In other good news my shoulder is mending fine. If I didn’t even go into the clinic until the second day it hurt, chances it was never that serious. The word is I will not require surgery, only therapy. It still puts me two months behind schedule. What can I do to make up for this? I’ll start looking, but travel comes to mind.Travel, and items like the scooter repair don’t keep showing up here by chance. These are intentionally given priority because how daily events occur in real life. Ask Charles Dickens, that’s who I learned the theory from. Blogs that try to report only the spectacular don’t last long. The same happens with blogs that are too contrived. A certain amount of the on-going is required as a tie-together or things can get too disjointed to follow along.
As I walked into the bakery this AM, how nice it was to find all the ladies had been waiting for me. You see guys, the trick to seeing four women is to make sure they all know each other. Take them different places and spend different amounts of money on each. Whee! Then let them discuss you to death, they’ll be occupied for hours not believing each other. Avoid the Liana Morris types from the get-go and you’ll learn from experience. If you only date one woman, marry her. She'll make your life hell. So find the rare woman who has something which makes you consider that existence worthwhile. I know of a few, but that gets controversial.
“The Life of Pi” is, by page 90, largely a comparative discussion of religion. There is no mention (or warning) of this on the jacket. It goes on without any apparent relation to the plot. This alone gets it a so-so rating from me. It is advertised as an adventure tale and maybe it will be, but with a quarter of the pages gone past already, things had better pick up. So far, it is more boring than Moby Dick.
You can also tell how much I’m into a book by whether I begin reading a second before I’m finished. That’s the case here as I’m reading up on the history of air mail. It is a livelier tale than you think. What we call passenger service today is a result of people paying to travel with the earlier mail planes. The first airliner of twelve seats was built as a mail carrier, with the passenger fares considered “gravy”. The actual development and operation of airlines stems from the mail routes, which often had government backing.
Next some Florida goof gets strip searched for bringing a boa constrictor into a high school. Poor baby. He should get the lash. His parents want to sue, but that’s a given. This is material for the talk show hosts. Okay, all you teenage boys with a big black snake in your pants take one step forward. Not-so-fast there, Tyrone.
Here is a box of perfume. I had to look this one up in case it was some kind of stunt. How can you guess this is a men’s brand? FC is for “French Connection”, so they say. If I’m the last to see this as a horrendously low-geared marketing concept, could be [because]I don’t watch TV. Yep, this is definitely aimed at a TV-watching audience. Campaigns like this are so infantile they can hardly fail among the proles. Why do I get the funny feeling this is the start of a new low.Later. It is 7:34 PM and I’ve got all the symptoms of a terrible flu on the way. Didn’t I just get over one? This will be a bad bout, I can tell. Couple that with the disruption of my sleep pattern from my shoulder and I'm out of the game for a while. This would mean shutting down operations for the duration. So, can I resist saying it? Am I gonna say it? I'm getting powerless. I can't help it.
Here goes, "Oh fcuk!"
ADDENDUM
Music, in particular the performance of music. I play the electric bass, which is really the only bass played in modern country bands. The standup bass is not a related instrument on which one can double up. Those things are expensive, difficult to play, and not all that expressive when you get down to it. Some associate it with 1930s bluegrass bands, but I’ll match my playing to anything those guys could do. Which brings me to the point here.
Playing electric bass is too often a discussion with those who think they know what the bass is all about. The majority have no idea. You hand them the bass they start all kinds of antics, popping, riffing, and soon it’s “Smoke On The Water”. But to effectively accompany throughout an entire song, well, I have yet to see it. It is almost comical to watch a guitarist “stand in” on bass unless he knows the exact tune.
A guitarist playing bass immediately reveals that he has trouble playing the same steady patterns for the duration. Dedicated repetition is the very essence of playing bass as an accompaniment as opposed to a backup instrument. The guitarist will start overplaying by the second verse, thinking he is spicing things up. By third verse he is noodling. And few can play the same pattern for three minutes even when tasked to it.
This is necessarily a generalization. I’ve seen all musicians doing a respectable job on the bass. But not that often. And when they try to jam, their guitar-think gets in the way unless they stick to well worn rock or twelve-bar sessions.
The other misconception is that any instrument is suitable for standing in with the bass. This is not so. A jam tune or two is fine, but few people could stand listening to the same instrument all evening unless it is a guitar or a keyboard. Can you imagine four hours of banjo or violin? And of the two long-gig instruments, I choose the guitar for a multitude of practical reasons.
I have failed repeatedly to find a proper guitarist. To a one, their egos have blocked their careers. This “guitar star” mind-set is the wrong philosophy for playing in a small combo, where the duties are best shared “60/60”. This is no idle observation on my part. I spent a lot of years and money auditioning every available guitarist in rehearsal distance and some beyond that. No success. They had a fixed list set and a fixed mind set, and regard all other players as cronies. It is not like that everywhere, but it is in South Florida.
