Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Based On A True Story

Order of importance, Sleep...
I went to see Jerry my weed guy, who informed me that he had had only 4 hours of sleep over the past few days, and had opted to extend his waking state by dropping acid.

I have no problem around people who are dosed on acid. They seem to appreciate me also, when they are in that state...

From Jerry's, from whence I had sallied forth with a small bud, I rode along Bourbon Street. Three days after the latest shooting incident, I thought, as I looked down the street and saw not too many tourists.

This could be for the same reason that I hadn't brought my guitar with me into the Quarter to see Jerry; the weather forecast was for high gusts of wind and rain, also.

I had seen on the wunderground.com site that there were no rain clouds in our area, and that whatever little wisps of clouds that showed up were moving very fast. Thus, I thought that I could go out and busk on such a windy night.

It was only 7:45 PM, though, when I was surveying it; plenty of time for me to return to the apartment, grab my stuff and then be back and playing before 9 PM.

I have been working on a pencil sketch which I intend to send, to the person and her daughter depicted, as a Christmas gift. I had a blank sheet of drawing paper, nice and 12" x 18" I would say; and had pencils AND decent erasers.

Monday night, I had stayed in and worked on the drawing, as the forecast for that night was for the same high winds and heavy rain which wound up materializing, though not as high and heavy as predicted.

I had done what I thought was a pretty good job on the first half of the drawing, which was the face of Jasmine, the daughter of Jennifer, whose family I lived with when I was in Florida, 20 years ago now; yikes.

But then, I noticed, after I had set the drawing up alongside the picture that I was copying, that I could do more with the shading and so I grabbed an eraser and set myself to the task of shaping the nose on the girl.

I grabbed an old, crumbling, decrepit eraser that I had laying around as my only eraser in the house, and proceeded to mar the surface of the parchment after, instead of lightening up the graphite, the eraser smudged it into an even darker shade, and added its own eraser-colored stain to the mix. Any further attempts to erase brought the parchment close to ripping and rolling into little paper burs that would look like little tumbleweeds under magnification. Little black wads of paper that had been ripped but not torn free by the friction of the only eraser that I have in the house. Jasmine now had a blotch of freckles on her upper nose, instead of the sun hitting it.

I had learned a lesson in that hour; which is kind of a reverberation of a lot of things going on in my life.

Here I was fretting over how much money to spend on a harmonica, thinking on one hand that I should spend every cent on the very best that I can get my hands on, even if it leaves me without food, and a substandard eraser becomes instrumental in ruining (what I thought was) a piece of art.
The art gods were suggesting that I not just get the Jambone harmonica, which is on sale for $1.27 (regularly $6.99) and save a lot of money for other things.


I had sent off for the Suzuki Folkmaster in the key of C, earlier Monday afternoon, and was going to ride out the foul weather by staying in and working on the drawing; waiting for the harmonica to arrive, as I did.

The Suzuki's were priced differently, depending upon the key that they were in. I found this fascinating.

The cheapest key was the key of A, at $14.97. This stands to reason for the fact that I am sure this is one of the most popular keys and can be produced in mass quantities.

It was almost 3 dollars more for the key of A flat, and D flat. These are keys that harp players would add to their arsenals only after having amassed the more "common" keys.

It just made it seem appealing to me to pay a little more for the D flat harp. I could tune my guitar down a half step across the board, so it would be oriented like a regular D harp.

I would feel like I was playing in a fine, expensive, and thus exotic by default, key on the Cadillac of Susuki harps. All this because they charge 3 bucks more for those keys; I'm a sucker for that kind of marketing, I guess.

I paid $16.99 for the key of C; a dollar more than the bottom shelf key of A, but still less than the ones people buy for "that one song we do in C sharp."

There are some harp players that supposedly will pick up a cheaper harp because they only use it for one song in their repertoire, while they play high dollar "professional" harps on all the other songs. To me, this would just make the guy "hate doing that song."

Tuesday morning, I woke up on a mission to get an eraser.

It usually takes me 2 or 3 attempts at a pencil sketch from a drawing before I nail a pretty good one. So, I had my first practice sketch of Jasmine's face before I ruined it with the crappy eraser. Tonight (Wednesday) I think I will go out and busk, but not before having put and hour and a half into the drawing. It will be shown here on the blog; probably through the built in camera in this computer, as soon as it is done.

Soon, I will ride over to the dental place that I had missed an appointment at last week, and try to remedy the situation. I don't know what, exactly, they were planning to do at that visit. They are working in tandem with the Daughters of Charity Hospital. There are some stages of the planned dental procedure that cannot be performed at the one place, but can at the other. They may have been sending me to see stomatologists, to measure me for the dentures that will ultimately replace any teeth pulled.

This is a pain in the ass thing that I have to do on my "day off" because it is important in regards to the fact that some foods have become harder to chew after my latest episode of a tooth breaking and falling out. The last tooth was a porcelain one. It was in excellent condition for having crunched cashews for 30 years, but was basically undermined by the decaying of the bone that it was attached to.

So, it is off to the very important meeting with the dental clinic people, whom I am praying are not going to tell me that, since I missed that appointment, I have set my treatment schedule back 6 months ...and one of your teeth is going to become abscessed in probably about 4...

1 comment:

  1. Look for a type of eraser called Polymer or Magic Rub. Avoid ArtGum, Pink Pearl, etc.

    ReplyDelete

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