Today during math Shamara was smelling the white board. I mean, nose right up to it like something I'd do if I were joking. Omari went, "Man, Shamara, you belong in Special Ed!"
TJ looked down and did a half laugh, then started laughing really hard. Carlos looked in Omari's general direction (making sure not to look directly at him) with a confused look on his face.
"What? It's true! She belong in Special Ed!"
"Uh, this is Special Ed, Omari . . ." went Carlos.
"This isn;t no Special Ed! Man! People in here are dumb!"
"This is special ed, Omari." said Mrs. Freddi, who was working with us since she didn't have "a student".
Omari started looking all over the room.
"You're here because you're very special," said Mrs. Freddi, trying to be tender. I kind of groaned, but you can't help it if someone doesn't realize kids stop buying that kind of thing once they hit 1st grade.
"I'm not special!" said Omari in that high-pitched kind of exasperated voice. "I know what special means!"
"Man!"
What we know now about Karate tournaments is that the All Valley wasn't exactly true to life. No, the Quan's Martial Arts Championships didn't have packed bleachers, clearly defined antagonists running around chanting, "Cobra Kai!" And it definitely didn't have the PGA Tour-esq leader board with crowd gasps and cheers as new heros rose higher and higher. No, it didn't have any of those things, but still, there were things I took away anyway:
Almost five years
since you put on that worn green shirt
and stood under chirping cicadas in Austin, Texas.
All I really had at the moment
was the $1 flattened penny you'd asked me to save from Yosemite,
which we'd had a joke over,
which made it perfect.
And so it was.
In California, I mourned and then forgot.
So I have this student who's been suspended more than 20 days this year for hitting teachers and other students (mainly me). Totally unrelated to his disability. The district had to bring in this specialist team who spent a month observing him and finally developed a system to help keep him in line. Guess what he's working for? A smiley face. And if he doesn't quite earn it, you guessed it. A sad face.
Today he got a sad face during math, so he threw a book at my 60+ year old assistant and made a run for the street. We caught up to him, but then he broke for the picnic tables, jumped on one, and flipped me off. One of the behavior ladies said as calmy as can be, "Miguel, right now you have a sad face, but you can still earn a smiley face before lunch."
Worked like a charm. Smiley faces.
It was horrifying to reach for my Lie-Nielsen #5, only to find it trapped inside it's deep green Lie-Nielsen storage sock, sealed within forever by what appeared to be gallons and gallons of dry, crystalized superglue. Just like an arsonist, the conspicuously empty body of red label Hot Stuff super glue was the first thing to the scene, laughing at the poor plane from the wire shelf above. "Think you can store me forever?" it said. "Ha! Think again!" A pronounced burst running from cap to bottom along its white plastic seam.
So after half an hour of repeatedly soaking the crystalized sock with super glue solvent, #5 is finally free, needing only a bit more buffing to be glistening and shiningly renewed.
The sock was originally glued from just below where the angle of the blade meets the body, under the sole, and up around the cherry knob handle.
One of my responsibilities at school is to be part of a team that's developing school-wide guides for behavior. We're going about that by showing students how to be successful rather than, "don't do this, don't do that." The area we decided to focus on this year was the bathroom. I kid you not. It's been really fun. I get to develop quick bathroom etiquette videos like this:
While the other teachers had to go off to their cold caves to write lessons today, my principal told me to get to work on a new script. How's that for hard knocks? The humor in this next one will come out once all the elements are put together. At least I hope :)
Enter Quietly: Ninja
I'm going to be in a band! I couldn't be more excited. It's a church band, so we won't have a name (church bands aren't supposed to have them), but still, it's a band!
Church bands are still bands.
I'm going to be in a band!
And I feel like I did when I was 16, lugging my guitar to school on the bus, playing more when I got home. My sister coming down stairs to tell me my 5 watt practice amp, six inch speaker, was way too loud. When my mom paid a man who hadn't moved on, 15 dollars a week to bat his long hair across his shoulder, look down at me, play a chord, and ask, "you dig?"
16 was when I was a star. It was my time to shine. And I did, every tuesday in front of the Life Club. Every sunday night in youth group, from which my then partner has moved on with a successful career in San Francisco's theater "scene". It was my way of being someone my five or six friends could say they know. It was James. Guitar. All the wrong reasons. But in my heart, the reason I loved to hear an instrument make sound, all the right reasons too . . .
I'm in a band, and I'm afraid. I stalled for six weeks---when Brook and Paul originally said it was something we should do---until Dean so slyly slipped a note over the pew. "Look, are we going to do this or what?"
I'm in a band, and one of the members is over 50 years old.
I wrote back, "Yes. I'm intimidated, but yes," and less than covertly handed it back. Then, during the rest of the sermon, thought about it more and decided we should have an assignment. "Ok, we should take a small step first . . . lets all go home and put together a playlist of songs we like to hear, just so we can think about things and get an idea for our, kind of, I guess, collective taste."
I put mine together tonight, and it was hard. I don't really care for many Christian songs. Not antagonistically, but they're just not usually the things that stretch out to me. I put together a list of songs that help me stop thinking about myself.
I'm excited about being in a band. I was listening to Yo-Yo Ma in the car last week playing Gabriel's Oboe. "Man," I thought, "they must feel like they're lifting off . . . "
I'm in a band! I'm nervous and disillusioned with my ability to make appropriate sound . . . but I'm in a band!
So your calves have thick, long tendons connecting them to the ankles. Evidently mine weren't prepared or strong enough to jump rope for 10 minutes because I've been walking in mild pain all week. Which means I can jump and bounce around punching and kicking for a few hours a week, so long as I don't six-year old it up and use a jump rope.
Conditioning sucks.
Ghost won't get the best me of me,I thought.
It's unnerving to wake up to disembodied coruscations, wondering when Rosemary Timperley and her little, "Harry," snuck into my head.
I looked to my feet, then to my right, thanking God that the initial looming dark figure was, in reality, only a guitar resting in the chair; the flickering shadow in the bathroom was nothing more than the charging LED of my shaver; and nothing, though so obviously the creepiest of all said creepy spots, was scrawling down towards me from up above. But the fact remained, and this is where it gets kicky, something had just finished whispering to my left.
It was with great hesitance that my eyes rolled far enough over in the general direction for them to see, making damn sure no part of my body visibly followed. It was there that the dark, willowy figure appeared, in some ways wiggling, in some ways inching along the wall like a water noodle from hell.
"Oh Jesus!" I thought. You have got to save me. Protect me from whatever evil thing is about to go down!
They say you're supposed to say that stuff out loud in order to complete the holy halo, but it seems only reasonable that doing so is nothing short of waving the red cape in front of the bull and shouting, "Toro!"
"You're supposed to leave the Bible open, too. Like, on your bed. Pick your favorite verse," encouraged my wonderful friend Ruth.
Thank you, Ruth. Why don't I just whisper back, "Truth or dare?!"
Unsolved Mysteries used to do this to me when I was little, and Sci Fi's special documentary on Roswell just a few weeks ago let me wake up on Christmas morning thinking for a moment that my sister, shaking me awake to open gifts, was an alien.
And now, unfortunately, back to bed is where I have to go, hoping hoping hoping s/he doesn't come back to strike up another conversation. And if it does---if my evil wall noodle takes it to round two---I have a plan.
Step one? Whatever it takes, that thing's going to think I'm soundly asleep.
Step two? A silent, mortified prayer to God.
And step three. Picture that thing in a turtleneck.
My God, isn't music incredible? The way classical turns into a string of pearls, the way you hear the soul of the artist in a good pop song, the way motown sings the harmonic structure of jazz, and Boyz II Men sound like Giant Steps. The way the harmonic structure of jazz has so many twists, turns, surprises, a way of syncopating it all like nothing else? My god. And no, that's not meant in vain.
We were sitting in the hammock, talking, tonight. You would say something, and I'd think, in turn, in song. So I said them. "Have you heard Where the Angels Sleep? By Bebo Norman? Or Running to Stand Still? That's by U2." That's how I thought. And then we listened. And they did something. They went off the way music usually can.
There's a gift God gave us in music. What a gift it is to get to play a part in it. By playing, by singing, by listening, by moving; by cranking it, by getting it to make you shake, by massaging all those quiet passages . . .
It's amazing what pop can do over such simple chord structures; or the way gospel, soul, and blues can turn the textual fidelity of classical music on its head with all its extravagance and variation in the melody, the color of tone, it's long runs and licks.
The harmonies from central africa send shivers up and down and up and down my spine each and every time, and you know what they do? Those guys think the boys deserve a little fun, so they move the melody to the tenors and get the sopranos to sing the sixths. Altos get the root, and basses get whatever color's left missing. It's incredible.
This year I've wanted to be B.B. King. Brad Paisley. The girl in Sugarland. Hayley Williams from Paramore. Snoop Dogg. George Winston and every member of U2. Doug Young, Larry Carlton, and Tommy Emmanuel. A male Keyshia Cole with John Mayer backing Male Keyshia me on guitar. But when I drove home listening to Lauryn Hill sing Tell Him, as unfamiliar as it was, I wanted to raise my hand.
It's this, I thought. This is what takes me to God.
Traveling never really seems to work out the way you expect.
Last year, for instance. It was advertised as a luxury townhouse, but my uncle Stan went through each and every cupboard looking for the source of what he swore was the smell of fish lingering in the air.
"Judy, I'm telling you, it's fish. There are fish somewhere in this condo. I smell fish."
"Oh Stanley, would you sit down? Nobody else smells them."
"Judy, if I sit down, they're going to be in the next door I would've opened."
This year it was the door locks. Our door locks turned only a quarter of the way, stopping at 2, 5, 7, and 10 o'clock, so using the restroom was never without the thumbprint of anxiety over whether the door was, or was in fact not, open.
I am definitely feeling the withdrawals, writes my sister. Shouldn't I be in a kayak and not at my desk reading inclusionary housing plans? This year we hiked a sand trail in the coast redwoods, took a tour of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, kayaked on the ocean, slept on the beach, saw Larry Carlton at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, sailed on a catamaran, and had generally great times with family.
Rick also invited me over to hang out while he worked at his bench for an hour or two, Trish came over for a night with Ashley, and the family finally conceded that The Brewery just isn't all that good.
I loved our coastal week as usual, and also as usual, I'm feeling completely guilty for wishing I could simply live in Santa Cruz, build guitars, and work on a boat.
Men's Health Fall Guide to Style. Just what I wanted.
I'm flipping through, wondering if the Perry Ellis briefs could help me do chin ups from tree branches in public, too---or if the glossy crimson colored sleeveless parka could work for me. And where to do I buy the Abraham Lincoln jacket, anyway?
Then it came. A sweater that grabbed my attention, not for the ridiculous staging, but because it just looked good. The description called it the "Pringle of Scotland argyle sweater," but according to the internet, it's no where the be found.
Just as well. I don't exactly have $600 to drop on a black and white cashmere sweater.
We're in Santa Cruz for the week, but my strat project will be all ready for finish when we get home. Trying to replicate this finish job is going to be hard, but I'm looking forward to trying. In the meantime, finishing the artwork for the headstock was really fun!
Woah---whirlwind!
Will I ever finish the story of the passive aggressive master teacher from "heaven"? Not at this rate.
Today: rewired an amp to match the schematic of a vintage (1964) Vox AC30. Otherwise known as the amp played by The Edge.
Tomorrow: Michelle explores an amazingly cool field between Calvin Crest and Fresno Dome (with me) to satisfy my desire to follow it around the curve to the end . . . and I explore a fantastically creepy silo to satisfy her desire to see what it's like inside the old stomping ground of a satanic cult.
Yesterday: Roasted Dave Dack during his going away party in about two complete sentences. These things are terrifying. After you've been consecutively funny twice, people expect you to do it again. More than that, they expect you to take them to a different place. A place of laughing at something they never would've imagined on their own. So it's on you. And the whole time you're thinking, Damnit, why'd I have to be the one to get stuck with dry humor?
And the day before that: James Lyons was married. Relatives made me the impromptu DJ, armed with a foreign computer and a playlist populated with descriptive song names like, "Track 01," "Track 02." James and Diran are two of the most intelligent, creative, thoughtful, non-fronting people I know. They could both have doctorates in fine art (one of them does) and still manage to make my rinky dink projects sound like the most incredible things going.
4,500 people have watched me play guitar and sniff on YouTube, including one hater. That's a lot of people. I was once a month on the news, and 80,000 people watched that, but for some reason it doesn't make me feel nearly as out there as 4,500 via YouTube (including my hater).
This thing made me unexpectedly mad; then I realized two things.
1) Other YouTubers were rushing to my defense and sending me private messages to direct me to their comments to him.
2) After watching his video's (including his cover of the same song), my personal Simon Cowell can't be older than 15. Suddenly he was cute.
I've been working through a vocal program, but whenever I figure out how to sing in tune, I don't think I'll be able to do it quite like Marc Broussard (1:30 in is my favorite section).
TJ looked down and did a half laugh, then started laughing really hard. Carlos looked in Omari's general direction (making sure not to look directly at him) with a confused look on his face.
"What? It's true! She belong in Special Ed!"
"Uh, this is Special Ed, Omari . . ." went Carlos.
"This isn;t no Special Ed! Man! People in here are dumb!"
"This is special ed, Omari." said Mrs. Freddi, who was working with us since she didn't have "a student".
Omari started looking all over the room.
"You're here because you're very special," said Mrs. Freddi, trying to be tender. I kind of groaned, but you can't help it if someone doesn't realize kids stop buying that kind of thing once they hit 1st grade.
"I'm not special!" said Omari in that high-pitched kind of exasperated voice. "I know what special means!"
"Man!"
Friday, June 5
What we know now about Karate tournaments is that the All Valley wasn't exactly true to life. No, the Quan's Martial Arts Championships didn't have packed bleachers, clearly defined antagonists running around chanting, "Cobra Kai!" And it definitely didn't have the PGA Tour-esq leader board with crowd gasps and cheers as new heros rose higher and higher. No, it didn't have any of those things, but still, there were things I took away anyway:- I have the best friends ever. These folks sat in high school gym bleachers for 6+ hours waiting for my match. Let me say it again for emphasis: 6+ hours. Most of it excruciatingly boring.
- Sparring isn't real. In fact, it's a lot like flag football. Even though you can drag the guy all over the field, it doesn't matter for anything if he gets ahold of your flag.
- Rules or not, the other guy probably won't follow them. My opponent jabbed my face over and over again, making solid contact with my eye at least twice. "Your head is too strong," said the ref. "If you'd popped it back we would've given you the penalty point." Thanks. And if I only kind of gave him a stiff round house to the femoral?
- So I won't be Jet Li's stunt double anytime soon, but I'm proud of my performance. Watching the videos, I'm the one who waited patiently, who seemed relaxed, who didn't flail around, etc., which was both good and bad. I waited to move in, but you can't do that when the entire match is two minutes long, and you can't willingly take a strike when it results in the other guy getting a point.
- I didn't throw anything I couldn't land. That's a big deal. I wasn't grasping for straws or getting scared. I stood my ground.
- I was robbed. I thought the people telling me so after the match were just trying to make me feel better about the loss, but no. I had all kinds of legal, light contact in legal areas that didn't result in points. Clean thrust kicks to the core area, a jab to the forehead, and none of it counted in my favor.
- Silver isn't half bad!
Tuesday, May 5
Almost five years
since you put on that worn green shirt
and stood under chirping cicadas in Austin, Texas.
All I really had at the moment
was the $1 flattened penny you'd asked me to save from Yosemite,
which we'd had a joke over,
which made it perfect.
And so it was.
In California, I mourned and then forgot.
Monday, April 27
So I have this student who's been suspended more than 20 days this year for hitting teachers and other students (mainly me). Totally unrelated to his disability. The district had to bring in this specialist team who spent a month observing him and finally developed a system to help keep him in line. Guess what he's working for? A smiley face. And if he doesn't quite earn it, you guessed it. A sad face.
Today he got a sad face during math, so he threw a book at my 60+ year old assistant and made a run for the street. We caught up to him, but then he broke for the picnic tables, jumped on one, and flipped me off. One of the behavior ladies said as calmy as can be, "Miguel, right now you have a sad face, but you can still earn a smiley face before lunch."
Worked like a charm. Smiley faces.
Super glues that attack, and the handplanes who pay the price
It was horrifying to reach for my Lie-Nielsen #5, only to find it trapped inside it's deep green Lie-Nielsen storage sock, sealed within forever by what appeared to be gallons and gallons of dry, crystalized superglue. Just like an arsonist, the conspicuously empty body of red label Hot Stuff super glue was the first thing to the scene, laughing at the poor plane from the wire shelf above. "Think you can store me forever?" it said. "Ha! Think again!" A pronounced burst running from cap to bottom along its white plastic seam.So after half an hour of repeatedly soaking the crystalized sock with super glue solvent, #5 is finally free, needing only a bit more buffing to be glistening and shiningly renewed.
The sock was originally glued from just below where the angle of the blade meets the body, under the sole, and up around the cherry knob handle.
Monday, February 9
One of my responsibilities at school is to be part of a team that's developing school-wide guides for behavior. We're going about that by showing students how to be successful rather than, "don't do this, don't do that." The area we decided to focus on this year was the bathroom. I kid you not. It's been really fun. I get to develop quick bathroom etiquette videos like this:
While the other teachers had to go off to their cold caves to write lessons today, my principal told me to get to work on a new script. How's that for hard knocks? The humor in this next one will come out once all the elements are put together. At least I hope :)
Enter Quietly: Ninja
Monday, February 2
I'm going to be in a band! I couldn't be more excited. It's a church band, so we won't have a name (church bands aren't supposed to have them), but still, it's a band!
Church bands are still bands.
I'm going to be in a band!
And I feel like I did when I was 16, lugging my guitar to school on the bus, playing more when I got home. My sister coming down stairs to tell me my 5 watt practice amp, six inch speaker, was way too loud. When my mom paid a man who hadn't moved on, 15 dollars a week to bat his long hair across his shoulder, look down at me, play a chord, and ask, "you dig?"
16 was when I was a star. It was my time to shine. And I did, every tuesday in front of the Life Club. Every sunday night in youth group, from which my then partner has moved on with a successful career in San Francisco's theater "scene". It was my way of being someone my five or six friends could say they know. It was James. Guitar. All the wrong reasons. But in my heart, the reason I loved to hear an instrument make sound, all the right reasons too . . .
I'm in a band, and I'm afraid. I stalled for six weeks---when Brook and Paul originally said it was something we should do---until Dean so slyly slipped a note over the pew. "Look, are we going to do this or what?"
I'm in a band, and one of the members is over 50 years old.
I wrote back, "Yes. I'm intimidated, but yes," and less than covertly handed it back. Then, during the rest of the sermon, thought about it more and decided we should have an assignment. "Ok, we should take a small step first . . . lets all go home and put together a playlist of songs we like to hear, just so we can think about things and get an idea for our, kind of, I guess, collective taste."
I put mine together tonight, and it was hard. I don't really care for many Christian songs. Not antagonistically, but they're just not usually the things that stretch out to me. I put together a list of songs that help me stop thinking about myself.
I'm excited about being in a band. I was listening to Yo-Yo Ma in the car last week playing Gabriel's Oboe. "Man," I thought, "they must feel like they're lifting off . . . "
I'm in a band! I'm nervous and disillusioned with my ability to make appropriate sound . . . but I'm in a band!
Sunday, January 25
So your calves have thick, long tendons connecting them to the ankles. Evidently mine weren't prepared or strong enough to jump rope for 10 minutes because I've been walking in mild pain all week. Which means I can jump and bounce around punching and kicking for a few hours a week, so long as I don't six-year old it up and use a jump rope.
Conditioning sucks.
Saturday, January 24
Wondering if you're still awake?
Hearing whispers to my left, I kept my eyes closed long enough to be sure they'd gone done and hit mute.Ghost won't get the best me of me,I thought.
It's unnerving to wake up to disembodied coruscations, wondering when Rosemary Timperley and her little, "Harry," snuck into my head.
I looked to my feet, then to my right, thanking God that the initial looming dark figure was, in reality, only a guitar resting in the chair; the flickering shadow in the bathroom was nothing more than the charging LED of my shaver; and nothing, though so obviously the creepiest of all said creepy spots, was scrawling down towards me from up above. But the fact remained, and this is where it gets kicky, something had just finished whispering to my left.
It was with great hesitance that my eyes rolled far enough over in the general direction for them to see, making damn sure no part of my body visibly followed. It was there that the dark, willowy figure appeared, in some ways wiggling, in some ways inching along the wall like a water noodle from hell.
"Oh Jesus!" I thought. You have got to save me. Protect me from whatever evil thing is about to go down!
They say you're supposed to say that stuff out loud in order to complete the holy halo, but it seems only reasonable that doing so is nothing short of waving the red cape in front of the bull and shouting, "Toro!"
"You're supposed to leave the Bible open, too. Like, on your bed. Pick your favorite verse," encouraged my wonderful friend Ruth.
Thank you, Ruth. Why don't I just whisper back, "Truth or dare?!"
Unsolved Mysteries used to do this to me when I was little, and Sci Fi's special documentary on Roswell just a few weeks ago let me wake up on Christmas morning thinking for a moment that my sister, shaking me awake to open gifts, was an alien.
And now, unfortunately, back to bed is where I have to go, hoping hoping hoping s/he doesn't come back to strike up another conversation. And if it does---if my evil wall noodle takes it to round two---I have a plan.
Step one? Whatever it takes, that thing's going to think I'm soundly asleep.
Step two? A silent, mortified prayer to God.
And step three. Picture that thing in a turtleneck.
Monday, January 12
My God, isn't music incredible? The way classical turns into a string of pearls, the way you hear the soul of the artist in a good pop song, the way motown sings the harmonic structure of jazz, and Boyz II Men sound like Giant Steps. The way the harmonic structure of jazz has so many twists, turns, surprises, a way of syncopating it all like nothing else? My god. And no, that's not meant in vain.
We were sitting in the hammock, talking, tonight. You would say something, and I'd think, in turn, in song. So I said them. "Have you heard Where the Angels Sleep? By Bebo Norman? Or Running to Stand Still? That's by U2." That's how I thought. And then we listened. And they did something. They went off the way music usually can.
There's a gift God gave us in music. What a gift it is to get to play a part in it. By playing, by singing, by listening, by moving; by cranking it, by getting it to make you shake, by massaging all those quiet passages . . .
It's amazing what pop can do over such simple chord structures; or the way gospel, soul, and blues can turn the textual fidelity of classical music on its head with all its extravagance and variation in the melody, the color of tone, it's long runs and licks.
The harmonies from central africa send shivers up and down and up and down my spine each and every time, and you know what they do? Those guys think the boys deserve a little fun, so they move the melody to the tenors and get the sopranos to sing the sixths. Altos get the root, and basses get whatever color's left missing. It's incredible.
This year I've wanted to be B.B. King. Brad Paisley. The girl in Sugarland. Hayley Williams from Paramore. Snoop Dogg. George Winston and every member of U2. Doug Young, Larry Carlton, and Tommy Emmanuel. A male Keyshia Cole with John Mayer backing Male Keyshia me on guitar. But when I drove home listening to Lauryn Hill sing Tell Him, as unfamiliar as it was, I wanted to raise my hand.
It's this, I thought. This is what takes me to God.
Saturday, August 16
Traveling never really seems to work out the way you expect. Last year, for instance. It was advertised as a luxury townhouse, but my uncle Stan went through each and every cupboard looking for the source of what he swore was the smell of fish lingering in the air.
"Judy, I'm telling you, it's fish. There are fish somewhere in this condo. I smell fish."
"Oh Stanley, would you sit down? Nobody else smells them."
"Judy, if I sit down, they're going to be in the next door I would've opened."
This year it was the door locks. Our door locks turned only a quarter of the way, stopping at 2, 5, 7, and 10 o'clock, so using the restroom was never without the thumbprint of anxiety over whether the door was, or was in fact not, open.
I am definitely feeling the withdrawals, writes my sister. Shouldn't I be in a kayak and not at my desk reading inclusionary housing plans? This year we hiked a sand trail in the coast redwoods, took a tour of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, kayaked on the ocean, slept on the beach, saw Larry Carlton at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, sailed on a catamaran, and had generally great times with family.Rick also invited me over to hang out while he worked at his bench for an hour or two, Trish came over for a night with Ashley, and the family finally conceded that The Brewery just isn't all that good.
I loved our coastal week as usual, and also as usual, I'm feeling completely guilty for wishing I could simply live in Santa Cruz, build guitars, and work on a boat.
Wednesday, August 13
Men's Health Fall Guide to Style. Just what I wanted.
I'm flipping through, wondering if the Perry Ellis briefs could help me do chin ups from tree branches in public, too---or if the glossy crimson colored sleeveless parka could work for me. And where to do I buy the Abraham Lincoln jacket, anyway?
Then it came. A sweater that grabbed my attention, not for the ridiculous staging, but because it just looked good. The description called it the "Pringle of Scotland argyle sweater," but according to the internet, it's no where the be found.
Just as well. I don't exactly have $600 to drop on a black and white cashmere sweater.
Monday, August 11
We're in Santa Cruz for the week, but my strat project will be all ready for finish when we get home. Trying to replicate this finish job is going to be hard, but I'm looking forward to trying. In the meantime, finishing the artwork for the headstock was really fun!
Monday, August 4
Woah---whirlwind!
Will I ever finish the story of the passive aggressive master teacher from "heaven"? Not at this rate.
Today: rewired an amp to match the schematic of a vintage (1964) Vox AC30. Otherwise known as the amp played by The Edge.
Tomorrow: Michelle explores an amazingly cool field between Calvin Crest and Fresno Dome (with me) to satisfy my desire to follow it around the curve to the end . . . and I explore a fantastically creepy silo to satisfy her desire to see what it's like inside the old stomping ground of a satanic cult.
Yesterday: Roasted Dave Dack during his going away party in about two complete sentences. These things are terrifying. After you've been consecutively funny twice, people expect you to do it again. More than that, they expect you to take them to a different place. A place of laughing at something they never would've imagined on their own. So it's on you. And the whole time you're thinking, Damnit, why'd I have to be the one to get stuck with dry humor?
And the day before that: James Lyons was married. Relatives made me the impromptu DJ, armed with a foreign computer and a playlist populated with descriptive song names like, "Track 01," "Track 02." James and Diran are two of the most intelligent, creative, thoughtful, non-fronting people I know. They could both have doctorates in fine art (one of them does) and still manage to make my rinky dink projects sound like the most incredible things going.
4,500 people have watched me play guitar and sniff on YouTube, including one hater. That's a lot of people. I was once a month on the news, and 80,000 people watched that, but for some reason it doesn't make me feel nearly as out there as 4,500 via YouTube (including my hater).
This thing made me unexpectedly mad; then I realized two things.
1) Other YouTubers were rushing to my defense and sending me private messages to direct me to their comments to him.
2) After watching his video's (including his cover of the same song), my personal Simon Cowell can't be older than 15. Suddenly he was cute.
I've been working through a vocal program, but whenever I figure out how to sing in tune, I don't think I'll be able to do it quite like Marc Broussard (1:30 in is my favorite section).
Monday, July 28
