Ill Winds

I think it was somebody who said that an oboe is an ill wind that nobody blows any good. Interesting that, because I always thought an oboe was a down-and-out vagrant – but maybe I’m getting confused with a bassoon player. In any case, the Japanese Buddhist monks who used to wander around with their shauhachis under their arm could hardly have foreseen the travail and tribulation some of us shakuhachi aspirants would have to go through (not to mention the people listening to us while we go through it). I’ve been blowing away at the shakuhachi now for about 18 months, and I am starting to wonder if I shouldn’t have taken up the oboe, origami, or DIY brain surgery instead. I know what the Zennies say: the sound will come when it’s good and ready – it comes from nowhere, and disappears without a trace. But that’s not what you want to hear when you’re trying to coax a groovy tune out of a piece of hollow bamboo (well, in my case it’s polyester, but let’s not quibble over trifling details). Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against Zen. When it comes to maintaining your motorcycle, it’s simly the best. And I do try to live life by some of those aphorisms – “I’m open to all possibilities, but not all possibilities are open to me”, “sex is like air, it’s only important when you’re arewn’t getting any”, and “it may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others”. With that in mind, I’m off to my shakuhachi lesson. Be warned!!

A: Musing

Well, life begins at 50, so the cliches say. Blogging does too, so it seems. As the name implies (and names can imply a lot, as the makers of the old Aeroplane Jelly commercial well knew), this little blog is inspired by braille. It’s also being written using braille, because I’m a braille user: that’s a user of braille, not user made of braille (although the distinction is a subtle one). I’ve been using braille since age 5, and it’s been a year or two since then. I use it to read, write, play the piano, play scrabble, cook, and all manner of things. One of my current projects is to find a way of integrating it into ceramic pieces. All of my posts will be written using refreshable braille, although I’ll muse on other topics too. Web accessibility will probably get a cameo role. Like, for example: Myspace doesn’t allow blind people to join, because we can’t complete the captcha test (where you have to copy distorted letters and numbers from a picture into a text box). Captchas are supposed to tell computers and humans apart. So if you can’t pass the test, you’re a non-human. Hmm. So that’s why I’m like I am. It’s a good thing we aliens can still appreciate single malt whisky. But Myspace isn’t my space (is “cyber-apartheid” in the dictionary yet), so I’ll just stay around here for a while, and maybe phone home when I get low on the Lagavulin.