Saturday 00:15 a.m.
I bought a guitar once - a copy of a Humingbird - about 1975, when I got a tax rebate. The only new guitar I ever bought. A thing of beauty. The Domestic Bliss stalked it everywhere, and knocked it over, and dropped it, and finally killed it circa 1993. Better than the executioneer's axe, it fell perfectly onto an edge and the head flew off it. Hmmm. If I had put that guitar on a guitar stand in the middle of Hampden Park and let her loose in the blindfold without telling her about the guitar being there, she'd have gone to it like a homing pigeon and knocked it over.
I cannabilised a part from what was left of it last night to fix the guitar I use just now and, instead of putting it back on top of the cupboard, I decided to burn it up the allotment.
The train to Bellshill was cancelled today so I was meditating for a couple of hours up the allotment this afternoon. As it was getting dark I rolled up, twisted and knotted two plastic bags fulls of newspapers, and then put the guitar on top of that to stare into the flames, the fabulous flames.
I started to learn how to play the guitar when I was twenty one and staying in a room in a student house with a very good guitar player. I couldn't tune it. I have no musical ability at all; my sense of pitch is lousy.
In those days I knew that all drugs were bad and when anyone ever offerred me one of those funny smelling cigarettes, I always said no in case I immediately came down with the schizophrenia. However, I was lying in the dark somehow, probably having succumbed to the dense, smokey atmosphere the progeny of the evil bourgeois used to inflict on me, when I heard Albert the Bavarian picking out a tune on the guitar I had then.
If I'd known he was gay at the time, I don't think I'd have felt safe wtih just him in the room, in the dark, as he picked out the Hall of the Mountain King by Peter the Gynt. I asked him if he'd ever played the guitar before and he said no, this was the first time. Amazing musical ability really, it seemed to me especially since I don't think I'd even heard of Peter the Gynt.
Only when reading his bloggie thirty five years later do I discover than, in fact, he was ukelele maestro from an early age. I mean, it's lying really by default sort of, but I can understand why he did not want to admit the bit about the ukelele. Because it might not have seemed all that cool at the time.
I use the start of the Hall of the Mountain King to see how out of tune my guitar still is to this very day. He must have shown it to me.
The cannybliss yogurt delivery man came half way through this post. What a nice man! Bring on the dancing girls!
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12 comments:
O happy guitar, cannibalised and burnt on the pyre.
A bale fire for a guitar, what a lovely thing.
But then I like fire. I would love to have this body burnt in a good old fashion bale fire on a hill when I finally escape it. However I think that the neighbors would most likely object.
Ion: I think Domestic Bliss might have wanted it put out of its misery, saving it from the beating it used to get from me! Hotboy
Marie Rex: Funnily enough, I often fantasise about getting torched up at the allotment. Five minutes after the fire got to it, the guitar might never have existed. Gone. Just like that. Magic. Hotboy
I say!
Most surprised that Hotboy has ever paid tax.
I must admit to being rather the worse for wear en ce moment. A South African medic once advised me, during a formal consultation, to drink more beer in order to alleviate the effects of the old hunting injury to the kidney area. Supposedly, beer is good for the kidneys.
Well, I ask you, who am I to argue with a qualified medic? So this afternoon I sent Doviko down to the bottlestore with instructions to carry back as many bottles of Carlsberg Greens as he could carry.
My goodness, I didn't realise he was so strong. There's half a bathfull of them, keeping cool along with a large chunk of ice which Cabbage carried back from Kandodo.
Doviko also cooked Mrs M and myself some tenderloin and rice for tea. Where would we be without him? Should I give him a rise?
I say Hotboy - so this broken part of a guitar has been lurking in your abode for 15 years before you put it to rest? Quel rite de passage!
Can you point me in the direction of some of Albert the Bavarian's ekelele podcasts?
MM III
Mingin'! I think you might get a tax break on the beer since you have to drink it for your health. I've always been a total abstainer myself, so I don't know much about this beer stuff. Hotboy
Probably just as well I can't repay the compliment and say I remember what your playing was like. I was actually telling the truth. If only you'd asked the right question - have you or have you not ever played the ukulele?
Did the guitar make any sounds as it burnt? Surely the strings would have twanged as they snapped! Maybe you had a Hendrix in you all the time.
"thirty five years later" - that can't be right, I'm not old.
Albert? There were no strings on the guitar when I burnt it, and it did not make a sound. Quite a show though! Hotboy
"you had a Hendrix in you all the time"
Not in a gay way, surely? Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It isn't gone, it has just changed form and headed for its next incarnation.
Marie-Rex: the tranformative power of fire is amazing. Nothing else has quite that effect, has it? Hotboy
Nope not really as far as easily seen change.
Water can be pretty impressive. I'll never forget going to bed one night and waking up to find 15 feet of my garden and sea wall just gone.
I live near the sea, and often pass water on the way to work.
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