What Jag needs is the inside on how to play in a band. At that age, there is a fixation on playing cover tunes to a perfection. One of the first lessons I give is to let the student listen to a piece of music while I talk about it. Hear that drum part? There’s a stop. That’s a bass run. Did you hear the guitar change? This has proven to be a total eye-opener, particularly to guitarists who never deduced their thinking was channelized. Then, the student picks a piece and I listen to their analysis. Like the Hippie, there is so much they don’t hear, they tend to play in a cocoon, focusing only on their part.
The object of music lessons is to sell more music lessons. Is there a single hit out there dedicated to a music teacher? I also copied the 505 concert for Jag, the five guitar jam of November last year. I mean, if guitar lessons worked, why do I never hear of anybody else’s successful students, or see their videos of their graduation classes? Jest askin’.
In the news again is the evil specter of deflation. I inquire again, what is so bad about falling prices? There is some nonsense about retailers not replacing their stock if it might devalue, but it is high time these people started risking their own money by paying in cash. Who knows, their own prices may fall. It is false to assume survival of the capitalist system is dependent on unlimited credit.
America still has ten million shopkeepers who need a wake-up call. Those who can only survive by increasing prices need to be allowed to fail. I lived overseas in a world of used cars, ten dollar concert tickets and home made sandwiches, and it is not that bad. Furthermore, for all the babble, deflation has never been tried as a policy, so I don’t believe the naysayers.
My next place is definitely going to have a private laundry. Those people Wallace made friends with, whom I successfully managed to ignore for a year, are over here asking for emergency car rides all the time. Since I can’t, they’ve taken to waiting until I go past with a load of laundry. There are three washers, but only one dryer. They save up a load and just before my wash cycle is up, they load the dryer for an hour. This turns my laundry day into a minimum two and a half hours.
Do they do it on purpose? No, they are not that smart. Like my family, they have that sixth peasant sense of when they can get in your way. It does not help to have a schedule, that just hands them another advantage. Also, they leave their things in the dryer a long time over, hoping you’ll make the mistake of asking them to finish up, confirming they’ve got your goat. They’ll move, but now you owe them a favor. It is 11:30 in the morning and they have not emptied it yet. You see, they know I'm waiting and they want to force me to ask.
However, I know how to bug these types. Always have something to do that they can’t. Even the patience to read a book is enough to incense them. I’ve been practicing bass and drum machine combinations since breakfast. I know first hand how much it eats at such useless people when they can’t impose themselves upon a situation and I'm waiting until they unload that dryer on their own. It's like back when used to give my brother fits because I was “fooling people” by pretending I could play music. Although he totally missed the boat, he did learn a single bass run in his early twenties. And by god, he still plays that same run today, albeit every other year, but he does play it in every song.
I can still hear it, a root note dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-de-dum. Hey, I just said it without falling asleep. Wonders never cease.
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