dr_lizardo

My old gf J. and I were talking about our camping trip out in Ithaca, about the landscape and how you can feel the presence of time out there. Vast aeons actually. There are awesome gorges out there where streams have cut through the shale and limestone that were deposited in the ancient inland sea that covered the area 400 million years ago. I was saying that you can feel the presence of time out here in massachusetts as well, some of the mountains, like the holyoke range, are the cores of extince volcanoes. We don't have gorges here because the stone is much harder. This is where the sediments came from that washed into the sea whose bed now forms the rolling hills of the finger lakes region.

But actually when J and I were talking about the presence of time we were talking about different scales of time. When I took the photograph up top there I was at the lookout tower at the quabbin reservoir watching rainclouds drift by. I was feeling the eras of men, of the last few centuries.



These are chisel marks on the headstone of mr Darius Cook who left this world on March 5 1818. It is not so much Mr Cook that I find evocative as it is the chisel marks that the stone carver left on the stone 190 years ago. Just a day's work. A little before that I was up at the newfane flea market and I came a cross an old copy of George Eliot's Romola that someone had given to her friend back in 1919. Inside the front cover the giver had written a couple of pages to her friend about why she had thought so highly of the book. It was just nice to come across the happiness and friendliness that traspired between two people now long gone. I guess what I feel when I look at old factory buildings or tombstones or old houses, books or pieces of writing is not that the people are gone but that they were here. The walked the same sunny summer days, got the same dust on their shoes, heard the same crickets and cicadas. The ancient stuff they left behind was new then, the pages of their books weren't yellowed and didn't stink of age. The leaves they pressed in books were fresh and green.

It seem kind of like I should be in grad school studying history but I don't know that the feeling I get from encountering it necessarily means that I would like academia, studying some completely arcane and irrelevant topic for several years. I still like the beverage Coca Cola even though I do not love delivering it. Maybe I would still like the beauty of history even if I were studying something to death.

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Saturday I broke down and bought yet another geetar, a crafter TA-50 I found at the guitar center in manchester ct. It's very fancy with abalone inlays and looks like a three thousand dollar martin but cost about 2600 dollars less. It has a body that comes up to the twelfth fret on the neck, whereas on most steel string guitars nowadays the body joins the neck at the 14th fret. So compared to a 14 fret guitar a 12 fret guitar has a little more room in the upper bout to resonate the higher frequencies and has a distinctly different sound, full and sweet. It doesn't have as much bass output as some other 12 fret guitars I've tried that cost 4-6 times as much but for a quarter to a sixth of the price it is more than adequate. Actually one reason why I bought it was that I got this idea hopelessly stuck in my head of putting some heavy guage flatwound electric strings on it and putting a pickup in the soundhole to produce a pretty unique and interesting sounding jazz guitar. I did put a set of faltwounds on it yesterday and they helped to lower the action abit. Rather a different sound from when the bronze strings were on it. I'm not sure what pickup I want to put on it, if I do that.

Lately I feel like I switch back and forth between heaven and hell. Hell is steel and asphalt and rain, heaven is stone and wood and rain. I love the beauty of the world when I'm not working or neurotically standing in my own way of taking it all in.