One year ago today: March 31, 2016, 8,766 hours per year.
Five years ago today: March 31, 2012, right through my shirt.
Nine years ago today: March 31, 2008, messing with Craigslist.
Random years ago today: March 31, 2014, Ruby, addicted to cheese.
Sit back for a good read today. I’m home and not going anywhere. I was all over the place but it was mostly logistics, so the top story today is money. But first, take a look at this class piece of Americana. This is a ridey-horse from a kid’s merry-go-round or carousel. This is indicative of the material in Agt. R’s massive stockpile. It would take months to begin an inventory. This is the exact type of object we are discussing selling on e-Bay and otherwise on-line. And as far as I know, I’m the only one in the gang who speaks HTML.
There was a major upset this morning. For the first time ever, I bounced a check. I’ve been overdrawn before due to bank fees, but a bounced check can have far-reaching consequences half-way round the world for me. It took 39 minutes to get to the bottom of things. A deposit back in September was recorded twice. So that’s the good news and bad news, well, maybe not completely. The good news is despite a lot of 5-figure checks flowing through that account, the buffer is so big nothing bounced until now. Yes, we have on-line banking, no we don’t use it because of security and privacy issues.
What, you didn’t know the bank tracks which ATMs you use? And if your account shows a even a single transaction out of the country, your passport, if it had the chip, is flagged and reported to security. My point of view is that if you leave the country, it isn’t any of the damn bank’s business.
As everything on that account is electronic, there has never been a manual (cash) deposit or a check (paper) deposit, so the balance has not been reconciled in close to five years. It’s called management by exception, when everything is flowing smoothly, we don’t look into things. The bad news is that I was the only one who could come up with the shortfall. I won’t say, just that it was in excess of five large. (Hey, am I not the one who just bought a house less than a year ago?)
This also put me in touch with my estate executor who is the sort never to complain. And now it’s hospital time for that condition where the backbone calcifies at the lower back. This condition has been going on five years and nobody said a word to me. And frankly, yes, I get a little antsy when the possibility arises that I might outlive my executor. So, I’m not the only one getting old. Did you know I once left half my estate to a lady called Julie K? If she had not let me down, she would have been mighty happy one day.
But that day may be getting distant. In just six more days, I get on that treadmill. And I passed that same test two years ago. That surprised me. Let’s just say if I ace it again, that will be nothing short of miraculous. I would still be unable to endure the slightest stress but then, I wouldn’t be that foolish either.
Dating site “slender”.
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I promised you a picture of the I-bar. That’s it leaning against the house. The other junk in the picture are yard tools, an old bike helmet, and a one of those dishes you put under potted plants. That is the beam that fits under two joists at a time so I can lift the house high enough to install a new sill plate. The old one has to come out completely. I found a spot where it is cracked in two, fortunately it was right over a support pylon.
The guy is one of those types who has smoked a lotta, lotta, da ganja. You know how they say it has no long-term effects but they are so wrong. This guy could not give me directions to his house when I took a wrong turn less than a mile away. He could not form a picture of where I was and sent me on a roundabout road that took me back to less than a half-block from where I started. But, I got there and it was the same old story.
The guy is not a country musician and he could only play what he could play. He could not catch on to the most basic country strums even when I showed him. Yes, I play guitar, but I don’t like to play guitar. So I kind of hope that any guitar player I meet will able to strum better than I can. How can somebody claim they play guitar when they can’t even boom-chicka?
Next, like most guitarists, he knows nothing of music theory. They don’t seem to realize how difficult they make things for themselves being like that. If you don’t know the circle of fifths, which is first grade theory, they have to custom memorize every damn tune like the Hippie does. And that takes time we do not have. Plus that contradicts the first sentence of my ad, which states you must be a fast learner. He could not play a decent rhythm to “Jambalaya” or “Cocaine Blues” and had a really hard time playing anything fast. He dragged every tune down to half speed, a hallmark of the heavy, heavy weed-smoker.
He further did not know basic band terminology or stage signals and seemed to know only the slowest of the “new country” songs, without a clue that just because it is new and some famous guy wrote it, that does not make it a good bar song nor qualify it for playing in a duo. Some new country “solo” artists have as many as 23 people in their backup bands but he never noticed that until I mentioned it.
I tend to keep puzzles until I finish them and this one is from February. The clues have kept up with the Internet by expanding on my favorite technique—answers that cannot be looked up, but must be figured out. So my favorites from this puzzle were “words written with an index” (washme), “they may be wild” (dueces), and “penetrating winds” (oboes).
Back to music. But when it came to what he could play, he aced it. I asked him to play a Bo Diddley beat and got a blank stare. He could not do it even when shown. But ten minutes later, he was playing a different tune with almost the same beat. He could not spot the relationship. We used to call this condition “fried brain”. Still, he showed potential over the fundamentals, so I scheduled a second rehearsal.
I regularly meet these guitar players who think they are so great they will respond to any ad, thinking their greatness will win anybody over to their musical philosophy. Right, Glen? But I don’t have time for them rote memorize and I have no time for the “bass is easy” crowd. So while this guy was good when he knew the song, he was otherwise a musical dunce. The problem with guitarists who memorize rather than learn is that I have no way of knowing how long that took—a very critical factor. This guy found regular strumming to be difficult, he almost could not do it.
Yet the potential is there because I played that way when I was in my teens. I had no choice back then, I was years away from beginning to spot the world of inter-relationships between notes and instruments that no amount of lessons can impart. You not only have to play, you have to think, to be self-critical to the point of pondering why you play each note. Then you find the world is full of guitar players who have never gotten that far. Not. Even. Close.
This guy told me he knew all the country classics. Lies. He knew one, “Folsom Prison Blues”. He could not play the simplest strums, but he could play the hell of the complicated ones. So tell me why he could not strum the simple rhythms? Ah, mary-jane. Now here’s the part where communication gets tricky since you can’t see or hear my mannerisms when I write it. Okay, I regularly meet very accomplished guitar players BUT most guitar players have never met a bassist like me. I’m not going to avoid the issue to be cute, these guys may be incredible guitarists, but I am bass-playing royalty and I know it.
They don’t even come close to being on guitar what I am on the bass. But this escapes most guitar players because they will duck the issue by saying it is comparing apples and oranges. To this day, people like the Hippie actually think they are better on guitar than I am on bass. Bullshit. In certain musical departments, like stage work, I am light-years ahead of these people. And to me, that stage is what counts, not the recording studio.
This is also why I don’t believe them when they say they can read a crowd. Jesus, man, just listen to who gets the loudest applause, dammit. Until they meet me, most guitarists have never been exposed to a bassist who is better than they are. I know exactly how Charlie Daniels must have felt. Yet the one place I would never win a contest is over at Guitar Center. I don’t play that way.
Now this new guy, he fell into line right away. See, I knew some of you would not understand. I did not say I was the greatest bassist, or the fastest, or the most talented. The only comparison I’m making is to the overall effect of them playing guitar in contrast to how I play bass. Most of them can’t follow me when I play a two-chord special right after I show them how it’s done, much less come close to me on stage. Put another way, no matter how great they think they are, they are always copying somebody else and the audience has seen their whole ho-friggin-hum act somewhere before. With my act, only another minimum sixth-grade classical piano player will recognize any of my technique.
I had to turn away from the guy several times to stop him watching my left hand—a sure sign he’s used to rotten bass players. He kept trying this even after being warned it would not work with me. He’s been playing, he says, for forty years, but had never spotted any relationship between chords. He was kind of stunned when I pointed that out if there’s a C, there’s always a G. This guy’s got long-term habits.
Other enduring weed effects were his focus on his brand of guitar strings, the referrals to music by the artist instead of the song, the emphasis on slow draggy songs, the whole two guitar yards. Now the clincher. At the end of the session he asked if I would be interested in teaming up with a lead guitarist. Not on your life. Do you have any idea how many times that stunt has been pulled on me? Any idea? What does “duo only” mean to you? Well, it means something different to many a guitar player, apparently. I told him not only was that out of the question, if I catch my guitarist multi-banding, he’s toast. No guitarist can serve two masters. Certainly not when one of them is me.
Nonetheless, what he could play shows promise, so I’ll send him a list of must plays and trade for his generic humdrum new country and learn his in return. But I gave him fair notice what will happen to him if he gets on stage next to me and tries to play that slow shit or any song that is not a pre-1992 country classic. He was floored several times when I played bass lines to his “originals”, but I assured him that’s because new country is stereotypical. The licks are there but not the spirit.
Last, he had this borderline scary problem of playing minor chords. Time after time I’d ask for E and he’d hand me an Em. I’d say, no, no, and E, and he had real difficulty understanding what was wrong. And then make the same mistake over again on every verse of the song. I’ll let you figure that one out.
So, drop back to see if this flies. I’ll back him up to the best of my ability, but I expect the same in return. You guitar players are put on notice, if you are stupid enough to play any of your monotonous laundry list of crappy standards next to me on stage, you are going to quickly become invisible. They don’t call me the stage darling for nothing. I will walk all over you in the nicest way you’ve ever seen. I’ve been on stage with guitar players so dense they had no idea this was happening to them. See, Hippie, I never mentioned any names on that one. You must not think I’m being malicious because it is the result of years of striving to keep up the crowd momentum around guitar players who were bent on killing the mood with their blockheaded ballads.
In my opinion, the top songs for losing your audience are: “Blackbird” by The Beatles, “Simple Man” by Skynyrd, and “House of the Rising Sun” by anybody. Oh, they’ll listen to the opening and politely applaud at the end, but you’ve lost them.
“It’s better to give than receive,
especially if you are in prison.”
This is a leaf from the June 8, 1917 ledger of the library meeting. This lists some of the books the committee. Plus monthly costs of operations. The janitor made $15, the groundsman only $5. From this you can correctly infer I’m looking way back into the history of gold mining or dredging in the Peace River. And researching the gold operations from river bank to piggy bank. You liked that one, did you?
Yet the few books on mining museums, mostly self published, allude to several finds of low grade jade, opal, and pink quartz. Naturally, I looked into what’s new with refining and smelting on a small scale. Again, because I’m looking it seems, there is a very limited amount of instructions available. Every time I want real information, the Internet goes silent on the matter. I was able to find out that if gold ore can be melted, it will naturally separate to around a 95% purity. I’ll try to get you more data on a mini-kiln. It was neat to watch the video.
It’s basically a coffee can lined with that super insulation that replaced asbestos. There is a small cavity in the center and around the bass are two ports to attach two propane torches. Ordinary plumbing bottles with a jet nozzle. There’s a tiny brick to hold an ceramic mug, which is used as the crucible. It’s a neat setup but the $600 price tag is scary. The video showed some nuggets being melted in five minutes, then poured into a mold. Yes, the oven is tiny, but so is an ounce of gold. If you could melt an ounce a day, you’d be living mighty large. I’ve calculated one ounce per month would provide a $610 income before expenses. Whether that’s profit would depend on how may hours it took to produce it.
Oh, and the dredge I thought I’d seen back west was instead a contraption called a shaker table. It is meant to be set up on a steep creek with fast-running water. The ore is then physically shoveled into the hopper and the table shakes as the mixture flows through, separating the paydirt by saltation. But, it is rusted and the motor is missing so I am not shipping it east.
ADDENDUM
There is a larger old building for sale near the Mongolia. I stopped there [the café] today for coffee and chatted with the owner. Um, she’s married and not my type, but she is the only person I know that’s got a surplus of cash. We speculated what might be put in that old building. She came up with an idea similar to the premise on which I bought this place. A location to base my work without paying for a roach motel. So I walked around the outside and she’s right. The upper floor could easily be made into some fairly decent-sized hotel rooms.
You see, there are no taxis and no hotels in the downtowns of Mulberry, Bartow, or Auburndale. And Bartow is the county seat and court house. She says when lawyers appear in this venue, they often have to drive all the way back to Miami afterward. I told her to pursue the idea and talk to me when she has some firm money figures. You see, I know that downstairs would make a dandy full-service office center. Attorney Nirvana. And who do we know that can install and maintain a computerized office scenario right down to the stamp machine on the wall? Hello.
Wait, there’s more. The other half of the downstairs is licensed for a “public house”. Right now, a ranking lawyer from Broward or Dade who is used to a country club setting has one choice in Bartow. If you had a decent place they could crash, work, then libate, you’d only need one first customer to start the stampede. Just in case, I’m going to re-do the finances for fiscal 2017-2019 on the outside chance of something developing.
Everyone who reads back far enough knows the value I placed on having some place to stay around half-way out of the state from the south. You can bet I’m not the only one. I’ll further contact my real estate lady to add that criteria to my standing search. Having a bunch of lawyers for temporary tenants, well, you could do a lot worse. I know of two self-made millionaires, and one of them is a slumlord.
Last Laugh
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