One year ago today: January 30, 2017, no consent before 1965.
Five years ago today: January 30, 2013, I won’t mention the twenty bucks.
Nine years ago today: January 30, 2009, SEC: a swollen carcass.
Random years ago today: January 30, 2010, the rent-week slowdown.
Here’s your picture of the day, the progress on the floor. This view clearly shows the fresh new plywood up against the older parts of the floor. Those were torn up to redo the wiring, and were walked on a lot, so they are dirty. Not visible is the wiring, nor the insulation and blocking now installed under the boards. The boxes are from the move, I have still not fully unpacked. This room will put an end to that.
Told you, band startups are intensive stretches. Think of it as a boot camp that weeds out all the knuckleheads and their shortcut dreams to glory. I spent four hours learning lead riffs on the bass, and you know why? Not because I want to be a lead player, but because I can’t find a guitarist who can do the job. That’s why I’ve opted to go in with a lady who plays strictly rhythm. The guitar player I really want is out there, but is probably as jaded as I am about finding the right bassist. The music field is like real estate, where the top 1% make all the money.
To be fair, there is a small musical middle-class. They are the performing musicians, such as myself. But the bulk of musicians are bottom rung, but a significant proportion are the bandless scramblers, last-chancers, and hacks. And 90% of them are guitar players, who are so full of horse-squeeze they don’t know. So, I’m learning what fills and riffs can be played on the bass because I don’t expect my rhythm player to do them. It was so grueling to find someone to play like she already does, I’m not pushing her to do anything extra.
I’ll use any resource available, which includes watching youTube videos of people playing covers of passages that are difficult to learn by ear. But never have I seen so many dreadfully bad third-raters as when I searched on “Long Haired Country Boy Lead Solo”. It seems every guitarist in the land thinks he can play that song. But I could not find one who could demo the lead break from the original. It’s a brand of guitar playing I can’t get by myself. So, I’ve decided to see about emulating the notes and style from Travis Tritt’s version. I’ll never be even a half-assed guitarist, but I could do a better job than those jokers on line.
There’s another piece of advice I would give to a lot of youTube guitar players. Look at yourself in a mirror before you take any videos of your face. If you see what we see, get your mug off there and aim the camera at the guitar neck. What a pack of uglies, fatties, and mouth-breathers. At that point, nobody is going to care how good you think you are. What a sorry-looking bunch of sad sacks who don’t need no stinkin’ rehearsal. That’s what the world wants, more warts-and-all guitar footage.
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Drat, another chilly spell. I worked on the floor anyway. The ornery joist is now fixed and soon I’ll have the area for the bedroom framed in. That’s destined to be the practice area I’ll need shortly, making me glad I got all the electrical done right. There are twelve outlets in that room. (Two are not generally available, such as the air-conditioning line and the recharging station.) Right now, my amplifiers and such are piled up in my bedroom, but the speakers are out in the shed, poor things. I think for now, I’ll just have the music gear and a sofa in the new room. The kitchen is handy enough if anyone wants to sit down or have coffee they can take three steps across the hall.
The pipes themselves will be insulated because it is a twenty-foot travel from the water heater, and the pipes in turn will be in a framed and insulated trough that runs under these joists. The old iron pipe runs in the open and is only supported at the ends, which may have accounted for the leaks we fixed a couple months ago. There will be no such problems with the new piping.
Remind me to measure in case I want to put in a handicap door. If Wallace was here, I’d ask him to help me install it. So I could haul amplifiers through it easier. I understand that isn’t a consideration for some guys, vis-à-vis the women they date. But the only exit without going through the kitchen is out that front door. That one problem joist took two hours or I would have spend more time with the bass today. I was in the dust and dirt most of that time. I can see the kitchen, the last part to be leveled, is going to be much more of the same. Fortunately, I’m getting better at this.
How sad the next item makes the blog. Last Sunday was the fourth time that I’ve bought the $2 weekend paper to find the G, or comics and puzzle section missing. I complained but to no avail, because here’s what I learned. The people to drop off the papers for sale put the issues together themselves. I did not know the papers did not arrive pre-folded for delivery. So here is another example of how disgustingly the American system has degenerated. Yet, most of the populace does not recognize the nature of the problem.
The real snag is how each segment of the supply chain has twisted its affairs so that no matter who screws up, it is the end-user who winds up taking the fall. It’s not the store’s newspaper, they just sell it. The newspaper, well, they are not the direct supplier. They’ll just say you should speak to the middle-man, who will just tell you it isn’t his fault. It’s like the banking system, where every mistake is always in their favor. And the legal system where each cog in the machine can prove they did their job right, but the wrong person still goes to jail.
Last, I may have a date with a gal who claims to be 49. You know what that means, but without too much detail, that still makes her younger than my ex by now. I’ve not had great success with older women, or is it the other way around. I don’t really count the women I see only once, so when I say I’ve never dated women my own age, I mean there was nothing on-going. The last time I went out with a gal over 40, she asked me for money eight or nine times before I just dropped her off at her apartment and went out for a brew. She didn’t ask for much at a once, but she set the pattern.
This is not the only time this has happened to me. Usually they ask for money to buy small things, like minutes on their phone, cigarettes, help with the electric bill, fix a flat, all things that a woman over 21, if she’s truly single, should be providing for herself. I understand some guys think this is a normal part of dating women, but I’ve never stooped so low as to pay for it like that. It gets tough when there is no longer any quality available. Ah, but that’s when you get back into a band no matter what it takes. Did you see that one coming?
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