I often accompanied my friend to band practice. It might be more forthcoming to say I was in a band with him, but in truth I felt like an impostor. Music for him was blood and sinew, his very bones reverberating the chords and melodies that went through his fingers and into nylon strings or ivory keys and the very separation of him from his craft would likewise be so calamitous as the loss of bone marrow or spinal fluid.  My father and fathers father and fathers fathers father had all been military men, this chain likely continuing  ‘till before the word conflict had been conceived yet the language of violence already was antiquated by the time that ancestor whittled or knapped a sinister point. This bloodline had undoubtedly been diluted by the time I was born, for I did not join the military but still had a residual thoughts on rigidity and structure and I felt that drumming what I did in my friends band was enough burden for the world and that this vice was to be kept to a sideline towards a practical career that would be like a tent pole for the circus of society and not the lion tamer with chair and whip ready to be devoured by the lion or even by the whims of the crowd when the circus emptied and eventually faded into irrelevance and the lion tamer left with just his knowledge of chair and whip is unprepared to face the lion who requires a suit and tie and briefcase to battle with. And while the life of the main event, the lion tamer, was intense and vivid it was likely short and fraught with maimings and scarring.

 It was when we started to attend university that were awoken to the fact of our differences. I had less and less time to devote to practicing the drums and it was tacitly understood that he was the superior contributor, both in natural talent and effort for he had written all music and practiced even when his fingers were raw. I still attended his shows and while he was a great showman and his music unique and interesting it had a quality that was unpalatable to the general masses and I was often a significant fraction of the crowd that paid him any attention at all. I’m hesitant to say I felt bad quitting the band, for while it was just my friend and I, I felt to be adrift in a terrible marching orchestra, drumming along to a greater chorus individually unknowable and vast beyond any and all reckoning, and that while luckily my role was infinitesimally small and easy to follow the leader of the band was watchful and ready for a slip up for which the punishment would be that to which you would give a distracting fly buzzing around your workstation. It was around the middle point of our sophomore year that the lack of success was beginning to take a toll on my friend. His family was not very wealthy and his needing to be sent money from them was draining their resources. He had steadily been growing a small following but again his fan base was small as every album he released was a furtherance of musical capability. His lack of consistency was like a faucet with open mouthed beseechers below. They would be attracted by a slow trickle or stream and when the next album was let loose unto them they scrambled away as if the faucet had been turned to full pressure and scalding hot attracting a new type of imbiber to who would then be likewise disappointed by the next revolution of the turntable. But recently he had struggled to make a breakthrough in his art. When he returned to the house that we shared he had the demeanor of a man who had been smashing a rock wall with a pickaxe for hours at a time. In a way he had been, his long hours in a studio bearing no fruit. I had seen this wane before, it was his time of research and planning before the wax of performance. This time was different, it was longer, darker. We had moved abroad to attend a prestigious university and while I have tried thus far to keep details vague, I have always found this point to be salient: when this university was built, the Aztecs were rolling heads down ziggurat steps in the hopes that Quetzalcoatl would continue to gag himself with his tail. In this university was a great library likely unrivaled anywhere on Earth. So as my friend was unable to peer into the future to determine what musical technique or theory would be crafted next, he would turn into the deep history of humanity whose insidious winding tales and twisting passages and dark stories mimicked the library with its shadowed halls and dusty old architecture paradoxically categorizing to the most exact order the chaos within it.