A Brief Visit From Me To Me

I need to write this quickly. I am in the midst of a battle against a disease (Crohn's....SEVERE Crohns's). It isn't fatal. But it narrows life. It drains color from it and replaces what used to be just living with unexpected and expected pain. With discomfort which is not quite pain. With a new distrust for my body. We are at odds. The reason I write this here is that I haven't played a guitar in weeks. Maybe a month. I don't work on them. I don't think about them. I don't delight in the feel of one in my hands. My life, as I said, has narrowed. Flattened. Washed out. There are cures and I not ashamed to try them even though, in research, it seems they are similar to doing away with your moth problem by burning down your house with you in it. No Moths. There. I need to stop before I want to stop writing. One thing...right before this became awful I got a Gould (sic) guitar that was handmade (it had to be) in Israel. It is quite the thing. Okay. Let me get off before I am someone else.

Vintage Olympia OM C1 CE

Isn't this just so prettty?
Soon it will be in my hands.
I am such an addict!

Guitar work seems to be distracting enough from my distractions that I get distracted.

So....I'm sick. Not I'm gonna kick off tomorrow so gather round and let me share my final wishes sick. But sick enough that the sickness distracts me from any activity that needs concerted concentration over a long period of time. Leaving an activity and then returning after a bout of what I'm bouting is exhausting and requires putting the head in the same place. This is not always easy. But guitar work seems to be distracting enough from my distractions that I get distracted. The changing of strings, The oiling of a fretboard. The examination of the saddle and the nut. The repairs I am capable of. Contemplating the repairs I would like to be capable of. The choosing of the tool and then the re-choosing of a tool. The playing. Ah the playing. I'm improving. It has taken a few decades and the passage through many events both personal and universal. Playing around with a chord or a note. Hearing how that sounds on a variety of guitars. They are all different in how they sing. My ears have become more discerning. I now hear the precision of a high note in the midst of a muddled low note. How each guitar plays the same progression differently. How I play each guitar differently.  How the same string of notes played on a different guitar can either grow or just wither. The difference in the gauge of the strings and how they feel under the callouses of the tips of my left hand. The differences in the brands of the strings and the component metals and coatings.  I order my tools and then reorder them. I love the smell of the wood and the oil and the polish. I smell each guitar like a rose and inhale the differences in age and wood. Mahogany does not smell the same as rosewood. The feel and texture. A satin finished cedar top is so markedly different from a gloss finish of spruce. In the midst of the slow rearranging of my bodies priorities I have been given....shit....I have given myself a continuing low intensity joy. When I told my son Oren that I was ill but that I probably wouldn't kick off for a while I got to joking about the funeral. I said he should try to do it as cheaply as possible. He asked me if he could use a guitar case for the casket. I love that kid!

They come and go..........

 The above painting is

Abstract Guitar by Trisha Lamoreaux

I've been off of this for quite some time and it was not from any desire to ignore the thing. It came from confronting various not quite serious diseases that, in truth, are serious. Really. Mostly just annoying but cumulatively exhausting. I have begun to develop a new relationship with my interior and exterior. It pisses me off. I've fed it for years. Washed it almost every day and done my best to provide it with its various animal oriented pleasures. What do I get in return? An array of stuff that has resulted in my ingesting, every day, so many pills that I can make little pill men or pill faces every morning.. The palette of colors and variety of sizes has a certain degree of  interest but it is very fleeting. But, enough about me....let's talk about guitars.

They are coming and going with great rapidity these days. Having had  my income reduced.....REDUCED!!! I have started to buy and sell guitars. Some mean little. I have an ARIA upstairs that has a severe case of Martin envy. Not that it sounds awful or that it looks dreadful. It doesn't sound dreadful. It is just a little soulless.

There are others that have come my way that are seriously difficult to consign to the sale sign. There was another Aria. Oh twas a magnificent thing McGee. Looked real and solid and sounded like bells with cinnamon over ice. There's a Yamaha that is a known quantity. Been around. Reproduced and multiplied. Inhabits whole sub continents. It has had labels of all hues. From the coveted red to the respected tan and a few stops in the black region. But it is solid and light and plays like someone who has rediscovered tap dancing on bronze strings. My fingers have such an easy time moving up and down the neck. There is no effort to a chord. Certainly it ain't no slide guitar.

So, eventually, I do sell them. They are brief but passionate affairs of short lived intense devotion. I carry pictures of them in my wallet and sigh when I show them around the bar.

Electronic Amber: Melissa Hechtman, Melissa Delaguna

I am writing this for a particular reason. The reason is that if anyone does a search on the web with Google, Bing or any of them and they want to know about my late wife (that is just so polite isn't it?) Melissa Hechtman before marriage Melissa Ann Lopez deLeo deLaguna they will end up with a woman, who is nice I suppose, who works at some University in Florida. They would not find any mention of my wife. So...here is the mention. Now she will show up in a search and she will not be lost to the internet. It is a method of preservation. A sort of electronic amber.

"Nothing's for always. I won't pretend."

It's not that I've run out of things to write about. I haven't. I've been running a guitar business and that has taken so much time. But if you're going to have your own leetle business there is a great pleasure in having it be about something you love. I love guitars. I do. I do. I love the feel of my callouses on my left hand's fingers. I love the screwing around without regard to official chords and tunings. What I do is buy and sell guitars. I love the buying. I am not overly keen on selling. However, as I am in need of whatever extra cash I can create I just grit my teeth ( and the dentist has high co-pays by the by) and sell the damn things. Currently there are two. I'll get boring here and you can bail out if you feel a need. No hard feelings. One is an itty bitty little travel thingy called a "Joey" by Washburn. I am no fan of Washburns. For those of you who care for them I ask your forgiveness, I don't like Washburn because even though there was indeed a real company called Washburn that was in, I hope I'm right here, Chicago it went mechullah (Google the word. Yiddish if you must know). Bye bye. The name has been resurrected and there is no connection with the original company other than the fact that, I think, the new company is in Chicago and...well....that's it really. It is not a Washburn. It is something else. Not a bad something else but something else. I understand the marketing aspect. I do indeed. Another similar story can be woven about Epiphone. I actually did a good deal of reading about that company. It is gone also. However it is now the name Gibson puts on it's Gibsons that look like Gibsons but aren't Gibsons because they are made somewhere else where the medium of exchange is not the slowly shrinking greenback. Not that they aren't nice for the money. Well, let me take that back. Some of them are okay. I had one once. A Jumbo. It took three takes to get that picture distributed. I had to go through two of them before I got one that played like it was a guitar and not a representation of a guitar. More of an art project. Oh...this little thing. (I do go on.) is just so adorable. Looks like a larger ukulele or Bilbo's favorite guitar. It is lovely. Solid spruce top. Ovankol back and sides and a neck that is a weapon in six states. "Please mister don't hit me with that guitar. I really did enjoy the song. Honest!" Sounds like feces in E but dances a soprano sort of beauty in A. I am selling it. I do not want to lose it but I will sell it. I am hard man. Rock hard. Knife at the ankle and a sense of doubt about everyone. Arghhhh.  Another one is more disturbing. It is an Aria (owner of the Japanese company that made it was anmed Arai. See. Aria...Arai? Get it. See if you take the i and the a) It is just beautiful. Beautiful. It has a headstock that angles in. I like that. Less stress on the strings. It has a solid spruce top and mahogany back and sides and neck and headstock also I think. It is magnificent. I mean that. It sings like a combination of Janis Joplin. Maria Muldaur and Judy Collins. It picks great and strums wonderfully. It could disguise itself as some luthier's wet dream. I love it. I will sell it. I have to. It's a business isn't it?  For me a very difficult one. However it seems consistent with my life. A life where things kept changing without anyone sending me a note about it. Wrote a song once. "Nothing's for always. I won't pretend that the things I've seen today will come again. Nothing's for always. So far away from now I count the places that I've been. And I count my sometimes friends." So careers come and careers go. Lovers have come and gone. Wives. Gone one way or another. Some out of annoyance some suffering from a severe case of dead. I can't forget most of them. I have remnants of the careers. Radio. Politics. Money. Company's  I've owned and businesses I've started. Places I've lived. So. This exquisite guitar will go. It will. I will never forget it. That's me. I am my own index. Hey. "Nothing's for always. I won't pretend."

I think sometimes about what I've and who I sang to. Of the songs I've written and forgotten. I think of the moments when I expressed in song what I couldn't express in words all by themselves. Tonight with the guitar in my hand I think of them and feel a little overwhelmed. But just a little.