Skip to main content

Trombone

 Last night me and my friends went to a goth dance event downtown. I danced until my clothes were so soaked with sweat that they added a couple pounds (the benefit of wearing black, nobody can tell), someone got a tattoo, and then it was one in the morning and we all needed milkshakes more than we've ever needed anything before. DQ was too far out of the way, so we ended up at Dick's Drive-In, along with apparently the entire population of Capitol Hill. 

 While we were in line figuring out who was going to pay back whom, we saw: a young boy with spikes on his Converse, a man wearing a toga, a couple in matching red T-shirts, and a busker playing the trombone to some background jazz music. Man, this guy was good! And loud-- we could hear him as we left, even with the windows down. 

 When I was in elementary school band, I played the flute. The trombonists sat right behind us, and while I never got hit in the back of the head or anything, I definitely considered them my enemies. Trombones are loud instruments. I'm sure that an eleven-year-old skill level wasn't helping my opinion, either. I don't listen to much jazz at the moment. I don't go to events with marching bands. I'm very rarely around trombones in my adult life. And I found out while eating fries last night that this fact needs to change because trombones, I discovered, are awesome.

 They're more dramatic and playful than a trumpet. They can be disruptive or annoying or sonorant or gentle. They look like a wonderful loosened knot made out of brass. And they're loud-- this used to be a drawback, but recently I've been having a great appreciation for things that demand attention.

  I'm going to go listen to some jazz.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Patio

  Where gray polyvinyl chloride meets  Drying strands of grass, like wheat  Which makes no grain, only waves  In sunlit breezes through the day.  Chairs older than my oldest tooth  Wear metal grating wound with roots  From ivys which do not know poison,  Only sweet tea, coffees, the noise one  Makes when they step into the morning  After a night full of dreams like warnings.  The wind chimes snake-rattle, the mint leaves  Attempt infinity, bound in a pot that won't keep.  And the sun loves me here. He sings  To the top of my head, and makes me king.
Post a Comment
Read more

Yard Sales

 Summer means yard sale season. I love everything about it. I love the neon-green signs with sharpies and an arrow (time and address optional), I love when there's obnoxious music playing directly from someone's phone speaker, I love listening to people talk. I suspect that the most interesting conversations in the universe happen during yard-sales, something about sitting in fabric camping chairs and watching strangers rummage through your life that shakes stories loose.  This picture is from a yard-sale that a family of musicians were holding before they moved to Bali to form a jazz band. I admit, I eavesdrop.  At yard sales, I've seen skateboards, bunnies, entire dining room sets, a marionette puppet, and cumulatively enough graphic tee-shirts to clothe my high school's graduating class twice-over. And I don't even make a hobby of going to yard-sales, I just follow the arrows when I come across them.   I think that my favorite part about yard sales is the ele...
1 comment
Read more

My Crappy Dorm Room

 I'm moving out of my crappy dorm room tomorrow, and then I'll be back in my home town for a few months. I'm going to wake up in the morning, file paperwork with Human Resources, take a final exam, ferry boxes and bags into a car which will drive to the storage locker place, ferry the boxes and bags into the storage locker, drive the car back to my crappy dorm room, ferry more boxes and bags into the car, drive the car back home to my parents' house, and then I'm going to fall asleep, surrounded by unpacked things which I can only imagine will be resentful of their cardboard trappings and will probably haunt me in my nightmares. I'm really looking forward to it.  The truth is that I've come to love my crappy dorm room. One time, me and my roommate saw a fawn walking by a meter from our window. My walls were covered in postcards from people important to me. We filled the room up with lamps so we never had to turn on the ugly florescent overhead light. Yes, we...
Post a Comment
Read more