“It’s everywhere…”
Some context: yesterday was my last day of work at my former employer. My new job starts Monday.
I’m sitting in what seem to be endless meetings at my former employer’s corporate headquarters (which is not here in Austin). An old co-worker, who resigned some time ago, is also present in these meetings. I wildly interject a couple of times and say inappropriate things, offending some of the old guard present at the meetings. By the time the next meeting is being organized, I decide to walk out and not tell anybody.
Walking out of the office puts my in downtown Austin. I wander up and down Congress a bit, poking into some weird old shops… I look in a costume shop and purloin an office chair; I literally wheel it out of the shop and get halfway across the street when the proprietor stops me. She scolds me, I make some lame excuse (returning the chair in the process), and then she begins to lament about how someone returned the hooker costume in the night (it’s early morning) and the morning dew might have damaged it. The costume isn’t anything sexy or revealing; it looks like mummy wrappings, off-white gauze, with what look like tapioca-yellow salad forks for claws? Hands? I’m not sure.
I begin to move toward the capitol that has a south mall that looks a lot like UT’s south mall. A grand wedding is taking place so I try, as much as possible, to make my way through the proceedings (Is it the ceremony? Or the reception?), trying not to get in the way of people in formal wear taking pictures, staying away from the wedding party… I find myself in some temporary reception hall, some large tent. There are tables and chairs everywhere, and some unidentifiable stage equipment set up near the entrance I just walked in.
As I make my way towards the opposite entrance to get away from the wedding, I skirt a girl who is playing a small, Casio keyboard on a keyboard stand near all the equipment. The keyboard is the type that has only about sixteen or eighteen keys and has loads of silly sounds that are more annoying than fun, no matter what their marketing department thinks. She’s plunking out some aimless melody. As I pass her, though, she plays the theme of a song I wrote when I was sixteen, my “show-off” song, my friends’ favorite. How could she know this song? I turn around and march back up to her.
“Where did you hear that?” I ask her.
“That song? Oh, it’s everywhere,” she replies airily.
“I wrote it.”
“No way! Prove it!”
So I attempt to play different parts of the song on that tiny, sad keyboard… it turns out that there are three bands of color on each key and only the lowest band sounds like a piano note; the other bands are all strange whistles and sighs, the weird Casio sound effects I never like. After some messing around, I play various bits of the song back to the girl and she’s so surprised that she’s found me.