I have been paid to sit on a bucket while shining a flashlight at a piece of glass. I have been paid to hand-deliver a cylindrical green lampshade to an empty building in Manhattan. I have been paid to clean chalkboard erasers, fetch high-quality printer paper for a pregnant woman, and track the movements of a 3 foot tall puppet with a spotlight. As intensely satisfying as all of these tasks were, the greatest honor I have even been bestowed was the privilege to serve as a costumed character performer at Walt Disney World.
When I wasn't bouncing on one foot, trying to avoid the screaming 5-year-olds barreling towards me from all sides, or handing out my phone number to female co-workers, I spent a lot of my free time playing chess. I had known how to play chess for as I long as I could remember, but I had never taken it seriously before working at WDW. One day I noticed a chess program on my computer, played a few games, and was instantly hooked. I did everything I could to improve my game: practice problems, tutorial videos, articles, games against the computer, games against my roommates, day after day after day. None of this seemed particularly unusual to me -- by this point in my life, I was already well aware of my obsessive need to master random nerdy skills.
A few months into my employment, I was cast as a Toy Soldier in the Christmas parade. There was often a lot of downtime between shows, so, naturally, I would bring my Walmart chess set to the break room and challenge my fellow parade performers. There was only one person who could consistently match my abilities, a man by the name of Jimez. When I first met him, I could barely understand a word he said due to his thick New Orleans accent. So we didn't talk much at first. Just chess.
One day, Jimez decided to open up to me about his life, and there was a lot to tell. This guy had been through literally every horrible thing that can possibly happen to a person, despite the fact that he was only 23 years old when I met him. He was born into a gang of satanists, he had been shot, stabbed, knocked unconscious, and at one point he was addicted to heroin pills, something I had never even heard of. As an added bonus, he was in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. Somewhere along the line, despite (or perhaps because of) all of these vicious events in his life, Jimez found faith in God and renounced all of his old ways. He didn't drink or do drugs anymore, and the last vice that he was trying to kick was cigarettes.
After he told me all of this, Jimez looked me straight in the eye and said "The only thing that keeps my mind off of the cigarettes is playing chess with you." This was the first time that I felt an overpowering sense of purpose in my life.
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There is a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the Cantab Lounge. Every Monday they host an open mic night. The host, Geoff Bartley, is an extremely talented acoustic guitarist who would play very difficult folk songs and make them look effortless. All of the other guitar-toting weirdos who showed up were the exact opposite: clueless morons who would choose easy folk songs and make them look very difficult.
It was clear to me from the very instant I set foot in that bar that I was not going to fit in. Everyone else had acoustic guitars and seemed happy to play folk songs. I brought my hollowbody electric, fully intent on showing off my highly technical repertoire of original music. I also wanted to get some experience performing solo in front of a crowd, something I had only done once before. After a humdrum first performance, I came back to the Cantab nearly every Monday for several months. For whatever reason, the open mic night would fluctuate wildly between the-only-person-listening-is-an-83-year-old-drunk-guy and so-crowded-that-the-only-available-time-slot-is-never-so-come-back-next-week. Frustrating? Yes.
On the very last Monday before moving back home to Connecticut, I showed up early and signed up for a good spot. As I was waiting to go on, a female human went to the stage with an electric guitar. My first thought was obviously "Holy shit, I may just have to marry this woman." Sadly, she was absolutely terrible. She stitched together seemingly arbitrary notes that vaguely resembled melodies. She couldn't remember her own lyrics, and when she did sing, it sounded like a drunk apatosaurus scraping its head against the ground. It was embarrassing to watch, and by this point in the evening, there were quite a few people watching. Nevertheless, she finished out her set, thanked the audience for their benevolent support, and quietly took her seat.
Before I began my set, I felt compelled to dedicate my performance to her. "This one goes out to Dana, because she had the courage to come up here and show us what she's got, and that takes some serious fucking balls." I launched into I'll Do it by Myself, followed by Multifaceted. It was, without any doubt, the best set I had performed there. I even got a round of applause for a guitar solo, something I had never seen happen at the Cantab.
After I was done, Dana came up to me, looked me straight in the eye and said, "I'm a better person for having seen you play." This was the second time that I felt an overpowering sense of purpose in my life.
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As warm and wonderful as both of these memories are, I had never made any connection between the two until yesterday afternoon. Some might think of them as the workings of fate or some higher power. Some might think of them as two series of interesting but insignificant coincidences. I think of them as a reminder that, besides helping me to grow as a musician and as a person, my 1000-hour quest may just have the power to inspire others. Excellence, after all, is contagious.
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