January 30, 2002 — What you never did

I left Jeff and Amy’s house a bit before midnight, realizing as soon as I made it to the sidewalk that bass guitars are heavier than I’d imagined. I passed the case from hand to hand whenever my arm started to hurt until I arrived at the subway station. I awkwardly squeezed through the unmonitored, automated turnstile that tries to make it a tight fit for two people (and which consequently makes it a tight fit for one person and a guitar case).

On the subway, I sat across from someone who was editing pages and pages of musical notation in a spiral-bound book of blank bars. Watching him, my musical aspirations seemed a bit less impressive, especially given that they don’t go much further than hopefully being able to play the bass line from “Love Will Tear Us Apart” without making too many mistakes. But I’ll be pretty happy if I ever do get to that point, and maybe that’s enough.

When I made it to the St. Clair West station, I missed a streetcar by a few seconds and had to wait.

I was listening to Hot Water Music’s cover of “Bleeder” from their split EP with Alkaline Trio, having made a copy of the split for myself from Nathan’s when he visited to play Scrabble earlier in the day. An obviously drunk man started playing the harmonica, and, for a moment or two, it sounded nearly perfect accompanying the song that I was listening to.

The man with the harmonica came over and asked me for change. Since I had walked to Jeff and Amy’s house, I had decided not to bring my wallet along, so I had no money at all. I apologized, and he told me not to be sorry, and that I should be happy. He asked me if I played guitar; I lied and said yes because the truth is more complicated.

He took the same streetcar that I did. He started yelling at a woman to be quiet because she was talking loudly into her cellphone. Then another man got onto the streetcar, and the man with the harmonica asked him what sort of music he listened to. “Hip hop,” the man said. “I guess that’s alright,” the man with the harmonica replied. Then he took out his harmonica and started playing loudly. Everyone on the streetcar turned around to look, and I smiled even though it didn’t go along with what I was listening to at all this time. The woman who had been talking loudly on her cellphone moved to the front of the streetcar with everyone else.

After leaving the streetcar, a woman started to talk to me while I waited to cross the street. She said she had been crying, but I couldn’t really see that she had. She gave me a long and complicated story about her sister dying in a car accident the day before, saying that she had only heard about the accident this afternoon. She said that she needed eighteen more dollars to make it to Parry Sound, and that she’d been outside in the cold for six hours crying while trying to find the money.

I believed her for a second, but then she got rather mad at me when I said that I didn’t have my wallet and turned off any pretense of being grief-stricken.

In retrospect, I should have immediately become curious as to why she was asking for money so far away from the bus station. And there were plenty of other holes in her story. But she made me feel awful at the time, and now I’m convinced that it was all a lie.

I hate having someone fuck with my emotions for pocket change. It makes me want to be more cynical.

I’ve since made it home. I can’t play them well at all, but I’ve more or less figured out which notes to play in which order for a handful of Joy Division songs. The fingers on my left hand hurt quite a bit, but it’s nice to have a new distraction.

And, just for fun, I’m going to leave it at that. While yesterday’s journal covered five days, today’s covers a little over five hours. Consistency is highly overrated.