Five years ago today: April 5, 2009, Cape Fear.
MORNING
Allow me to address a year-old issue. Yes, I dislocated my shoulder in early 2013. And here is the culprit. Driving toward US 1, shown here, is the manhole plate in the sidewalk that was my nemesis. They have not yet repaired it; see how it slants back into the sidewalk? More than enough to throw me onto the grass embankment on the right. Ah, I hear someone ask how I managed to drive into such a cavity. Imagine it is raining and dark at night with the hole full of water so it appears level. That’s how.
The difficulty with gear is a band has to work with amps and speakers able to handle the largest likely gig. The same grunt effort thus becomes necessary for every low-octane gig in the meanwhile. I helped by dragging such gear as was on casters. I felt the after-effects this morning, I’ll wager so did the other guys. It is forty-eight years since I first played a bass. And I come from a family where nobody had ever heard of such an instrument, so it’s not like I got any help.
This leaves me in fine shape. Sore foot, sore back, extra money. I went to the market just to spend some of it. It required an hour to walk a quarter mile and all I bought was 18 pairs of socks. What’s with that? Actually, it is a conservation measure. They are identical socks and cost just a dollar a pair. Conservation? Sure. Identical means I don’t have as many orphans—a curse I believe was put on me by a lawyer lady called Judy Murphy when I was 19. I lose one sock per laundry trip. But you know, if socks get much cheaper, it could be all told more expensive to wash them than replace them. I should quit washing and just buy new. But no, I’m not going to marry Judy.
Dragging my tush back here, I carefully rewired the NOR gate. It was finally a successful build of part of that rudimentary flip-flop memory circuit (RAM) that has baffled me for months. It works and now to see if I can duplicate it to ensure I didn’t just get lucky. Expect a slowdown after this project as transistors have recently tripled in price. But getting here was not bad for the gout-like symptoms disappeared as quickly as they arrived. Careful, the slightly swollen knuckles remain, but in all anything that gets me out of these doldrums is welcome. Life has be blah for two months.
What I did find was criticism. Lots of it but it will be ignored because the first noticeable factor is that it arises from have-nots. And of course, from the United Nations, who could aptly be renamed "We hate everything the US does." Um, actually, drones aren’t even robots, they are remote controlled. That’s an important distinction. If a robot harms you by mistake, you can’t sue it. What will surprise most people who first encounter a robot is how incredibly strong they are. It won't be long before your car door can be legally removed in a wink.
What’s this? An e-mail from my old university. This is the budget east Texas campus I first attended that has since degenerated into selling degrees. That was to my dismay. I strongly objected because it waters down the value of my degrees (an associate in military history and a bachelor of education, neither of which I have ever used). Last September I began receiving demands from GLAD, a database of academic credentials, saying I had to “verify” my degrees at my own expense. I quickly advised them that if any of the documents they issued to me was brought into question, they themselves had better rectify matters.
Today I received a letter of apology. I am asked to ” . . . kindly disregard the previous email that you have received as all of your credentials are completely valid and recognized. We regret any inconvenience this has caused you in any way.” I will never trust them again and have withdrawn all support and affiliation. My guess is that when I later left Texas, I attended school in a foreign country. They somehow found out and concluded I was a foreign student. Screw them.
Here's your trivia. Do you know what "ocean maturation" is? This is where expensive liquor is placed in old wine barrels and sent on a cruise around the world. The theory is that the wave motion causes the alcohol to contact all the wood and thus gain in flavor. So, ocean maturation is above anything else, a selling point.
EVENING
No, the news isn’t happy. Mucho years ago, after the PA equipment had paid for itself, I got into the habit of leaving it set up at Jimbos. Don’t lecture me, all humans sooner or later have to trust something or somebody. Six years, nothing happened at Jimbos. Well, I just got stung. Be damned if some two-bit guitar player didn’t come along and wreck equipment. Here’s what I know so far.
Some total loser asshole guitar type walks into the club this week. He’s selling a Telecaster. He talked the new and inexperienced barmaid into using my bingo PA to demonstrate. Ask yourself, what caliber of guitar player walks down South Dixie trying to hock a Fender but without an amp to prove it works? Right, that’s what I thought. The barmaid let him plug into my PA and he blew the stage right channel. Think $635. (Later, it turned out to be the phono jack. But that was a close shave.) I took up the matter with the barmaid, it won't happen again.
When I got to bingo tonight, I was horrified. By sheer luck, one of the patrons present remembered seeing the guitar player. Let me tell you. In six years I have yet to find a guitar player in Florida with the brains and talent to match his big mouth and his big dreams. Much less figure out how another man’s PA system works. Most guitar players are psychomaniacs that way. What manner of guitar loser would wreck another man’s PA system to sell guitar even the pawn shops will touch? By and large, that is the caliber of musician I’ve consistently seen in Florida.
I’ll point out that I don’t call people with medical conditions “retarded”. And I’ve never in my born days met as many retarded guitar players as in Florida. I still have not finished my booklet on the mental disease “guitar-it is” but I think I may have one more chapter. Don’t argue with me that anybody can make a mistake, it is the overall guitar player mentality that makes them think they are better than others and thus can help themselves.
Read my lips: I do not like guitar players.
