One year ago today: March 2, 2025, merit-based.
Five years ago today: March 2, 2021, the sound was off.
Nine years ago today: March 2, 2017, I hesitate.
Random years ago today: March 2, 2014, “a factory virus”.
Not a good day. Most symptoms relapsed and a return to weariness. Seven solid hours of good sleep and still drained. It has to be waited out, hospital-style. It’s plain the chest wound is widening and about to leave a larger mark. With windows open, my room hints of caramel and disinfectant. I’ve plenty of coffee and gingery ale, so check in later.
The bulk of the day I was sitting or lying down, minimal movement. Streaming movies saved the day, one I’d never heard of was amusing. “The Extraordinary Adventures of Adéle Blanc-Sec” for special effects, though not for plot. The movie’s best aspect is it moves at the pace I can muster today.
I’m unable to read many of my notes from January 30 to February 3, it would seem I had great difficulty holding the pen. I was unable to lean forward and nothing in the room, including te bed tray, was enough for a surface. There was no hallucinating in the sense everything I saw was real, just distorted. The scribbler shows even at worse I was writing full but short sentences. And that I knew something was wrong—and that it would go away. What a horrible episode, if I cannot decipher the writing in a few more days, I intend to destroy it for reminding me how it could blot reality.
Next I tried to watch “The Last Witchhunter” but its cliché with too many weak spots. The gal in the skinny jeans is okay but developing little bulges. Years back I saw Gibson in “What Women Want” and I’m going to find it again. It’s comic for me, since I was around 19 when I began to notice the patterns of women. No, I can’t read minds, but it turned out learning the patterns was enough. The Gibson plot is not only wrong, that’s the movie that I disliked for casting the plain Jane pudgy gal as the 15 year old lead, which for me destroyed and ideal. I get enough tire-biters in the course of events, I want my actresses to represent an ideal.
Sydney Taylor.
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To counter my physical listless day, I took a far closer at the lead patterns to “Hotel California”, both tabs and notations. My brain still works, and I’ve figured the pattern, again noting its similarity to one of the first tunes I ever learned, the fast version of “Hey Joe”, must have been maybe 1966. Now I know the notes will work major and minor, and there is actually just one pattern needed to fake the tune. The only challenge is the motif is 16 measures long.
You can hear it best at the end of the song, as the music fades. The earlier solo breaks have variations but they are not as distinctive and won’t be missed. I simply chopped the 16 measures into 8 smaller sets and made them identical except for the changes. But I know those changes well and soon as I’m able again, I’ll work them into a flashy bit of bass work, I will. You can try this at home, but most of that solo is guitar 4ths which become a real stretch as you move down the bass neck. I would have to be in top form to play this. And I’m not.
The old club invited me to an art show tonight. Kind of. The club is dead, my guess is they have been losing money a while now. So management is open to any ideas (except my advice to change it back into a neighborhood country music venue) and Wilford came up with this idea. He provides a ton of art supplies and anybody in the audience can dig in. Novel idea, but I seriously do not think there are enough creative people in the territory to make it work. For that matter, Wilford can’t be unaware he’s wasting his time with four or six customer’s all night long.
The location is great advertising for his photography business, though it’s not the most effective way to advertise. I have not contacted my latest guitar player since I returned, but then, he has not contacted me, either. By how, he and I should have been able to approach the old club with a duo for those dead Saturday nights. Since Cathie left, they have tried almost everything except live music. Worst was the DJ that played the pseudo-rap disco noise that drowned out any chance of conversation.
We’ve gone over this business cycle before and here it is, staring us right back in the face. The downfall is predictable, the club hires full bands, business is good but the best match is small bands, that is duos or trios. Except, there aren’t any and Bash bands are too expensive. (Bash is the local bulletin board agency, for corporate events.) So the club drops to solo guitar players but soon that becomes a rotation of the same few people. And I have long since spotted how they do not hold a crowd with their choice of music—just ask the Hippie.
So, the club crops to Karaoke. You know that mistake, there is a certain period where the show is novel and the house makes an extra couple hundred per night. But it is not live and it wears thin, but worse, the club loses the regular clientele who liked live music. With the loss of business, the club drops again to DJ music and that quickly dwindles away. So, here we are, a dead club that can only be revived by live music and that music has to be, in my experience, country. That’s why I switched to country, folks.
And that is where the club has sat since last year. All the regulars are gone and except for payday at the mines, long empty nights. And that mining crowd is nasty, fights and police outside. Normally, I would have made a deal with the club for tips only because I know the formula for neighborhood country music—but I do not have a band to offer. Neither does anyone else nearby. If I lived forty miles east or west of here, I’d have been in a band for years now.
