Greetings folks
This is a dead tree against the sun. I don't know if it has much to do with my life but I've already sized the image for my DA account and it fits the SG blog format so whatever.
Past couple of days my fortunes have gone up and down kind of more dynamically than they usually seem to where I live at the hub of the wheel of fortune. I had a difficult day at work on wednesday but on thursday I had a pleasant enough route to run out rural western mass, Ashfield and Whately, but then I managed to lose 60 dollars that one cash account paid for their delivery and I'm responsible for it. But I had friday off because I don't normally work mondays, and Coke is nice enough not to screw me out of a paid day off that people who normally work modays got for memorial day. SO at least I didn't have to throw soda around to earn the the 60 bucks that I lost.
This past weekend I picked up a little Vox DA5, a small battery powered guitar amplifier that I could bring to open mic night, and have a go at playing a little electric geetar, not being disposed to bring my enourmous marshall amp for that purpose, what with its weighing something like 50 pounds and being likely to blow a fuse since they don't have much in the way of wall outlets at Sam's and all the electronic equipment is run off of a long extension cord run from the kitchen. The little amp allows me to be heard when I play a fingerstyle arpeggio, like when I do house of the rising sun. Another thing though is that my sense of rhythm is slow and weirdly syncopated from all the fingerstyle blues I've played and everyone else there, the drummers and other guitarists, play too fast and with a different rhythmic sensibillity than I. I had hoped that the little amp would be loud enough that I could get the other players to slow down to my speed but it didn't work, and the resultant speeding up and/or rhythmic garbage really screwed me up and was frustrating. I was really unhappy with my set. People always praise me afterwards but I think the faint applause I get is more telling. I hope I don't suck as much as I seem to in that situation. Maybe I just need to be asshole enough to insist on playing alone so my weirdness avoids the nonintegration with other players problem.
Lately I've been trying to adjust my mind to abide in desirelessness, but it tends not to work because the stuff I desire is more exciting than even the thought of a settled desireless mind. I've been off and on wanting to get a hollow body electric, something like what Brian Setzer would play Sleepwalk on for example. I had the desire suppressed a litte bit I think, but then there was this fellow Zack who's a music teacher in one of our local towns, and he shows up at open mic with a beautiful D'Agostino hollowbody and I let him use my litte amp with it, and he played up a storm. That really fucked up my hollowbody electric desire suppression. So this morning I was watching some youtube videos of people playing Gretch 5120s and I went out to Daddy's junky music and looked at a couple of models, particularly a white Ibanez that I really like. But when I played it I couldn't really make it sound anything like the people who make me want such a guitar can. A guitar can't do anything by itself, you might say, It can only make sounds that you tell it to make. I don't know how to make those guitars make those sounds. Brian Setzer could hand me his very own Gretch, but I sure as hell couldn't play Sleepwalk with it. That fellow zack got his undergrad degree in jazz guitar. He has vast knowledge of things that he can tell a guitar to do. Playing those guitars and not making those sounds helped to dissipate the craving a lot, but I don't know if it's going to go away completely.
I guess people should be mature enough to understand these things by the time they hit their mid twenties, or at any rate some age earlier than I have, or have yet to. I run on desire a lot more than discipline. Hard ware requires software to make it work and I've never been much disposed to get that software going in my mind, some mixture of lazy bastard and ADD or what have you.
I suppose it was appropriate then that when I was walking back to my car with my little amp in one hand and cased guitar in my other, thinking about getting an orange 5120, that I tripped on a curb and went face down on the sidewalk and scraped up my knee bigtime. Still bleeding a bit even know. If this is my last journal entry you can assume a flesh eating bacteria got me. Took a nice chunk out of the corner of my litte amp and I thought I had broken it five days after purchasing it, but with the batteries reseated correctly it's working.
I guess this journal is that of someone who's not much of a grownup, psychologically. I'm going to have a go at learning the instrumental solo of Nothing Else Matters. Try and become someone who's absorbing information rather than just material posessions.
This is a dead tree against the sun. I don't know if it has much to do with my life but I've already sized the image for my DA account and it fits the SG blog format so whatever.
Past couple of days my fortunes have gone up and down kind of more dynamically than they usually seem to where I live at the hub of the wheel of fortune. I had a difficult day at work on wednesday but on thursday I had a pleasant enough route to run out rural western mass, Ashfield and Whately, but then I managed to lose 60 dollars that one cash account paid for their delivery and I'm responsible for it. But I had friday off because I don't normally work mondays, and Coke is nice enough not to screw me out of a paid day off that people who normally work modays got for memorial day. SO at least I didn't have to throw soda around to earn the the 60 bucks that I lost.
This past weekend I picked up a little Vox DA5, a small battery powered guitar amplifier that I could bring to open mic night, and have a go at playing a little electric geetar, not being disposed to bring my enourmous marshall amp for that purpose, what with its weighing something like 50 pounds and being likely to blow a fuse since they don't have much in the way of wall outlets at Sam's and all the electronic equipment is run off of a long extension cord run from the kitchen. The little amp allows me to be heard when I play a fingerstyle arpeggio, like when I do house of the rising sun. Another thing though is that my sense of rhythm is slow and weirdly syncopated from all the fingerstyle blues I've played and everyone else there, the drummers and other guitarists, play too fast and with a different rhythmic sensibillity than I. I had hoped that the little amp would be loud enough that I could get the other players to slow down to my speed but it didn't work, and the resultant speeding up and/or rhythmic garbage really screwed me up and was frustrating. I was really unhappy with my set. People always praise me afterwards but I think the faint applause I get is more telling. I hope I don't suck as much as I seem to in that situation. Maybe I just need to be asshole enough to insist on playing alone so my weirdness avoids the nonintegration with other players problem.
Lately I've been trying to adjust my mind to abide in desirelessness, but it tends not to work because the stuff I desire is more exciting than even the thought of a settled desireless mind. I've been off and on wanting to get a hollow body electric, something like what Brian Setzer would play Sleepwalk on for example. I had the desire suppressed a litte bit I think, but then there was this fellow Zack who's a music teacher in one of our local towns, and he shows up at open mic with a beautiful D'Agostino hollowbody and I let him use my litte amp with it, and he played up a storm. That really fucked up my hollowbody electric desire suppression. So this morning I was watching some youtube videos of people playing Gretch 5120s and I went out to Daddy's junky music and looked at a couple of models, particularly a white Ibanez that I really like. But when I played it I couldn't really make it sound anything like the people who make me want such a guitar can. A guitar can't do anything by itself, you might say, It can only make sounds that you tell it to make. I don't know how to make those guitars make those sounds. Brian Setzer could hand me his very own Gretch, but I sure as hell couldn't play Sleepwalk with it. That fellow zack got his undergrad degree in jazz guitar. He has vast knowledge of things that he can tell a guitar to do. Playing those guitars and not making those sounds helped to dissipate the craving a lot, but I don't know if it's going to go away completely.
I guess people should be mature enough to understand these things by the time they hit their mid twenties, or at any rate some age earlier than I have, or have yet to. I run on desire a lot more than discipline. Hard ware requires software to make it work and I've never been much disposed to get that software going in my mind, some mixture of lazy bastard and ADD or what have you.
I suppose it was appropriate then that when I was walking back to my car with my little amp in one hand and cased guitar in my other, thinking about getting an orange 5120, that I tripped on a curb and went face down on the sidewalk and scraped up my knee bigtime. Still bleeding a bit even know. If this is my last journal entry you can assume a flesh eating bacteria got me. Took a nice chunk out of the corner of my litte amp and I thought I had broken it five days after purchasing it, but with the batteries reseated correctly it's working.
I guess this journal is that of someone who's not much of a grownup, psychologically. I'm going to have a go at learning the instrumental solo of Nothing Else Matters. Try and become someone who's absorbing information rather than just material posessions.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
And...what SilverSurfer said.