Another picture perfect day, which I’m given to believe is not the case country-wide. Except for a run up to the Shack for a 100K resistor, I took the bicycle out today. So did many others and this is the first time I’ve seen one of those e-bikes with the mammoth price tag. They are nice but if you pick one up they are quite hefty.
Okay, but everyone wants to hear about music. I have all my equipment up and running again and a practice scheduled for Thursday. You watch, everyone will pick up right where we left off. Everybody who plays in a band with me never forgets because it is a learning process where we don’t learn tunes. I learned that tactic when I was 13, others never learn it. Jag and I will be focusing on music styles by Patsy Cline and Faith Hill, musicians from Mars as far as he knows.The point is we are developing a great rhythm sound that takes advantage of his unfamiliarity with the riffs, meaning what he plays necessarily has to be quite original. There is another popular misconception that we exploit to the hilt, the theory that the guitarist is the band and everybody else just a bit player. Although the voicings are arranged to be equal, prima donna guitarists see this as a startling reversal of roles.
Oh yes, we’ve had them walk up to the stage and advise Jag on how to “take back control”, as if what we are doing is a bad dream they want to kill before it spreads. This is also why Jag and I stop playing as soon as a guitarist says, “Follow me.” We don’t follow anybody, instead, we play the music right. Follow you where? Are you going out for cigarettes?
But that “follow me” concept has an interesting explanation. First, the guitarist has to imagine he is the king of the hill, then, he needs a bassist who believes that is true. It must be a bassist who is a failed guitarist and who is thus familiar with the same tunes. Only then can they make those pre-memorized patterns sound like they know what they are doing, why it fools some of the people all of the time, and why it seems so repetitious and unoriginal to the rest of us. The bassist isn’t following, he’s remembering, because being a guitarist wannabe, he has been brainwashed to the same degree.
Having an extra hour in the afternoon, I completely revamped my electronics blog to read like a guidebook. In the weeks since the Arduino arrived, I have actually performed only 15 experiments, of which roughly a third failed. Those are documented for all to see. In the end, I got no help from anyone, so stumbling and bumbling have a merit of their own. You should see me work a breadboard now, I may actually have trained myself to wire the circuitry in my head before I start.
I now have an off-site work shed to store my surplus gear and work on projects in complete privacy. It is small, but I own both the building and the land, plus a locked-in investment that pays for the taxes and upkeep forever. It will also ensure I can never again be held hostage by an unscrupulous partner.
I’ll be rewiring the electrical this week so I can hold band practice in there if necessary. Yes, it is true my one-time friend caused hardships on other band members who deserved better. I’ve always practiced at home and that’s exactly where Wallace’s relations tried to kick me in the teeth. They failed, but the attempt is permanently and duly noted.
I’m still reconsidering the trip around Lake Okeechobee. It would now have the added bonus of being a celebration, although I cannot yet reveal the true extent of what has happened. But I can tell you some people are not gonna like it and it is entirely their own fault. And that I’ve targeted the real troublemaker. The minute you mind my business, it is going to cost you, and that is that.
As bad as things were is as good as they are going to get. I predict by 2014, I will be living in a mansion in Ft. Lauderdale or have a cabin on private acreage in Colorado. Paid for with $122,000 in cash. I’m just waiting for the collapse of those government and school board pensions invested in mortgage-backed securities to bring down the big shots and housing prices. (I’m not against the workers, who will always suffer anyways, but just the braggarts and bigshots.)
