...my mind wanders, recalling the time, three mornings ago, when I sat outside a cafe in Marylebone...it was cold, and it rained, and I felt like an actor, wondering who was directing the film I was in...and what my role was...an assassin for Melville, perhaps...or a criminal on the run for JLG, with Anna K in tow...
...and as I fantasised a middle-aged man in a dark blue raincoat opened the door of the Merc parked just to the right, threw a bag on the front seat and returned to the building next door...he was being directed by Chabrol, although he did not know it...his wife was cheating on him...and when he returned to drive away, pulling a fast turn in the road, he was going to kill his wife’s lover...
...I left the cafe to walk through Paddington Street gardens where a row of wooden park benches were occupied only by brown fallen leaves from the planes trees...
...that was Wednesday...
...and Thursday? I find it hard to recall anything of note, least of all what I may have imagined because unless they’re written down these imaginings will, like dreams, disappear...yet I am not a compulsive note-taker...I am not a novelist...which reminds me of the interview with Paul Auster on TV last night and the way they spoke about The Author and his job, his role, and such pompous, self-important bullshit, the kind of thing I would have fallen for years ago, back when I too saw novelists as a special breed with important work to contribute to society...
...now a quote from Paul Weller comes to mind, simply because I had given it some thought with a view to writing about it the other day. He said, having chosen ‘Milestones’ as his favourite Miles Davis album: 'It’s so controlled and it’s not any of that ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ bollocks that a lot of the jazzers do’...what an idiot, that was my initial response before correcting myself and acknowledging that anyone is free to make stupid statements about Jazz, should they choose...I should know, I wrote a book of them...(he says, self-effacingly)...but Paul, are you really dismissing a school of Jazz and if so, which do you have in mind? Be-Bop, with its rapid reworking of standards along with quick-fire improvisation? Are you dismissing the school in which Miles was tutored? Are you saying that only a certain type of playing is acceptable, and that the rest is ‘bullshit?’ OK, I concede that you are allowed an opinion, even that opinion, because I know that many pick just a few fruits from the vast orchard of Jazz...those that are to their liking...and I am not about to get high-and-mighty about a failure to appreciate everything, from Trad to Improv...no sir...
...I pause, look back at what I’ve written, and stop reading before coming to this point for fear of disappointment, dissatisfaction...in the spirit, perhaps, of Kerouac’s supposed philosophy of first thought best thought and to hell with editing, even though, I believe, this was not always adhered to...
...make a fresh coffee...
...when I return I note a bracketed ‘1’ in the Facebook tab, take a look and find that somebody ‘likes’ a link I posted...which naturally gives me a small sense of satisfaction...I also notice that ‘Facebook’ is in the Word programme’s dictionary, but I can’t remember if I added it or not...it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft had written the social network into their dictionary...it certainly isn’t in the Collins English book variety which sits on my desk because it was published in 1979, and the message written on an inner page testifies that it was given to me for Christmas, 1980 by the parents of my then girlfriend...did they think my vocabulary needed expanding? Perhaps, although dating their daughter for three-and-a-half years did allow for a reasonably communicative relationship to build...
...30 years...christ...we would split up that year...my last memory of her father being him opening the door in his pyjamas because I was stupid enough to knock on it too early in the morning having spent the night trying to sleep in a telephone box just down the road...not to be near her, but because I was stranded after a disco I had attended, perhaps in the hope of finding someone new...who knows, who can remember motives that are 30 years old? And of course, like all of us who have lived long enough, I wonder where past lovers are and what they are doing...is she on Facebook, and if so, would I even want to get in touch with her? It’s so difficult, is it not, to rekindle what went out years ago...
...now I become too conscious of what I’m writing, wary of straying into the personal because...because I do not wish to reveal too much...there are plenty of blogs out there in which writers expose themselves fully...the blog as psychiatric couch...the internet as provider of all the answers one could think to ask...with so many voices joining in the babble, willing to supply answers to anything from how to change a light bulb to dealing with cancer...
...oh to be able to supply you, dear reader, with the answers to something, anything...as opposed to this, my improvisational meandering...which, I feel, must come to an end...
...right...
...about...
...now...
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