soon to be featured in "Chicken Soup for the Miracle-Seeking Entomologist":

Today, maybe for the first time in a seventeen-year lifetime of living in North Carolina, I saw

a praying mantis,

latched onto my mailbox post. I was milliseconds away from snatching the mantis up into my palm and snapping a photo with my cell phone. I probably, within the next hour, would have uploaded the picture onto my computer, printed it out, made 1000 or so color xeroxes of said photo at the nearest Kinko's, and distributed them free of charge in the parking lot of the Knightdale Wal-Mart...

...When suddenly --divine intervention-- from a loudspeaker concealed in a cumulus cloud somewhere afar off in the sky, there came the simultaneous sounds of a religious, somber chanting of Buddhist monks, chanting somber, religious things like "Praise the Mantis, from whom all blessings flow," and "Holy, Holy, Holy, O Green Mantis that has deigned to appear in mid-autumn," albeit in some foreign Buddhist tongue like Mongolian or Himalayan, I wasn't quite sure ... in discordant conjuction with the sunshine-and-bunnyrabbitness of Beethoven's "Spring" sonata for violin and piano. In a strange, connect-the-dots-for-adults kind of way it was rather fitting that the materialization of a loudspeaker in the heavens playing recorded tracks of the above should coincide with seeing a praying mantis for the first time. Makes perfect sense.

I consequently dropped to my knees. There were several dramatic flashes of lightning accompanied by several thunderous booms of thunder. A few solid shafts of sunlight perfunctorily pierced through the clouds, illuminating the mantis like something from a painting of the holy Virgin and Child.

Now this may seem trivial, inconsequential in the scheme of things, when compared with sentimental, soul-stirring stories such as angels rescuing babies from burning buildings, the tears of the crucified Jesus healing grandma's cerebral mutation, or how Sarah Palin took charge in a time of extreme distress and got rid of that damn Bridge to Nowhere. But hey. I don't complain when a miracle comes my way.

a tragic tale of love lost

best night ever

Yes, Jeremy navigated his Porsche on his own through ghettos and slums and tornadoes from Oz to make it to this concert, with only his unfathomable wits and unmatchable gaydar to guide him.

(Alessandro and Ferrero Rocher had the night off.)

He parked half a mile away, only to be told by the big black woman in a police uniform that he better not think his ass was parking here, 'cause this was the handicapped parking.

While at above concert, I became engaged in conversation with a woman sitting next to me. She said she studied medicine, and that I shouldn't drive all the way to Chapel Hill without visiting LocoPops. She was right.

note to self:

Drink caffe verona every night before bed. Induces hallucinations within limit of the law.

I had a lovely dream last night. I was holding a piano score to Kapustin's 2nd Piano Sonata in my hands, and marvelling.

I carressed the spine and binding with my index finger, and sighed in ecstasy and wonderment. It wasn't increasingly falling to shreds by the second due to cheap-ass glue and stitching.

I opened the score. I drew each inked note into my vision...

Each error-free, all-accidentals-rhythms-ties-etc.-correctly-notated-because-folks-were-actually-paying-attention-while-transcribing, note.

Then I closed my eyes, and tilted my head back, and smiled, a smile that said,

This is heaven.

(If you didn't know me all that well, you might have misinterpreted this smile as an "I got laid tonight, and you didn't" smile. Yes. It was that full of superior satisfaction.)

But it was someone famous or maybe it was my mother the day she bore me that said "All good things must come to an end." That means dreams, Jeremy, even ones in which your subconscious has built a utopian fantasyland where music publishers actually live for the sole purpose of making life easier for young piano prodigies such as yourself -- in short, they have common sense -- and where all the raindrops are lemondrops and gumdrops.

And world peace.

But alas, it wasn't meant to be, because then Lucifer came and dragged me kicking and screaming to Hell, where there was a hardwood-floored concert hall, and he put me inside and locked the door, and I was made to listen to Mozart violin concerti for all eternity...

Oh wait.

That actually happened. That wasn't a dream at all. Though it was only for two hours, a full recital of ALL the Mozart violin concerti is not a smart idea. It starts to creep into people's dreams and give them nightmares where they have their own private concert hall in Hell.

(Also on this concert, Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole, played with the consistency of the organic soy vanilla yogurt in my fridge.)

(Also, too, on this concert, a wholeheartedly dispassionate "Praeludium and Allegro" by Kreisler. Seriously, yo? Dispassionate Kreisler is like dispassionate sex. Not fun for either of us. Just don't do it.)

Note to young and upcoming violin superstarz: please for the love of God quit playing "Praeludium and Allegro" like you smashed your violin under your pickup truck just prior to the concert, ok thanks.

the day all my dreams came true!

The day CASCADA (yes, of the ludicrously-heavily-eyelinered, -"Every Time We Touch" variety) recorded "What Hurts the Most", formerly by sappy country music band Rascal Flatts.

You can sob over lost love and have a rave at the same time.

vote no to disorderly conduct

This morning, I found myself pressing my black RAZR to my ear in what can only be described as disbelief.

I could also describe it as fervently desiring my grip to be strong enough to crush my slim phone into six or seven chunks, but that would be redundant. Opposite me on the telephone line a prim female's voice told me that I was $200 overdrawn on my checking account, as sweetly as if she had just said "One lump or two, Mrs Merriweather?" at an octogenarians' Thursday tea. It was like having the dentist tell you that you unfortunately had somewhere in the vicinity of nine cavities, and hurt almost as much.

I was incredulous. Because like his teeth, Jeremy takes quite good care of his money.

The problem wasn't really that I was two hundred bucks in the red. That I could deal with.

What, you might ask, was the problem, then, that would drive a relatively sane pianist to wish to plunge his head into the nearest brick wall? The problem, children, was in the miscommunications between my dear bank and myself. I don't like when things don't match up. For example:

Think back to earlier that morning. I'm getting out of bed, preparing for the day, dealing with the hair-and-makeup crew, putting on my Armani tie and cuff links, making several expensive phone calls to high-end personages that make very high-end decisions, all that jazz. And in my haste, amidst the whirring and clicking gears and cogwheels in my brain that are processing the morning's doings, one thought bubble rises in precedence over the others. I remember, I'm running low on funds in my checking account. The logical question that follows is, how low? I put this thought into action, hurriedly tell Alessandro to stop with the hairspray for a moment, while I call the bank. The same prim voice that will later be the herald of the apocalypse sweetly tells me I have $100 remaining in my account. Alright. Good; not bad. Jeremy can withstand the temptations of dining on that $150 tuna steak tonight.

And so the day goes, me not spending any money with my debit card, not wrecking any Porsches, not making any progress with Herr Bach, and certainly not having tea with the Queen. (...of England, that is. I did have tea with the Queen of Hearts just now, actually.) All in all, a perfunctorily sunshiny day.

Until Catastrophe occurs, see example A, above, paragraph 1. If anyone knows how I mysteriously lost $300, don't hesitate to let me know. If you've stolen my identity, I'd like it back now. If there are any private investigators reading this that wish to perform a complementary investigation, that works too. Call my public relations secretary, Beatrice.

The moral of the story is things in life don't always exactly match up. Expect disorderly conduct from mere mortals, e.g. Prim-Female-in-the-a.m.'s story not quite matching up with Prim-Female-in-the-p.m.'s story. That's always bound to make someone upset.

But in music, hey, when things don't match up, it doesn't matter. Disorderly conduct is in fact encouraged, usually ending up being something wonderful. You can have 2 against 3, 3 against 4, 4 against 5, 3 against 5, all manner of things. When I'm in the car and my turn signal is clicking metronomically, and the windshield wipers are going at different rhythms with the turn signal, and the car in front of me has his turn signal and windshield wipers on, all at odds with mine, and the stoplight is flashing red in syncopation, and I have the radio on as well, and the rain is beating a steady hiss on the metal of my car... it's all fine. Because it's music. Which is how life should be.

jeremy finds classical music in the most unlikely of places

As I sit in the library, huddled over 'internet station 26', I listen. And watch. It's 6:45pm. The after-school crowd still lingers, and bring with them the recitations of multiplication tables, and the periodic table of the elements, and Shakespeare -- tutors with beaded i.d. tags swinging across their chests huddled over student 26 of the day, or Alex A. that comes in my 6:30 slot, or the last child of the day until I can go home -- the talkative boy with the two-sizes-too-large t-shirt from GCF suddenly becoming a closed book when asked if this is the second time he's repeated fourth grade, or a face creased in frustration over a desk, the dark-skinned bunch of teenagers congregating in the rearmost corner, shooting cusses at the policeman by the front counter with their quick looks --

And I run my fingers through my hair, and smile, mostly because it's Thursday. And 6:57 in the afternoon. And I've had an iced vanilla latte within the last hour.

And I have cause to be the happiest man alive. It sounds -- it is -- cliched. But hey. A cliche only became a cliche because there was so much truth in it, everyone wanted to use it.

Some of us call this day of the week the Friday of the Tuesday-Thursday classes. (Tuesday is the Monday of the Tuesday-Thursday classes. Simple really.) At precisely 6:00:00 pm, every Thursday, everything stops, and exhales its seven-days-been-pent-up blackness. The deadlines are over; all frantically scrawled/typed essays, lab reports, lists of life goals and aspirations, pre-cal sinusoids, suicide notes, and literary criticisms are turned in, and as far as I'm concerned, they're all as good as dead. Because just as with the dead, I've put them as far from my mind as possible.

The world almost, quite imperceptibly, stops turning for a nanosecond, and if you blink -- or fall asleep, or jet across the Atlantic to a cabaret in London -- well, you'll probably miss it. But you won't miss the immediate immense silence; the pre-dusk gold settling into the air; the expulsion of toxins and hazmat from your thoughts. Right, all those little black things labeled with a skull and crossbones having had a week to breed, they're extinguished.

Because it's 6:00:01.

*

And since I've now had verging-on-an-hour of toxin-free living (me and Amy, we're accountability partners, see) in which I could put the week in perspective, I know what it is that needs writing.

*



On Monday (but it was really Tuesday) I went and had to do the thing I don't like to do and never like to talk about, except to my psychiatrist when discussing nightmares / and or fantasies. (My psychiatrist is a purple-striped cat, by the way, that smokes Dutch Masters cigars and visits the psychiatrist, himself, when someone mentions the name 'Alice'.) Even more than visiting the dentist, I dread taking my car into the shop; we all have our little childhood-trauma-inflicted complexes, as you know. And Monday (Tuesday) I had to take my car into the shop.

It's the whole experience from start to finish that I hate. The macho-macho men that thrive at an auto shop. Me walking in with my wool and leather bag from Gap with a novel and orange Trident gum in it, and not knowing quite exactly what to say when asked the make and model of my car... But it was fine; all was fine.

Everything's fine when discussing Tchaikovskian ballet.

It started when the man that had been sitting next to me for the last hour in the detention cell waiting room set down his books and papers and said 'Excuse me, um. Hi. What's your name?'

I had already looked over at not-really-him-but-his-books a few times. They were mostly diagrams of human muscles. Deltoids, and trapeziuses, things of that friendly nature. 'Jeremy,' I replied.


'Could you do me a favor and hold out your left hand, Jeremy, palm up?' he asked.

I figured if he was a demented connoiseur of sorts that collected teenage boys' pared limbs and digits, now would be the best time to excuse myself to the restroom. But my curiosity for humanity in general got the best of me. And so I obliged.


Within the next hour, I found out he was 38 years old, had been in the navy for a long while, stationed in Sigonella, Sicily, the same place my brother had been stationed for four years while in the navy, and that he had now dropped everything to become a full-time student at NCSU, studying physical therapy. One day he hoped to open his own practice.


I told him I was in high school, and hoped to study piano in college soon.

At this, his eyes lit up and he smiled a large, genuine smile. He asked what it was I listened to. The birds. I try to understand what they're saying. People. I try to understand what they're saying, too.

Oh wait. Music. As far as classical compsers? I asked. Contemporary artists? 'Anything,' he said. 'I don't know alot about it, but I can learn.'


I liked that. It was unabashed friendliness.


Just hearing the phrase 'classical music' is such a turn-off for conversation for most -- how do I say it -- normal people. At least Americans. It's old people's music, or music one listens to when one's supply of sleeping pills is running short and one particularly doesn't feel like counting sheep, or music for the high and mighty: the cultured folk.


Classical music can be all of those things, but certainly not in a negative way. And it is so much more than that.


So I threw some names out: Bach, of course, and Mozart and Beethoven, the 'greats', so to speak, but I was quick to add that neither Mozart nor Beethoven were really things I took to immediately.

Then he mentioned Tchasikovsky, and that he had some Tchaikovsky ballet music. What I'd taken before as a friendliness-interest I now realized had been an actual, knowledgeable interest. 'Tchaikovsky, to me,' he said 'is...' and he faltered. His fingers did a little groping around in the air for a while as he looked for a word. He couldn't find one, and for a good twenty seconds was left occasionally saying 'um', or 'What I'm trying to say is...'

I smiled.

'It's wonderful.'

Seeing a person, someone uneducated in music, trying to describe Tchaikovsky, and not being able to come up with anything in words ... It was very telling. Classical musicians can analyze chord progressions and crank out essays and biographies and criticisms and magazines and newspaper articles about what does or doesn't make music great. But in the end, I think we're all reduced to wriggling our fingers around in the air, sketching out vague pictures, uttering monosyllabic words. Because the embodiment of Tchaikovsky, or good music in general, can't be found on paper, or, in my opinion, even in deep conversation.

'Exactly,' I replied.

*

As it was announced that my car's oil had indeed been changed, and I got up to leave, the man sitting next to me hurriedly grabbed a business card off the front desk of the auto shop's waiting room, and scrawled an email address on it, almost embarrassedly.

'Send me the names of some more composers like Tchaikovsky,' he said, slipping the business card in between the pages of the novel I was reading.

'Alright,' I said, smiling. 'I'll do that.'

A Brief Overture: in which none of the main themes are really present

Hello. You've somehow arrived at the blog of Jeremy Harris. He isn't in right now, and is quite likely never to be in, in most senses of the word. Most likely, given all possibilities combined with freak spontaneity combined with chance, he's off engaging in a ménage a trois solving crime in the Bermuda Triangle, unaware that the significant decrease in atmospheric pressure is permitting his body to dissipate,
one
molecule
at a time.

So yes. We're piping direct from the East Regional Library, Knightdale--what? Never been there? Never heard of it, you say?

Can't even partially explain why most people can't locate it on a map of the United States?

Don't beat yourself up about it. I wouldn't expect as much, unless you're Ken Jennings. Or Miss South Carolina. Then I demand an explanation, while I smile and nod and say a polite "thank you for that endearing response".