I spent the day apprenticing and making the usual number of bone-head mistakes. Generally since I’m turning a profit for the shop, it’s not a serious thing when I screw things up. The worst situation these days is I’m working beside a loud vacuum machine and I’m missing phone calls. Thanks a lot Nokia, for being such useless scum, selling a phone that won’t ring and telling me I have to return it to some dealer I never heard of. [Author's note: between Nokia and MetroPCS, they finally replaced the phone. Everyboy call me back.]Degbert is sending me lots of photos and quips, but he doesn’t understand a few things I need to finish the rodeo article at this end. For example, a list of items that must be included, and I’m flying blind without it. He has to market the production and I won’t be doing another Al Vicki in Florida.
Who’s Al Vicki? He’s a writer, of sorts, that I met in California back in ’91. I’d had a laptop for years by then. (Yes, there were laptops back in 1985.) He came into the Kinko’s where I worked and was renting a computer. It dawned on him that things could get expensive when you don’t know how to type. He offered me $15 per hour to word process a script. I would have declined except he did have some major hand in the production of “Alice’s Restaurant”. I thought he had contacts but if he did, he was not sharing the information.
The deal was I plug his words onto a disk. At any rate, that’s what I agreed to. Al figured since he was paying me so much (his opinion), he was going to watch over my shoulder and edit the script as we went along. It was taking an hour per page, made worse by his squawking over the price. Well Al, my job was to key enter sixty pages of material, not assist you in rewording half of it.
I usually work in an office, which makes me familiar with how low caliber people operate. Al reminded me of my coworkers, back when I had a cubicle at the big corporation. The company emphasized “cooperation”. The way this worked out was all fifty people in the department were constantly full of ideas on how you could make their lives easier.
Carlos across the way has a new roomie, the Dan-O I’ve mentioned. He’s come by some hard times so we’ve been helping out. Last evening Wallace asked for beer, which nobody keeps in the house. So I suggested they try that expensive wine. Half the bottle is still left. I tried in myself and I am no connoisseur. Frankly, it tastes exactly like the el cheapo Chianti that Eatmore (Judy Minty) used to order with pizza. It’s okay, but save it for somebody who enjoys such things. I’m aware of the theories about wine but the potential for alcoholism outweighs all benefits. There are so many people who deny they are addicted because they drink wine with a meal. Every day.
I know a lot about shoes than I did and the place is certainly a lot busier than the computer shop. Alfredo asked about some kind of computer system to track his tickets. He uses a scribbler and it can take a while to find older items. He color codes the years and he’s got shoes nobody has picked up since 1997. I’ll see if I can find my old copy of File Express, since his system does not justify Access (a relational database, so it is claimed).
Music is on the back burner. I’m learning a few new tunes each week. I can claim to play bass exactly as I always have since I was 12. While that is strictly true, I’ve noticed everything now takes on my personal touch. I used to record-copy, and it was not unusual to play several songs per set with virtually the same bass lines. Now that I’m a solo, I can’t get away with that. I leave the bass volume the same and most dynamics are from pickwork, you know, a plectrum.
I’ve been watching my act on video, and my bass lines have changed. Many times, I seem to play an old tune the way it would be played today (as opposed to the style of the time). I’ve compared this to different styles on youTube. The so-called great bass players are, for the most part, not playing bass. They are playing lead riffs. And like most lead, very little of it, despite what the composer claims, is original.
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