I Hear Johnny Fournote for the First Time.

Johnny Fournote sits near the door I attend, plunking on his guitar. We don't allow canned music to be played inside the Day Center because it fills up a space already overflowing with sound.

There's more tolerance for a human voice singing quietly, or a well-played guitar. In fact, we have several available to use. But if the music's too loud, we send them to the patio or vestibule.

Folks have different tastes, of course, and imposing your music on someone is the same as putting unwanted voices in their heads. Especially here.

Johnny isn't playing a song or even a riff. He's practicing a simple pattern, over and over. [For the musicians reading, it's two pairs of fifths. DDddDDddAD/CCccCCccGC/DDdd... Over and over and over...] 

He played the same thing last time I saw him.

It bugged me then and it's starting to bug me now—in part, because it's so monotonous, and in part, because his picking doesn't swing or express feeling. It's just rote tapping: DDddDDdd...

But nobody else seems bothered, and Johnny is a big guy with a bit of temper, so why provoke him by asking him to go outside when he's calm? Why is the musician in me more important than the demons in him?

And with that question come memories of sitting alone in a basement, playing chord progressions over and over, letting the strings ring out, as if I were swimming stroke after stroke through a circle of sound, hoping to summon an emotion or quiet the one ripping through me so it can be distilled into a song but right now it just comes out as hums and grunts and nonsense scat chasing a melody through the thicket of the chords until I scare loose a line and maybe that flushes out another and still I am thrashing, no idea where I'm going except away from the fugal blackness that brought me here, and now I turn on the recorder in case anything good happens, in case some decent lyrics appear out of nowhere—that way I won't have to stop to write them down and risk breaking the spell—but even if it turns into nothing except good vibrations, I'll be further away from the dark. 

Johnny's playing hasn't changed. It hasn't improved. But my listening has. He's off on a mind-body journey that has nothing to do with me or anyone else within earshot. 

No, nothing to do with me at all.