Offramp (a pat on the figurehead)

            You know your formerly limitless world has grown small when you have plenty of time to not only labor through a run-on series of digressions — overread into a ten inch statuette holding its ears as if to either keep something in or out — but, also a moment to contemplate the phrase “grown small.” It’s literally no wonder I can’t keep it together at an hourly job — I’m simply too busy, meditatively collecting/interrogating my thoughts.

When I initially bought this bust — bargained-down a decade ago from a highway-side thrift shack — it (the piece, anyway) was undamaged. The cracks & missing chips occurred a few years later when it was quaked off the stereo speaker ledge it still occupies, ever resembling a musically critical religious martyr, while I was cranking Pat Metheny.  

            I discovered Pat (that’s what I call him, like a slightly older second-marriage step-brother who lives outta town &'ve never met, yet a figure held close with a runaway fantasized-nostalgia fixation) in 1982 with the Pat Metheny Group album Offramp. The recording came out when I was about to turn eighteen & cashiered at Wherehouse Records in Yuba City, Calif. All of Pat’s works, leading up to & including this particular one, point me to & drop me back off at this singular place in my youth where I reflect from whenever I play this recording, like I am now as I write.