I got my voice back.

"The concept of the rock-guitar solo in the eighties has
pretty much been reduced to: Weedly-weedly-wee, make a face,
hold your guitar like it's your weenie, point it heavenward,
and look like you're really doing something. Then, you get
a big ovation while the the smoke bombs go off, and the
motorized lights in your truss twirl around!" -Frank Zappa

I have been playing guitar for a long time. It is my security blanket, my window into myself, the connection from the most abstract to vibrating molecules of air. Most of all, it is my voice. My primary means to expression of all sorts of things I would not dare to say out loud, much less in English- yeah, I'll tell you. In  song. With one note or sixty four. Not that I can express everything easily through music, but it beats Powerpoint... Baring my deep thoughts to total strangers on the Internet? How can you do that?  Well, to tell you the truth, this could all be a work of fiction by a single mother waiting to write the next blockbuster children's book about wizardly pre-pubescent teens, or the product of a shut-in that lives with his folks in a basement apartment somewhere in Des Moines. 

Maybe I'm  a group of technologically advanced badgers, with access to a local DS3 and a laptop? Perhaps, just perhaps.

I digress.

The other day something arrived in Yamhill via the Brown Santa. Once I saw it, i opened the package right then and there on the porch. The great man who sent it to me from Hawaii christened it "Little Wing".  Fitting, you think? 

 

 

Not having played for over a month, I was a little hesitant. Jeeze! Can I play anymore,  just bumble through something? Really bad blues in A?

I checked the tuning, and just played.

The familiar lick of a Hawaiian V I turnaround came and went. More notes, more licks, more chords. Soon I realized I was playing 5 minutes worth of Black Sabbath medleys to an empty barn and the barn kitty of doom. I think she might have reached for her kitty lighter of doom just then. Should have took a picture.

I'm writing(typing) this down, not for the random folks out there on the massive Internet, not for the $10K plus in Theoretical Dollars*,  but for myself. To remind myself why expressing yourself is a very real need for us, to remind myself that I've lost my voice for well over a month, and  to remind myself of one more thing:

 

I got my voice back on April 3, 2008.

 

Play on....