I had been out on the trot, and hadn’t noticed—so involved was I with Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber—the manhole cover that wasn’t raised sufficiently to be immediately apparent but was certainly raised sufficiently to catch my foot and hurl me to the pavement, where I skidded for most of the length of three football fields, leaving huge skid marks of epidermis and blood. I ended up by screaming an obscenity, which was completely ignored by the tattooed gentleman ahead of me—who was also listening to music.
It’s undoubtedly Biber who is the villain here—since who else could it be? True, the man has been dead for 310 years, but the point is that his Requiem à 15 in Concerto is a seriously wonderful piece of music—a sublime and rapturous piece of music that you definitely should listen to—especially if you’re in restraints in a padded cell. Otherwise, you could have the experience of Marc’s morning: floating until skidding. Click on the clip below, if you dare…
I had known about Biber for years, since a cello teacher had told me that he (that’s Biber, not the teacher) had been an influential composer for the violin in the last half of the 1600’s. In fact, there’s a famous passacaglia for solo violin that gets hauled out periodically. But it wasn’t until recently that people began to begin listening—often at serious risk to limb and tissue—to Biber.
I had known about Biber for years, since a cello teacher had told me that he (that’s Biber, not the teacher) had been an influential composer for the violin in the last half of the 1600’s. In fact, there’s a famous passacaglia for solo violin that gets hauled out periodically. But it wasn’t until recently that people began to begin listening—often at serious risk to limb and tissue—to Biber.
What I didn’t know about Biber is that, in addition to his many works for violin, he wrote a lot of sacred music, of which the most famous is probably his Missa Salisburgensis from 1682. It’s a knockout too, though to date it’s never inflicted bodily harm on me.
So there I was, on the sidewalk watching the help walk away from me (it does occur to me to wonder how much of the world I’ve missed as I’ve listened to music these many mornings since Wal-Mart), and pondering which was more difficult: picking myself up or dying under a tropical sun.
So I walked into the gas station that was across the street from where I had been felled, to be greeted by the lady who made Mother Teresa look like Ivana Trump or Leona Helmsly, or whoever the Queen of Mean was. Her first words, as you recall, made reference to the lack of a bathroom in the gas station. Unfortunately, she was standing in front of and to the left of an open room, in which there was a sink.
“I wonder if you might be mistaken,” I said, sounding cooler than in fact I felt, “since there appears to be a sink in that room there to the left.”
As clever as she was compassionate, she instantly denied that that was a bathroom.
“Hay una correlación estadística con la presencia de un lavamanos y un baño.”
(“There’s a statistical correlation with the presence of a bathroom and a sink.”)
Wonderfully, the clerk admitted that there was a sink, but there wasn’t a bathroom.
“Muy bien, porque no quiero un baño; lo que quiero es un lavamanos.”
(“Great, because I don’t want a bathroom, what I want is a sink…”)
“Lo siento, pero los baños están cerrados…”
It now, you see, was a bathroom, but it was closed.
I pointed out—with crystalline Aristotelian logic—that any room that had an open door was by definition not closed. She responded—with murky French Deconstructionism—that it was closed in the sense of being unavailable to customers. It now occurred to me that I had been drafted into a George Burns / Gracie Allen skit; ‘this has been quite a morning,’ I thought.
As resourceful as she was clever and compassionate, Gracie had the answer. I could use paper towels—which felt slightly harder than the sidewalk—with hand sanitizer! Oh, and she was good enough to point to where the paper towels were.
It was a good thing, I decided later, on two levels. Because what happened, twenty minutes after applying the hand sanitizer on the open gashes on my chin, nose, and hand? Yup—I felt as if I had drunk two martinis on an empty stomach after flying across the Atlantic. So now I know—if the shock of pain hadn’t been enough to tell me—exactly how much alcohol there is in hand sanitizer. Put bluntly, hand sanitizer is rubbing alcohol in gel form.
“Thank you so much,” I told my heroine, with heartfelt…something. “You’ve been so much more than helpful!’
“You oughta go to the Emergency Room,” she said.
Hunh?
“Or to the bathroom,” I nearly said, but by this point I was floating—chemically if now not musically—home.
And now?
Well, I’ve taken a shower, my hand periodically oozes blood or exudates or something, and my left chest feels as if the entire Green Bay Packers had spent the morning tackling me. My chin hurts, my hand hurts, my whole body hurts. And guess what? Even drinking two cups of coffee and eating two utterly-illicit-but-needed Milky Ways had absolutely no effect: the average nursing home patient is a master instructor of Yoga compared to me….
Oh, and I have a blister on my left finger, which means that I can’t play the cello today, which is a major annoyance, since having gotten back to playing, I now suffer when I don’t play.
Damn, now I know what it is, now I know why I feel so awful!
I’m medical history, Gentle Readers—the first known patient to get a hangover…
…from hand sanitizer!
