 |
| I just don't know how much longer I will be able to hold the attentions of my audience, should I continue to live in and write about Baton Rouge.... I've already ceded parts of Latin America, and bored Africa to sleep... |
Yesterday, (Sunday) began with a nap.
I waited until the sun had come up and there was an appreciable rise in the air temperature. Then, and only then, did I drop into slumber, and was I not tormented by nightmares about having set my backpack and guitar down somewhere (last nights nightmare had me putting it down on a basketball court, and turning my back for just "one second..")
Second Store Let Me Busk
I went and played in front of the other convenience store in the immediate vicinity of the boarded up house. They allow me to play in front of their store as readily as the guys at the Chevron store.
I made a few bucks, while at the same time feeling like I had really earned them. I was getting on it full speed, in a way that I sometimes reserve (to save strings, if nothing else), and for times that I am in the perfect mood.
The few bucks were from people whose expressions said, "If you didn't have anything; you wouldn't be gettin' anything; you hear me?"
 |
| Teach me how to catch these, and I will eat for life!! |
It was then off to cook the two pounds of Whiting fillets, which I had bought in a frozen state from Wal-Mart, Saturday afternoon.
It has been a mixed blessing, the incredibly cold weather here the past couple days. It preserved my frozen Whiting fillets, so that they were just defrosted and still cold at 7 p.m., Sunday, when I started to build a fire behind the boarded up building to cook them. They came out stupendously, and the only thing that I realised I had forgotten was, garlic. The fish was garlic away from perfection.
Howard tried some, kind of scoffed it down, actually and said that it was "not bad."
But, also, the frigid air made it hard to sleep and gave me nightmares about being chased and eventually cornered by a homosexual, kind of a trade-off
Flashbacks Taking Time
I've actually been putting a lot of time into working on the Flashback Friday pieces ...pieces of what?
and have been scheduling them to post automatically on Friday mornings at 1 a.m. (CST).
I am kind of off to work on one now, Chapter 4, I believe....
Laptop In Mail
I have gotten a message from Martin W. in West Virginia, saying that he has mailed a loptop computer to me at the general delivery box downtown. This could have the effect of changing the face of this blog in the near future, perhaps bringing it into the 21st Century, with the addition of music, video, and posts which can be conceived and delivered at my own pace, and not governed by a one hour time limitation such as those at this li................(Session over; logging out....)
I've been watching the trend on the Internet and my own ability to make use of it for about 5 years now and the trend is backwards. The laptop you get in the mail will likely be worse than the library computers you use now, and you will be farther, not closer, to posting anything but text and a few still pictures.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think Bach et. al. passed on what they knew in written form?
If you were able to put your songs into written form and post them, they'd be traveling the world now.
OLD tech is the future not "new" tech. The entire world is in a slide backwards now. Would you believe that color TV was invented and even broadcast in the 1920s? The Great Depression put that off until the 1950s. Likewise a lot of other amazing tech - it got put off by 30+ years.
I'd recommend just hitch-hiking the hell out of there and not waiting for any laptops, gold nuggets, 13k diamonds or any fictional or might-as-well-be-fictional items that may or may not arrive in the mail.
Well, another trend is that youngsters don't have the patience or attention span to read sheet music, as it was known since, yeah about the time of Bach, may have went back to further to Henry Purcell, or Verdi, whoever came first...now, stuff is in "tablature," a word which the editor has underlined in a red squiggly line, telling me that it is spelled wrong; it's not spelled wrong, the word just hasn't even found its way into Webster's dictionary yet...very few people can pick up sheet music to a song they've never heard and play it with the right "feeling," -I stopped to visit with Tanya (who's been playing violin since the age of 6) and Dorise, and just messing around, I said I was going to pick a song out of their fake book and they had to try to play it; I pulled a random number out of my head, (216, maybe) and flipped to it...it was "I Never Knew Love Like This Before," by some Disco Queen, and, after about a minute into it, Tanya said "I don't know about that one..."
ReplyDeleteMost people who can pick a song up by ear, only want the sheet music for the lyrics that they can't understand, because they have already heard the music and decided that they like it...but anyways; Martin said that he already sent it, so it would behoove me to wait x number of days and check at the post office; since a laptop is on my wish list; the ones that they put out in 1999 were able to be turned into recording studios, the "drawback" -just like with the Sony Mavica- was that you could really only have a small amount (maybe 3 hours) of music on the hard drives which were "cutting edge" back then, like 80 megabyte ones, Using all 16 tracks; you could sacrifice quality and hold longer songs, though; but -just today, I was in a thrift store that had cassettes for 50 cents... I actually thought I could get a stereo cassette recorder dirt cheap and then scoop up all kinds of music, and if it sucks, I can cover the "erasure prevention tabs" in the corners and record over the things with my own stuff. I used to send cassettes of my songs, arranged like an album, to friends and family at Christmas, each year. The Dolby HX Pro high-bias cassettes were all the "quality" that I ever desired, and when CDs came out, I wasn't totally blown away by the "improvement..."
I like low tech, I guess is my point; if the laptop is an ancient dinosaur, then, I guess I'll just put out music the quality of a 78 rpm record over a Victrola, if the music's good enough, it will come through...
But, let me get to my blog post, before I post it all right here...By the way, in 1935, my dad was messing around with the household radio (probably with an arch shaped top) in Massachusetts, and he picked up a station from San Francisco...as dad explained; radio was new then and they were still experimenting with wattage and such...and since there was no need to send any signal to the west, except for a few fishing boats out there, they bounced (and reinforced) the signal shooting to the east, north and south, hence my dad was surprised to hear the morning weather forecast of "early fog rolling into the bay" (Cape Cod Bay, what?)
I guess my point is; I'm still blown away by low tech, like talking to someone a mile away on a walkie talkie; always thought that was cool....
I LOVE low tech.
ReplyDeleteThis computer I'm typing on now is about 2005 or so vintage, and I can replace it for $100 or so any time.
Hmm ... I just bought two laptops for $10, got a wall-wart for one and it works, missing a few keys (LOL!) but the "nipples" are still there to press and they're not that important keys anyway .... supposed to use it to program some circuit boards I'm supposed to build. The other lappy is an unknown quantity, I'm guessing the battery is bad and of course the wall wart is missing. I don't know when I'll have time to mess with it actually ....
Tell you what, if you can get out here I'll give you this one I'm typing on now, an Apple iBook G4. I'm about due to spend a few $100's one a newer Apple and I can get a hell of a desktop system for a few hundred bux. I should be able to wipe out the stuff I don't want so you'll get a fair fresh, pristine, OS. One thing though is no built in camera, and the built in mic is broken because they all break on these. But Guitar Center sells a hell of a USB mic for $50, and some of the little digital cameras have pretty good mics on them too. I got one for $20 that I'll use to video my playing.
USB mics for 50 bucks, cool; I used to use Shure M157 ones, which were the "studio reference standard" or something; they were always about 120 - 150 bucks each (of course stereo is nice) but I imagine the new digital USB ones achieve a wide frequency response 20-20,000 hz...will have to try to find some specs, now that I might be in the market...time to post, am busy today, trying to Google Howard to see if he is a paroled sexual predator; something about the way he uses books to "dissociate" makes me think he might have been confined for years where nobody would talk to him; he can read two books a day (and absorb them, I've quizzed him before) but the other day he needed a plastic bag, and I had some cans in a doubled up bag; he asked me if I was saving the cans; he wanted to dump them out so he could use the (doubled) bag. I said "Howard, just take the outside bag off and us IT" "Oh, yeah," he said, as a light bulb went on over his head...isn't there a term like "idiot savant" for people like that??
ReplyDeleteI don't know why you let Howard follow you around. You'd be in Austin at least by now if you'd shaken him off.
ReplyDelete