Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
I Miss My Guitar
There, I've said it.
Since the stroke I've tried to maintain an at least partially philosophical attitude towards the lack of fine muscle control in my left hand. As artifacts of the stroke go, it's pretty minor. I had to lose something or else the lesson wouldn't have stuck. If I were given the choice on October 2nd to take this very outcome or roll the dice, I'd take this outcome and be grateful. I've heard them all. I've said them all. At one point or another, and to one degree or another, I've believed them all.
But goddammit, I miss playing the guitar.
I've had a guitar in my hands since I was 12. And I was terrible for years, but that didn't stop me from playing. I played little three-section three-chord pieces and slowly stretched my musical knowledge, my library of chords and which go together euphoniously, my technique, my ear, and my voice (the biggest challenge of all).
Lo and behold, one day I found myself playing for the sheer entertainment value of playing, and I knew I had taken a step. One day I figured out my first song by ear (Livin' After Midnight - I didn't say it was a difficult song) and I knew I had taken another step.
Poker night chez the Very Josie's was enhanced by the fact that there was a left-handed guitar on the premises - so I could for once pick up someone else's guitar and entertain people. You right-handed people have no idea how lucky you are in this regard, by the way.
I practiced even harder after that because even though I was little more than noodling around after I got knocked out of the tournament, I was playing for an audience, and I wanted to be good for them as well as me. Most weeks I would make sure I had a new number for them, so they could hear something fresh from me.
One day after playing "Things We Said Today," by the Beatles (of course), every person in the room I was in started clapping. For me and my mediocre playing and sub-mediocre singing. And I knew I had taken yet another, quite big, step.
I was a guitar player, more than 30 years invested in my hands, my ear, and my throat, and though I certainly wasn't great, and maybe not even good, I was solidly mediocre, and that made me happy.
I liked acoustic pieces, and I was good at songs where you had to pluck the melody along with the chord changes (like Norwegian Wood, by You Know Who, and for which a recording exists of my performance). I developed a quirky little number of my own invention that was born of a strumming-hand exercise, whose chording could be done with one finger - my name for it was Single Digit because of that. My next project, a song that was well within my grasp as a player, was the transcendent Allman Brothers song Little Martha, a tune that pulls at the heartstrings of every guitar player around the world:
(It's not as difficult as it sounds; it's in an open tuning which really does a lot of the work for you)
I was a guitar player, more than 30 years invested in my hands, my ear, and my voice.
And it's all gone now.
I tried to get it back. I would keep my guitar in my hands all day - fall asleep with it - forever trying to regain that elusive control of my left hand, my strumming hand, my picking hand - and never making an iota of progress.
It's all gone now.
It's gone and I am in that category of people who used to play something. Not so much due to any exercise of free will, but because of the 10,000 small yet catastrophically bad decisions I believe I've already discussed to death on this forum and elsewhere.
So here it is: it's 4:00 in the morning and I'm going to fill you in on a secret.
Yes - I have my health. Yes - I have my independence. Nobody needs to do anything to me or for me, to live my life. Yes - the story has, on balance, a happy ending. Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
But god dammit, I used to be a guitar player. Was part of my identity. Was something that I was proud of.
And I miss that. I miss that a great deal. And some days the platitudes that I tell myself to salve the pain of that loss ring a little hollow.
Thanks for listening. Go see a doctor if you haven't recently.
Since the stroke I've tried to maintain an at least partially philosophical attitude towards the lack of fine muscle control in my left hand. As artifacts of the stroke go, it's pretty minor. I had to lose something or else the lesson wouldn't have stuck. If I were given the choice on October 2nd to take this very outcome or roll the dice, I'd take this outcome and be grateful. I've heard them all. I've said them all. At one point or another, and to one degree or another, I've believed them all.
But goddammit, I miss playing the guitar.
I've had a guitar in my hands since I was 12. And I was terrible for years, but that didn't stop me from playing. I played little three-section three-chord pieces and slowly stretched my musical knowledge, my library of chords and which go together euphoniously, my technique, my ear, and my voice (the biggest challenge of all).
Lo and behold, one day I found myself playing for the sheer entertainment value of playing, and I knew I had taken a step. One day I figured out my first song by ear (Livin' After Midnight - I didn't say it was a difficult song) and I knew I had taken another step.
Poker night chez the Very Josie's was enhanced by the fact that there was a left-handed guitar on the premises - so I could for once pick up someone else's guitar and entertain people. You right-handed people have no idea how lucky you are in this regard, by the way.
I practiced even harder after that because even though I was little more than noodling around after I got knocked out of the tournament, I was playing for an audience, and I wanted to be good for them as well as me. Most weeks I would make sure I had a new number for them, so they could hear something fresh from me.
One day after playing "Things We Said Today," by the Beatles (of course), every person in the room I was in started clapping. For me and my mediocre playing and sub-mediocre singing. And I knew I had taken yet another, quite big, step.
I was a guitar player, more than 30 years invested in my hands, my ear, and my throat, and though I certainly wasn't great, and maybe not even good, I was solidly mediocre, and that made me happy.
I liked acoustic pieces, and I was good at songs where you had to pluck the melody along with the chord changes (like Norwegian Wood, by You Know Who, and for which a recording exists of my performance). I developed a quirky little number of my own invention that was born of a strumming-hand exercise, whose chording could be done with one finger - my name for it was Single Digit because of that. My next project, a song that was well within my grasp as a player, was the transcendent Allman Brothers song Little Martha, a tune that pulls at the heartstrings of every guitar player around the world:
(It's not as difficult as it sounds; it's in an open tuning which really does a lot of the work for you)
I was a guitar player, more than 30 years invested in my hands, my ear, and my voice.
And it's all gone now.
I tried to get it back. I would keep my guitar in my hands all day - fall asleep with it - forever trying to regain that elusive control of my left hand, my strumming hand, my picking hand - and never making an iota of progress.
It's all gone now.
It's gone and I am in that category of people who used to play something. Not so much due to any exercise of free will, but because of the 10,000 small yet catastrophically bad decisions I believe I've already discussed to death on this forum and elsewhere.
So here it is: it's 4:00 in the morning and I'm going to fill you in on a secret.
Yes - I have my health. Yes - I have my independence. Nobody needs to do anything to me or for me, to live my life. Yes - the story has, on balance, a happy ending. Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
But god dammit, I used to be a guitar player. Was part of my identity. Was something that I was proud of.
And I miss that. I miss that a great deal. And some days the platitudes that I tell myself to salve the pain of that loss ring a little hollow.
Thanks for listening. Go see a doctor if you haven't recently.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
A Poker Game, the Winning Dame, the Hands Are Lame
A big weekend for your Uncle Crafty, after a week which did not start off at all well.
One of the members of my erstwhile poker game, Noodles, lost his wife on the evening of April 8. I found out about it the following morning. She lost a battle against cancer and heart disease and left behind a grieving family. She was 52.
I was pleased to see that Noodles' friends rallied around him the way that they did, and if there's ever such a thing as coming back from something like this, he's got the infrastructure around him to do it.
I tagged him with the name Noodles, by the way. It's what we used to call someone who wasn't all there upstairs. One day Josie's sister Cricket insinuated as much to him and I suggested hell, why don't we just call him Noodles and have done with it. It stuck. A propos of nothing, giving someone a nickname and having it stick is one of my most sublime joys, so I was quite happy.
But moving on to the weekend: I played some poker at the ol' Sportsman's Club. We had 18 runners pitching cards all together. Did really well but didn't cash. I got a monster pile when, holding AA, two people went all in in front of me, and the aces held up. It was the third or fourth round of blinds and I was still putzing around at my original stack size, so I was the beneficiary of a massive triple-up and then some. That, plus some good aggressive big-stack play, let me coast to the final table
But, the blinds got big, the cards went away, I got to a point where I had to take a few chances, make a few steals, and nothing worked. I lost a good chunk when I overplayed a weak ace. Bottom line, I finished 6th, two out of the money.
But that's not the worst of it. The player that took me out, the player who would eventually win it all, the one player in the world who has my number more than any other, was none other than...Very Josie. I was shorty short, holding 10-6 as BB, caught top pair, shoved, got called with a higher 10, and that was the story of me. GG Crafty.
One funny little thing was that my hands seemed to have betrayed me yesterday. I was fumbling cards, spilling drinks, fucking up shuffles...hell, it got so bad I didn't want to take a piss. I've never had such a clumsy day before.
I wonder if this is what it feels like to be clumsy. I've never been hugely coordinated but I've never been clumsy in the sense of fumble-fingered. I guess I am now. Or maybe - hopefully - this was a one-day anomaly. I reckon time will tell.
Anyway, that was my weekend. It was absolutely grand, even though I didn't cash. Had a lot of laughs, a lot of fun, a lot of good food, and being in that club I secondhanded so much smoke it was like I was smoking myself. Ugh, can you imagine smoking yourself? Gross.
That's it for me. Go see your doctor if you haven't lately.
One of the members of my erstwhile poker game, Noodles, lost his wife on the evening of April 8. I found out about it the following morning. She lost a battle against cancer and heart disease and left behind a grieving family. She was 52.
I was pleased to see that Noodles' friends rallied around him the way that they did, and if there's ever such a thing as coming back from something like this, he's got the infrastructure around him to do it.
I tagged him with the name Noodles, by the way. It's what we used to call someone who wasn't all there upstairs. One day Josie's sister Cricket insinuated as much to him and I suggested hell, why don't we just call him Noodles and have done with it. It stuck. A propos of nothing, giving someone a nickname and having it stick is one of my most sublime joys, so I was quite happy.
But moving on to the weekend: I played some poker at the ol' Sportsman's Club. We had 18 runners pitching cards all together. Did really well but didn't cash. I got a monster pile when, holding AA, two people went all in in front of me, and the aces held up. It was the third or fourth round of blinds and I was still putzing around at my original stack size, so I was the beneficiary of a massive triple-up and then some. That, plus some good aggressive big-stack play, let me coast to the final table
But, the blinds got big, the cards went away, I got to a point where I had to take a few chances, make a few steals, and nothing worked. I lost a good chunk when I overplayed a weak ace. Bottom line, I finished 6th, two out of the money.
But that's not the worst of it. The player that took me out, the player who would eventually win it all, the one player in the world who has my number more than any other, was none other than...Very Josie. I was shorty short, holding 10-6 as BB, caught top pair, shoved, got called with a higher 10, and that was the story of me. GG Crafty.
One funny little thing was that my hands seemed to have betrayed me yesterday. I was fumbling cards, spilling drinks, fucking up shuffles...hell, it got so bad I didn't want to take a piss. I've never had such a clumsy day before.
I wonder if this is what it feels like to be clumsy. I've never been hugely coordinated but I've never been clumsy in the sense of fumble-fingered. I guess I am now. Or maybe - hopefully - this was a one-day anomaly. I reckon time will tell.
Anyway, that was my weekend. It was absolutely grand, even though I didn't cash. Had a lot of laughs, a lot of fun, a lot of good food, and being in that club I secondhanded so much smoke it was like I was smoking myself. Ugh, can you imagine smoking yourself? Gross.
That's it for me. Go see your doctor if you haven't lately.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Anatomy of a Con
You probably know, on one level or another, what I'm going to say, so I'm going to wait until the end to say it.
And at the risk of boring you with an overabundance of self-congratulation, let me just say that this one was perfect. It had a little bit of everything - shocking news, a voyeuristic peek behind the curtain, hints of salacious details, and over all, a con job worthy of the movies. To say nothing, by the way, of a textbook primer on how improvisation works, and why it's so effective when executed well.
The idea was born last year - a year ago today, in fact. I tried to run a weak-ass gag past you, when I announced to the world that my wife of (at the time) 18 years was asking me for a divorce. The more gullible among you were hooked like mackerel - stupid mackerel, it must be said - but most of you saw through the ruse with ease. I decided right then that next year's effort would be epic.
I talked to Josie and we hatched a plan (history does not record who had the basic idea) to have a very public, very ugly fight on our blogs. I rubbed my hands together with eager anticipation. It was a perfect plan. She would say something catty, I would overreact, and the fun would begin.
Well, life does in fact sometimes intrude upon the pulling off of a prank, and 2012 saw both of us remove ourselves from the ranks of the every day blogger. For my part, 2012 was a year of some pretty big changes - I managed to screw my head on straight, bury my dad, and point myself in a better direction, at least until October 2nd, at about 9:30 pm.
So when last week rolled around, and I remembered the plans we made last year, I called Josie and suggested that we run the con, with a few changes. Integral to the new plan was that it would take place in March, when guards were down.
I didn't really know exactly how things were going to go; I just knew that I would mention that Jo and I were estranged and imply that I didn't want to give out details. And then something wonderful and magical happened.
In improvisational comedy, there are a few rules to follow if you want things to go smoothly. One of them is, whatever you take, add something to it. Neither one of us had the faintest idea of what exactly we'd be fighting about when I wrote my post - my lack of detail wasn't just me pretending to be discrete.
But then Josie, taking what she got and adding to it, said that she called the cops on me - an absolutely brilliant detail. I took that and added the fact that she was drunk, and that she had given me a bruise. She took that and added the fact that she should have kicked me in the balls, which implied some kind of untoward behavior. I added some very specific details, like the peach vodka drinks (here's a rule to live by: if you're gonna lie, be specific), and a drunken misunderstanding of contact. Through my feigned anger I was chortling with glee.
One detail I think sold the whole thing was that I expressed dismay that details were being let out - that instead of being eager to tell the world of our ersatz set-to, I was reluctant to do so.
The only blemish on this prank was the fact that one of you figured it out, however belatedly. The "inch-high private eye" award goes to...........Cranky! She sent me an email basically saying "heyyyy.....wait just a cotton-pickin' minute here," in response to which I basically admitted things and asked for her silence on the matter. Congrats, Crankster, for sussing out the truth. All the rest of you, you can take the hooks out of your mouths now.
And just for the record, Jo and I are fine. The event we alluded to didn't even come close to taking place; in our long association together I've never once gone out drinking with her. She likes an only occasional drink, and I'm not a tippler at all.
Well, that's about it from me. Hope you enjoyed the bread and circus. And now I think it's time to say what you all knew I was going to say: APRIL FOOLS!!
Friday, March 29, 2013
A pretty weak week
First things first: I'm doing ok. My neurologist is tweaking my meds because he thinks that what I'm taking to regulate my cholesterol is making me fatigued and with no stamina. I hope this comes to something; I'm pretty sick of having just no energy.
Secondly, and I don't really want to dwell on this too much, but it appears as if my friendship with Josie, whom you may remember, is over. I won't go into the details but we each said and did some things that we both regret - well, certainly I regret things for my part; I can't speak for her, and really don't want to. Suffice to say that I'm a little hurt, a little angry, and what I'm getting instead of apology or even explanation is attitude and lip.
Part of the Crafty Southpaw 2.0 experiment is getting rid of the complicating and negative elements of my life, and if that means having no more contact with a friendship that was over a decade long, then so be it. I'm sure I'll miss her at some point, but that point has not yet arrived.
In other news, my general practitioner and my neurologist are of two differing opinions on how to best manage my care. Neuro wants a stress test; GP thinks that's not the best use of time or resources. I told neuro that I had a family history of cardiac issues; he seemed to think that all the more reason to have the test. So I have that to dread in the coming week.
In other other news, it seems that the family gums have finally lost the ability to hold most of my teeth, and I'm having yet another batch removed and having an alveoplasty, a scraping of the bone in my jaw to make for better adhesion for a partial plate. I was told to expect pain in no small quantity. Hey, that should match the emotional pain of this fucking Josie thing perfectly.
Not a good week for the kid.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
An Open Letter to Memphis Mojo, Who Asked Me How My Rehab Was Going
First of all, thanks for asking. It's nice to know that some people out there still think of me.
To answer your specific question, my rehabilitation is proceeding apace. There were certain things that I can do just as well as I could before the stroke, and there are things that still give me a bit of grief. I still can't play my guitar with any degree of ability, and my penmanship is changed. It hasn't gotten worse, exactly, because it was never good to begin with. But it's a different kind of messy now, and the act of writing is still a little bit unnatural.
My legs are really where I'm finding myself most affected. When I left rehab, the areas where I needed most help were related to balance; walking up and down stairs, showering standing up, and the like were all things that I could technically do but not without some difficulty. My neurologist asked me to walk heel to toe and that was surprisingly difficult as well. Now that's licked but I find my legs stiff and tired almost all the time — both of them in fact. The vacation that I took in December to visit my wife's family put a strain on my legs that I still haven't recovered from. Now whenever I am upright, walking or standing, it's a safe bet that I'm in some sort of discomfort.
I find myself with an overall lack of strength and stamina; if called upon, for example, to move some boxes from hither to yon (my dictation software interpreted that last phrase as "from Hitler to yawn"), I would need to stop and rest way earlier than I would have before.
I tend to look at things philosophically; from a nuts and bolts perspective, I'm in no more discomfort than, say, someone with a chronic bad back. Given the universe of potential outcomes of the stroke, I'll take that any day of the week and twice on Sundays. And, without getting too metaphysical about things, I think that even though calling my recovery from the stroke a "wake-up call" is paying short shrift to the work that I put in and trivializing the whole event, there's something to be said there. I might not wish to admit it, but it really was a wake-up call of one kind or another. I made it a practice to ignore matters of health, and it bit me square in the ass. If I had made a 100% full recovery from this, maybe I would have no reminder of how bad it was before it got better. Maybe I had to lose something for this lesson to sink in to any meaningful extent. Would I have chosen to lose my ability to play the guitar? No. The lesson was a sharp one, I guess; all the better to remember when I feel like not taking my pills in the morning.
Anyway, that's how I'm doing. I hope you're doing well, and everyone else in the blog world, you wacky sons of bitches. Thanks for thinking of me.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Calling All Born-Again Christians
First let me point out that I respect your view point and worldview, as I respect everyone's view point and worldview, even though I don't agree with it. But hey, I'm a live and let live guy anyway.
But there's something I've been thinking about lately, and perhaps you can tell me your rationale for this particular quirk of behavior that Christians all seem to share: as a rule, born-again Christians do not drink alcohol. For some reason they think that drinking is a sin. Now I don't understand this, because one of the most famous of the ways that Jesus was said to have shown His divinity was that He turned water into wine. Now, this was at a wedding. They were celebrating a joyous event with wine, and at some point they ran out. They HAD water; they weren't in any danger of dying of dehydration. Wine was not something they had to drink; wine was something they wanted to drink. And Jesus was said to have used His unlimited powers as God's only begotten son to give the attendees at the wedding (and presumably Himself) more wine! If nothing else, this shows both the societal attitudes of the day towards wine, and Jesus' own attitude towards it.
Why, then, has the drinking of alcoholic beverages become such a taboo among the Christian community? It seems like the attitudes against alcohol are ours, no one else's. If you don't want to drink, because you don't think that alcohol is something you want to put into your body, fine. I personally don't drink. One might say I don't do it particularly well. So I don't do it at all. But that is my choice. Do Christians not drink alcoholic beverages because they think somehow it's against Bible teaching? If so I'd love your rationale. You'd be educating me.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm not judging anyone or anything. If you've given your life over to your Savior, great. Mazel Tov. Who am I to say you did anything wrong or stupid? I misspent the better part of my life, and I'm glad I did. But to each his own. I just want to know: why do you guys not drink?
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