December 24, 2006

           Where is JZ, the world wants to know. No JZ and no call, so I piled on the Jamis and did 17 miles before 9:00 AM. Not as much Xmas traffic as the car radio predicted, but enough to prove the theory that Floridians are too slow-minded to plan ahead is not confined to just hurricanes. I was all the way over to Greynolds’ Park south of Aventura and noticed it was a busy place for that time on Christmas Eve. This lady came by and talked to me. She was homeless.

           I’ll tell you the story, but make sure you understand that my position on things is that if I did not work and read every day, I too would be homeless. She had gone through the trash can at the park shelter and found old paper placemats and a red candle. She was setting the table for “fourteen people”. So far very touching. Then, however, she went on to babble that it could not be thirteen, because that was the number of people at the last supper and hence bad luck. So would eighteen, which is three sixes.
           When she started in that her goal for 2007 was to “get off medication”, I pedaled out of there back to civilization. There you have it, mind you, that homelessness has little to do with society, for she was far better looking than Paulina from y’day. A natural blonde with blue eyes and slim as well, maybe late thirties. It is strange to see this on such a nice day, but you give some people everything they could ask for and they still get nowhere. I have never felt any individual responsibility for people who have things I could only dream of, but they they mess up anyway. I may feel sorry, but I do not feel responsibility.

           I have a standing invitation to head over to JZ’s dad’s place, but I still wait until I'm asked. I’m thinking to maybe open the thrift for a few hours, just to see who else is around. I’ve got two hours to decide. I went off-road for a few miles and I feel limbered up to keep active all day long. On the way home, I found a brand new wooden medicine cabinet on the roadside. I strapped in on my carrier and it is soon to be hung up around here. Maybe it really did fall off a truck. Except the mirror wasn’t broken. Merry Xmas. (I do not know why I salvaged that medicine cabinet, lugging it home on my bicycle. But a few days later, a friend asked me if I knew where he could get one. Presto!)

           On second thought, I’m going to experiment with the Alesis some more. A pot of coffee and an instruction manual, who could ask for anything more? I ran through the thing last night and listened to every sound, carefully marking down which drum set produced each. I did find a kind of tambourine sound. Later, when I went back to the same settings, the sounds had changed. Way to go, Alesis! Also, when you program your own A-B rhythms, the effect of the footswitch changes completely. It goes to a fill instead of to the alternative rhythm. I’ll see if I can figure that out today. It may be that every change requires a fill and if so, that will be lots of fun without profit.
           It is now ten o’clock at night and I never went over for dinner, the rule is that unless I get contact I don’t drive across Miami. It is odd that nobody called. The Mexican neighbor, whom I’ve dubbed “Jose” has several old Hewlett-Packard units, those mini-towers with only room for one CD player. They’re worth something if I can salvage them. He also got a printer, but remember HP are the printer mafia. Eight hundred different models at any time with over five hundred incompatible print cartridges. HP will screw your.

           In return, he brought over a flaring tool and we fixed the gas stove. Yep, the one that JZ swore he would be out y’day morning over. It gives me an extra excuse not to attend this evening, I had trouble finding a repairman, right? Dickens called around noon and the air conditioning is on the fritz again. Thus, I had an entire day to myself. This means lots of progress with the Alesis.
           I found the finger-snap and the tambourine, so I partially take back what I said. Remember, not having it and putting it where it is hard to find are much the same to me. It works by choosing a “drum set” and assign it to one of the pads, preferably one with some strange name for two sticks you hit together. As I went through the 49 preset drum sounds to catalog them, I find that most of them are entirely useless for my purposes. Some are over-layered to emulate drummers with twelve arms, I suppose. There must be a fill between all changes, as suspected, and those can be even stranger than the patterns.
           At any rate, I’ve successfully programmed around half the tunes required to play a decent gig. I stress programming because what I’ve programmed is a facsimile of the original versions and vastly superior to choosing any of the presets. Every time I hit a snag, I could not help thinking about the drum box the G showed me, explaining how it had so many hundred digitalized sounds (and why the Korg I had was not good enough). This from a guy who has trouble burning CDs, so I told him I’d like to hear how well he fares. That was last June. (He never did program the thing or use it. Myself, this was eventually another instance of my programming a drum machine only to never actually use the tracks. But at least I got that far, G.)
           The day was well-invested working with the Alesis, it is definitely a dimension that was missing from my former band and from Florida bands in general. This is not the same as sequencing, which comes out artificially perfect. I’d say for a non-standard holiday, this was quite a full day.

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