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Friday, Feb. 13, 2004 / 5:56 p.m. ~Drums~ We lived in a big house, a house divided into apartments, a big old house broken into little boxes with tall ceilings, and drip stains, and space heaters in the fireplaces, old floors painted too many times, windows made of glass cut years and years ago, thin and wrinkled, stuck in frames that sagged and sank. Everything there was old and run down, but it was cheap and I grew to love it. Any place can become a home, any place at all, a shopping cart, a piece of cardboard, an old box, a curb, a gutter. Dirt becomes your dirt, and the tears in the linoleum become familiar, your feet get to know them, step over them. You sweep past it all, and when the bathwater is run above you, you expect the drips to the floor below. Never has water sounded so loud, so clear. But it hits the painted floors and you catch it in buckets. We left the cats alone there one weekend, returned to find blood spattered everywhere, the coppery smell unique to blood ever present, overwhelming almost. The one's claw had grown into his paw's padding, finally cut through to the veins there, and severed one, opened up a gusher that the cat then splatted around, shook his paw furiously, must've licked and sucked, and cried out. I remember mopping and looking carefully at the walls, the books, my little self portrait in infrared black and white hanging on a matte board on the wall, spatters, splatters there to this day. We took drugs, we imbibed, we were young and he was older. He had addictions, he could not refuse, he could not take nor leave, but I tried and experimented, never wanting to say no, to turn down any chance, for anything, and when he got stoned he drummed upon his thighs. Drumming, nervous, constant, obsessive, and I'd say, "Stop, just stop", drumming, starting, he couldn't not. I'd leave the room. We fought. We were tempestuous, we were poor, we scrimped, we didn't save. I wanted everyone else I saw, I regretted being with him. We were young, I was too young, I didn't want to play house, I didn't want to be in the old house, there, with him, everything old and cold in Winter, cool in Summer, and alone when he was gone. Every beautiful face caught my eye, every opportunity seemed missed or lost, and one asked me specifically, to tempt me. I bought him bongo drums. "Here, drum on these, not your thighs, use them, when you get stoned, make music", but he didn't take to them. I did. I loved to sit and pound out my own internal rhythms. I sat on our big front porch, as big old houses in old old towns have big front porches, tall ceilings, everything big and old and tall and run down, and we had plants all along the railing, plants in pots, succulents and not, green, flowing, plants whose names he knew, and he taught me. I sat there, on the porch, alone, at dusk, and I gingerly started, I played his bongos, I heard my own rhythm, something old, something common, and someone walking by asked if I was in a band, as everyone was in a band then, in that town. It was a musical town, it was college town, and every big old house downtown, every big and old house with rundown everything, peeling paint and dripping tall ceilings had multiple people living there together, musical people, creative people, people who sat and played music before taking it to clubs. "No, I just like to play", and I did. I wanted to. Today I listened to Santana's first album, through headphones, and listened to the remastered Woodstock version of "Soul Sacrifice", and I moved to the music, there at work, and I remembered, like some primal memory, my relationship to percussive instruments, my own desire to play, to bang on drums all day. Cost of the War in Iraq
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