The Raw Heresy of Contentment

There are two ways to want for nothing.

The first is to get everything, and the second is to opt out of wanting.

We are so culturally committed to number one that number two sounds like an insult to human dignity.



See also The Real Secret.

Shostakovich, Eddie Barefield, and The Evolution of Western Art

The following posting from August 2018 was was my most literarily ambitious—and least popular—posting. It's a challenging read, much as Shostakovich is a challenging listen. But it offers a rare big picture view, from a musician's perspective, of the evolution and degeneration of artforms.

My discussion of a composer who refused to move in straight lines (or flatter expectations, or adhere to templated notions of coherence) didn't land for readers because it failed to move in straight lines, or flatter expectations, or adhere to templated notions of coherence.

I was channeling Shostakovich while analyzing him. And while it (and he) might seem wildly chaotic—unbridled and just too damned much—I (like him) counted on audiences noticing the control and craft. A rock-steady intentionality governs the apparently rocky ride, and lands the observer in a predetermined condition.

A tumultuous puppet show oughtn't make us doubt the puppeteer's discipline. Watch the strings: If they're wielded expertly, the tumult is content, not failure.

But in this case, control, craft, and intentionality were not parsed because, being no Shostakovich, I don't merit a careful, generous read. A composer of Shostakovich's name recognition compels infinite generosity. His work might truly be the disorganized muddle it seemed in 1936, but no one would find fault with the great composer, while a lesser name, having built an equally wild ride with skill and control, seems undisciplined.


Riled up by Christopher Lydon’s terrific Open Source podcast on Shostakovich, I ventured to Tanglewood last weekend to hear his Fourth Symphony. It’s always a powerful, emotional experience; a triumph born of failure. As so often happens in the arts, the composer tried to imitate (in this case, Gustav Mahler) and failed magnificently.

Mahler wove popular songs and motifs, gestures and dogma, commentary and meta commentary, seamlessly into his majestic symphonies. You always know when an orchestra is outfitting itself for Mahler. Every half-decent brass and percussion player in town gets called in to fortify those sections. In this, his most Mahlerian effort, Shostakovich beefs up the band aplenty. A furniture store of basses, along with a complete second set of timpani and a redundancy of tubists (scary gleams in their eyes, awaiting the bloody meal) are just a few of the upgrades.

But I'm sorry, Dimitry. You know I love you, but you've produced no bold smash of schweinefleischy indomitability, because you're just not that guy. Rather, the Fourth Symphony plays out like a nerdy, nervous, soulfully acerbic patchwork of musical tchotchkes. Pravda was foolish to call it "muddle not music", but, political pressures aside*, you can't blame them for failing to appreciate such a sharp turn. Shostakovich's brilliant cornucopia helped usher in a more ADD approach to 20th century art, eventually culminating in postmodernism (as well as at least one soulfully acerbic blogger). In retrospect, it was a glorious muddle of profound musicality.

A style was born, even if partially the product of serendipity. Charles Mingus tried to write like Duke Ellington, but he lacked Duke's jaunty elegance and formal structure, so the result was a rumbling slurry of primal soul. Many of us prefer that slurry.

Mahler has inevitability. His music may sound dissonant and clashy to the uninitiated ear, with more dense cross-talk than a Robert Altman film. But it dependably presents as a unified whole, all elements seemingly preordained. As disparate as the strands might seem, one cannot imagine revision. By contrast, Shostakovich's work feels like more of a ride, a personal journey through 1000 ingenious inflection points. Inhabiting the composer's point of view (Mahler had no POV; he was channeling God or whatever, and you will obediently sit and you will listen), any effort to anticipate where he's going is swiftly toppled by tsunamis of feverishly fertile invention. One’s expectations are methodically and craftily defied.

It amounts to open warfare against expectation. Whenever a passage turns prettily tuneful, some unimagined dissonance - spitting trumpets, kooky double reeds in buzzing half-steps, or WTF jungle juju percussion - descends like a Terry Gilliam animation to wreak havoc and avert complacency. It all hangs together beautifully, but it's pastiche; a dense warren of delightful interludes rather than a structure of momentous revelation.

While Mahler preaches at you, Shostakovich endlessly fucks with you. Temperamentally unwilling to erase his own tracks, he obviously wants you to know you're been fucked with. Never is the listener allowed to feel comfortable; ears are deliberately denied what they want to hear. Instead, you get something fresher, more nuanced, personal, and rife with bittersweet irony. Like a great used bookstore, there's scant hope of finding what you were looking for, but you will assuredly take away greatness.

What, exactly, does the ear want to hear? This is a thoughtful question with a thuddingly banal answer: the clichés of the previous generation, that's all. Bach piously adhered to rational principle - principles he himself had largely initiated. Before art can go “off the rails”, rails must be established, and there was no greater rail-builder than Bach. But the obedience was short-lived. Mozart applied his genius to gleefully, wittily, brilliantly flout those rails, barely skirting wreckage. His music, as heard at the time, was a delight (or a misery, depending on your disposition) of elusiveness, never quite yielding the expected. "This is the part of the meal where you're traditionally offered an ornate chocolate petit four, but here, instead, is a thimble of rich hot cocoa dosed with a provocative touch of black pepper." Mind blown! (By the time Shostakovich appeared, a few centuries later, the metaphor might be scorching cocoa beans shoved up your nostrils while your temples are tenderly massaged, the burn extinguished in the nick of time via a dainty spritz of chilled champagne infused with a note of nightingale sweat.)

Every great creative artist both rebels against the previous generation and lays down updated rails to be defied by the following one. Art advances via a chain of generational defiance. In all eras and in all arts, a few are compelled to shatter complacency - denying the audience the anticipated tropes, and offering, instead, something enticingly skewed.

Shostakovich's rebellion was both deliberate and accidental. Failing to fully embody Mahler, he was diverted by Gustav's gravitational field into a path of his own, following an instinct to mischievously sideskirt convention. Every snatch of tunefulness explodes like a trick cigar; every lovely bit is spiked with bitter bite; every soothing flow chafed by an intractable grind. Blessed with exquisite taste, he was sensitive in doling out surprise, startling open-minded listeners into astonishment rather than pummeling them into confusion.

It's shocking, as a jazz musician, to recognize how far classical composers of this period had progressed. At that time, jazz was flattering its audience with unashamed facile conventionality. Jazz had started as a movement of inventive rebelliousness - marches, waltzes and sappy popular drek were cheekily adorned, defiled, swung up, profaned and debauched. It was beautiful. Mozartian irreverence...and funky! But then it grew popular for a while, and commerce does not encourage the deliberate defiance of expectation ("The film I'm envisioning will be sort of a cross between Forrest Gump and Shrek...")

While jazz had grown docile in its eagerness to gratify audience expectations, classical composers were building sophisticated terrains of dissonance that wouldn't influence jazz until decades later. It was only its death knell as a popular form that recharged jazz' original spirit of rude rebelliousness and invention.

By the mid 1960s, jazz had nearly caught up, but, by then, classical music had painted itself into a corner. Movements like serialism and microtonalism had seemed destined to open up vast landscapes of possibility, but, paradoxically, vistas only contracted and desiccated.

The vitality of an art form derives from the friction between rail hugging and rebellious invention. Creativity is kindled by confrontation with status quo. Thousands of microdecisions emerge from this confrontation, aggregating to imprint a creator's vision, personality, taste; perhaps even soul. Without any rails whatsoever (or with a new, theoretical set of rails that haven't been - and likely never will be - internalized by one's audience) you're left with sound rather than music. We hear many composers mucking around amid infinite space, rather than purposefully blowing up a railroad. Which strikes you as the more engrossing proposition?

Both jazz and classical music have settled into a steady state. Rails fully obliterated, it's now all about performance rather than creation. There's money to be made in reviving old repertory, and armies of conservatory graduates deliver technically accomplished renditions of each era's status quo without a trace of rebelliousness. The performance even of dissonant music once considered subversive now carries the edgy gleam of a Perry Como tribute.

The greatest creative docility is now found at the intersection of composition and performance, in improvised music. Since leaving Chowhound I've roamed unsung nightclubs like Rip Van Jazz Cat, searching for the indomitable creative spirit of thoughtful defiance. But I've heard nothing but flat conventionality, without a scintilla of invention. No bombs thrown, no expectations ingeniously baited-and-switched. To the contrary, expectations are dutifully, even eagerly, coddled. That's become the whole game - the unabashed goal of an entire generation eager to recapitulate the same-old, unskewed by a nanojoule of spontaneity, let alone sabotage. Status quo has, alas, finally become the status quo. And so the universe cools.

Having spent my 20s hanging out almost exclusively with elderly semi-forgotten black jazz veterans, I shudder on their behalf. For example, in 1990 I gigged in a bored Williamsburg watering hole with a musty band of oldsters including Eddie Barefield, a direct link to the earliest days of jazz (he'd played with freaking Bennie Moten!).

Though Eddie had been a fixture in every subsequent era (he'd mentored Charlie Parker, dead 35 years by this time), few remembered him (even his home town of Scandia, Iowa had long-ago faded and died; today it doesn't even Google), hence his presence at this $50 gig. He sat, mildly choleric, in his chair, occasionally hocking loogies to the bandstand's sawdusty floor. His technique was no longer supple, but by the second or third chorus, his spirit would sometimes rejuvenate back to 1936 - the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony's birth year - and, amid the moldy swing tropes, he might slip in some astonishingly oblique ear-defying run that left me and the other musicians startled and breathless. “WHAT IN JESUS HELL WAS *THAT*??” I'd silently scream to myself, whipping my head around toward Eddie, impassive as a wooden Indian, while bored patrons continued to blithely sip their beers. Eddie had gotten from Point A to Point B in a manner never before heard.

Such miracles were not modern anachronisms. They stretched 1936 conventions, never snapping them. Eddie was recalling fallow branchings that had spawned no twigs or flowers; forgotten Shostakovichian tchotchkes of rebellious glee; the sort of material deviously inserted by lesser-known players of the time who hadn't fully shaken their subversive instincts.


* - As for the pressures inflicted on Shostakovich by Stalin's regime, that's interesting history but it's a serious mistake to draw conclusions about an artist's work from events in his personal life. My travails with the DMV coincide with my writing of this article, but I'd much prefer that you consider the material at hand full-on rather than recast this as my oblique rejoinder to a repressive bureaucracy. Great art seldom refers to our planetary day jobs - our day-to-day yadda yadda - despite efforts by the small-minded to reduce a heavenly sweep to something more consciously manageable; to force-translate poetry into prose.


An index of some of my previous music writings

All previous music writings (reverse chronological)

A recently discovered video of me performing on trombone on a particularly good night in 1992.

Doth Protest Too Much

To my Republican friends:

The Democrats may be incredibly annoying, but they're not (by and large) a nest of pedophiles.

The pedophiles, predictably, are on the team incessantly hollering about pedophilia. Just like strident homophobes always turn out to be closeted gays.

Can we finally officially recognize this perennial human conceit, so we're not fooled by it any more?

If you know someone who won't stop raving about all those goddam arsonists out there, DO NOT let that person anywhere near your matches.

The Profound Joy of Ascendence from...Wherever

Everything feels great on the way up, even if you're still far down.

Everything feels awful on the way down, even if you're still way up.

Your position on the up/down scale doesn't matter. You can't even feel it, unless you constantly tell yourself stories about it. It's really all about trajectory.

This explains why billionaires stay greedy. And why Hell is a less comfortable chair.

And it's yet one more explanation for self-destructive people, who I described as surprisingly rational:

They're acting out a drama, just as we all are, but tweaking parameters for more challenging gameplay. They're simply working at a more advanced level, like increasing resistance on a StairMaster. They've rejected the easy win, that's all.

A deliberate drop resets the game for another climb. It's an accepted move in many contexts when things get dull. But applying this broadly for some reason looks like madness.

Pivot from Portuguese Purgatory

My waitress was slow bringing the migas and potatoes to accompany my fish. It happens. But the restaurant's wizened, cranky Portuguese owner went berserk, screaming at the kitchen while pointing at The Customer (me), who'd been forced into a low-carb lunch here in the land of starch.

At meal's end she handed me—like a smuggler proffering diamonds—a glistening handful of freshly roasted chestnuts and—as if my shocked gratitude needed another kick in the gut—a moist/crispy slab of cinnamon toast (rabanadas). It was her apology. I didn't realize the word was even in her vocabulary.

We have a history, she and I. Even stout-hearted Portuguese tremble at her notoriously brusque command, and I've never seen another foreigner in the place, which is (like every tyrannical perfectionist operation) perpetually mobbed thanks to sky-high quality. On my third visit, I pointed at a photo on the wall of a terrifying-looking day-glo orange fish, and asked if it was good. "Ah," she sighed, briefly waxing slightly less ball-busting, "Rascasso! Delicioso!"

This was where I messed up. I asked if she'd have any tomorrow, and she nodded affirmatively. Then a series of oblique signals and punishments, fanning out over the subsequent 24 months, made it clear that:

1. She'd reserved one for me, which had required breaking character and
2. I'd failed to show (I was still fresh from New York, and hadn't realized that, here, an idle few words to a restaurateur can ensnare you in a Whole Thing).

This was not a person to piss off, but I somehow endured my lengthy sentence of purgatory. And today I was granted clemency when she needed to wash her hands in the sink near the front door next to the fish tank after hawking a vat of dead sea creatures out to to the charcoal grill manned by her husband just outside the restaurant in the street. Waiting to be seated, I was blocking her way, though attempting to reduce my 6 foot bulk to an inconspicuous singularity to avoid making trouble. But before she could ask, I executed a pivot more elegant that one would ever imagine possible from someone of my age, height, and timidness. She freely waltzed to the sink, washed her hands, and began screaming at the wait staff to set a place for me. Normally she makes me wait 20 or 30 minutes even amid a glut of empty seats, but the Baryshnikovian pivot had redeemed me. I was back in good graces. And this is why she'd been particularly galled that my carbs were delayed.

Groaning painfully after ingesting an entire charcoal-roasted sea bream, a large platter of migas (sautéed bread crumb stuffing), boiled potatoes, boiled sweet potatoes, salad, and wine (16€), she demanded I consume the chestnuts and the cinnamon toast, together, and stood over me gloweringly awaiting my reaction. When I convulsed in pleasure, she nodded authoritatively and strode away. Shortly after, I paid the bill and told her, in my unreliable Portuguese, “Estou matado de alegre.” (hopefully "I've been killed with pleasure"). Apparently I nailed the Portuguese, though the syntax was just off-kilter enough to provoke a semi-grin. I think.

Her tray of rabanadas, which only emerged once nearly all customers had left. Like the chestnuts, it was staff-only. I've won at Portugal.

Peace and Quiet

In my previous post—a meditation on creativity titled "Steve Jobs' Black Turtleneck"—I proposed a cure for the age-old problem of fickle muses and erratic inspiration. I suggested giving in to monotony. Tolerate a static backdrop to focus creative attention on a foreground pursuit.

Creative people feel omni-creative—and are!—but creativity comes in spurts if you don't focus it. You've got to let go of creative control of practically everything else (including, ultimately, The World) in order to stabilize your backdrop and seal off potential creativity leaks. "The more chunks you background," I wrote in that post, "the more propulsive you'll be in the foreground." Yielding to monotony is the ultimate counterintuitive move, but the rewards can be heady.

Perhaps an example would help.

Me, For Example
In my 20s and 30s I aimed for, and achieved, an extremely varied life. The facade seemed richly dynamic to outside observers, but I was oppressed by remaining chunks of monotony. One can't jazz up every aspect, though I damned well tried. The result was rollickingly interesting...but also out of control.

I don't mean grown-up control—well-pressed wardrobe, neatly-potted plants, and each bite of food chewed 27 times. I had no control at all, including any basic ability to take care of myself. Or to concentrate. Or to apply discipline in a sustained manner. Such things desperately evaded my grasp. Naturally, my output suffered, but I could easily jump from failure in one sphere to a happier position in another. Or simply create a whole new sphere (Chowhound was one).

I did retain one baseline for a while that provided some gravity: music. I'd aggregated enough effort, technique, and commitment to sound reliably impressive. But I was shooting for better—for greatness—and it was frustratingly elusive. It was, as artists have complained through the ages, unpredictable. It never arrived on command, so I was inconsistent. It was torture.

I had the exciting life I'd hoped for, but paid a high price. No control of basic functionality, plus a juicy inner ribbon of artistic torture. But it sure looked exciting from the outside!

At this moment in 2025, my life has switched from one end of the telescope (The Andromeda Galaxy) to the other (a single skin cell). I live a teeny life of monotony. But I've given myself up to that monotony. There was one optional chunk: I swapped in a fresh backdrop by moving overseas. As I recently wrote, we can't determine our dramatic arcs, but a new backdrop can be swapped in. I like this one much better. Though, really, any will do (that’s why it’s “optional”).

I've achieved a static backdrop with little dramatic variation, and while that should be tough for someone of my temperament, I was lucky enough to notice the reward, which is subtle but awesome.

Convoluted Reassembly of a Previously Common Phenomenon
All this talk of "backdrops" feels convoluted. It used to comfortably boil down to a familiar concept. There was a time when it was taken for granted that artists and mystics required "peace and quiet" to do their thing.

The phrase turned archaic without our noticing. Today, it's almost meaningless. Within our hyperstimulated inner and outer lives, what would "peace and quiet" even look like? We imagine dressing in cotton tunics and moving languorously. Lots of smiling, and nary a glowing screen. A weekend fishing trip. Reading in bed all day. A (jesus christ) spa day. It's never conceived as a way of being; more of a stop-being before resuming real life. Walden's pond is a nice view to grab on our smartphone and upload to Insta.

"Peace and quiet" wasn't supposed to be a pose to strike, but now we can't conceive of any other use for the phrase. So I talk about backdrops, hawking the virtues of "monotony" out of recognition that anything not sizzlingly hot seems frostily frozen. You don't need a cotton tunic, or to act a certain way, or to give up your iPad. It's just a matter of willingly sinking into static backdrop while keeping one chunk sizzlingly super-heated.

Small or Large?
I spent over 30 years as this disease's poster child, aiming to tinker busily with busy backdrops while also hoping to play and write at a high level. It left me haggard, frustrated, and bereft of control. I enjoyed little consistency in any context, but, man, my backdrop seemed exciting!

Now—unbelievably for those who knew me then—I've got a daily routine and the only variation I permit myself are choice of lunch venue and film to watch. I don't wear a black turtleneck, but that serves as metaphor for the swathe of volition I've foresaken.

Here’s the reward: now, when I focus on some mystery or curiosity, I find, with gleeful delight, that I can slice through it like butter—and explain it cleanly to others. It's consistent now. A steady flow. No more torture.

Is this a small life or a large one? It frames either way, but it's best to simply keep going, rather than mire with backdrops. Gifted with a really nice pair of red shoes, one is compelled to dance.

Steve Jobs' Black Turtleneck

Nothing is the womb of Something.

No one seems to properly understand why Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks. Even Jobs was vague about it. He said it was “one less decision” to make. That answer points toward the truth, but not the full truth.

Creativity needs a backdrop—a static, solid framework—to work against. Static backgrounds itch. They can't help but coax action, motion, change, dynamism.

The usual backdrop is convention. We skew creative results so they grind provocatively against expectation. Other backdrops—authority, momentum, our own habits and inclinations—work the same way. You can’t skew without a fixed reference point.

If you roil in constant motion—because you live a richly varied life—solid ground appears only when the gears momentarily align. This explains the notorious fickleness of inspiration. Creativity waits for perfect gearing. But if you stabilize yourself—simplify and ground—creativity flows freely. Hence the black turtlenecks. Less moving parts, more static backdrop.

The problem is that creative people feel compelled to fight monotony in every aspect of their lives. They want all gears spinning. But the effort absorbs creativity, so when you pick up your violin, creative flow may not be available. Inspiration hasn't run dry; it's been diverted into a swarm of mundanities.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Applying creativity to daily mundanities is its own art form. But if you manage innumerable processes, don't expect the Muses to appear the moment you decide to write a poem.

For creativity to flow consistently, that wild spurt must be controlled and channeled. It's a matter of accepting the backdrop (daily routine, present circumstance, "lot in life", etc). Having eased into the poise of monotony, sizzling creative flow becomes available on demand. That's how you bottle lightning.

It's not about "fewer decisions". No matter what, you'll be deciding whether to drink coffee now or in some other moment. We decide something every second. Rather, it's a matter of backgrounding all gears but one, which is deliberately left to spin freely. Magic happens when the only conspicuously moving part absorbs all available creative intensity.

Simplifying—or backgrounding—your wardrobe would be one part of that. Wearing only black turtlenecks takes a process off-line, helps stabilize the backdrop, and seals a potential creativity leak. The more chunks you background, the more propulsive you'll be in the foreground.

If your world appears to spin, you'll remain fixed. Affix your world, and you'll be compelled to dance.


Followup posting: "Peace and Quiet"

The Right Hands

"Tesla shareholders have voted to approve a plan to motivate Elon Musk with a bonus of as much as $1 trillion in additional stock. Musk had threatened on social media to leave the company if the measure was rejected. He claimed he wanted a big enough ownership stake in Tesla so that he couldn't be fired, so the 'robot army' he is developing doesn't fall into the wrong hands."

The proper reaction is "'The wrong hands'? So Elon Fricking Musk represents the right hands? He's Mr. Reasonable?"

But it's broader than that. It's always broader than you think. The escape route from this stifling box is to train oneself to fan out one's attention. Resist the contagious urge to simply fixate on the "proper reaction."

In this case: do you know anyone who'd never question whether they truly know best? Or consider whether they're truly deserving of the responsibility, trust, and acclaim they thirstily seek? Me, I hardly know anyone not like that. In fact, I can't name a single person who'd lightly challenge a daffy notion randomly wafting into their mind. The contents of our minds feel pre-approved. Their mere existence in the most vaunted vault in all creation makes them inherently, unimpeachably, solid gold.

We're all Elon Musk on this bus.

The Dubious Proposition of Human Communication

It's a foregone conclusion that human beings communicate. It seems obvious when we emit stylized vibrations at each other and outcomes (sometimes) imply that parsing and coordination were achieved.

On that level, yes. But that's not much different from shoving punch cards into a mainframe. Or sparrows squawking to attract other sparrows. Or a water glass breaking, signalling via its alarming sound to the floor below that a drench of water and hail of shards is incoming. It's hardly communication at all. Mostly just signalling, a far more primitive thing. If you closely observe human beings, you'll find that they exceed this only with vanishing rarity

The capacity dried up at some point, and no one noticed. More on that in a moment.

We've managed to maintain our suspension of conversational disbelief because, as with punch cards, sparrows, and water glasses, the repertoire is extremely limited. Even a gorilla can be trained to signal if you keep things very simple.

The shortfall is readily apparent to those who think and speak differently. If you impart some spin—subtlety, recursion, reframability—to your throaty vibrations, communicating more richly than coaxing your dog to fetch a toy, you will hit walls. You'll confuse people. By disrupting the process, you break the channel.

I spent many years assuming it was my fault—that humans communicate just fine, it's just that I do it funny. But highly fragile communication that only works when everyone stays on-script is more akin to punch cards, sparrows, and water glasses than to anything real.

Humans are not so different from stock characters in a computer game. "Hello, friend!" greets the ruddy bartender in the village inn. "What are ye having?" We overlook that this is his only line. Hello, friend! What are ye having? Hello, friend! What are ye having? Hello, friend! What are ye having?

Say "Gin and tonic" and he nods, fetches the drink, and likely tries to sell you a treasure map. But if you answer "A mid-life crisis!", he’ll freeze, requiring a reboot, or else groan "Reply non-parsable!" That's the only response to the vast universe of utterances that don’t meet the prompt straight-on, failing to insert the expected punchcard.

There was a time when "A mid-life crisis!" would have comfortably parsed for most people. People actually spoke like that back in the 60s. Fewer in the 70s. Almost none by the 80s. Unscripted types—"characters"—strode the human landscape speaking nothing like corporate support agents or middle managers, yet communication channels didn't break. Until fairly recently, we possessed a genuine faculty of communication.

In fact, go back further and consider how the hoi polloi comfortably processed—enjoyed, even!—the dense intricacies, subtleties, and sly semantic playfulness of Shakespeare in real time. Can you imagine such a thing? Ponder it to understand what’s possible, and what’s missing.

Hello, friend! What are ye having?

Off the Scale

I don't show up with "do you know who I am?" gravitas. Maybe I'm doing something wrong—I honestly don’t know—but I never saw the point of trying to seem like someone like me, whatever that would even mean, so I just act...regular. Which suits me to a tee, though I do have certain faculties and bona fides which occasionally leak out. And when they do, it's not like in the movies.

God, is it ever not like in the movies.

A few months ago, I told a tale of meeting a local jazz musician in small town Portugal (newcomers: I was a respected world-touring jazz trombonist for a couple decades):

We played together for a few minutes, and I coaxed him into swinging a little harder, and he managed not to stumble on a few of the easier chord changes (by local standards, this constitutes jazz mastery). The song ended and he looked up at me, thoroughly unsurprised, and asked where I'm from.

I said "New York". This is like an Okinawan showing up in a Dutch karate dojo, but he wasn't visibly affected. He just coughed and told me about the jam session every Thursday which I might sign up for a week ahead if I'm aching to play. Perhaps they'll let me, because I sound pretty good. Then he very politely and courteously told me that he needed to practice, and sent me on my way while he resumed the karaoke.

Strange as it was, that was a clean example. It's not always clean.

The chef in the little joint where I eat most lunches has no idea that I'm a nationally-recognized food authority. For her, I'm the hapless American who shleps in and eats with extra gratitude. If I told her—and on the remote chance she believed me—she'd stop short, offer some vague words of confused quasi-admiration, and immediately forget all about it, because it's simply off her scale.

When things go off one's scale, one instinctually pulls back to normalcy. This is understandable. Efficacious. Evolutionarily adaptive. Whatever was just said or done might be politely acknowledged, but previous assumptions quickly snap back. It's exactly like getting past a brain fart.

This reaction—vague acknowledgement followed by amnesic re-composure—is bumpier than anything the Portuguese jazz guy experienced. He placidly absorbed my words like chatter on a radio across the street. He didn't blink. But I'm pretty sure the chef would blink. For a moment.

With the blinking, a whiff of emotion is often out-gassed. Whichever is that person's signature. Effusive people might enthuse "That's so GREAT!" while distracted eyes reveal they're mostly thinking about their expiring parking meter. Paranoid people will contemplate how this piece fits the nefarious puzzle. Insecure people will shield their inadequacy. And jealousy is far more prevalent than we realize—it may even be the default. Highly sexualized people will ponder how this involves getting laid (if you're a promising candidate, chops will be licked; if not, you may be snidely spurned, even though you'd never offered).

The emotionality rarely builds to a rip-roar. Just a visceral belch of disruption before returning to the previous comfortable framing. Back on track. Back on the scale!

This is all extremely strange from the viewpoint of the surprising person (longtime readers have watched me straining to puzzle it out for years now). But this is the only way it could possibly work. The world is the Scale. To go off the scale is to slip well and truly offstage for one's audience. There's no familiar role to play as "That Off-Scale Person." You're off the show.

Edge cases of all sorts are outcast.


See also:
Lost Perspective, explaining how we instinctually normalize anomalies.
Fans, explaining the weird dynamics of meeting people who profess to admire your work.

---

After selling Chowhound, I relayed the news to family members.

(I'm not respected in my family. I'm the troublesome, nonconformist cousin with the oddball career as some sort of horn player or whatever. They speak slowly to me so I can understand. I'm a bit of an embarrassment.)

They were aware that I was running some kooky little web site, and when I mentioned that I'd sold it to a major corporation, response was oddly uniform: "That's nice..."—followed by a swift, eerie change of subject.

Why?

Off the scale! He's not that guy!

Now, where were we? So how are your parents...?