His Bop Sounds Swell

Sunday’s been infected with Monday, as it always is, around 9:00PM.  That’s 9:00AM in China.  Whatever weekend you had is now over.  People are busy at work in the morning of that Monday you are accountable for.  Get to work.  From that moment on its fair game for people to demand my time, inquire as to my opinion, remind me of what they were expecting me to do.  My only unconditional refuge from the wash of expectations is sleep.   

I’m enjoying listening to the remarkable pianist Carl Perkins lay out some eight-dimensional blues with his unique cross arm playing style.  Majestic, melancholy, utterly plausible, he’d place his polio afflicted left arm across the piano and use his elbow to hit base notes.  And though he well surmounted the challenge of polio he fell like so many to the blade of drug addiction, dying young at twenty-nine.  His bop sounds swell, playing loudly out of my desktop speakers, but with the chord plugged into the lap top I can’t swing my body away from the desk as I want to do with my feet up on the bed and the laptop on my legs and its late, so this frustrates me.

I’d purchased a large world history text.  I’ve left it on the kitchen table.  Perhaps we could turn to prehistoric man and plot the projection forward after we were done with this Chinese history course that I usually teach undergrads, but this year teach my daughters during our enforced period of home-schooling.  Today we covered the Japanese invasion and ran through till the end of the civil war.  Things haven’t been good, and they won’t improve for the hapless citizens of China, for many more decades to come on the eve of “liberation.”  This new text on the table had me considering the origins of man, back at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.  I flipped on through the opening chapter as I was soon in Iberia fifty-thousand years ago with the Neanderthals, whom, I was reminded, had larger brains than humans and interbred with human beings as well. 

This got me laughing.  I laughed to think about the obsession with racial purity which was so important for one after another white stock character I’d encountered in the African American cannon.  The Western Europeans, unlike it many Sub-Saharan African people, were all “tainted” with non-humanoid blood, non-humanoid DNA.  It was the Sub-Saharan African people who seem to have maintained themselves as “pure” humans.  And what was the result of all this Neanderthal blood on the development of man?   The book on the kitchen table didn’t speculate.  Neanderthal’s then, online, for tomorrow.  For now, its sleep before any more of Monday claims you.

Monday, 07/27/20