Consuming the Tangible

I really needed a break.

That’s pretty much the long and short of it.

There are myriad reasons, but for now a lot of them are personal. I’ll hold those close as I continue climbing back up, my family (now wonderfully united, my son having returned from his first year of college) and music always the steady and sturdy rungs of progress. It’s just that the desire, the need to write about any of it was gone, wiped by the stresses of too many things, multiplied by the overindulging in excess both materially and, well…psychedelically, I suppose.

On the material side I already spoke about the Marshall cab and Bugera head I picked up from a friend selling them on the cheap. That turned into a small detour as I turned a quarter of my basement into a practice/recording room, and continued practicing and getting to know how to actually care for and maintain my guitars. And, well…that turned into more trips to the guitar store, and…well, remember in that last post about my two main guitars? They now have siblings, specifically a Fender American Ultra II Telecaster in Ultraburst, and a Gibson Les Paul ’50s Standard in Tobacco Burst. Beautiful guitars, and after some small adjustments they play great.

But the real apple of my eye is this $180 Chinese Telecaster copy (I think they call it a TeleMASTER) I picked up off of Amazon. With a slight relic to it already, I took it completely apart, put in brand new pickups (this sweet set of Brad Paisley signature La Brea pickups); via trial and SO MUCH ERROR learned how to swap out pots and wire everything together. From there I sanded down and filed/polished frets, adjusted the truss rod, action, pickup heights…a new pick guard, some relic’d control knobs, saddle, locking tuners and a whole lot of stickers later, I have Birdie. I won’t lie and say it plays as great as the Ultra II, but it plays a hell of a lot better than a sub-$200 guitar should, and dare I say a lot better than a few of the Fender and Squier models I tried in the past few months. My brother is building something similar with a weird mustard yellow/butterscotch model using different pickups (the Jason Isbell set), and I’m looking forward to hearing and playing it, picking up (ha!) on the differences.

On the more psychedelic side, a mix of medication adjustments and a broader range of let’s say “tactical herbal anxiety and depression remediation” methods have been an interesting time, using one much more to offset the effects of adjusting the other. I meet with my doctor this week to discuss optimizing and changing certain prescriptions, so we’ll see how that goes.

---

Finally, music has and continues to be a priority. I’ve been engaging in an active listening project with my friends, and experimenting with listening to music in different ways and with different focuses. We’ve covered Bruce Springsteen, the Minutemen, Bob Dylan, Funkadelic, Julian Cope, and wrapping up Oliver Nelson now. It’s been interesting figuring out my thoughts and feelings without writing them down, and also understanding how my friends read into music. I’m thinking about short write-ups here when we complete each one, but that’s not definite: there’s something about living in the music without the added burden of thinking about translating those experiences into words that I’m enjoying.

That being said, I feel ready to come back to reviews, playlists, and whatever else comes up. So if this is of interest to you, hey! I’m back! We’ll be focusing on newer and heavier music for the rest of the month so I can catch up with the new stuff I’ve been digging into, and then rest assured it’ll be a heavy trip back to weird and obscure hard rock, prog, psych, and jazz from the late ’60s to late ’70s.

Anyway, that feels like a good close. Here’s a pic of your host, enjoying his brief retreat to Charleston, SC, over the last week. He’s tired, but feels ready to get back into the fight.