I Think I'll Disappear Now

I must admit, I've been having quietly seductive thoughts about 'disappearing' lately, and frankly, it's been so long since my last blog entry I might as well have done...a lamentable lapse for which I can only, as too many times before, humbly apologise - to the three (or fewer) people reading this who might be slightly interested.

I am, of course, about to dive into a plethora of pathetic excuses and not-at-all-mitigating circumstances, none of which, however, sound particularly convincing...even to me. Worse still, that's really all there's going to be this week - no tenuously-linked, topical cultural references welded clumsily onto a chassis of music-related mumblings, no gratuitous insults aimed at highly successful artists to whom I'm less than a dab of wash-hand basin soap on the underside of their coke spoon. Not even a personally prejudiced/under-researched/almost certainly wrong review of some instrument, or lump of musical gadgetry...

No, this week it's all about me! (Exactly like every other post, in other words. Just this time, the desperate egomania won't be skulking about in the depths of the verbal foliage).

Trouble is, for a variety of reasons, I've been having serious motivational issues. (Oh, in case you were wondering, there's something that you might find humorous at the end of the post - if I were you, I'd give all this solipsism a miss and head on down there). Part of the problem has been the inevitable single-parent-two-energetic-small-boys childcare exhaustion. That, and jazz. Actually, I blame the jazz far more...

...one of my "projects I have no real time for" is to learn, finally, to play the piano 'properly'. That, of course, means knuckling down and practising loads of 2-octave scales, learning how to shift hand/finger positions, and plonking my way (oooohhhh ssssoooo sssssloooooooooowwllllyyy) through (simplified!) versions of t'Moonlight Sonata and its ilk. Which is far too much like hard work - so it's been out with the jazz books instead! Loads more fun, yes, but I've found that after 40 minutes of trying to twist my unwilling digits around some demented chord sequence I wrote on a guitar nearly 2 decades ago - and man, is it easier to jump from hand-mashers like "Gbm9 [flat 5th, sus4, carry the 3rd and subtract the number you first thought of]" to...anything...when it's strings and frets that are involved - my brain has scrambled itself, and it's all I can do to remember how to unplug the piano and slump on the sofa without falling off.

Then there's the "sympathetic teething". Oh yes - timed perfectly to coincide with smaller mini-primate suffering from the "hot-swollen-cheek blues", I've got a long-dormant wisdom tooth which has, after an interval of about 15 years or so, decided it's time to have a growth spurt. Didn't expect that one. Nor did it engender thoughts of a spontaneuosly comedic nature. Still, it's a pity that "wisdom teeth" fail to live up to their name - it would have been nice to think "hey, I'm teetering on the brink of life's scrapheap, but I'm about to get less stupider! Cool!". Ah well...

Finally, there's the stress. I know, we've almost all got it - but right now, my financials are creaking almost as ominously as an American investment banker's, I'm stuck facilitating my 'to-be-ex' wife's "sex and the city" lifestyle, and I appear to be a completely unattractive prospect to women...this is worse than it sounds, since I can't even afford to put any cash aside for my cunning solution to the latter problem - radical genetic surgery to turn me into a bass-playing version of George Clooney. Now you've got to admit, judging by the (highly realistic) photo - this idea's a winner!

Fine, so "Human Clooney-ing" upsets some (anachronostic) faith groups and bio-ethicists, the scientific techniques behind it are, shall we say, "untested" ("non-existant", "piffle", and "oh dear, he's finally gone over the edge, hasn't he?" may be a little closer to the mark), and it's been specifically prohibited by the governments of 217 countries...yes, that's right, countries that don't even exist yet have banned the Clooney-ing of human beings. But think of the potential benefits - especially for women:

"If you, too, want to save the future by banishing unattractiveness in men, just reach for your credit card and send lots of money to my PayPal account today.
Human Clooney-ing - a chance for a better world. The more you give, the better it might get."

Anyway, after all that, I'll leave you with an upstanding example of accidental honesty from the Freshman Guitars' "Cedar Creek" series catalogue, (page 9):




Right...time for some bad jazz piano...unless I fall asleep first...