Diary: April 2004

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Friday 9th April

Right, right, April it is, it is indeed.

Ahem.

Yes, haven't actually done that much, to be fair.   But have been kinda unwell, - in fact I've been "kinda unwell" for a bit of a while really ...   I'm not usually in the peak of health during the winter months, as I've probably mentioned before in these pages.   I don't like winter.    It is dark and cold and nasty and it makes me sad.   More to the point, it makes me sick!   And I had the misfortune to be ill for most of last summer as well, so it's all rather run together into one big "ill" ...

But yes, although general unwellness between, say, September and March is no reason to stop the press, over the past couple of months I've been going, well, it's almost Spring, and it's getting soothingly light these days, can I be better now, can I? ... and basically I've been expecting to feel better in a couple of days for, well, months now, and it hasn't quite happened yet.   I was hoping not to have to mention it, you know what the British are like, don't like to make a fuss, stiff upper lip, chin chin, down the hatch ... oh, sorry, mind wandered.   It must be because it's sunny outside my window, I'm thinking about heady summer days, afternoon picnics in the park, a glass of wine, ... perhaps another glass of wine, it is so refreshing ...

Sorry, did it again.  So, yes, am held up by waiting to return to full health before doing any proper band rehearsing (too much standing up involved), but as I have mentioned previously, I have been taking the opportunity to do some pre-rehearsal warm-up practising, and as soon as I have more strength than my current boiled-jellyfish status, I wil do ... something else!   Aha!!

So.   Yes, we apologise for this delay, which was caused by a delay.

Oh, one more thing - to return to my musings last November, re: reconciling my need to get my stuff "out there" with what seems to be quite a strong internal resistance to having my stuff out there, in the public domain, etc, be it music or the thoughts I narrate in these pages, I've come to the conclusion that if I can get to a stage where I genuinely don't care what anyone else thinks, everything will be fine!   Thank you, thank you, you've been great.   The on-stage self-belief of Bill Hicks, for example, would be handy.   How to achieve this is less clear.    I'm sure there must be some section of the brain that can be neatly excised to produce such a result, hmmm ... pass me that old Biology textbook, would you?

Monday 26th April

Blimey, been a while since I've managed two updates in one month - I use the term "update" loosely, as things were pretty up to date before, in that not very much has changed!   Then again, adding a new bit of text definitely counts as an update in the literal sense, especially when it's got today's date on, can't get much more up to date than that now, can you?

See, this is just the sort of incisive debate that people flock to these pages to read.   See, even when I'm not actually doing anything of use as regards music, I'm still enriching the collective consciousness of the planet with these philosophical workouts.   Truly I can feel fulfilled.

But apparently not just yet.   I can feel a bit rubbish, that's easy.   Still missing from my life in a serious way is creating a big noise, somehow controlled by very thin steel wires via an electromagnetic transducer.

That reminds me, that is my plan for the week - it's been on the things-to-do list for a long time now, to be frank - I need to get myself a proper (i.e. cheap copy of a more famous make of) guitar.   Being that my current electric, bless it, which I gained in exchange for a tape deck in the late 80's somewhere, and later sold because I never used it (and possibly needed to buy a bass, or was it when I wanted to get an acoustic for the first time?) and eventually bought back off the guy I sold it to when he had a proper (proper proper, that one) guitar, is a bit ... well, let me just say it's not quite ideal for me.

See, I just can't bring myself to criticise it, which shows you how sentimental I am.   I'm not that sentimental about guitars - for example, after hearing that Jimi Hendrix used to sleep with his guitar, I thought that it might actually help my guitar playing to follow his example, by somehow forging a deeper bond between man and machine etc., and might even make me seem cooler and more appealing to girls (though how putative females were supposed to be influenced by, not to mention aware of my nocturnal guitar proximity, unless in my company at bedtime anyway, is a mystery, and anyhow in that instance the presence of a musical instrument in the conjugal bed would presumably be short-lived), but in the end I concluded all that happens is you suddenly wake up to a sharp pain when you turn over in your sleep, and bony extremities make brisk contact with big chunk of wood.   This is why sleeping with other people is generally a more common choice among the general population (more yielding to the elbow, unless you get unlucky).   Unless I was missing a vital spiritual element in my approach.

So, no sleeping with guitars for me, see what a sensible non-sentimental down-to-earth type chap I am.

Well, having established that, I can tackle the important issues of the day, such as ... what I was talking about.

Oh, yes, buying a guitar.   Yes, having now played, well, three or four different electrics, I now realise that I need to get a different kind of guitar than the one I have.   I'm not exactly sure, for I also believe I need to re-learn my guitar style a bit - obviously I need to re-adjust to the electric having been playing almost exclusively acoustic for literally years and years.   But it's largely a question of trying a few, and seeing if I can afford any of the ones I like.   Last year I tried the big name guitars, just to get a sense of perspective - Gibson Les Paul and SG, Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster.   Decided I liked the Strat best, which was a total shock to me, having had an 80's-full of Dire Straits et al Strat-aversive conditioning.   But then I remembered Hendrix, and I was like, oh yeah, Strats don't have to mean dreadful 80s blandness and white-boy "funk".   Phew.

So that was alright.   But I didn't have a grand to spare at the time, so I left it.   Come to think of it, I'm not sure I could pay that much even if I had it   Somehow I feel I should get a second-hand Strat copy from a dusty little music shop, or out of the paper.   Aha, that'll be my previously unasserted punk ethics.   Ahem.   Problem is all the dusty little music shops seem to have closed down, and I don't buy newspapers because they make me too angry.   Even Bargain Pages.

Oh well, maybe I'll be inundated by offers of second-hand guitars from site visitors.   Or with.    Inundated with.   Can you be inundated "by" something?   Hmmm, I do value accurate use of language.    Communication's hard enough as it is without getting yer words wrong.

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