens will be like. I'm going to listen to it right now.

Like I said: Imagine having that in your head, but not yet recording it. I really do love that moment when an idea is just your own. You know you have to share it. It might die upon release. But the joy of it, of just containing something that feels new, before it must become actualized. The little inner motions of thought.

Anyway. You can, if you work at it for a few years, sit down and play haltingly a medieval song, just with your own eyes and fingers. No one can stop you. You can wear headphones and sing the song of Marion in 1250, and to hell with that interloping knight, because Robin is the man for me, he got me a kirtle.

And my hands are friends now. The world can be out there, pissing all over itself, and you can log off. You don't even have to put a picture on the top of the blog post. Because the real ones will get to the end of the post even knowing there won't be toy surprise. Just because it's good to be alive together. Boring each other to death. We can suck as bad as we need to, to get through this bullshit, and maybe one day we'll play Christmas Carols together, or murmur along with Ava Maria at the funeral mass, or pick up the bass in the nursing home Nation of Ulysses cover band. It's good to talk about love in an age of fear and death.