8/19/2013

Just got to the library, setting up shop here, and a group of people with Down's Syndrome walk in.  Maybe six, and one guy who is in charge.  I've been him before, many years ago.  These aren't kids, some of them quite old.  You get all caught up in your problems, and then you just see that it doesn't matter a hill of beans what you do.  Some people have it worse.  I have a mind, a pretty good one, and lots of education that put things in it.  I have my health, pretty good health.  I can do what I want at my age, still.  I'm running a lot, working out, losing weight, eating right.  No telling how long that will last.  One thing goes wrong, I have the mind or health of one of the people that walked in.  But it's pretty good now. I'm going to work it for all I can.  You know how sometimes just a smile from someone on the street can mean a lot?  Well, it means even more to people trapped in those minds, who for the screw up of one chromosome can't fully feel all it is to be human, to solve a math problem, to experience a Renoir, to hike the Appalachian Trail and truly begin to comprehend what it all means.  I can do all that, and so much more.  Lucky, I am.  No one to thank.  I mean, my parents for making my education, and in a way, all of this possible. Stop and say hi to some of them, and the guy in charge.  It helps.  I know.  I was him.

Half a bagel this morning, two cups coffee, etc.  One more tomato from my Knobl harvest to go!  (Thanks, Geoff!)  Will get more at the Farmer's Market this week. There's one guy who sells at the market right down the street here in Salem.  The actual market is Saturday, but he comes in every day.  Maybe he has some.  Brought Indian potatoes and sweet potatoes, with onions and bell peppers, that I made last night.  And a hummus sandwich, ww bread, lots of tomato, spinach.

Had a spinach and lettuce salad last night.  Had some bleu cheese crumbles, some almond slivers, dried berry pieces, for it.  And Italian dressing. And lots of the Indian potatoes.

I played mostly uke for hours.  Watched some educational videos on it.  Learned a lot.  One guy was tuned down like a whole step.  I can get it in tune with him, but it would have been nice had he jsut said, "Hey, I'm tuned down a step."  Would have saved time.  Then, in another video, he's tuned somewhere else.  Frustrating. Need 3 ukes.  One of each (not a baritone) would be nice.  Someday.  But I did learn a lot of blues licks, and how to play in A.  Couldn't do that before. Learned some nice turnarounds and new chords.  Also, there was a video lesson of Shady Grove.  Great song, just two chords, but the Am is nice.  The guy runs through it slow--it's amazingly easy--and then at regular speed, BUT...before he took off in the lesson, when he's just playing it through in the intro, he took off on this little run that was nice!  That's what  I wanted to know.  Of course, he wasn't teaching that, so I had to figure it out.  The camera was on his hands, so it didn't take too long.  I think I'll add this to my uke repertoire.  Need to learn the words.

Marshall Chapman was good the other night, but I want to focus on her guitar.  I have a guitarist rating system, 1 to 10, with Richard Thompson on top. This isn't for guitarists in bands, but mainly for solo guitarists or those who have minor accompaniment.  David Rawlings counts, and he's like 9.5.  5 I reserve for like, professional-like competence, but no extras. Finger picking adds a point, and of course, the more you do with it, the more you score.  Chapman is a 5.5, nothing to sneeze at.  Usually, people at a 5 who have done it as long as she does have made a choice not to go any further.  If you have great lead players as she often does, you don't really need to do more.  She was very good at just "entertaining with voice and solo guitar."  Thompson, Kottke, Michael Hedges are the tops there.  And her thing is song writing, not guitar playing.  So a 5 isn't criticism.  I think Gillian Welch is a 5.  Sharon could get there.  (I want to show Sharon how to gain some points, but that's another topic.)  Playing Shady Grove well, finger picking it some on uke (this system applies to any stringed instrument, pretty much) is a 5.  What the guy did last night gets two points.  I learned to do it.  Need practice to make it smooth and second nature, but I can do it.  I don't know the theory of WHY certain 'extras' work.  The only thing I know is that there is a relative minor scale, three frets down from the root.  G has Em as its relative minor.  A has F#m.  Here's the cool thing.  You can always solo/do lead parts in the relative minor key, especially in countryish, folksy music.  I mean, you can always solo in the scale OF the key, G for G, and so on, and you can use a major scale or the blues/pentatonic scale.  That's the only two I know.  In the relative minor, and this is only an hypothesis, but I think likewise you can do the pentatonic or (what I will ignorantly call) regular scale.

That's why there are so many rootsy songs in G--you have the relative minor right there in Em.  Now every unfretted note (in standard tuning anyway) 'counts.'  And what I will call the fundamental blues lick, sliding up a double stop on the second and third strings to the second adn third frets, correspondingly, is ALWAYS appropriate.  That's just too cool, and that's all I know and I'm sticking with it.  Would love to have someone to ask about these things.  Here's one question--and I could just try it, I guess--playing in the pentatonic scale alwasy sounds good in the relative minor; does playing in the major or minor scale work as well??  I'd need a rhythm guitar player to explore this.

I bring all this up, because I have this pretty well down, at least some of it, on guitar.  Now I'm doing it on the ukulele, and I don't know ANYTHING about the ukulele, so I...well, don't know what I'm doing.  The guitar is easy because you have barre chords and you can THINK of where the barre chord is on the neck and instantly find both the relevant scales in that key and the relative minor of the key.  Uke has barre chords, but I can't THINK in them yet.  Oh well, I'll get there.  Want to take my guitar (and uke??) to Bburg Wednesday night for the jam at the Market.  Might learn something there.  I'm just making all these connections in my head, almost FEELS like new neural connections are forming, and it's exciting.  How this scale fits in with this chord progression, etc.  Doing it for BOTH the uke right now, and the guitar.  Have to put a new string (or maybe all of them, if I think it needs it) on my mandolin, and I'll be doing it on that instrument, too.  I was doing that before the string broke, then moved away from it.  What *I* love is that all these instruments are in different tunings. And I'm exploring Open G tuning, which I have never really done much at all.  When I get back to doing SERIOUS open tunings, I'm going to be ecstatic.  Some people become great guitar players and never explore different tunings. Traditional jazz players, I think, never use different tunings.  Blues players use Open G, Open D, mainly.  I love the idea of open tunings, and what the masters, Nick Drake, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, did with them.  (Confession: I've never really explored DADGAD, either. Yikes!)

I used to want a guitar for every tuning, and I was getting there.  My guitars are, with the exception of my Martin, all in Florida. Doug has two, and the electric (which needs work) is in storage.  I gave Zara the one I used to have in Open D.  I'll get back there.  Now I want another uke, maybe a concert one, so I can put a low string on top.  Ukes have a higher string on top, and I absolutely love that, but in Florida I had access to a uke that had the top string switched to a lower string, and it opened up some possibilities that weren't there on the regular uke.  I don't want to play uke only that way, but I want to be able to.

Maybe change mandolin strings tonight, get back to it.  Blues mandolin is an amazing thing.  Need to get my Yank Rachell mp3s switched over to this laptop, so I can just listen to him. He's the master.  And Johnny Young.  Got to meet Yank in Indianapolis before he died, but I wasn't interested in mandolin then.  Damn. Missed opportunity.  He was full of stories.  I remember a couple, need to write them down.  I can watch some lessons on youtube, but just listening to Yank records is the best.

Now to work.  I agreed to take a little less per hour with Gordon, in exchange for a guarantee of more hours, and a lump of cash.  Still better than working at Lowe's or something.  Better than minimum wage for sure.  Waiting to hear from the other 'editee.'