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I’ve spent the better part of the past half hour being fascinated by this 11 second video.

The clip is of a tall thin man storming through a crowd of people supposedly in a 70’s folk festival. He’s alone, wearing a short sleeved crimson velvet jacket and long brown wavy hair. Could it be?

From the end of the Pink Moon sessions in 1972 to his untimely death in 1974, Nick Drake frequently left his home for days, drive around purposelessly until his car would run out of fuel and call his parents. No one knew much of the things he did, and it appeared to those around him that he didn’t have a better clue either. If the allegations are true, and it is in fact Nick Drake walking in the video, I would guess that it was from this period. From the descriptions in the documentary A Skin Too Few, it seems that no other person would have been capable of being as depressed and hopeless as he was, and I somehow find that aura in this footage of the back of a walking man.

It is very unlikely though, that this really is Nick Drake. Drake was tall at 6′4″, but I don’t think a person his height is capable of standing out so much in a crowd, unless all of the hippies around him are around 5′3″.

But the idea that there exists a moving picture of adult Nick Drake in the world is too eerie to ignore. I was born after the debunking of Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster, but this video makes me feel like a 6 year old being captured by a snippet of Big Foot on his Black & White television.

So I was watching this video.

Instead of providing any useful information, the video aroused to me this idea: what if people communicated solely by breaking into impromptu song? The human brain composes sentences of words instantaneously in speech. Would it be possible for us to create melodies in the same speed by simply giving it the same amount of practice?

At the early stages of language, a child would be monotonous, much like how we speak today. Eventually the child would see the limits in expression and begin singing their words in one key. By doing this at such an early age, almost every child would develop absolute pitch, or at least a very accurately relative one. Children in New Orleans would take into the ii-V-I and those in Seoul would probably opt for something like a I-IV-V - a lot like different accents in different parts of the world. Some phrases would change drastically in meaning just by being transposed into a different key, while keeping it’s word choice. And then the developing homo sapien sapien would begin to incorporate a few key changes into his/her life- like a Beatles song. It’d be catchy, and would cover the basic human emotions. So practical this would prove, that most probably would never grow out of this phase.

Then there would be the Coltranes and the Beethovens of speech. The chatterboxes of the world would fire up long monologues like “Giant Steps” and the masters of language would prepare speeches reminiscent of the glorious 9th. Poets would go on world tours, selling out stadiums full of coffee drinking fans awaiting to see how their interpretation of written poems matched up to that of the author’s. Music and our perception of it would be so advanced that people would see pop music the same way we see spoken word today, and music by Stravinsky would be considered “poppy” and “uninspired”.

I think we are entirely capable of such a life style, not that I would ever hope for such a thing.

I was rudely interupped from a vivid dream I had on Friday morning when I woke up to go to school.

In the dream, my fake tooth had spontaneously fallen out as was bleeding uncontrollably. There was no pain in the equation, but it was still somehow very uncomfortable. And when I woke up, I jumped into my shower for my wasteful, anti-enviromental routine of 13 minutes of standing around and 2 minutes of washing. During this time, I finally came to realize how ridiculous the whole scenario was and reached with the tip of my tounge to rub at my tooth. I was severely dissapointed; the tooth was still there. It’s odd that it took so long for me to question such an outrageous incident, but I guess that’s what happens when you wake up the body before the mind is ready.

Not a minute goes by these days without me pulling the aforementioned rubbing maneuver with my toungue. It’s sort of like one of those pointy nail things sprouting out of the side of your fingernails that you can’t ignore for some reason.

In fact, if my tooth was a person, I would very much fancy hitting it hard with a baseball bat. Unless of course, the tooth insists on being an impoversihed 6 year old girl, in which case I would probably have to resort to calling it names. And if the tooth turned into a 6′6″ bodybuilding actor, I guess I would just resort to posting annonymous hate messeges on it’s IMDB page.

I’m not sure that I want to visit the dentist again anytime soon, but this tooth is something that I definately don’t want to spend the rest of my life with.