Wednesday 3/24/21
People often use the words "chemistry" and "connection" interchangeably, but they mean quite different things.
Chemistry is a kind of rapport. We can think of it as occurring at the water's surface. The top of one body of water meets with another, and they flow in the same direction. Chemistry is when someone makes a remark to you, you respond as if you were completing the back half of a beat, and they then provide another beat off of your beat. It's in that rhythm. Looks may have a rhythm. It's not just words in this context. Touch may have a rhythm. Humor may have a rhythm.
Connection involves the soul. The soul is not at the top of the water. The soul is what is below, way down, in the depths. That does not mean depths of darkness only. The depths can be limpid. Connection is twining at the essence of two people's beings. They need not be similar people. They need not possess similar qualities of mind. That can help. Chemistry must be present. Connection goes so much further, though.
We are apt to live our lives without knowing it once--at least not experientally. And yet, we can identify it, feel it, when we see it, as in a work of art, which is ultimately what I do. "Fitty," for instance, is about what I am speaking of here. We do not even possess the chance of having it without vulnerability. To connect with someone requires much, and one of those things is that two people must become mirrors unto themselves, and unto each other. They reflect each other, as each truly is. They help make each other known to the other and to themselves.
I have had one real connection in my life. In some ways, it was an unlikely one, but all connections, really, are unlikely--they are miracles of shared humanness in the very core of what makes each person the human that they are, and the human that they might come to be. In other ways, it was not unlikely. It wasn't with any family member or so-called family. It wasn't with any friends over the years. It wasn't with a spouse or any romantic partner.
Moving on.
Here is a new piece that came out the other day in The Smart Set on bassist Jimmy Blanton.
Just a coincidence that I had two pieces on bassists published last week. And that I write so damn much on so damn much, of course. Imagine what you'd be seeing if I was backed by an industry and not blackballed by it?
I've been walking only three miles most days. I'm just chipping away at this journal now. There's too much to get to, and I can't save it all up for entries that the little counter above inform me take twenty minutes to read. Sunday marked 1729 days, or 247 weeks, without a drink of alcohol. On that same day I walked ten miles, ran the back-up stairs ten times--there's video--and then ran ten hill sprints. We call this a Zulu hat trick.
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