Familiarity and Solidarity, the Human Condition

Lately I have been recognizing a lack of familiarity in my life.  One reason may be I am living in my parent's house.  Once I lived in this house also, but it was thirty-four years ago when I was eighteen.  My interests were outside of this house and for a specific reason.  They were mine.  I traveled and spent four years in Chapel Hill and five years in Columbia, South Carolina.  Later I spent almost a decade in Columbus, Ohio.  Then I spent twelve years living on ships.  Needless to say this house is not that familiar.  Many things have changed.  Many things have stayed the same.  Mostly there was clutter, clutter from my father's life.  At first I set up house and did as I knew how.  I re-capped our Hammond A-100 organ.  I rebuilt my l981 Rhodes 73 electric piano.  I rebuilt my father's 1981 54 electric piano.  I cleaned my studio gear that had been in storage and replaced most of the dead batteries.  Much of it survived.  A few pieces like my Oberheim Matrix 6 rack did not.  Meticulously I arranged this studio gear into a new configuration and hauled it upstairs into my bedroom sacrificing my comfortable double bed.  This gear needed to be in a temperature-controlled environment as did the Rhodes.  I also hauled my Uncle Edwin's vinyl record collection upstairs into the same room.  Slowly this room unfolded into a workable MIDI studio, but it is not familiar to me.  Nothing much around me is very familiar.  My Rhodes is sitting less than ten feet from me under the air conditioner, and because I played it in college I don't feel a connection with it anymore.  I do know that my restoration of it yielded an instrument as good as any recorded Rhodes in history.  That is a tall statement, and while I am sure there are more expensive Rhodes around, this one is perfectly voice to my exacting ears and experiences playing both live and in the studio.  I didn't play trio jazz on this instrument, so I chorded on it in a commercial band context.  The low end was too strong, so rarely did I use my left hand.  When I voiced it, I took this into account consciously attenuating the lower frequencies.  In the future in due time it will serve its purpose as will many of the things I possess.  This Rhodes sitting less than ten feet from me is supported by two Leslie 60 tone cabinets with brand new Jensen Mod speakers.  Although they are quite old, they sound better than most modern keyboard amplification systems.  I forget this often.  Sitting atop this Rhodes is a what now could be  considered vintage analog synthesizer.  It is a Prophet 600, and there is one bad VCA making it a five voice instrument.  This pair of instruments was my first tangible gig rig.  I made a fair amount of money with this set up.  Still it feels unfamiliar.  I can't think of anything off the top of my head that seems really familiar.  The piano on which I learned to play sits in our living room.  While it is a beautiful piece of mahogany furniture, surreptitiously I despise it.  I do have pleasing memories with this house, and they involved Kelly Gooding.  We courted one another in this house, but that is very difficult for me to remember.  Happy memories or thoughts rather are sparse.  Life is a struggle, because of this unfamiliarity.  What is most startling about living here is my physical movements are foreign.  Daily I expect to complete a task that will reveal itself to me in kinesthetic familiarity, but it does not.  Each and every thing I do feels foreign, like I never have done it before.  After assembling vintage skateboards in our garage over and over, these motions now are foreign to me.  Imagine how my piano playing feels.  I am ensconced in a never never land of challenge rarely that ever gives an inch.  The house laughs at me when I stumble like a naive child and cut my finger or stub my toe.  These are things I have not had to think about in thirty-five years.  I have realized living here is a complete different ballgame than what the rest of my life has been, and I don't want it.  It is not mine.  I have done my best to customize this environment by moving furniture to more functional places, and to a small degree it has helped.  Still these new surroundings are not familiar.  What is familiar to me?  Not the bed in which I sleep.  Not the bathroom in which I bathe.  Not the kitchen in which I prepare meals.  None of it is me.  Dirt doesn't change, and although our yard as progressed through varying degrees of carnage mostly it is under control.  There are three new magnolia trees that pee pee leaves all over the lawn.  There is a conspicuous absence of grass, because soil erosion and dampness have encouraged the growth of fungal-laden moss.  I have waged war upon this moss and killed some of it.  It returns.  Our garage has a brand newly insulated outer wall with custom vinyl sliding windows.  It has developed into a desirable large work space, but it is not temperature controlled.  I use a kerosene heater to warm in in winter, and it is effective.  During the summer, it's a throw away unless you are willing to sweat continuously.  It houses my three motorcycles which are familiar.  It houses one keyboard rig, which although it has been extremely problematic the last year also is familiar.  I am not sure I can rely upon it for a gig.  There is a 1971 Fender Rhodes 73 key stage piano awaiting my third restoration.  Mostly I do not feel familiarity here, because what I feel is what my mother feels.  It is the nature of being a son.