San Anselmo, California, June 6, 2003:Adrienne will be dropping by the Department of Motor Vehicles, to renew her license, to take her pretty picture and provide a thumbprint.

She has an appointment for next week, but she cannot go to her appointment, due to the convenient DMV voicemail-appointment system.

It sounded like a good idea.

She’s a dogwalker, and sometimes brings playpals to visit our border collie, Tulip. Tulip’s best friend, a loud and brassy retriever, was visiting at lunchtime, and Adrienne thought this afforded time enough for eternal voicemail, so she called the DMV.

After selecting English and hearing important information about how they will monitor the conversation — what conversation? — she heard about their hours, and how to get to the place, which she passes daily when she’s working.

Then came another series of options: “Please press 1 to make an appointment … You have pressed 1 to make an appointment; is this correct? Please press 1 if correct, or press 2 if not correct, or press 3 to hear these choices again.”

Tulip and pal are standing beside her. Half their attention is on her — let’s play ball! — and half they’re scouting for intruder dogs on the sidewalk. Adrienne ignores them, frowning in concentration. The voicemail has reached an important point.

She has been offered one date or another date. She has selected one date. She has confirmed one date. She is receiving an Important Message: “Please have a pencil handy to write down your Appointment Code. You must bring the Appointment Code to your Appointment. Your Appointment Code is-“

A corgi and a ratty-looking terrier skitter down the sidewalk, dragging a young boy on a leash. “Yap! Yap! Yap! Yap! Yap!” exclaims Tulip’s friend. “Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!” exclaims Tulip. The dogs scrabble at the window. The DMV voicemail, completely inaudible, drones on.

“-C45”, it says, “Remember, you must bring your Appointment Code to your Appointment. Thank you for calling the Department of Motor Vehicles. For information about our hours and locations, please press 1.”

So Adrienne cannot go to her appointment. She does not have her important Appointment Code. She’ll just have to drop by.

Sometimes that’s just how it goes.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

There is no limit to anything in the Physical Universe except for one thing: Your time.

That’s it.

What is the limit of what a human can accomplish? The only limit is what the human can consider as possible. That is, if you can perceive the possibility, then the possibility exists. Simply put, this means that the only limit imposed upon you absolutely would be the limits of the Physical Universe.

Is there a limited amount of money in the Physical Universe? Not really. For all practical purposes, the possible amount is unlimited. Likewise there is no limit to the amount of land, water, sportscars, wine, women, songs, books you could write, or houses you could build.

Is there anything that absolutely limits you? You bet. There is only so much time in your life. Not one second more. And the funny part is: you never know in advance exactly how much there is. Isn’t that a riot?

The strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link. The richness of a lifetime is determined by its most limited resource. That resource is the time alloted you. Add it up, and wisdom suggests: Make every moment matter.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.

Lyon Street, San Francisco, 1987:

I loved the synthesizer, and found it easy to read the manuals, to fiddle with the sounds.

Playing the keyboard was something else.

I took two lessons, to learn how to move my hands on the fretboard. I began learning to read, but it was slow.

Then I happily discovered that composition is easy.

First, chords. Staying in the key of C, you just play all the white keys. If you play four notes, skipping every other white key, you get some kind of a seventh chord. If your lowest note is on the C or F note then you’ll get a major chord, which sounds very rich. If your lowest note is on the D, E, or A note you’ll get a minor chord which sounds haunted. If your lowest note is on the G or B note, you get a real sour chord.

So, for starters, you just plunk around with these seven chords, and find a series of them that sounds good. This is pretty simple. The next step is even easier.

Fire up the drum machine. Set its speed and the rhythm pattern.

Play these chords on top of the rhythm. Find the way that sounds good. Now just play it over and over again.

While you’re playing imagine that some melody is already there, and just listen for it. It is already there. If you listen, you’ll hear it. Maybe bit by bit, or maybe all at once, but you will hear it.

Sing or hum this melody. Go around a few times. Now start working out how to play that melody with your right hand. I wasn’t a good enough player to do that at the same time as playing the left-hand chords, so I’d just record the left-hand chords and let the machine play them.

After you’ve worked out how to play the melody, you can write it down. This was very slow for me, but note by note, it can be done. Now with the chord symbols and the melody written down, you have a written piece of music.

Learn to play it with both hands.

Nothing to it.

Want to hear one? Go to the musician’s gallery at my Traktor website and click on my stage name Traktor Topaz, then scroll down to find the blue shockwave music player. Select a song — I recommend Maggie’s Song and Fly Like Summer Love — then press the triangular ‘Play’ button.

Composition is easy.

Lyon Street, San Francisco, 1990: I’d been playing keyboards, and I found the strange instrument in the keyboard magazines. It looked like a black board about four feet long, with lots of strings. It was kind of like a guitar, but more strings.

You played it by tapping the strings to the frets with both hands. Though it was expensive, I was intrigued. I called up the company and asked if they had any used ones. No, they didn’t. I scouted music stores. I found one, and bought it, then set to learning to play.

I was lousy.

On a week’s vacation, I practiced. After a week, I could play the song “Just in Time”, and felt very proud. A year later, I had some time off. I’d just sold my business, and had my first vacation in many years. For several months, I practiced daily, and then I was ready to play in public.

I was terrified, so to get over it, I’d drive to San Francisco where I’d put out a hat and play in Ghirardelli Square with a portable amp. I wasn’t very good, but some people liked the music. I made gas money, and got over being scared.

Ready for the big time, I learned 30+ songs, and arranged them in a binder. I bought a tuxedo, and had studio pictures taken, then made up a kind of program, with a story (somewhat dramatized) about my musical past, and a big list of songs in the middle. It was like opening a menu at a restaurant, but it was a menu of songs.

With a little tape of my songs, I talked several restaurants into letting me play on certain nights, for tips and a meal. Since I didn’t know many songs, I’d play a bit, then walk around and hand my menu to folks. They’d choose tunes, I would go back and play them, then they would put tips in my tip jar. This way they never requested other songs, because I didn’t know any others!

It was a lot of work, hauling the amp and setting up. From these jobs I got a few paying jobs: a corporate meeting on the Embarcadero, a wedding in Tiburon. But I never got even close to making a living.

As my money drew near its end, I had to choose: get a job, or start another voicemail company. I had a voicemail machine. I started another voicemail company. It quickly grew to provide a living, but the time spent playing in public dwindled and dwindled, until I stopped doing it.

Yes, the career of a musician is an exciting thing. Yup.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

If your offer sounds good, the human will wonder what’s wrong with it?

That’s it.

It’s human nature to worry if an offer sounds good. Since you know they’re going to do that, make up a “downside”, and make this downside clear in your offer. Anyone reading your offer will find this vastly reassuring.

For example, if you rent cars for less than the best-known brand, you might say something like, “We’re only number two, so we try harder.” In this successful ad from the 50’s, Avis pointed out that they were not number one. It was a drawback, freely offered, a part of the headline. Readers of magazines stopped, and thought, and decided that they didn’t care about Avis’s drawback, being second. Readers concluded that the downside didn’t matter, and then went out and, greatly reassured that they knew the reason for the lower price, rented Avis’s cars by the thousands.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.

Henrietta, Texas, 1949: Because my mother worked as a nurse for my Uncle Doc, I spent the day at Mrs. Miller’s house, along with her boys Rex and Mike.

As I recall, that day we’d had

a lunch of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, or it might have been balony sandwiches, and we’d looked at an old copy of Life magazine, which contained pictures from a movie called King Kong. It was about a really big gorilla, and we boys were pretty impressed.

We’d run around all day and were quiet now, at perhaps 2 in the afternoon, when we heard the neighbor lady call out.

Mrs. Miller seemed alarmed, and we followed her outside. We stood in amazement beside the fence, looking up. There was a jet-trail streaking across the sky, high, high in the clear blue.

As it happened, the iceman was just passing by, perhaps the last person in our town who used a horse to draw his wagon. The wagon was essentially a large box on tall wheels, unpainted wood, with the single, faded word ‘ICE’ on the side.

The wagon was stopped in the street, the horse resting with drooping head, in grazing position with nothing to graze on the pavement. The iceman gawked at the sky. The contrail turned into a new direction. We gasped.

Up and down the street, people were standing and staring. The iceman and the neighbor lady were talking. She thought it might be a UFO. We didn’t know what that meant, but it was something never seen before. What was it?

The iceman was excited. “Call Sheppard Air Force Base!” he cried out. The airbase was in Wichita Falls, 20 miles to the north. The neighborhood lady paused.

“That’s long distance,” she said. Calling long-distance just wasn’t done. It was very, very expensive. She dithered, finally going into her house to call the Sherrif.

High above, in the pale blue and beyond the slight haze of summer, the contrail soared, far above sight. What was it?

Nobody knew. We didn’t realize that we were gazing not into the sky, but into the future.

Midwestern University, Wichita Falls, Texas 1963: My big plan was to become an engineer, because I thought a slide-rule would look good with my glasses. And so I was in the math class.

The professor was a large, languid fellow with an embarrassing habit of scratching himself absentmindedly, spreading chalk dust on his pants.

On this particular day, he was chalking a proof on the blackboard. “Let’s assume such-and-such,” he said, and then described five or six steps, “and then as you can see, the result is so-and-do.”

Except that something was wrong.

I’m no whiz at math, and had to struggle and focus. But it just didn’t look right. Something was wrong. The proof and the class ended at the same time, but I remained sitting, going over it.

To my left, Bill the ex-marine with crisp black hair still in a crew cut. To my right, Dennis with wavy long blonde hair. They were staring and pondering, too. All the other students had left the room. The professor looked at the three of us.

“A question?” he asked us.

“There’s just something …” began Bill.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

“It’s this,” said Dennis. “If your original assumption is correct, then the proof is correct. But if not, then the conclusion is wrong. The proof is circular.”

The professor smiled a slow, warm smile. “Well, now,” he said. “That’s exactly correct. The real proof requires calculus, which I can’t use here. But without giving a proof, students just don’t understand it. So we use this one.”

Haw haw haw haw haw!

Over coffee, I met the boys. They were older. Bill had just finished his Marine stint; Dennis an army tour. Both had been in Japan. “Ohio,” they said when meeting; I think it means hello. “Gomenizai,” they would say, “I’m very sorry.” Haw haw haw haw haw!

Next semester we shared a drafting class. At that time, there was an adventure with a girl, she missed a period, and I was all uptight. They just laughed. “A woman is not a close-tolerance machine,” said Dennis.

Huh? I had no clue what he meant.

“He means,” Bill said, “that most likely you got nothing to worry about. Just relax.” They thought my expression funny. Haw haw haw haw haw!

I neither relaxed nor thought it funny, but they were right, as it turned out. After drafting class was lunch. Over burgers, Bill was talking about El Toro Marine Base, and about sky-diving. Really?

By the following week, Bill had found a place where we could go sky-diving. It cost $50. Dennis said he was in. I did, too. Bill handed me a piece of paper: a release. “Since you’re eighteen,” Bill said, “you need to get your parents to OK this.” I said OK.

In the evening, I handed the paper to my mother and stepfather. My mother didn’t know quite what it was, and my stepfather seemed uncertain. I explained that it was perfectly safe, and that you just jumped out of an airplane. It was really fun, like flying, and you had a parachute.

They looked at the paper. They looked at each other. They looked back at me.

Haw haw haw haw haw!

Henrietta, Texas, 1948: Mrs. Miller started a dayschool, and off I went. The first day, my mother walked the four blocks with me, to show me how to get there and back. We lived behind Uncle Doc’s medical office, and she worked there as a nurse.

During that first season, I learned about coloring books, and naps and cookies, and how you don’t run while playing a trumpet because falling down can hurt you. I was warned not to eat the castor beans growing beside the house.

In just a few months, Mrs. Miller seems to have learned her dayschool lesson. The dayschool was closed. No more herd of children in her home and backyard.

But my mother made some special arrangement, and though the mob of children had gone, still every day I walked to Mrs. Miller’s, and played with her sons Rex and Mike, until their father came home from work. He’d swing them up and down. He didn’t swing me up and down, which seemed a great disappointment. Then I went home.

That summer, the vacant lot beside their house had grown weeds as high as us boys. A man on a tractor came and mowed the weeds, and a vast torrent of grasshoppers came flying from the devastation.

Quickly we grabbed jars, and captured hundreds of them.

There was then the question of what to do with them, but Rex, the older one, knew just what to do. And so we went around the neighborhood to houses where nobody was home. Doors were generally left unlocked, so it was simple to open the door, shake out a jar full of grasshoppers, and then leave.

I suppose our belief was that, this way, everybody could share our joy.

Sure, that’s what we thought.

Us rascals.