I'm not a fan of Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, but this morning I was thinking that if I had to do the soundtrack for Light by M. John Harrison (and let us hope that they do not make it into a movie, because they would probably remove the brother, sister, and Tom Bombadil; make Ender's daemon a polar bear, and replace any subversive elements with a 25-minute tap-dancing rendition of Hamlet, without even bothering to cast Christopher Walken or Christian Bale; I mean, seriously ), I would include 2 Nocturnes No. 8 in D-flat major, Op. 27: II. There are people in this world who believe that mediocrity is a sin, and that it is incumbent upon them to push and prod others into realizing their full potential, that potency above all else which will transform one from an unremarkable nobody into someone quite remarkable, for no higher purpose than the remarkability itself. There are other people who believe that these people are overbearing authoritarian morons guilty of child abuse and worse, that being normal and average is fine and dandy, and that whiling one's days away without ever accomplishing anything is perfectly acceptable, since it won't make a lick of difference when one is rotting in the ground. Then there are people who are themselves motivated to do things like spend 16 hours a day playing Wii Boxing, becoming the best in the world, and achieving remarkability for nothing more than an ego boost, only to be attacked by the first two groups of people for having priorities completely out of wack. A long time ago, a bunch of possibly crazy people sang Free to Be You and Me in my general direction, while cavorting and being otherwise scarily insane all around me. They did not explicitly instruct me to be myself , and if they had, I was far too young to know to distrust them. Somewhere by a weeping willow near Charles's special homo friend who was mistaken for Charlie Chaplin in the redneck bar, a bent-out-of-shape mechanical arm smolders in a chemical fire, and the guy with the red leather topcoat doesn't care one whit.

I had a friend who had a friend who was at a party with Christopher Walken, he said, and he got creeped out when Walken apparently told him that the best part about being Christopher Walken is you get to bang Natalie Wood in the ass . And then throw her over the side of a boat! she said.