Morning Pages Day 4 -- Jan 7, 2022

 

Morning pages (afternoon number 4)

This is going to have to suffice. I woke up too late to get my morning pages done before 10:00 AM. At 10 AM on Sundays, I have my weekly Google meeting with my mom. And since I was up until 3 AM, I wasn’t able to do get up early enough to do much before it was time for the meeting.

I am out walking on Loma Rica Road. It’s not my favorite place to go for a walk, but it is conveniently paved, and in the winter time, when the ground is muddy, that makes a big difference. I just started breaking in my new hiking boots, and I don’t want to get them soaking wet with mud and dew from the grass, which would surely happen if I were to go walking in the wilderness area. Being Sunday, you would think there would be less traffic. You would be wrong. Same amount of traffic. Loma Rica Road rather sucks ass in that regard. When I’m out walking with an audiobook, I pretty much have to hold my phone up to my ear or the cars will drown out half of the narration.

So, what’s new? I pulled the trigger on my amp purchase on Friday. I woke up and I placed the order on Reverb.com. It is a silverface ‘79 Fender Twin Ultra Linear. I fell in love with the sound while watching a short demo. Pictures insured that the amp was pristine inside and out. Did I spend more than I wanted? Absolutely! It will cost me just over $1200, delivered to my house. It is coming from a music shop in Louisiana.

While I am excited to have this delivery to look forward to, I am still waiting on the tubes to repair my old amp. My philosophy of never settling for a repair when an upgrade is possible led me to buy an amp that is more than twice as big and powerful as the one that failed. It is going to take up more space in my little room downstairs than I anticipated, and I may have to rehome my cable spool coffee table. When the tubes finally show up for my old amp, and they don’t fix their problem, I will have to take it to a guy in Sacramento.

When all is said and done, I will have three guitar amps, a bass amp, and a powered mixer. I should probably thin out the herd, but I am reluctant to get rid of anything that might prove to be a valuable back up later. I am currently using the bass amp to play guitar, although I have a Crate acoustic amp upstairs that I use to practice my coffee shop material. I run guitar and microphone into it and send the signal out the back into the powered mixer to play through my 4 x 12 and 1 x 15 cabinets. That’s a lot of amplification for someone who is too timid to play in front of more than one person at a time.

The good thing about these dumb morning pages, as I see it, is that it allows me to ruminate without recrimination. I am doing my morning exercises, I tell myself. I am not obsessing over amps or God knows what other mindworm has hacked into my brain; I am performing a valuable function. I am liberating my consciousness from a bunch of thoughts that cling to it like lint.

The bad thing, I don’t have much desire to do any blogging, since this happens to supplant any other writing done at this time of day. I haven’t had any dreams to write down, either, so it isn’t just the morning pages that are to blame. For that, I blame a nasty habit that I have picked up of smoking a bong hit before I go to bed. It’s not making me a better dream journalist, or a better writer in general. It is making me lazier and more forgetful, two traits that could do without amplification.

Oh, the sound of chainsaws buzzing in the distance! Music to my ears. Chainsaws mean work is being done. Work to improve someone’s landscape. Dead trees plague my neighborhood, and the foothills in general. The rain, which is supposed to be the salvation of these dying trees, turns out their undoing, as the over-saturated ground becomes too loose to support their top-heavy structure. At any given time there are one or two dead trees that I must contend with lying on my property somewhere. Many more are dead and simply awaiting the next wind storm.

And now, the jingle jangle jingle of cows with cowbells attached to their necks. That has a musical sound too, although I bet the cows get tired of hearing the same sound all day long. I don’t know if it would be better than what I am hearing in my head all day long. If I could swap with a cow, I’d like to give that a try. They would probably go nuts hearing all the crappy dialogue as it plays out between my Id, super ego, ego, inner critic, God, the devil, Monty Hall and Cal Worthington. The cowbell would be much simpler to deal with.

How will I know when I have reached three pages? My phone has a tiny screen; do those one or two paragraphs per screen pages count? I guess I will have to find out when I upload this into Word.

Let’s just pause for a minute, shall we, and marvel at the variety of technology at my disposal to enable me to do word processing. Growing up, we had pen and paper. The typewriter was a luxury. I eventually did get a typewriter for Christmas, right about the time word processors started becoming available. Word processors were computers with a single function. They were an extravagance, but could save a lot of time and paper when doing rewrites. Now, we have smart phones with voice memos with speech-to-text capability for transcribing notes.

One would think that having free access to these super user-friendly digital formats would make the chore of writing a breeze, like cleaning the stovetop with 409. I don’t feel any more inspired to write, however, just because I have an army of digital assistants ready to take my dictation. Possibly, because they are numbskulls, and I am forced to do all of my own transcription anyway. Voice to text is the worst when it comes to putting your exact thoughts into writing.

I’m going to guess that I’ve only completed about a page and a half. My reasoning is that last time I did my morning pages it took me two hours. I am out walking, and I am only a little less than halfway in. I plan on giving up on or before the halfway point. I simply can’t talk to myself for two full hours.

So earlier I was correcting in this interpretation of the phrase "shall we." Siri misinterpreted it as “Shelly." Saying the name Shelly in my notes reminded me that I haven’t talked to my Facebook friends for nearly a year. I abandoned them last year, saying that I needed to take a break and that I would be off Facebook for the foreseeable future. I offered my contact information, I left my account open for a week, but only one or two people actually messaged me to get my phone number. Out of those people, zero have called me. Yes, I am still butthurt about the whole Lesa thing.

One good thing out of that whole debacle with Lesa was that I finally cleaned the soap scum in my downstairs shower and have been rigorously maintaining it ever since. Every time I take a shower, I wipe down the shower stall and the tub with a towel to prevent hard water deposits. When I originally cleaned it, I used vinegar, baking soda, bleach, CLR, Ajax and some foaming cleaner with scrubbing bubbles. None of those made much of a dent, and the majority of soap scum had to be scraped off with a pocket knife.

A similar phenomenon was taking place simultaneously with my stained teeth. There was a layer of plaque that no brushing could address, and it was getting stained. I tried tooth whiteners, but apparently, they don’t whiten plaque. Nothing like scraping with metal instruments.

Have I had even one single, solitary thought worthy of the time and effort spent in transcription? Is there anything at all in these Morning Pages to warrant the use of high technology or the effort involved to re-edit and correct errors? No? Good! I’m saving my “good writing” for a much better venue. Now, if I could only figure out what that venue is…