smokehouse

This province has strict anti-smoking legislation in place. For a musician this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is certainly far, far more pleasant to be playing in clean smelling, smoke-free rooms (ok, clean smelling is not always accurate). It is less stressful for the vocal chords and it's nice to come home and not have to shower and throw all the gig clothes in the laundry basket. On the other hand (ah, yes, you knew there was going to be an "on the other hand") - the legislation has caused some amount of hardship for small bar owners, especially for people who hired jazz musicians to play in cigar and cognac lounges. Less business for owners, less business for musicians. The legislation is fairly new and I have not felt its impact too strongly. Apart from one or two places where I no longer play, most other venues still hire music despite the smoke ban.



Imagine my surprise when I walked into a place last night to play a trio gig and the place was positively saturated with smoke. Acrid, thin cigarette smoke as well as pungent, heavy cigar smoke. There were well fed dudes with stogies standing around the bar and thin ladies with thin cigarettes sitting at tables. I mean - everybody smoked in that room. I later learned that this was the segregated smoking room which some restaurants are still allowed to operate...

Now the shocker: my first reaction was light-headedness and nausea and I almost thought I wouldn't be able to play. But play we did and people really seemed to enjoy it and half way through the second set, despite tearing eyes and a scratchy throat I sort of realized two things: these smokers were simply having more fun AND smoke and jazz somehow go hand-in-hand. Not in any rational way! I still came home and showered and threw all the clothes in the hamper. But somehow, the second half of the gig felt right, in part because of the well disposed, garrulous smokers and in part because that blue smoke provided such a perfect backdrop for My Funny Valentine

overthinking

My wife and I lay in bed last night, watching a documentary on the mores and rituals of dating in 2005. Almost without exception, the people interviewed - both men and women - seemed confused, insecure and above all, rationalizing their every move, action and gesture. Women complained of inattentive, rude men, yet at the same time extolled the virtue of being single and independent. Men complained of hard, unyielding women, all the while praising their own well-developed 'feminine' sides. And the most surprising thing of all? These people were all in their mid- to late thirties!

Both my wife and I found the spectacle to be quite sad. The problems these people grappled with belonged in the realm of high-school. The endless yapping about soul-mates, parties, the complaints and recriminations - this is all stuff I remember being engaged in when I was about 17. By the time I was 20, I knew enough about my own sexuality to have a few "serially monogamous affairs" (of course, this is a 2005 term, we just called it "going out"). I was married at 27 and by the time I was 31 I had two kids. It all seemed perfectly natural. I don't think that the word "soul-mate" ever entered my mind or my wife's mind when we were dating and later living together. That is not to say that either one of us lacked introspection - simply that getting married and starting a family was not predicated on some unattainable ideal but rather on immediate realistic expectations.

It didn't work out. We were divorced after 13 years of marriage and I have now been remarried for 7 years. My present marriage shows no signs of the angst and paranoid neurosis of the people we saw in the documentary, even though my wife falls in the age category of the people portrayed in the piece...

Our main thought was this: why the need for the tortuous overthinking? Why the fear of committment on both sides? Why the stuttering hesitancy? Where is the spirit of joy and adventure? Isn't it better to plunge ahead and experience great moments of togetherness, start a family and build a *real* life - even if the adventure ends in failure? I would think anything must be better than this self-pitying hand wringing in chi-chi coffee houses, the speed dating, the pretending, the analysis-to-paralysis.

There was a woman lawyer featured on the program, who boasted of having a six figure salary and a 60 -80 hour work week. She then explained that she chose this lifestyle because it "gave her freedom"....Well, the immediate question that sprang to my mind was 'what kind of freedom can a person have when they're cooped up in an office 80 hours a week?' Would she not have far more freedom earning half her income but enjoying more free time, giving up some of the illusory independence for the beauty and warmth of a committed relationship and family?

As we turned off the the set and went to sleep, we felt profoundly sorry for these people, profundly happy that we are not 40 year old teenagers but also profoundly disconcerted at our lack of understanding of these people's M.O. We understand they're confused - but we don't understand why. The mores may have changed but the biology and the basic drives of men and women have not: the drive to have a family as a unit of togetherness, as a bulwark against the slings and arrows of life and as an imprint of your genes on the future - that drive has not and will not change for millenia. All the tortured self-justification is not going to change that.

And as a final thought: one women interviewed on the program opined that this change was somehow spontaneous, that it was not driven by an ideology. That's nonsense. It was the utterly crazy, stoned, misguided ideology of the 60's that brought the change about. It is the ideology that tries to supercede the family with government. It is the ideology that sees government, not the family, as the ultimate arbiter and rule setter of society. It is the ideology that elevates groups above individuals. It is the ideology of all the radical "-isms" that has confounded and confused the minds of people from the seventies on. And the way to get away from it is to follow instinct, improvise, create, stop overthinking and playing childish games. Oh well, probably easier said than done for a guy in his fifties who doesn't have to play the field and learn new rules. As I was falling asleep, I was really thankul for not being thirty-something today, trying to get laid and having to spout pseudo-intellectual nonsense in order to hide simple biological truths.