Today and here I stayed inside, using the time to go over more of Eddie’s material. I’m convinced some guitarists can only hear other guitarists. Unlike other musicians who hear the whole band, guitarists can’t hear when the rest of the song is boring. Case example, that dry, useless “Horse With No Name”. I suggest 99% of guitarists do not know what it means or how the bass line goes (like they care). It’s a gronk guitar song written for gronk guitarists, but they will argue blue in the face how fantastic it is.[Author’s note: another tiny but stealthy idea is simmering back of my mind. Eddie’s solo work has caused him to fake any riff or strum he cannot play. Alone it sounds hokey; with my bass lines it is electrifying. Should I talk Eddie into emphasizing this very aspect as a standard part of the act? It would insult any ego-guitarist in the audience because we are so obviously “pretending” to play. Yet a trained picker couldn’t dare criticize because all we’d have to ask him is “You spent how long learning that?”]
[Author's note 2015-08-02: Later I determined that these riffs he played could be adapted to the electric bass. That became necessary when before long I noticed it was not really random, that he was playing about the same thing in every tune. That's something I never do, on principle alone. Sadly, Eddie could not teach me how he was doing it before he came into a pile of money and drove back to Philadelphia.]
I’m learning “Long Black Veil”, a droll ballad for sentimental drunks. It seems to me I heard this tune with Daina (not Diana) back on the left coast and don’t like it any better twenty years ago. Something about some guy who is dumb enough to believe his best friend’s wife still pines over his grave. But such songs were written before 1962 when sex was discovered during a beer shortage in northeastern San Francisco.
I didn’t even brave the heat for a moment, I was indoors all day. This means a $200 electric bill if we don’t get some heavy rain. A day or two inside gives me a chance to catch up on the paperwork, which I generally have more of than average. At the same time, far less goes wrong in my life due to missing documents or misfiles. This is an age where not having a system can really cost you.
The cat stayed indoors as well. She’s learned that fans mean cool. Something is unusual how intelligent that cat is, I mean, she goes beyond what can be explained away by mere instinct. Why doesn’t this cat like real food? Today I made a huge pan of fried catfish; she would not touch it raw or cooked. Or maybe the cat is telling me something about the quality of supermarket produce?
I also watched several TV shows (videos previously recorded from television--if there is no remote control device to change channels, it is not television) about geology. I would have been a great geologist, but I never heard about it as an occupation until too late. What impresses me is how the shows now portray as common knowledge many things that I studied as leading edge research as little as ten years ago. The iridium layer, the Oort Cloud, and how the giant asteroid could have been a small comet, or how it alone could not explain the total extinction of dinosaurs. Most of the theories, including continental drift, have become accepted except by religious kooks.
Still, there are enough fanatics to dispute any non-Biblical concepts. That’s another reason I am hoping for extraterrestrial life to be discovered in my time. Any life beyond Earth at all relegates all the centuries of ritual to meaninglessness. It is not that I regard religion as “a relic of our superstitious, prescientific past”, but it would be nice to just make them practice instead of preach. Only a total hypocrite would try to reconcile religion with alien life. You know I like construction, but I hate construction workers. Well, I’d also like religion if only there was a way to make them shut up.
Alaine called to check in, make sure I’m okay. She reports a new shop that opened next door to theirs was attacked over Friday night. Bullets through the front window. It is a surf shop that must have opened in the last couple of months. I’m trying to imagine how such a place could be drug or gang related. Does it make any sense to you? Somebody running hot surfboards or smuggling illegal snorkels?
I wonder how my day at home compares to the world at large? By the sounds of it, I'm sitting pretty.
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