Morning Pages Day 3 -- Jan 6, 2022

 

The next day. Well, here I am. I showed up. What prize awaits me? Uh, hmm. A big box of NOTHING, that’s what.

I woke up at 9:00 AM. How do I know that? Because my new atomic clock was staring me in the face the moment I opened my eyes. Conveniently located above my TV, I can look up at it without craning my head to the east, as I previously would have had to do.

Why is this important? Well, for me, it is about perception. When I am facilitating my DBSA support group, I have to be mindful of the time. It doesn’t look good, however, if I am constantly looking down at my phone or gazing off camera. Someone might think I am being bored by their share, feel slighted or get the impression that I can’t wait for them to finish. This conveniently located clock allows me to glance up without breaking eye contact with the camera.

Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it. I wrote a paragraph, just to state some mundane fact of which the world was previously unaware. As my friend Emery says, “So, now you know.”

Except that I wrote almost the exact same thing on Day 2 about that stupid clock, and now I'm just repeating myself, re-telling the same useless minutia that barely passed for news the first time around. 

**Note -- rant from the future

Here's a fun fact:

I bought this clock at Walmart and kept it for around 3 weeks. Being a fancy atomic clock, I was never going to have to set it, and I could always be assured of having the correct time. But right away, I could tell something was off. The minute hand was not synced up with the second and the hour hands. I could never tell which minute we were supposed to be thirty seconds into or 30 seconds out of.

To make matters worse, it was loose, and the hand would nudge forward a little extra with each tick of the second hand, making the discrepancy a little greater every time. The cumulative effect was that the time displayed was off by several minutes every day. Even when it reset itself, the hands were still out of sync, so it never read correctly. 

I returned it and searched in vain for a replacement. They'd pulled the remaining stock, or sold out or something. I stared at a nail on the wall above my TV set for a month. That might have worked as a primitive sundial, but it wasn't gonna cut it for timing my meetings.

A month later, I checked the shelves, and low and behold, there was the same clock that I had returned, sitting on the shelf. It was the only one of its kind: atomic, large numbers, second hand, etc. I bought the same motherfucker again, hoping against reason that perhaps it was a different unit, or maybe it had been reconditioned. 

I should have known better. When I returned it, I'd put it back in the box upside down, so the clock and the packaging were out of sync, just like the stupid clock. The clock in the store was packaged the same way. 

I took it home anyway, put a battery in it and hit the reset button. The hands quickly moved around to the twelve o'clock position, and the minute hand stuck out again, like an offside football player on the line of scrimmage. "Foul!" I called, and I boxed the bastard up for a second time. Fool me twice, OK, but no more. 

Today, I ordered a clock that runs backward and has the numbers on the wrong side of the dial. It is a month out on Amazon, and it's not an atomic clock, but I don't care anymore. I have been looking at a nail in the wall for 2 months now. We never start the meeting on time anyway, it's always 3 minutes or so after the hour, so what does it matter?

**end of rant from the future

In other news, I was going to drive to Vacaville today to check out a tube amp for sale on Facebook Marketplace. It is a 1978 Traynor YGT Mark III. This is a vintage, handwired amp head with a 4-12 speaker cabinet. All for the low, low price of $600. I checked out some YT videos, and similar amps from that era have a sweet Fenderesque tone.

The thing is, I don’t have a need for another 4-12 cabinet. I actually just want to replace my Blues Jr., a much smaller, bedroom type amp. It unceremoniously expired on Christmas Day, leaving me with no tube amp with which to fiddle around on Saturdays. Saturdays are sacred, too sacred for solid state amplification.

This big tube amp would most likely live in my living room along with the cats. Both the cab and the head have covers to keep the cats from clawing the grill cloth. I have to give my cats credit; although they have destroyed two mattresses, a couch and the hallway carpet, they have left my Marshall cabinet grill cloth alone. <retroactively knocking on wood>

I do most of my rocking out in my downstairs room, though, and I don’t know how I could squeeze a giant amp like this down there. It would certainly be overkill for the room.

Other considerations are the fact that tube life can be short in these amps unless one has the original vintage replacement tubes. New old stock tubes for this are a rarity and commensurately expensive. I already have one tube eater, the Blues Jr., and I don’t really want another hungry hippo in my menagerie.

Hey, this isn’t so bad. I’m just thinking out loud. I could do this quietly, and to myself, but this way I am fulfilling my obligation to the Morning Pages exercise. And I get to continue to obsess over my latest folly: the pursuit of the perfect tube amp.

So, my friend Emery asked me to facilitate for her tonight at the meeting. This will mean that I have to be back here by 5ish in order to be ready to go at 5:30. I walked for 5.4 miles yesterday. It was a drudging bore, but at least it was sunny. Today, it is foggy and 51, but since it isn’t raining, I have no excuse. If she hadn’t called to swap days with me, I would have gone to Vacaville, perhaps bought this obnoxiously big amp and definitely skipped my walk.

I booked a room for 2 nights at the Anchor Lodge in Fort Bragg. Denise hasn’t ever been there, and I wanted to give her the whole waterfront room experience. It’s been 2 years since I last visited there. On that trip, I brought along Sharon’s ashes to spread around on the various beaches we’d visited on our many vacations. This will be kind of reclamation of the venue for new experiences.

When Sharon first took me to Fort Bragg in 1999, we had only been dating a couple of years. It was a magical time for me, since I’d never been anywhere on the coast north of  Zuma Beach in my life. I spent all my beachgoing years in Santa Monica and Venice, occasionally taking side trips to Malibu, Redondo, Seal Beach and Huntington Beach. Going back to crowded beaches like those now seems as unappealing as a Christmas Eve trip to Walmart.

Not much else is going on right now. Let me recap:

Still looking for an amp.

Gotta go for my walk.

Facilitating my meeting tonight.

Going to Fort Bragg with Denise in a couple of weeks.

What the hell else do you want from me? I am only obligated to finish 3 pages per day, content unimportant. Fill 3 pages with anything, she said. So, here is is. Done and done.

Please tell me that these pages aren’t as long as they seem to be. I was just thinking I was done, and then I scrolled down to see more blank area at the bottom. Unfair. I protest. More time expended on filler, willy-nilly gibberish that no one wants to read. Thankfully, this isn’t supposed to be read at all, even by me. I am pretty sure that I’ll be violating that rule at some point, however. I just can’t help looking, like after a very satisfying dump, just to check out what has been expelled from me.

I’m a “save old parts” kind of guy. I wish I could have kept my melanoma and lymph nodes in a jar. I’d keep them in my curio cabinet along with my collection of coyote teeth and my No. 5 premolar, which was prematurely extracted from my mouth in 2015.

Oh, come on! Still no page break in sight? Fuuuuucck. This is hereby and henceforth the end. I put in an extra couple of lines yesterday. I am going to draw on my account, and leave off now.

Third day running. Will I continue this daily exercise, or will it prove to be too much for me? I am having some doubts. Here are my doubts:

Why should I spend all this time writing just for the sake of writing. Hmm. I guess that question answered itself. OK, let me rephrase that.

Why should I spend all this time writing about writing, or writing about how I don’t want to write? If I had a decent, inspired topic, or a purpose, such as, say, writing an email to a long lost friend, or even keeping a dream journal, then I might be more inspired to do it. It would seem to have a purpose. This “wake up and complain journal” is getting a bit redundant.

 “Well,” says I, “then go ahead and give yourself a better topic. Who’s in charge here, anyway?”

I have an email that I need to compose, and I have been procrastinating. Yet, here I am performing an exercise with the very brain cells that I could be using to get that task accomplished. Why is that? Am I expecting to get credit for keeping up with one obligation while failing to even start another?

Here are some of the thoughts that come to mind when I contemplate writing the email. Well, first, here is the context:

Jennifer, a dear friend of Sharon’s, recently sent me a Christmas card. I hadn’t heard from her in nearly 4 years, the last time being shortly after Sharon’s death, when she came down to visit and console me, bringing me soup and beer and all manner of condolence gifts. Before that visit, she had been absent from Sharon’s life for 8 years. Time flies, I know, and she was busy with career and kids and marriage. I responded to her Christmas card with a text, promising to catch up with her soon, but given her own lengthy absences, soon could be a relative term.

So, why not just knock out a quick reply? Just stick to some basic milestones within the last 4 years. Paint a picture, a sketch, if you will, even a thumbnail, just to say, “Hey. I’m still here. Here’s a little of what’s been going on with me.” Would that be so difficult?

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it will.”

“OK,” I reply to myself, bifurcating once again for the sake of dialogue. “But can you elaborate on what exactly you find so difficult about the task?”

“It is the same reason that I find it difficult to start any writing task,” I complain. “I have a problem condensing my thoughts, reducing my story to bullet points. I tend to feel that it has to be laid out like a technical manual, discreet chapters, verses, chronologically accurate and progressing in a linear fashion towards a clear conclusion.”

“Well, you know that isn’t any reason to avoid sending a little note to a friend saying how things have been,” rational me argues.  “It doesn’t have to be your magnum opus. You aren’t writing an autobiography. Think smaller. Think postcard sized. After all, she sent a Christmas card with a minimal amount of personal prose written on it. It’s the gesture that counts.”

“Hmm. Good point,” I reply. “I’m still not feeling the inspiration, though, to do even that.”

“OK. So, don’t do it then. Don’t do anything that you don’t feel inspired to do.”

“Like write these goddamn Morning Pages?” I snark back.

“Touche. I get it, Mr. All-or-nothing. You want to do what comes easiest at any given moment.”

“Well, isn’t that what the Taoists say?” I offer weakly. “’Be like water, my friend.’ Bruce Lee said it best. That’s what I am doing, being like lazy, uninspired water. Stagnant water, just evaporating in a pond, a thickening layer of scum forming on my surface.”

“I would offer that you are being pretty conspicuously meticulous about comma placement and sentence structure for pond water,” I jibe. “You are using the backspace key in a highly motivated fashion. Perhaps, you are more of a seeping artesian well than a stagnant pond. Some fresh stuff comes to the surface, but at its own pace. Quality, not quantity.”

“That’s where we disagree on this whole Morning Pages thing, I think,” my contemplative guy chimes in. “You are treating it like an obligation, and therefore you are resisting it.”

“No, I’m not,” I counter. “I’m just resisting doing it correctly.”

“That’s not possible, and you know it,” says the inner cognitive therapist. “There is no right way to do stream of consciousness. Just because it’s called the Morning Pages doesn’t mean that it has to take the form of a well thought-out newspaper article. Anyway, if you want to type gibberish, go right ahead. No one is judging you.”

“Yeah, well, since you tell me to be all free form, loosey-goosey, that is just what I won’t do!” I rail, rebelling for the sake of rebellion. “And anyway, I’d like to talk some more about amps, and how I am having difficulty narrowing my search. It’s becoming a daily obsession, doing all this research. And for what? I’m just dreaming and fantasizing about having some great sounding amp, when all I will ever do with it is play around with it in my little room downstairs.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” the encouraging me pipes up. “What about your living room venue, Andrew’s Coffee Shop? You have been slowly making progress towards a complete set list.”

“True,” I concede. “I may just play a concert for my cats soon enough. Plus, I really have always wanted another tube amp head to sit atop my Marshall cabinet. If I don’t get one, what is the purpose of owning a big speaker cabinet, anyway?”

The speaker cabinet in question, a 1980s 4-12 straight floor cab with wheels has been with me since the early 90s. I bought it to use as a PA cabinet for a band I was playing in when I lived in SoCal. I bought a powered Yamaha 6 channel mixing board to use as an amplifier. I was the singer, and this was my vocal rig. I did have a Marshall head at the time, too, that I purchased to go with it at some point, but I kept it at home, rather than leave it with the band in their garage. They already had a guitar player, and it wasn’t me.

The head died in the early 2000s, and like a dumbass, I sold it for $100. It probably had a blown fuse, for all I know. It had been working fine, but at some point it became a doorstop, an ugly reminder of why I can’t have nice things. They always break, and I just wind up with broken junk to look at. This was one instance where my hoarder gene failed to kick in, and I feng shuied it right out of my life. I’m still kicking myself for that.

If I find something comparable, it will cost me in the thousands of dollars, and I am reluctant to buy someone else’s doorstop. I want it all, I want it now—and I want it cheap.

Blah, blah, blah. And I really have to pee right now.  

There. That was an easy choice. Get up and pee, for god’s sake. Even race car drivers make pit stops.

“Not to pee,” I counter. “They go ahead and pee in their racing suits.”

I have no idea if that is actually true. I heard it once, and it stuck with me. Race car drivers are a soggy lot, pissing themselves willy-nilly rather than lose valuable time making a stop. Every 500 lap race has to have at least one pee-soaked participant, or else when they were up on that podium, they would be dancing the hurdy-gurdy. Note to self: google “hurdy-gurdy” and “NASCAR urination strategies.”

Oh, are you going to wait for me to actually do it? Am I even allowed to while I’m writing this exercise? Wouldn’t that be breaking protocol? And what about my getting up to pee? Was that breaking protocol too? If something is bugging you, by all means relieve yourself. Scratch the itch.

And, say, what happened to your neat little dialogue? You just abandoned your post on that one, changing formats in midstream. No quotation marks denoting the change of speaker, no consistent perspective, just a vacillating, oscillating, wishy-washy guy questioning everything. Ooops. I went over. Well, hallelujah. I wanted to be done anyway. Now I have this ugly widow at the top of the page. Can’t have that.

What now? I’ll tell you what now. I will put this keyboard back in the drawer and play a quick game of Words With Friends, aka Words With The Computer, on my phone and then grudgingly get off this couch. After that, exercise, breakfast, then…who knows? Go for a walk or drive to Vacaville to check out an amp that is too big for my needs, but might just be a steal at $600?