Essays

I love music. I have loved music for as long as I have played it, and even before then. As a child learning to fundamentals of the saxophone and encountering jazz, this love manifested as a single-minded devotion. Music was not simply a passion, a fascination, and an avenue to self-expression. My love for music was religious; music was sacred. If someone quoted John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” over a corny funk tune, it was not simply heavy-handed and distasteful; it was sacrilegious. Music was not just an art; it was a spiritual experience, and it demanded not only serious study, but reverence.

As a high schooler, I subscribed earnestly to this notion of jazz musician as hero. John Coltrane was this master samurai who honed his talent to honorably push forward the musical zeitgeist into a new realm of consciousness. He was a messiah who would bring about change on earth through the comprehension of his improvisations, the study of his harmonic theories, the inspiration of his dedication. Jazz music was serious business, and had to be treated as such. The Bad Plus, at the time a newly formed jazz trio with a penchant for interpreting pop anthems, was heretical. They dishonored jazz - I thought then.

It's midnight. I sit in the beautiful lobby of Hotel St. Nicolas in the heart of La Rochelle. Next to me is a new friend, D'Arcy, a warmhearted and sharp-witted Canadian expatriate, who I met between sets at a May 6th concert. This trip has been a story of chance encounters, new friends. It has been characterized by adventures both exhilarating and exhausting but also by the warmth and tranquility of home-cooked meals.

I normally find it easy to write about recent experiences, but I find myself struggling to process the last two weeks, and to contextualize it in the wild adventure that has consumed the last three years of my life.

Most people entertain a deluded concept of the practice of medicine. In the fantasized version, nearly all common diseases are well-understood and their treatment algorithms are well-tuned according to the latest research and adjusted as newer treatments are developed and clinical trials performed. In contrast, a large number of idiots, quackadoos and conspiracy theorists imagine that most of medicine is a sham, that doctors know nothing, that more harm than good is done by western medicine. While these purveyors of homeopathy (treatments that tend to be at best ineffectual and at worst dangerous) are far from the truth, so are those who imagine medicine to be steadfastly scientific.

Self-promotion is the part of professional music I'm least comfortable with. It's always been an awkward process for me. The most offensive component has always been the bio. Musicians, artists, and everyone else trying to compete for the limited leisure-time attention of America's distractible public all find themselves, willingly or reluctantly, having to write self-congratulatory bios lauding their own prodigious talent, notable associations and historic achievements. To make it palatable, the standard form is for bios to be written in the third person. Here, I will try to account for who I am in a way for which I'm not ashamed to take credit.

Recently, a friend pointed me towards an edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in which the preface contained a number of critical reviews contemporary to the book’s writing. Not surprisingly the critical response was overwhelmingly negative. Naturally, my first inclination was to pooh-pooh the critics and lament their failure to recognize something great in its time. But another, more important idea struck me.

For hundreds of years, the increased specialization of labor drove greater productive capacity and increased efficiency across all sectors of the world economy. Philosophers like Karl Marx noted the potential damage of such a division of duties to man’s soul. But few could have predicted then that the over-specialization of labor could spell financial catastrophe on a massive scale for those married to very specific skill sets.

Twenty-one months ago, my brain stopped working. Something might have been amiss for some time before then, but in January, 2008, I first knew beyond any doubt that I was broken. Before the month was out, I had seen a neurologist to rule out the possibility of multiple sclerosis or a brain tumor. Nearly two years later, I am not yet sure what I am fighting, and, at times, why I am fighting.

After two years of cycling between ten percent and fifty percent of my former cognitive and physical capacity, I have progressed little but learned much. I have acquired more knowledge than I can currently process about my own health, the myriad families of medical conditions that can cause neurological complications, and the problems that plague the healthcare industry itself. In this article, I will elaborate on some of the horrifying discoveries that I have made on my medical odyssey.

As my twitter feed has already suggested, my confidence in the Obama administration has been shaken, perhaps beyond repair. Given the wide range of reasons, more often illegitimate than justifiable for shaky faith in Barack Obama, I feel compelled to elaborate on my specific sources of concern.

At risk of sounding curmudgeonly, and perhaps being hypocritical, I feel obliged to join the shrinking chorus of individuals who protest the demolition of standards in written language. When I was a child, teachers ineffectively forbade the use of spell-check on school assignments. Spell-check – we were told – would foster a dependence that would leave us unable to spell in the absence of a computer.

Often, when systems are automated, adapted to great scale, one necessary trade-off for the efficiency gained is a gross oversimplification of the information being captured. Email is archivable, searchable, easily stored in less than 10kb of memory and easily transmitted to any number of recipients. The downside of this miraculously efficient representation of a human letter is that it lacks all of the nuance that can't be represented with ASCII symbols. Handwriting, sketches, personal stylistic choices of layout that once characterized the written exchange are lost. Similarly, the healthcare industry has oversimplified human health in way that leaves unacceptable gaps.

A profound lack of talent and ability characterizes the majority of music created today. This seems especially true of music that exists outside the mainstream. The surprising aspect of this phenomenon is that the bands taking themselves more seriously seem less likely to offer anything resembling serious musicianship.

At rare times when fear, furiousness, and frustration ebb as the dominant emotions that I associate with episodic altered consciousness, curiosity rises to fill the void. Moments of clarity bring not only a rush of sensation and cognitive potential, but also a stream of questions concerning my identity and what my precarious situation implies about it. Clearly, at this moment, ‘I’ refers to me, the one who can read a chapter of a book and remember it for longer than three seconds. Surely, it refers to the man who can taste his food, and smell it toו. And it refers to the guy who can play a modest amount of music, has respectable mathematical abilities, and craves independence.

I have been a lifelong Yankee fan. For this I have never made any apology, nor do I have any plans to. In the sense that fandom is an unquestioning instinctive knowledge instilled from an early age, I can only be a Yankee fan. My relationship with the Mets was never acrimonious; in fact, it was downright cordial. My gloves and hats were signed by Mets greats at baseball camp. Bobby Bonilla was the first big leaguer I ever met, and I shagged flies delivered by the bat of Ed Kranepool. But if I had to click on a radio button, I have always been a Yankee fan.

Half a year later, the world, still, likely neither requires nor desires another self-indulgent report on the tragedies befalling my brain and the ludicrous circus that constitutes the effort to revive it. However, participating in the act of writing is vital to rediscovering the connections that have long lain dormant between my ailing neurons. If I sound whiny and pathetic, I have earned that right and make no apology for it; in fact, I preemptively retract any apology that I might make for it in the future.