tic

The last thing I wrote about had something to do with a piano teacher and a little girl, the same little girl in Paris who I saw catching sparrows with tiny shoe-lace nooses.

The piano teacher falls in love - sort of - with his little student, mainly because she is a genius on the keys, delicate and sad and inpiring. But also, it should be said, because he is despicable and lonely, and although very handsome, he is aged, widowed and peniless.

The affair begins with a postcard he sends to her ( a post card I really found in a garage sale up in Montmartre). He is always calling her 'his little friend' and with each lesson they have he falls madder and madder in love - wreslting all night with images of her perfect piano playing, her hands on the keys, etc and so on.

One day she kisses him on the cheek just as her mother picks her up from the lesson.

And then I was thinking of pretty much ending the story right there.

(However there's a chance that somethign entriely differnet would happen - ill explain in a second - but it's a little fantastical and I don't much know what kind of stuff I would rather be writing: little empty vignettes, saying nothing really; or obvious little stories saying something, but not much.

He would, after the little kiss, stay up all night feverishly writing a beautiful beautiful piece. He would play mad and marvelously. And since he used to be a prodigy himself, it would be as if he were young again, and life was good again, and all the right music, it just comes to him, and through him, like a sieve of light - no a sieve for light. Playing piano like how he used to - before years and marriage and death and life drained him and his talent of potential or success.

Anyway, he stays up all night and the next day, he keeps on playing the piano. He just can't stop. He goes all through the weekend, day and night. Only pausing to scribble some notes, have a cigarette, or a coffee. Complete mania - but really really genius, extravagant mania.

The little girl comes back the next week for her lesson; and he is no longer - he discovers, with only slight surprise - at all inspired or touched by her presence. In fact, he can't even stand to listen to her play anymore. Before the lesson is over, she is kicked out,, crying and even admiting she adores him, begging for him to not be so cruel, but the piano teacher - unwashed, unshaven, but crazy happy - - sits down to continue with his work.

A few hours later, as the sun is setting, outside on the street two neighbours talk between eachother. They have been out on their front lawns, maybe watering the garden, or washing their cars or something, and they start to chat. They can hear him playing, the sweet and sad and wonderful melodies coming through the windows, and they say just how beautiful it all sounds.

***

This is more the kind of thing I want to be doing here . I cringe that I made a promise to end a stupid wornout travel blog in a four-parter, and I am only halfway done.

I am drinking scotch and recently I thought of an old friend and some older, deader, poet friends (who(m?) I never met).

The next two parts will come soon to the conclusion. But I can tell you right now they are entirely fictional.

There's the two weeks I will spend living in a Paris hotel with a girl I met in a hostel. I can't see that being too interestign or beautiful, however, I just really want to try out a scene or two and see how that goes. (I will probably throw in a few scenes from Buenos Aires too. There was a few things - again that never really happenned - that I've been dying to tell you all about.

And the final part is going to be a gigantic explosion of fireworks and will be limited by words but not by emotion or vision. It's going to mean absolutely nothing to me, except for the fact that it's all over and time to find a new place to get really excited about. By place I mean this website stuff. I've told a few of my friends how important it is to me to write online; otherwise I can't write at all anymore. I think perhaps if I got a typewriter . . .

that's enough for now.

this wasn't anything.