February 5, 2021

Yesteryear
One year ago today: February 5, 2020, damn near anyway.
Five years ago today: February 5, 2016, $383 evaporates.
Nine years ago today: February 5, 2012, dentist anniversary coincidence.
Random years ago today: February 5, 2011, ”partial nudity”?

           A generic day. They put me in with Big Loretta again and I’m in no mood or condition for yard work. This is a journal, so this is how I spent my day. No somersaults, no fireworks, this is the tail end of a lifetime, folks, and therapy is a help, not a cure. Even today’s photos are repackaged. I stopped at ACE, the hardware store that has everything, then over to a dentist I finally found that still works out of a house and not an office. Just my luck, he’s closed Fridays. My tooth is not mending itself, which has always happened before. Here’s a compound picture of removing the seats from the van. The single picture from last month made it look easy.

           The cold spell is waning so I went for a drive in my comfy minivan, just around the area of east Lakeland, an area I don’t know. The roads are all goofy because of the lakes. JZ called and it could be he’s finally admitting hard work is not the thing that keeps you young and healthy. He suspected I was going to show up unannounced to show off the van. But, I told him, it’s still too damn cold. That place we found to chat up college women, the cowboy bar, was an early victim of the lockdowns, he reports.

           Finding that guy a wife has not been easy. He’s not at all fussy so it should be fun and easy, but no way. JZ, like most men, has never mastered the easy way to get all the women you want. Er, that’s all you want, not the one you want. That takes a lot more derring-do if you want it to go your own way. I still cannot talk the guy into crashing here until he gets something going. I know what it is like to get attached to a town and stay too long. Then once you move, you wonder why you didn’t sooner.
           Getting home, I went over McRoy’s song list. In the sets he designated, he chose seven songs I either never heard, don’t play, or detest. But I’m cherry-picking, letting him do all the work for a cut of the performing. Usually I get this the other way, try it and you’ll know. You do all the hard work of setting up the band, equipment, gigs, management, scheduling, rehearsals, and they come out of the woodwork, all wanting to join up after the fact. There is also the factor that McRoy has gathered the danger of letting anyone else make the decisions.

Picture of the day.
The Queen’s bedroom.
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           The list is not difficult, but the way I deep learn takes effort that never gets recognized because “bass is easy”. Let me qualify that. Not recognized by other musicians, but certainly by the audience. And there is a certain combination I really like. It’s a song with major guitar work, beloved by lead players, but who have let themselves unawares that the song also has a fantastic bass solo they don’t recognize either.

           One is on the list, it is called “Pride & Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, an artist whom I only like maybe 5% of his material. That bass line is better than the guitar in the sense it is one massive bass solo start to end. Plainly played by a guitar player who switched to bass. But take a pause and look at this neat panel shot of the work on the east window, the closest thing this cabin has to a bay window. Now back to music.

           This “missing the bass line” is prevalent in guitar players, who seem deaf except to their own parts. They hear but don’t listen, and you get the opposite. Guitar tunes that have sloppy or indistinct bass work, and he’s got a dozen of those in there. However, I am not complaining, as both extremes have become my specialty. I can set the audience on their asses without disturbing the guitarist, who often thinks the applause is for him. I mean, who else does the audience cheer for? I’m pointing these things out because I’m in a grouchy mood with a sore shoulder blade.
           I wrote to Elliott, sending a transcript of the bass lines and the original bass tab. He’s a guitarist of sorts, never performing, but with a great interest in the mechanics of band organization and how gigs play out. Of all the 81 tunes, 61 of which I fast-learned for the five-piece band of 2014, there is 1 on the list. That’s how out of touch that band was with contemporary music, how I never played any of their material elsewhere. But now, we get another bass show-off tune, “Spooky.”
           And for the first time ever, I’m playing “Cheap Sunglasses”. Can I turn that into another bass solo? Not very many notes in that song, but the recording is fuzzy sounding enough to throw in a few extras. Check in, I spent the evening recuperating, er, I mean relaxing from therapy.

ADDENDUM
           As you may notice, I’ve got my Photoscape back. My old habit of creating install folders on hard disk came to the rescue again. I quit hunting for the disk and installed from an old hard drive. But all my settings are gone so don’t expect exact work for a while. As a note to myself, there is a new router in the area called “hug2go34242” who is up to something funny. He’s knocking down other people’s links. Possibly some punk hacker? I’m okay because I never check automatic connect or leave my link up when not in use. But I see others get dropped and try to reconnect several times at a session.
           As you may notice, I’ve got my Photoscape back. My I’m now using Firefox, which goddammit, still will not let go of their outdated pop-ups, flawed marketing, and poor customer philosophy. Like advertising every time you open the app. Guys, if they have not bought it after the first 50 times, give it a fucking rest.

Last Laugh