Depression And Scientology

I stayed at the Uxi Duxi, sitting outside, doing yesterday's post until my battery died on the laptop.

It died just as I had clicked on a link on a photo hosting website that is notorious for "redirecting" one to other websites, even the ubiquitous one that pops up and causes a voice to sound, saying something like "Warning, your computer is under attack; don't shut it off; call this number immediately and speak to one of our technicians; who will charge you a fee off your credit card; otherwise your whole hard drive will be deleted and you will lose everything; warning; warning..."

I have gotten to where I can head this one off at the pass by paying attention to the address in the tab that pops open. If it isn't a link to the photo, which will start with the address of the photo hosting site, then I "X" it out before it even loads.

But this time, my battery died and the screen went black right at that point.
I walked back to the apartment, wondering if my laptop was even going to work when I got home.
All the ideas about what kind of music I was going to work on when I got there had become dependent upon "If my computer even works, that is."

I had torn through the 20 dollars that I had started the day with.

$3.00 for an all day bus pass...this would have been good if I was to use it for more than one trip, which I didn't.

I had ridden to the hippie bar, after stopping to spend $3.12 on a creatine monohydrate drink.

I had spent $6.00 at the Uxi Duxi, which had left me, after spending $2.80 on Harold the cat, with the 5 dollars and change that I threw on the coffee table, before feeding the critter the lone can of food that I had, and then sitting down to either read or practice out of the Mel Bay book, or record more versions of "Carry Me Back To 'Ol Virginny." I wasn't sure which.

That piece of music, I'm not going to be through with until I have recorded a version of it fit to be played on NPR radio. This will be the way I will test myself to see if I am ready to progress to Grade 2.

I really wish I had had a teacher, back when I was 14, who could actually play the pieces expertly, and point out the details to me "...you need to let these two notes ring while you play the next two; so you actually have to re-position your hand so your fingers are coming straight down, otherwise the side of the first finger might mute the lower of the notes that should keep ringing..."

The measure to the left demonstrates this. In order to let the two (dotted) notes ring while the next two sound, the first finger has to come down on the second of them from an angle of almost straight above, so as not to touch the adjacent string.
This is just the second measure of the song, and my teacher at the time, Brian, should have stopped me with: "Nope, you gotta let those notes ring for three beats. It can be done, but you have to change the angle of your hand. You just have to teach your muscles to move in a certain way...now, let's just play through that one measure repeatedly, focusing upon that..."

Instead, Brian, at The Music Box By Salvatore (a store that was open in 1993 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts but which can't even be found by Google now) would do things like come into the lesson room, playing the opening guitar riff to "Oxygen," by Foreigner, which was "really cool," because that song was climbing the charts, and could be heard blasting from the stereos of kids near and far.

Cranking out that riff, and sounding just like the guy in Foreigner kind of implied that the guitarist had everything he needed to go on and sell millions of records, tour the world, get laid, be famous, expose his art to a worldwide audience, wear cool clothes, have long hair, expensive cars, jewelry, cars, boats and a lot of cool guitars.

Then, after my awestruck reaction of "Wow, my teacher really is good; I bet he could start a band and they would be one of the most popular in town" wore off, Brian would say: "OK, where were we; what did I give you last week?"

I found Brian on Facebook; guess he plays drums now...

"Um, 'Carry Me Back To 'Ol Virginny,' and this minor scale in the second position..."

I would then plunk my way through the thing, not keeping steady time, not letting the two notes ring for three beats; while Brian sat there with a "I hope I can milk several months of lesson fees out of this kid before he looses interest in the instrument" look on his face.

It was so not something that you would associate Foreigner or Led Zeppelin or stardom in general with, that it begged the question: "Why do I have to learn these queer songs; what am I going to do, get up on stage in a nightclub and say into the mic: 'This next one is called 'The Grey Goose,' and it goes a little something like this,' and then turn the knob of my Marshall Stack amplifier up and rock the place?"

So, I am now trying to undo the damage done to me at the Grey Goose level, by a poor instructor, back when I was 14. The motif to Led Zeppelin's "Dancing Days" is a good example of a single measure that requires that the guitarist use his muscles in just such a way to allow certain notes to ring while others are hammered on and pulled off, and the picking hand needs to be involved in a way that the pick is hitting the strings at a certain time and in a certain direction, up or down.

Another handicap for me at 14 was the fact that I had a very limited exposure to the wide variety of guitar music "out there," and would buy up books such as Mel Bay's "Bluegrass Guitar Method," thinking that I was going to broaden my playing skills, but would soon toss it aside (where it would land on top of Mel Bay's "Mastering Spanish Guitar" book) after concluding that I had tried it, and I guess, wasn't really into "Bluegrass."

It would have been nice to have had Tommy Emmanuel walk into my room with a guitar and say: "Here's how I play that one..." and then rip through it.

"That's that song?!?" I would probably ask.

"Sure, 'Orange Blossom Special' is a classic. This is a good book, it has a lot of great tunes in it...This Spanish Guitar one looks interesting, too."

I decided to stay up all night, reading.

I read about some of the things that cause people to become depressed, in a book that Travis Blain had left behind (as a rent payment) named: "The Art of Power." The book drew on a lot of Buddhist philosophy.

I then went back to "The Lords of Discipline," by Pat Conroy, and read about 10 pages, before deciding that I was going to jump around between the dozen or so that I was in the middle of reading, all with bookmarks at various points in them.

I want to be "well read," but don't want to read each book from start to finish before going to the next, because that makes me feel like I might never get to some of them.

Instead, I kind of set it up like a high school curriculum where I would get a bit of philosophy, science, math, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Ethiopian, and some fiction in a few different genres in each sitting.

In "Lords of Discipline," I had gotten to a part where the characters, who were students at a military academy were in an argument because one of them had been making jokes about Vietnam.

Another one was saying that those jokes should become off limits in their dorm, because they had friends that were dying over there.

This turned into a big moral discussion about war in general.

I returned the bookmark to between pages 85 and 86, and then went to the Bhagavad Gita.

The latter book, I just skip around in, it has no bookmark. So, I decided that I would go from where I was in the Conroy book, page 85, to the same one in it.

True to form, it seems, that page was all about the morality of war and violence, and touched upon the same subjects that the plebes had been talking about in Lords of Discipline. Leave it to the Bhagavad Gita to be part of such a "coincidence," which no longer surprises me.

Krishna says, by the way, that when a murdered is hanged, the king is doing him a favor by dissolving his bad karma and helping along in his next life. I wished I could have gone back to the dorm in the Conroy book and enlightened the plebes with that.

Then, while playing with Harold the cat, whose fir matches the cover of the Bhagavad Gita, my attention was drawn to the small pile of stuff that Travis Blain had left against the wall in my place. I moved a pillow off the top of a milk crate to discover that he had left a few of the "Dune" series of books by Frank Herbert (not contiguous, of course, because they were left by Travis Blain, who is "a few volumes short of a series" himself, and pretty much useless to me, unless I wanted to begin reading Return to Dune; the final episode, or whatever) the Edgar Alan Poe Review, and a book on Scientology.

I felt like I was becoming more scholarly, at the expense of having not gone out and made any money that night, which was some consolation. I had to stop and look up some words like "fustian" while reading the Poe Review.

It was one day after I had posted to my blog about a bugle blowing "revelry," I think was the word I used, that I saw the very same thing spelled "reveille" (a French word) somewhere, and had intended to go back and fix it, but haven't yet.

I had to smile, because, Alex In California, who plays the bugle, and who has called me out over my occasional misspelled words, would be sure to catch that one! I suppose he has come to expect such things in this fustian blog of mine.