Not a grey November day…

but it could be. 

I glance back and forth from my Ennio Morricone album cover to the black and white photo of the godfather himself, James Brown, while considering all the various ways I could kill the mitigating bored that was usually insufferable at this time of year.  October feels more like November’s such a horrible month with your brain racing to get things done.  There’s no more leaves on most of the trees and you body’s all messed up from the time change.  It’s hard to drive when you can’t hardly even focus.

Living in downtown Hamilton doesn’t help the matter of October/November racing either.  If you head out for 2 blocks in any direction you’re bound to hit a pub or club and most of them have at least one decent microbrewery choice.  Three or four choices later you’re sitting behind some broke ass piano trying not to race your way through Liszt’s rhapsody Number 10 in E major; Marc-André Hamelin’s version.  It’s really hard to play anything other than a Hungarian rhapsody when you’re two block s away from Franz Liszt  Avenue; not that there’s any decent explanation as to why Hamilton renamed part of MacNab Street Franz Liszt Avenue.

Sometimes a decent microbrewery choice does not actually do anything at all to the mitigating boredom.  At least if you’re was at your own apartment instead of the club you would at least be playing your own broke ass piano drinking Guinness out of the can.  You may even be playing the score from “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” instead of your own variation of Rhapsody number 2 or God forbid, some Billy Joel tune requested by the drunk in the corner.

I route through a few odd drawers and file boxes stacked in the corner of the room. There must be some sort of small piece of paper conspiracy going on.  Why is it that when you need the dealer’s number written on a small piece of paper you can’t find it but when you’re looking for dental floss, hey, there’s the dealers number? At least if you can find your dealers phone number then maybe, just maybe, you can cause a break in the mitigating boredom that is October feels more like November in downtown Hamilton.  At least you’ve got a shot at it.

I could get high and play my broke ass piano and let the world slip away.  You wouldn’t have to think about what you should be doing and aren’t or what you are doing that you shouldn’t be or some degree in between. There’s no pondering your existence once the lease is up, just music, sweet music, rushing through you.  It might be like surfing if I’d ever actually surfed.  There’s something to the image of riding your piano like you would ride the waves and I sway while I played as though I was navigated a tasty curl, dude