Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Les Paul Died today.

ThinFast is leaving for a couple years, and this makes me very sad. She was my favorite work-friend-who-is-a-girl-but-only-in-a-totally-platonic-way-honey-i-swear. I'm sure there is a word for that in German. She refers to me as her "work husband".

Ironman, my brother-from-another-mother, having cast his eyes longingly to the West for many years now, has finally caved, and weighs anchor for that halcyon coast in a little bit. Gone forever. How fucked up is that?

These are the types of events that could make me cry, if I weren't already an emotional cripple. As it is, I’m feeling pretty hard-done-by at the moment.

Wife (whose charity and patience I can never hope to deserve) keeps trying to get me to talk about my feelings.

Which, perversely, is hard to do without making everything somehow worse.

Obélix, recent hauptmann to my obergefreiter, has also been very supportive during these trying times, asking me how I feel, gifting me with desserts, trying to fondle my buttocks, "do [I] need a hug?", etc. Like his fictional namesake, he is enthusiastic, sensitive, fiercely loyal, energetic, and sometimes a bit soup-au-lait. A really good guy, in general, though a little naive. For example, he thinks he’s sneaky. Thinks I don’t know that he reads this blog (hah! piégé, mon ami!).

Obélix has a healthy appetite for good food. He eats the way the rest of us wish we could. So it was almost painful to watch him try to negotiate our communal platters of Ethiopian food last night, when we hit the town for a last hurrah, to wish ThinFast bon voyage (and for God’s sake, a speedy return, please!). Poor guy.

Well, I thought the food was great. After getting our hands dirty at the restaurant, we hit up Pang Pang Karaoke with about ten other people, and all crooned at each other until our throats were raw.

Surprise of the evening: SoftServe, who you’ve never heard of, but who’s been with PerpetualStartup since that ill-advised foray into the sleazy world of Precious Metals Redistribution. This guy has a voice like velvet, drizzled with honey, rolled into a fine cigar, and smoked with 12-year-old port. We were all suitably impressed. Still waters indeed.

Anyways, so that’s basically it. Pretty down in the dumps. But on the up side, Wife is once again knocked-up. That's right, I've been busy manufacturing replacements for all those bastards who are leaving.

Screw you guys!

Also, Directrix will be returning to PerpetualStartup in September (probably), so that'll be another friendly face.

P.S.: It has come to the attention of the editorial board that there has been a recent precipitous decline in the quantity and quality of intellectual content in this blog. So, next time I'll try and give you something educational. We'll start easy, maybe some Cantor Set Theory or something.

Maybe I Have, Like, A Problem?

Well, I went and did it. I bought another guitar. Am I addicted? Is it time for an intervention? What am I, crazy? Stupid?

Yeah, okay, I walked into that one.

Still, it’s a pretty sweet axe and all. No way will my loving wife, indulgent of my multitude of vicissitudes and eccentricities though she may be, allow me to ever buy a third one, surely? Only one way to find out, I guess...

FYI, For they initiated in the super-secret “we’re so cool” lingo of the guitar dork, and just because I want to crow, here’s what $500 gets you:

• Quilt-top PRS McCarty clone (very high quality. I actually played this one before I bought it).
• Seymour Duncan Pickups (SH-2n “Jazz” neck, SH-4 “JB” bridge)
• Sweet abalone vine inlays

Check out Raven West guitars. You’ll thank me later.

Guitar Player XOR Safe-Cracker

Sorry, no Christmas post. I had something lined up about how the war against Christmas parallels the War On Drugs, the War On Terrorism, and is really an expression of North American societal self-loathing, but I just couldn't pull it together. God I'm pathetic.

At some point, amidst the unwrapping, the face-stuffing, the food coma and credit card bills, my guitar arrived. Santa shipped it direct from China. My impish face glowed, my eyes lit in child-like wonder as I unwrapped it. Squeals of glee no doubt erupted.

I played it for about a week, but eventually I had to bring it into the shop for the "setup". This is something all electric guitars go through, usually before you buy it from your friendly neighborhood purveyor of musical oddities.

The setup is an array of delicate adjustments and fine-tuning that I couldn't be comfortable delegating to my own mechanical acumen (or dearth thereof), and so I had to give my baby up. I cried, but took solace in the fact that I'd see her again. I'm still waiting.

After a week of playing, I had basically lost all sensation in the fingertips of my left hand. The cold, tingly, frostbitten feeling was annoying at first, eventually soothing.

Someone said these are supposed to be calluses, a necessary step on the path to guitar mastery, but they don't really feel like calluses, like the kind you might get after a couple weeks of lifting weights, or shoveling dirt or something. If you've ever futzed around building model airplanes or the like, and accidentally gotten crazy glue on your fingers, it approaches the feeling I'm attempting to describe, a thin skin of unfeeling, coating your fingertips. The urge to gnaw on my own fingers until the feeling returns is unbearable.

Thus, along with the other trivial male pursuits of looking-without-seeing, listening-without-hearing, eating-without-tasting, and sex-without-loving, I now master touching-without-feeling. I think there's something ironic in there somewhere, that learning to express yourself through music, arguably the most direct conduit to human emotion, should require this deadening of the senses. And so now, these delicate instruments, my human hands, purpose-built for the business of feeling, with more nerve endings than the rest of my body combined, are denied their purpose, and die a little, that my music (such as it is) might live.

Is this a loss? Or a win?

I've heard it said, and maybe this is an urban myth, like becoming a ninja by dint of decades of studying with Tibetan monks, etc. But I've heard it said that safe-crackers actually use sandpaper on their fingertips, to remove the first couple of layers of skin in order that they can feel the tumblers of the lock clicking into place. I suppose the gist is of a heightened sensitivity to the mechanical puzzle before them. If this were true, then I have removed this occupation from the realm of possibility. In the quantum "many worlds" theory, I have amputated and cauterized the set of universes that are home to Cool Ranch Luke, master safe-cracker, in favor of that other set of universes containing Cool Ranch Luke, guitar player wannabe.

P.S.: If anyone out there knows how to get that little pencil icon to show up beneath my posts (the "edit post" link), let me know. In recent weeks, it has magically disappeared, and I miss it.

Bucking The Hum

Ironman doubts my commitment. He thinks I can't do it. He thinks I'll bail, or lose interest, and in his defense, he has solid historical evidence to back up his claim.

To you, Ironman, I say: Suck it.