Much of the time it’s true- I can’t stomach religious persons or their stupid beliefs. It’s not nice of me, but it’s true. I heard a middle-aged woman with frosted hair and a loud voice talk at work about how she loves tattoos and is planning her fifth, but she just hadn’t decided where on her body it would go. “Oh, what have you decided upon?” someone asked. Answer: A cross with the text of a Proverbs 3:??-??, which she then dutifully recited. Yuck.

Last night I went to a concert of the Eastman Philharmonia. I sat near the front, just to the left of the conductor. In general I had a very nice time. It was an excellent program, from start to finish. It’s just that I’m never quite happy about the people I sit near. People are never as invisible as I’d like them to be. There was an aged woman sitting alone a few rows in front of me and to the left . Dressed very presentably, in a long black skirt and nice sweater, proper shoes. She seemed the perfect no-nonsense companion to a concert . . . except… throughout the entire performance of Wagner’s Liebestod she never stopped nervously flapping her program in front of her face, as if nearly overcome with heat. It was October. It was not hot. I fixated on it. I couldn’t focus on anything but the flapping. I tried to shield her from my view, but it was hopeless, impossibly distracting. She might as well have been waving a giant flag, or holding an enormous bird by the legs as it tried to fly away. I wanted her punished for ruining my first piece on the program. Moving to the second piece, mid-way through the slow movement of the Mozart piano concerto, I heard a clatter near my feet as something fell to the floor. Again with the audience noise! To myself I cursed the man behind me for this second distraction. After intermission, I milled around in the hallway for a while. When I finally returned to find my seat, I looked down and saw beside my chair my own cell phone, which must have been the clatter I blamed on the man behind me! So much for my blamelessness. I don’t know why I even brought the damned thing. For the second half, and third piece of the evening, I held my cell phone in my hand, wrapped in the program so as to conceal from the man behind me that it was my cell phone that fell on the floor earlier--and also to make sure that no one in the audience confused me with those cell phone people who bring their noise makers into the concert hall, unable to sever ties to the wireless world. But somewhere in the middle of the Brahms symphony, as I clutched the phone in my right hand, I accidently pressed the On button, which caused the phone to intone its start-up ring pattern. Good god, what have I done! Well, there was no concealing it. I’d become one of them. Mark my word, though--I’ll never bring a phone to the concert hall again. It’s unforgiveable.

A week or so ago Ann and I went to the Adirondacks for the weekend. She’s now a board member of a not-for-profit organization, a summer camp in the Adirondacks, and so attendance at periodic meetings is necessary. This actually has an unanticipated benefit for me, which I realized during this past weekend. It was on the early side of the fall season up there. We arrived on Saturday morning, after a pleasant drive, gorgeous weather, sunny and warm. The camp was relatively quiet, with only board members and, in some cases, their families, in attendance. (I say relatively quiet because it was still annoyingly difficult to find a spot where one could sit without surrounding noise, or wanderers, small children running about with parents following behind, etc. It’s one of those things about the camp that I always forget about until I’m up there—a most gorgeous spot but for all the damned people and their communal ideas and habits! If only I could have the camp to myself. The location is everything there—all else detracts. But enough of this short rant….) Anyway, we arrived on Saturday morning. After a brief period of greetings, I realized I had the entire day free to myself in this wonderful location, in this wonderful weather, while Ann was trapped in day-long meetings. After bouncing around for a while trying to find a place where I could be alone and read in peace, I finally settled into a long Adirondack chair facing the lake, wrapped in a thin blanket to keep the breeze off of me, and a book in my lap. There I sat completely alone and undisturbed for hours, a little coffee resting on the arm of the chair, the occasional boater passing by, and the sounds of geese in the distance. I sat for hours reading my large tome on the life and paintings of Van Gogh. What could have been finer? It was an exquisite fall day in perhaps the most beautiful place to be at that moment. It’ll stick in my memory for years as one of those times that comes rarely and without effort. Such times can’t really be repeated or recreated , even though on this day I wanted to buy a cabin in the Adirondacks and relive that day over and over again-- much as I wanted to buy an apartment in Paris after similar experiences in that beautiful city a few years earlier. I think one of the important factors in this day was the forced exile from all concerns that intrude. I had hours to kill with few options for distractions. This is part of the problem even with time of my own during weekends. Sure, there are no work distractions, but still an entire laundry list of activities presses upon me, a list of things that I must sample, an agenda of things I must move forward. It’s tiresome, my mind and its goals-orientation.

I really want to write a play. Someday I will. A good one, I hope, but if not, then multiple plays, many efforts. Coincidentally, I was just listening to the radio. The announcer commented that Brahms didn’t complete his first symphony until he was 43. I’m 43, so I took comfort in that, momentarily. But of course what one must understand is that by the time Brahms was 43 he’d already written several masterpieces. By his early 20s Brahms was already being called Beethoven’s successor. So take no comfort, my friends.

I have great friends. [One always says so just before the zinger. Hopefully they’re not reading this. Of course they’re not.] But often I tire quickly of them. In truth I often don’t feel like they share my interests, or that they have a clue what I’m thinking most of the time. It’s not a new feeling. I’ve felt this way about my friends throughout my life, even as the friends have changed. The only difference now is that I have Ann to compare them with, for how little they know me. So it’s not about my friends… probably. I wonder sometimes, though, whether I’d feel differently if I had a friend who truly shared a passionate interest with me. Maybe what I need are a collection of niche friends —e.g., someone I only get together with to play poker, an annual camping trip companion, a friend who only goes scuba diving with me (if I scuba dived), deer hunting friends, friends who only help me move, the friend whose phone calls I always dodge, the fuck me buddy, the fuck you buddy, the resourceful guy, the creative guy, the bore, the guy I keep on deck for when I eventually take up jazz, or bridge.

Last week our chief operating officer visited Rochester. I’ve seen this guy via his many video web casts on the company web site. He always seemed to be a bit of a tubby dolt, likeable but not particularly sharp nor able to inspire confidence. He rolls his head back and forth too frequently, like a bobble head that’s slowly coming to rest, a white and visually able Stevie Wonder, someone who knows he should turn his head from time to time to cover the crowd but who hasn’t quite acquired a natural rhythm for it. When he spoke to the full Rochester crowd of several hundred people, however, he was pretty entertaining, and he had more of a presence, a presence befitting a man who heads a multi-billion dollar company. In the afternoon after his talk, he toured the buildings, bringing his video camera with him. (In prior visits to other locations he’s created videos of his trips which were then incorporated into his video casts to the company, typically funny little pastiches of various characters from the company and his encounters with them.)

I happened to be coming out of a meeting when out of the elevator steps the COO with his entourage, camera rolling. I tried to slip around him unnoticed, as surely the last thing I wanted was an encounter with the COO of the company … while being videotaped. I found my way to my cube and believed that I’d avoided disaster. But of course my cube is right next to the heavy foot traffic patterns, and here he comes, turning the corner to face me in my cube, camera pointed at me as he begins commenting on what he sees. I smile as my mind races. What am I to do? There’s some very brief chatter, perhaps an exchange of some words between us, none of which I remember now. Then he comments that I look like the type of person who says nothing but intelligent things. Frantically my mind searches for something witty to say, something that could both live up to that expectation and yet deflect attention from me so that he moves on. Of course these two are antithetical to each other. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I can think of neither. What I manage to say is, “I don’t respond well to such pressure.” At this he says something like, “Well, ok, let’s move on,” and he turns his camera to the women in the cube across from me and begins to question her about her shrine to the Red Sox. That man’s no fool. Well, I’ve since thought of several ways in which the whole episode might have come out better for me. Yesterday his video web cast was sent to the company, and I was not in it. But there was the lady across the way, and her Red Sox memorabilia.