December 30, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 30, 2018, they got back together.
Five years ago today: December 30, 2014, festoonage.
Nine years ago today: December 30, 2010, the supreme grip.
Random years ago today: December 30, 2003, Labor Day with no pay.

           Strange indeed in this time of rising prices, the number of real estate listings in Craiglist has dropped to just 8 or 10 per day in this area. Six months ago there were thousands. Is something going on I never heard about? Rather than ponder that, the boys and I piled in the station wagon in freezing weather and drove out to Donelson for a container of goat yogurt. That’s correct. The doggies get goat yogurt to keep their digestion healthy. Sparkie would live on the stuff if you’d let him.I want a guitar I can leave here, so I thought to shop around. See addendum, there is nothing much less than $150 any more, at least not on-line. That’s more likely due to the money, anything less isn’t worth the hassle of answering the phone. Or it just could be Nashville. Lot’s of failed wannabes might pawn their expensive instruments for a bus ticket out of town.

           Do I grab a guitar and see what I can do? Not such and easy decision since it sidetracks my bass playing. But was that not inevitable? I made up a quick list of 42 tunes I can play and sing, which is less than half my best bass tunes. That means half the music I play is so specialized on bass that I cannot duplicate it on guitar. Not only that, the list is mostly old music, most of it over twenty years old. There is stuff there from the 60s. While I’ve heard lots of guitarists playing this old material, they’ve also been playing it for twenty years. I’m due to put some thought into this. Bottom line: guitar solo is the most direct route to playing out that I have.
           Did you know I had a guitar when I was ten? By then, I’d been taking piano lessons for over a year and I just had no interest in the instrument. There were not bands or role models in the town we lived, so I sold it to Eddie Johnson for $5. Oddly, my father had brought it home, but he’d done this before with an accordion. We could not figure out what it was for but years later he said some nonsense that he was hoping the kids would “pick it up”. Talk about casting pearls before swine. Years later, I did learn how to play an accordion, but have since put it aside. I admit often wondering what most assuredly would have happened if anybody had been around to show me how to strum that guitar.

           Reb’s got a nice Yamaha so I grabbed it and ran through 16 of the tunes. Hmmm, that’s as well as I’ve ever played them, no better no worse. It’s comparable to Mack, the guy I first jammed with when I bought the cabin. And he plays out time to time, just not for money. But such a move for me could be both defeat or just attacking in another direction. I would not be the first old guy to say to hell with what I sound like, I’m going to have fun with this. And in antoher four years, I’ll have outlived my father.

Picture of the day.
1902 mug shot.
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           That’s a biting cold wind out there. The dogs and I did walkies at the boat landing but they constantly strained at the leashes to get back in the car. The Tennessee winter sun is enough to keep the car interior warm. You want to hear something weird? Sometimes and somehow, I attract the wrong kind of people. The parking lot was empty when I arrived at the landing, so I parked in the far corner out of the way. Sure enough the next car that pulls in drives around the whole lot and parks next to me. So what?

           I’ll tell you so what. That now means I have to keep an eye on my car. If he’d parked anywhere else, I’d only have to glance occasionally in the time it takes to walk across that huge lot. It was some middle-aged dude who walked over to the dock, but you see my point. I had to finish the dog walk always keeping my car within sight. It’s nothing except that it happens so often and under the circumstances, I cannot dare take a chance. Alas, the Americian system gives insufferable idiots the upper hand in such situations. I’ve gone into empty movie theaters to have some AOL come in just as the feature starts and sit in front of me—and act offended or bewildered when I move to another seat.

           What’s this got to do with the turtle picture? Well, JeePee taps on the glass. I tell people he is sending Morse code. Today he was saying if I don’t clean that glass he’s looking through, the next time the dogs and I go out, he’s going to jump on the beds. The cats also decided the Xmas tree ornaments needed rearranging. I finally had to put it in the closet. So much for leaving the tree up till New Years. I’ve so far found seven of the ornaments in corners and under furniture. This takes away from time I’d allocated for designing a chicken coop. All this actually fits together, you know. Let me explain.
           My recent comments on people who don’t take up a hobby stem from personal experience. I don’t exactly listen and watch other people. It’s that I’m exposed to so many of them in the way I naturally get about. Therefore, I disagree that the greatest agony of old people is lonliness. I say the underlying problem is boredom. A person who isn’t bored has little time to be lonely, so I rate boredom as symptom. Why do old women gossip and old men drink? Boredom. I could not be expected to feel sorry for someone who never developed any meaningful pastime. I rarely get remotely bored because I always have a backlog of interesting things to do. I am never just there and vegetating.
           I sometimes wonder if that could be why so many deadbeats park right next to me?

           Buried down here, you get my version of an incident. I rarely visit the Rusty Urinal any more, but after shopping I popped in to go over my song list. There appeared to be a few regulars and some okay looking lady by herself near the middle of an otherwise empty room. I took a seat at the far end from the barflies and around six stools away from her. She had her face in a smart phone anyway, and I wasn’t on the prowl.
           After around twenty minutes, she walks over to me and says something that I’m not going to tell you, but it was really nice. I cut her off saying I was married. She walked back to her chair, where she had a half-finished drink. She put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and walked out. A while later I asked the barkeep what that was all about. He said she’s crazy. But that he’d never seen her approach a man before. I turned back to my list.

ADDENDUM
           Research has turned up a bass with built-in amp. It is called the Vox Apache 2. But just you try to find a video that reveals how it sounds. The literature says for practice only, and the on-line demos show it connected to a conventional amp system. It also features a built in tuner, drum machine, and a regular phono jack. However, this is not what I meant with my idea. What few demos exist carefully avoid revealing what the speaker sounds like. Chances are it is tinny and barely able to handle acoustic practice levels.

           This is why I first looked and at semi-acoustic bass, with the roomier body. Speaker design for phone toys has come a long way and I’ve heard some serious bass sounds out of fairly tiny and flat models. The Vox has guitar-like controls including a “bright” switch, so odds are it was created with a guitar mentality from the word go. Not good enough.

Since the Vox units carry a $600 price tag, I’m not going to try to modify one. On-line isn’t the best place to shop for a used acoustic either, with prices of $1,400 not uncommon. This trend has been blatant to me beginning around 1980. America, instead of the former focus on abundance, has moved in two polar directions, which I call the penny-stock and the super-size. Just not very often. The first term means to scheme to take millions of just a fraction of a cent each, the other is self-explanatory. What they both have in common is they don’t require as much work as providing quality.

Last Laugh