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ODY: 35/365. Weekly, Not Weakly.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 24, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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I showed off my calluses today. Sitting in a seminar, engaged in a getting-to-know-you with Kim, I mentioned the Old Dog Year, that there’s a trick with a guitar that I’m learning to do. She plays, she composes, and so she had that warm and knowing interest. “Five weeks. Nice. How’s it going?” I offered her the fingertips of my left hand, and pointed out their toughness with bashful pride. She smiled. She got it.

Yes, there are moments when a chord comes out clean, or when the picking fingers work with a mind of their own. I slide into automatic pilot, a brief patch of detachment when I can let go and listen to what my hands are doing, no strings of wilful insistence attached. Easy. But one of the most valuable signs of progress is a blunt and fairly stupid one, but I like it: I have hard fingertips. My calluses remind me, when the guitar or even thoughts of it are distant, that I’m putting in the work. It’s like being able to catch a hardball in the palm of your glove without pain, cutting and jump-stopping in basketball practice without fear of blistered feet.

My belly is softer and rounder than I ever thought possible, but my digits are tough and nimble. I’m a hard-body! (From the palms out) Today makes five full weeks in which I have strapped myself to a chair and Done the Thing each day. Nearly ten percent of a year. Victory is mine! It is good to look back on 35 days of required clumsiness and see what small advances have been made. I’m proud of you, Old Dog! Good stuff! I almost said that out loud, and came dangerously close to actually believing it.

The thought of picking up the guitar every day is a pleasant one now. I’ve made friends with it, and it’s teaching me well though it cares not at all. I’ll keep the streak going, but I think from here I’ll record my progress weekly. Until Week Six. 

ODY: 34/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 23, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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I drove nearly six hours today and caught the last quarter of a high school girls’ basketball game featuring my old friend The Don’s team. The coach and I grabbed a quick post mortem pizza, and then I was off to visit my dear and declining, my barely but contentedly pre-mortem Mum. While there may still be hope for her fourth-born child, there are no more new tricks for this noble Lady. There’s not much left of her at all, now, unless you count a radiantly kind heart and a mind that, while it may not remember my visit ten minutes later, can sing the Oakwood High fight song from the 1930s and recite the 23rd Psalm. She smiles at me even when she’s not sure what I’ve said. “I’m happy with my lot,” she murmurs to me. “I’ve had good kids.”

Another hour got me to my big sister’s place, where I grazed near her fridge just like I lurked around my mother’s all those decades ago. For all my mocking of mid-life charges at windmills large and small, I do have to give myself a smidgeon of credit, though. In spite of cross-eyed weariness and my preference for Stealth Practices, I started messing around with the strings even while Sister Pamela and I caught up on some of the down-home news. And then I forced myself to do some determined if bleary playing before sleep. So yeah, this entry is a day late and several ideas short. But it’s almost five weeks now. I’m not sure who will come and what it means if they do, but I’m Building It. I am never so happy as when I am building something: a skill, an organization, a graceful sentence or a fresh capacity. Confidence in the young. Hope among the disappointed. Peace for the aging. Friskiness in my fingers…

ODY: 33/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 22, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Oh, what a practice tonight! I have so many new things to fiddle about with, and almost no time for brainless drumming. (Almost.) The G and C chords are new and awkward, but they came along fairly well. A was already familiar, and I had a remote acquaintance with D. The picking sequence that I learned two nights ago started to feel do-able. Tomorrow, I may try to do both at the same time. Maybe. A full hour of mostly happy exploration, ending with the usual deformed and painful claw at the end of my left wrist.

ODY: 32/365. Night Class.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 21, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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So there I was, learning to play with others. Sort of. Nine nervous grownups with that bright first-day-in-school blush. I even thought KW, our teacher, had a bit of a shine on, but he’s been doing this a long time. Maybe it was because he was distributing, in two piles of photocopied paper, his book. Ah, so this was a literary soirée, minus the canapés and the booze and, ah, staples. For me, it was a first chance to learn this new thing with people beyond my immediate gene pool.

There were nine chairs, nine music stands, and between them were six women and three men awkwardly hoisting their new best friends. We sat in a small basement studio in a northern capital city. A quick inspection confirmed that I was the oldest of the dogs here at Guitar Obedience School. (Wouldn’t have it any other way.) The hour went quickly.

It took a while to get the pages collated. KW’s amplifier had several ideas, few of which had anything to do with powering his little black axe, with which he hopes to be audible over our group’s acoustic cacophony. The cellar studio held a bizarre stew of tunings, and I knew that either I or the guy next to me was in a hopeless state. K shut us down quickly. “Let me give ‘em a quick tune.” Mine gave him a challenge, but he was pleasantly surprised that my crippled Dégas – “let me put it this way, they don’t make a high-end guitar” – actually made a decent sound once he’d cranked it about for a few minutes.

Not so with my near neighbour. “You have a bass guitar,” KW said. Twenty minutes later, he admitted defeat. “This is impossible to tune.” No wonder the hour went so fast. He talked us through some of the basics. I discovered that I’d even been holding the thing wrong, which is part of why my left hand has had so much trouble finding a way to make chords; the neck should be tipped upwards, but I’ve been perching the guitar on my right thigh so that it was quite horizontal. Oh. Okay, then. He reassured us: “You’re going to have a long time where you say, ‘Damn, I suck!’” He implored us to buy electronic tuners. He flew through a couple of chord diagrams to great passivity. (Calm acceptance of the familiar? Hmm. I’m betting on stunned incomprehension, but maybe that’s just me.) He showed us a little finger-picking sequence, showed us how to read the chord boxes on page 17 of his manual – thanks to my sons’ pencil diagrams and emails, I understood them; YAY! – looked at the clock, grinned sheepishly at us and said, “Bye!”

Oops. Later, the guy in the music store upstairs cheerfully pronounced my guitar “unplayable”, and explained to me that its ridiculously “high action” was not an expression of macho praise but a mark of how far above the frets the strings were. (I probably should have bought the Walden guitar they have on sale. It sounded JUST a little different than mine, and wasn’t one of the $2000 jobs.) When I walked out into the night of this Brave New World of Musical Education, I was a bit bewildered, but pleasantly so. Nowhere near catatonic, but I think some of my classmates were.

ODY: 31/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 20, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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As I said a couple of days ago, I do have to get out more. Out of myself, especially, out of my head. I want, too much, to keep my progress secret, to develop In House, to fulfil that mythology of the Self-Made Man that is so central to our cult of individualism, whether rugged or otherwise. (It’s a damaging myth, especially for the males at whom it is mainly aimed.) When I was in grade 7, my grasp of physics was even less certain than it is now, but here’s the thing. I believed that if I could only get strong enough, I’d be able to grasp the seat of my desk with one hand and the side bar with the other and lift both desk and me off the ground. I really did. At some level, I think I still do. 

When I tried out for the varsity basketball team as a walk-on in my second university year, I was in tremendous physical condition: stairs, weights, long runs, line sprints. I’d had a gym mainly to myself, and my shooting and handling had taken a huge jump. I was only 5’11”, but strong and quick. However, I had never spoken to the coach, had failed to find the best games where the stars and the other wannabes were. When tryouts were on, I suddenly turned into Mr. Team, distributing the ball and not showing off until too late the individual skills I’d worked so hard to hone. In short, I made every mistake in the book, which mostly came down to this: I was trying to lift myself by my own bootstraps. I was too much on my own.

 

So tonight, the Old Dog will be doing something he is not wired to do (the New Routine). As the next step in my year-long quest for mid-life guitar glory (the New Trick), I am going to join a bunch of other beginners at the Ottawa Folklore Centre. Guitar 101. (And with all these days on the Dégas, an el cheapo instrument that my son pulled from the garbage and glued, I’d better be better than anyone else! Absurd Expectations R Us.) But here’s the real point. I’m going to try the easy way. I’m going to learn from experience. Success leaves clues and I think I’ll try to read ‘em. It’s not worth less if I get some help along the way. Try easier for a change…

 

Sheesh. You’d think a teacher and coach would know these things for himself. What I have taught, in the main, has been stuff that I do (or did) pretty well. But when I’d encourage kids to work together in mutually challenging, mutually reinforcing groups, or to find someone better than them and follow in their slipstream, I was preaching to the preacher. I still am. Still trying to shed the label I’ve worn so long, even as a team sport athlete: Does Not Play Well With Others.

ODY: 30/365. I Guess Not.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 19, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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I don’t know what I’m doing when I do it, but I do it anyway. I love to mute the strings and mess around with percussive strumming and picking and fretboard assaults with the left hand. Especially when I’m brain-dead tired and another halting run through “A Blues Riff” or “Bonanza” feels too much like medicine. (Buckley’s. Cod liver oil. Not the sweet grapey stuff you get at the drug store now. Shoot, we used to figure if you didn’t gag on your medicine, it wasn’t worth taking! We used to eat burnt toast on a sore throat and never even chew it. Made you strong!) Work on a new chord? Left hand says, “I can’t want that.“

The Queen of Encouragement generally stays away when I’m in the Old Dog Gimme (Guitar) Shelter, but tonight she crept downstairs while I was noodling a rhythmic monotone on a muted string. I was hypnotized by it. She said, “Is that supposed to be music?”

ODY: 29/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 18, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Missions accomplished.

1. I had a good and satisfying guitar workout. The B7 chord, however, is a brutal thing. How do I get my paws around that?

2. I’m signed up for group lessons. Two nights from now. Beginner’s class, and I’ll have a 29-day head start. No pressure, but if I’m not the class prodigy I will melt like a water-logged witch.

 

ODY: 28/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 17, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Same stuff, different day, but I don’t get bored when I’m picking out a tune, getting pick-quicker, rhythm-ready, feeling what I’m feeling, reeling, real-ing and dealing. Four weeks of musical motion, appealing to feeling. Tonight was good, and I found the weights again, too. One for one. 

48 weeks to an OD (New) Year. Email message from the Itinerant Artist. Ben is a natural teacher. “Finally got caught up on the Old Dog entries. Great stuff. Your writing and intensity are fun [but] you’re really going about this in the strangest fashion: it’s fascinating, and impressive. Though you may not be accelerating your ability as fast as another Old Dog might be, you’re going deep and bloody seriously…That said: Get a bloody teacher already! And keep rolling!” Thus spake the IA. Oh yeah? Who is this other dog? I’ll pee on his practice chair!

“If it ain’t rough, it ain’t right,” said the Pistons on their way to playoff implosion last year. (I suspect the rap reference is a horny and misogynistic one, but that may be prejudice. Correct me.) I know one thing: my way is the hard way. The IA’s “strangest fashion” feels like home to me. Yeah, I hear you. I need to get out more.

ODY 27/365

Posted by :James Howden On : September 16, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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As per yesterday’s prediction, tonight was indeed a wonderful evening, full of learning, careful attention, sensational munchies, belly laughs and the sympathetic sharing of a believer’s Islamic journey. All of that goodness was in our living room, though, while the Dégas had to wait down in the down-down ‘til nearly midnight for me to make musical havoc on its strings. And I did, strumming my three-and-a-half chords, picking out my two-and-a-half tunes and even improvising some swingy bits in my basic blues. Now that I liked!

But as for the “tenacious discipline” that somebody was blathering about yesterday – its tendency to leak out into other chambers of the spiritual warrior’s life, its ability to cross over from musical dedication to a BodyMovin’, I’m-not-just-a-midlife-string-picker-but-a-studly-workout-demon-too kind of ethos – well, scratch that. 27 straight days on guitar for the Old Dog, but a fat oh-fer-three since I noticed how amazing I was with the weights.

A guy has to work awfully hard to suppress humility, it seems to me. There are so many ways to learn it.

ODY: 26/365. Tenacious D.

Posted by :James Howden On : September 15, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Hmm. “Got” the Bonanza theme might’ve been pushing it a bit. I thought I’d run through it enough that I’d remember how the innovative part ends, but I had to work it out all over again. Maybe tomorrow the tumblers will click into place. I’m now at the point where I could polish it and “A Blues Riff”, especially the latter, to sound pretty good with an hour or two of concentration. That’ll be for the weekend. But here’s the thing that might actually be interesting. (And there’s no accounting for taste, yours or mine, so here goes.)

Discipline might be a viral thing. It seems to leak beyond the boundaries of the thing being practised (and, sometimes, can be caught from the person doing the practising – this is why running backs used to go to the sand dunes for savage off-season workouts with Walter Payton, why ambitious ballplayers ought to make friends with Albert Pujols). In more youthful times, I often noticed that regular prayer and meditation were somehow easier during the days (or longer periods) where I’d worked out physically. Among other things, this puts the lie to the I haven’t got time excuse. It’s like when pro athletes publicly say “It’s not about the money”, which nearly guarantees that it most certainly IS. “It’s just that I don’t have the time”, without fail, means “I don’t really want to but I’ll never admit that to you or myself.”

So it’s 26 straight evenings on the Guitar Diet. And since I do my practice in our tiny downstairs library, I’m noticing (and getting excited by, even reading) the great books that I insulate my basement with. Furthermore, my dumbbell set has been leaning dustily against one of those bookshelves. Somehow, virally or otherwise, the I WILL of playing guitar has been transmitted to the Well, Alright of a quick set of lifts and stretches, even when I enter the library Old Dog Tired and as motivated as a plump squash. Fulfilling one promise makes the next one easier. One workout leads to another. Well, except for tonight. (And, ah, last night.)

Tomorrow should be sensational, though.