So, yesterday was my birthday. I got a few automatically-generated e-mails from the birthday list at Sunsite. And several genuine wishes of a happy day. A few more notes came in today, and the balance of the cheer should spin itself out around June, when the last of those who for some reason think my birthday is then have called at whatever inopportune moment to wish me well on "this special day." Once that wraps up, the next round of mistaken well-wishing will occur, this one leading up to the actual day, instead of trailing after it, and culminating in a dozen or so calls on or near the 30th of January, but never actually on that day. These things have their seasons.

On the bus this morning. Can't read while standing. I mean, on the bus, I can't ever be standing on a crowded bus and read anything that I have with me, not even a magazine or a newspaper. Although I can make like I'm reading, I can assume the posture of someone who is reading, I can LOOK BUSY.

But I can't eat and walk at the same time, nor can I shower and eat (I found this out one night trying to eat a bowl of stew while taking a shower on the third floor of the Parc Lincoln Hotel on West 75th Street. It weren't purty). In fact, I can't do much of anything while eating.

I can not eat while listening to music, and I can not talk while typing, nor can I speak (coherently) while playing the piano. I've known people who can do that (play piano and carry on a conversation), and it mystifies me, but I suspect that the quality of their piano playing suffered under the weight and distraction of what they were saying, I simply could not discriminate between the two.

What mystifies me even more, but in a different way, is when someone is playing piano for a group of people, and some of those people just start talking right out loud, gossiping among themselves and even shouting questions and comments at the performer. That's a mystery, inside of an enigma, wrapped in a cocoon.

I have been able to sing while playing piano, but can guarantee one and all that it's not something worth attempting except in some kind of emergency. Yeah, we can just leave it at that.

Of course, I can do all these things. I could force myself to stand on a bus and read Brautigan and play the piano, all while consuming a hearty beef stew, but the meaning and the quality of those four experiences would deteriorate, and I would probably throw up.

I can not talk on the phone and watch the TV, it's just not a good thing. When I do attempt such balance, the person on the other line thinks I'm drunk or doing something obscene, because my speech patterns waver and stop and start and wax utterly inscrutable.

Now, take that guy I just mentioned who could play piano and jabber like a jaybird. If you could hear just one or the other of what he was doing, I think you'd notice some weird lapses and lurches into obscurity.

I also can not really have much of a conversation while eating, and I can not read or listen to any kind of music while eating. All these things upset my stomach in some way. It's more accurate to say that speaking and hearing music and reading all engage my gut in some way, in what way I can not say, but if I knew I'd develop a technique that would allow me to simultaneously eat speak play piano and scowl at others who talk while I'm playing, therewith mystifying all those who become exasperated at the sight of someone doing more than one thing at the same time.

I've heard that Warren Beatty would have telephone conversations while having sex with Joan Collins. He would have sex dozens of times a day, and purportedly got Oscar nominations because of it, but now he's married and somehow has managed to come out looking like a man of dignity for having never cheated on his wife, because he never had a wife.

I can't juggle. Well, I'm sure I could if I tried, but haven't done any better than a couple of tennis balls. Once I tried juggling some clams. Juggling, playing the harmonica, learning Perl becoming a master of card-tricks, reading War & Peace then writing the sequel -- these are all things I've just not gotten around to doing yet, but they're all at about the same level of importance.

Had a dream once that I could juggle absolutely anything, not just physical objects (which included all the galaxies, and every pork roast in creation) but also abstractions, like faith and fear. It all circled and twirled in front of me, mixing into a blurry halo, and I handled everything like the county champion juggler. Crowds were cheering, making me to juggle more things, and some Ed McMahon-like guy was standing offstage throwing planets and houses into my arms, and I could handle it all, but soon discovered that one of the planets (I think it was Mercury) was really a giant machete, and the faith a gas blowtorch, and I woke up holding my stomach, thinking that I had cut myself in half at the waist and burned my hair off.

You know, that was almost 3 years ago, and I never even thought about that dream, except to remember that it had happened, until right this second. I'm glad you were here to share it, because I'm sure it would have slipped from memory altogether.

Another one that would have slipped away had I not written it down and posted it to some BBS somewhere was this one where I was sleeping in my apartment at Oberlin. I lived on Main Street, above the Army/Navy store, near the Fire Department and the Post Office and the giant fields of corn and pretty much every place else in that tiny town.

In the dream, I woke up at like 6 in the afternoon, and prepared to go to my job, which was some kind of all-night thing, washing dishes maybe. Looking out the window, Main Street had vanished, and in its place rolled an ocean, and on the ocean sat the island of Manhattan. The sky was very, very dark with storm clouds. The island was not simply the island of Manhattan, it was my own personal Manhattan. The island contained every place on earth I've ever been, all the cities and states and countries and all the rooms and buildings and hideouts of my life - New York, Tampa, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Bangkok, Laos... Manhattan island was not any bigger than it is now, but the depth of its nations was bottomless.

Going downstairs, leaving the apartment to go find this island, I discovered I was not in Oberlin any more, but here in New York, standing on 3rd Avenue. Crossed the street, where standing under a covered bus stop were two women, having a conversation about me.

One of them was extremely beautiful, and somehow I knew she was attracted to me and found me very interesting. But I found her beauty threatening, the kind of oppressive supermodel perfection that makes me scream inside, but that also makes me (and guys everywhere) lonely as hell. So even though I knew this woman was waiting for me to say or do something, I decided that if she was so perfect then maybe I could wait for her to say something, and neither of us said or did anything.

We made eye contact, and she whispered something to the person she was with, but that was it, and you know that sounds like no dream at all...

Anyway, I walked out onto 3rd Avenue, and climbed on top of a bus. The bus was driving the wrong way, and all the other cars were driving the right way, but we did not crash or have any kind of trouble. I got on top of the bus and lay down, looked at all the rooftops (this bus was several stories high) and saw that Woody Allen was making a movie, using several of the apartment building rooftops as his stage.

I fell asleep on top of this bus, and that was the end of the dream.

I've always wished that I could send myself e-mail from within my dreams at night, or that someone would send me an e-mail that I could pick up when I go to sleep. But I guess it's not to be. But if those Kreskin-esque guys with their photographic memories could get pictures of their thoughts taken by jerking their head at a camera, why can't they do the same to a computer terminal and send e-mail, too? I'd just love to get e-mail from the great beyond, I wonder if it would be encrypted.

Speaking of weird e-mail, I got this message the other day. It's in response to something I posted to usenet about 8 months ago, and the e-mail itself is dated 1980. In 1980 I was 12 years old and living in Florida, and I don't think I was posting messages to talk.euthanasia.

Anyway, one combination of things I can do is walk and talk at the same time. In general, I feel that my thinking capacities increase while walking. Also, driving a car and talking are OK. Driving and punching buttons on the car-radio has always come easy to me, and my virtuosity at this task has sometimes astounded and frightened people in the passenger seat.

Wow, as I'm typing this just now, the lights dimmed, and there was a slight clicking noise, then after a split second everything was back to normal, electrically speaking.

As I've said elsewhere in these pages, I can type with my hands reversed, though I need to maintain this activity for some time before gaining any speed.

One thing that always amazed my mother was how I could successfully play hand-held electronic games blindfolded. I would get a game like Calico's Electronic Quarterback or Mattel's Football II and get touchdowns and make these really long plays while I was looking out the window or doing something else, or while my eyes were completely covered.

For a short while I tried practicing piano while listening to CDs with headphones on. I would practice Wagner's Liebestod (transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt) while listening to Led Zeppelin's Kashimir at full blast through my headphones. I would use the beat from the CD as my metronome, and this way I didn't have to actually listen to myself playing the same thing repeatedly for hours and hours, I just had to know when things were falling into place. The idea was to spare myself the aural drudgery of practicing, and when I took off the headphones and heard what I'd been playing all these hours, it would be a wonderful revelation to hear myself again, and this would renew my love for playing piano, which I guess must have been pretty wiped out at the time. This was during the summer of 1990.

I never recorded myself playing like that, but I suspect that it must have sounded pretty awful to anyone who could actually hear it. And by the way, I don't recommend this way of practicing, though I know that Franz Liszt encouraged his students to put newspapers and poetry on their music rack so they could read something meaningful while going through the paces of scales and arpeggios.

Horowitz was very funny about pupils and students. Most commentators say that Horowitz was a failure as a teacher, and by most standards that would appear to be true, even though he had a few highly successful protegé.

Nevertheless, I think he was on to something with one element of his teaching philosophy. I met a guy once who was a piano teacher at one of the big music schools in New York. He lives in the Ansonia on West 74th Street, and he and I used to meet at his place to play 4-hand piano arrangements of Mahler symphonies (Mahler himself had lived in the Ansonia, it was kind of a neat feeling, yeah neato).

Now this guy had never met Horowitz himself, but his brother had, and through a variety of acquaintances and other connections, he saw and chatted with Horowitz on occasion over the course of several years.

The first time they met, he had mentioned to Horowitz that he had a brother who was 27 years old and who played the piano.

Horowitz asked "How does anyone make a living playing the piano? What does he do to support himself?"

"Oh, he has a few students."

And Horowitz just laughed and laughed, saying "Students? 27 years old, and he has pupils?" This was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

So from then on, every time Horowitz met this guy he would ask "How is your brother doing? You know, the one with the students?" And he would snicker. Horowitz felt, it seems, that no one in their twenties is ready to impart any meaningful perspective on the art of piano playing.