My dreams during the night, and especially dawntime, were as clear as the air between my smudged window and El Parque de los Enamorados. The last one featured Loyal as not a drum instructor but a meta-drum instructor. What is a meta-drum instructor, you ask? Well! A meta-drum instructor collects information about potential students and, according to that information, assigns a non-meta-drum instructor to said student.
In the dream, I was the potential student.
A group of us were sitting around the bed of a pickup truck. This pickup truck bed served as a conference table and the expansive out-of-doors was the conference room. The would-be non-meta-drum instructor sat to my right, partially occluded from my murderous grasp by another individual - one with no defined face. Loyal was opposite me.
The topic of conversation was drum fills. I was to be assigned (possibly) to the non-meta-drum instructor after Loyal was content that he could teach me the sort of drum fills that I fancied. So Loyal began to ask me which drummers performed fills that I fancied. I pondered and then came up with Christian Vander and Dave Kerman. About the former, Loyal commented that he was a complicated choice, or something along those lines. His thoughts on Kerman are lost to the morning as the dream slowly drifts into oblivion.
Lastly, I named Bill Bruford, that Loyal misunderstood as Tupford or something similar. Of course, such an error makes no sense since Loyal and the poundings of Herr Bruford are, or were during our years together in the so-called sacred 90s, intimately intertwined.
Information was transformed and then transmitted to the non-meta-drum instructor through a type of light pipe. We all know why light pipe came up in the dream, so I don’t have to elaborate. The non-meta-drum instructor nodded.
Thinking about it now, I should have named Daniel Denis. Were I to take lessons on drum fills, he would be the prototype of my lessons. No other plays the way he does.
