What, Who, Where Why?

I woke up on my bed, with a wadded up blanket under my head and part of it over my upper back. I had to get my bearings. Harold was still by my side, where he had fallen asleep.

A song of mine was still playing on repeat. I'm going to have to bring up the lead vocal about 2 db and bring up the special effects channel about 2 db...

The flu-like symptoms persist. But so does them going away after I drink a cup of strong coffee and start moving around.

Of course I hope it is (the ugga booga). That would mean that I am getting immunity at the small cost of feeling just a little chill each morning.

I wonder why, when they printed those v********* cards, the ones that people have to have stamped and dated to document each s***, they printed them with 4 blank spaces. How could they have known that 4 of them were going to be needed? They have a crystal ball? Or is it a geo-political move to take gas burning cars off the roads, and drain the bank accounts of all small business owners and funnel it into the coffers of the few Amazon's of the world?

To give everyone stimulus cash and unemployment benefits; then, tax it every time it changes hands until it is all back in the treasury; and nobody has any stuffed in a mattress, or in a savings account.

Ear Rings

I have a ringing in my ears, lately, that, once I notice it, can be annoying. 

I thought it might be my digital TV or my laptop emitting a high pitched whistle, but the volume of it remains constant, as I move around the place.

So, it doesn't surprise me that Harold has an ear issue also.

I wrote here about how, the time I got shot in the side of the face by a paint ball, Harold came home with a bloody mark on the side of his face; same side and in the same place as my paint ball mark.

I have always suspected that some organization might be using us residents as guinea pigs to test out that microwave beam equipment that diplomats in China had been complaining about, in exchange for giving us a place to stay.

Seeing if it drives us crazy, or if we report whistling noises in our ears...

Sacred Heart Apartments sure had started out with grand intentions. Each resident had been assigned a caseworker, who, along with knocking upon our doors each Monday morning to do a "wellness" check, were keeping records and making reports on our progress as human beings.

Tim, my caseworker, would ask me questions such as: "What do you feel would be something that might cause you to leave here?" The only sense I could make of that question had to do with the fact that several people, who had gotten apartments here, chose to leave, with most of them having gone back to sleeping on cardboard in the French Quarter. That way, if they woke up and craved a cigarette, for example, they could just walk to a nearby ashtray and pick butts, or approach a stranger, who might be within 100 feet of the bush they were sleeping under and bum one. 

Not so at Sacred Heart apartments, where they might wake up in an apartment with all the amenities, except free money, food, alcohol and drugs. The drugs would come by trading their food stamps for them, and so they would wake up with the cupboards bare, nothing in the refrigerator, no cigarettes, and perhaps having the shakes from there being no alcohol to consume.

In the Quarter, one walk down the length of Bourbon Street would typically produce a fish bowl full of alcoholic beverage, should they just rifle through the trash cans for half full bottles of beer that had landed upright in the can. These would be the ones that people had been in the middle of drinking when they encountered a bar or club they wanted to go into, but didn't want to hurriedly finish before going inside.

Taking that tour, while panhandling everyone they saw along the way, might have had them returning to their piece of cardboard with a fishbowl full of beer, a half pack of cigarettes and a sack of weed, or maybe even a piece of crack, purchased out of their "Excuse me, can you help me out with something to eat?" fund.

Those people had been miserable at Sacred Heart.

Tim used to prod me a bit, se he could finish the report as quickly as possible.

"How are you benefiting from living at Sacred Heart?" could be covered by me saying that it gives me a place to keep my music equipment safe, and where I could work on recording an album on my laptop, just like the artist "Burial" has done..

"Perfect." Tim had about a dozen people to see, and would save me until last, usually showing up in the late afternoon, because he knew I didn't go to sleep until around 5:30 in the morning; being unable (unwilling, actually) to unwind and go to sleep right after arriving home at 2 a.m. after busking.

Now, most of the caseworkers have been permanently laid off, and we have no hot water about once a month for a few days. It always seems to go cold on a Friday evening, and always has to remain so "until Monday, when the maintenance guys come in."

The "happy and grateful" exercise had been difficult, upon waking at 10:30. I could have bagged up my busking gear and gone right out, but decided to drink strong coffee and ride my bike up to the Winn Dixie, where I was unable to find anyone who would buy me a couple cans of food for Harold in exchange for me buying them a greater value of food off my food stamp card. Going there a half hour before they close is working against me in that regard because there are usually only a handful of people in the store then. The one guy I approached told me that he only had EBT himself. I had approached him because he looked like a normal guy; not an entitled loser, too lazy to go out and work.

I wasn't my usual ball of energy, who looks at the aisles full of unopened boxes, and thinks: "I could put all that stuff up on the shelves, by myself in half the time that it is probably going to take these 3 people!"

The Mel Bay Stuff

I am getting ready to make a video on Page 2 of Mel Bay's Book 2, a song called "Senorita," which is one that I had moved on from at the age of 15, thinking: "Yeah, I can play it," before turning the page to the next song.

I was disillusioned into thinking that I wasn't going to become a more advanced player until I got up into Books 7 and 8, where the sheets were more laden with polka dots, and qualified as "performance pieces" i.e. if you mastered them, you could actually play them in concert somewhere.

I assumed that "Senorita" was just so simple an arrangement that the performance of it was never going to sound like more than a first year student plunking away, and it would only ever be suitable for entertaining the likes of a 7 year old student.

My approach in recent months, though, has been to not blame the piece for not being interesting, but to see a different analogy in it.

If you were to take one word from the Spanish language, to maintain the "Senorita" connection, that needed to be pronounced using the rolling "r" sound, you would have to learn very precisely how to do that in order to sound like a native speaker of Spanish. That involves a tongue motion that an English speaker would never be required to make. And a certain embouchure of the mouth.

It was through playing the harmonica that I became involved in these different manipulations of the mouth cavity. For, to bend a note downward on the upper 3 holes of the harmonica requires making a sound that would be somewhere between a "th" and a "ch" sound, if you were to be able to hear it. But, since you are drawing air inward, you wouldn't. Try speaking while inhaling, and everything is going to sound like a croaking sound. That is because your vocal chords are not a harmonica.

The information age we live in is amazing! It appears that "Senorita" from Mel Bay Modern Method For Guitar, Book 2, is actually this very modern piece, composed by Mateo Carcassi some time around 1820. I was lead to this information after reading a comment left on one of the existing "how to play" videos on "Senorita."

"Does anyone know who wrote this?" was the comment.

Back to the language analogy, if you were able to correctly make the "r" sound and learn how to pronounce just that one Spanish word correctly, it would open up a whole vocabulary of other words to you.

So, learning to play "Senorita" perfectly will give you tools that will come in handy all the way up to the "performance" pieces in books 8 and 9...
I searched for that song and found one guy who had about 2,000 hits on his video where he supposedly teaches how to play it.

"I could smoke that guy," I thought. He was worse than me.

But, then I found a guy playing it as "Andante in A minor" on a classical guitar and it was more my speed.

Singing Bird Clock

After setting the Singing Bird Clock back an hour a day ago, I found that the wrong songs were coming out of the birds on each hour. A Googling of "How to reset a Singing Bird Clock" has helped me to set the world right again. Now the morning dove once again coos at 7 in the morning, instead of sounding like a house wren. That's a relief... 

Video Uploading

Uploading a 5 minute video (with still shots; nothing really moving) is going to take a little over an hour. I have 41 minutes left, according to YouTube...

It's going to be a sparse outline of a song taken from the Halloween Night Jam..

When I add parts to it, like bass guitar; and maybe re-arrange the images, I suppose it will take over an hour each time to upload it again.

I guess that keeps YouTube from being inundated with billions of frivolous videos.