Feels Like 88

9 Dollar Thursday

I am feeding Harold the cat one can at a time these days, spaced apart according to when I come by them.

Last night, I played for a little over an hour and made the above amount.

I took a break to move my bike, which I had had to lock up around the corner and out of sight of the half dozen web cams; and then just never went back to playing.

I have a closet shelf full of Disney movies on VHS cassette, and it oil-ifies me just to think of them...

I was in that closet digging around for a button up shirt to kind of change up my look.

Thinking about applying for a job at the Trader Joe's on Veterans Blvd. has perhaps put me in a button up shirt frame of mind.

It is Friday and I blew off a trip to the plasma place for 25 dollars because Jacob Scardino mentioned us jamming again, like we did last Friday at the house of Bob, his guardian. The "M.O.C." (Museum of Crap) Jacob calls it.

But, there has been no contact made by Jacob at this point, and it is getting too late to make the plasma run, given the contingencies that threaten to make it a fruitless trip. It is 81 degrees and feels like 88, with an 80 percent chance of rain.

What is that on my mirror?!?

The twenty five bucks will be there tomorrow, and I guess I will roll the dice, against 4 to 1 odds of getting rained on, and go out and busk in a little while.

Some positive things have happened.

A: Having songs that I once played coming back into my memory (perhaps because of the self-help dialogues that have me imagining the "me" of the past, with all the shortcomings and faults that led to the regrets and insecurities and guilt that I harbor today and which have caused me to miss out on opportunities which have been right in my face all along) is a good thing.

"If you can play 'Misty,' then you can play anything,"

Making that list of 1,000 songs that I could play, were I just to be reminded of their existence, seems to be inching closer to the top of the Things To Do list.

Use them or lose them, might have an element of truth to it, but actually...

Were I to reclaim about 224 songs from the past, then I would be in a position to develop the facility to "sound out" just about any other song that I know the melody to.

"If you can play 'Misty,' then you can play anything," a guy who plays rhythm guitar in one of those Old-Timey bands along with a banjo guy and a trombone, once told me.

This is kind of true in the sense that "Misty," goes through the "cycle of fifths" so that several keys are visited in it. The way the melody flows over those different keys is another study in how melody notes sound against different backdrops.

And there was a formula followed by song writers, especially back in the era of Frank Sinatra et. al. which involved the song going through little blocks of chords which, through cycling through the circle of fifths go into other keys, but the composer is always just a half step slide from slipping back into the original key.

Like in the example above, the E flat major 7th chord on the last line winds up being the E flat 6th which is the same chord with only one note changed.

The composer might have gone right from the first chord to the second like John Lennon did in "Across The Universe," but this progression gets to it by detouring through the C-F-Bflat (each a fifth apart) before it. And, so, it is "jazzier" than the Lennon song.

This same chord progression is in "Yesterday, When I Was Young," by Eddy Arnold, and in "It Was A Very Good Year," by Frank Sinatra. Which is no coincidence, since they are both "wistful" songs about lost youth. "Misty" is wistful in it's own way.

So, making a list of at least two hundred songs will soon be at the top of my list of things to do. I want to have it laminated, even.

I would extend what the guy told me to include that, if you can play "Bluesette," by Toots Thielemans, you could also play anything, including "Misty." That one is even more over-the-top as far as trying to hit all 12 notes in one song.