Spinoza never said that, although it sounds a little like him. Descartes could have said it, but he would have taken three chapters to do so. It’s a maxim that seems to make sense, but when you examine it, you find it to be a bit too obvious for anyone to claim authorship. Sort of like saying: A fast car is fun to drive. Uhhh, no kidding?

Something happened to me when I was a young man that was so spectacular I thought it could never be repeated, let alone surpassed.

I was playing the piano and singing in a little club down on Spring Street in Atlanta about ten years ago, mostly original songs, but a few covers mixed in to keep the crowd from completely evaporating. One of the songs I pirated was an old Bruce Springsteen anthem called Racin’ in the Streets, a slow, introspective ballad despite its supercharged title. After I finished the song I took a break and the lights and noise level came up. As I stood from the bench a slightly-built balding man walked up to me. He looked familiar, but only vaguely.

“You did a good job on that song, Do you cover much of Bruce’s work?”

Pleased to know that someone had heard me over the hundred conversations going on in the club, I smiled.

“I’m surprised you recognized it.”

“Oh, I know the song well,” the man said. He offered me a cigarette, like he was in no big hurry; I declined.

“What’s your name again?” the man asked after he had lit his Marlboro and blown a stream of blue smoke up toward the worthless 10-RPM industrial fans in the high ceiling.

That kind of ticked me off. I may not be famous, I thought, but the least you could do is learn my name before you come up here to harass me. But, alas, he was a paying customer.

“Matt Alley,” I said, extending my hand.

“Roy Bittain,” he replied.

After I got up off the floor, I immediately began replaying in my mind every note of every song I had played that evening, chiding myself for every flubbed passage. Roy Bittain was – and still is – a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band, the piano player, to be exact. And what was it he had said? You did a good job on that song. A good job! Life would be a massive anticlimax after that evening. A series of continually frustrated attempts to recapture the glory that had been mine that night, in a two-bit dive in the rundown section of Midtown. Surely, no higher praise could a man garner that this.

Or so I thought.

Yesterday, I found out otherwise.

I had driven from Publix to my daughter’s school, twenty-seven cupcakes perched on the passenger seat of my red Miata. An unexpected hard braking maneuver had already upset the top box and four of the chocolate covered treats lay upside down on my carpet, their brown icing smearing and melting down into the fibers.

As I pulled up to the school, I noticed that while the lot was full of the cars of law-abiding citizens, respecters of government property, someone had parked illegally in the turnaround directly in front of the building: a Laguna Blue “C” package with