I am back from my trip to Reno.  I won $100 on a slot machine.  I bought a new bass.  I had a dream about cookies.  I saw a big lake.

OK, first, slot machines - I have a mixed opinion.  I know they require no skill or thought.  I go to Vegas with a bunch of people that have about three PhDs’ worth of math classes between them, and to say they’re involved poker players is like saying George S. Patton knows a bit about mechanized infantry.  They, of course, frown upon the one-armed bandit, as there’s no strategy and you can’t beat the odds.  But usually when I’m at the point when I’m in a casino, I’ve been awake for days and am completely brain dead, and pressing the “repeat bet” button over and over every five seconds is about the only strategy I can mentally afford.  If I’m lucky, I break even.  This time, I hit some mystical combination of symbols and wildcards that gave me something like $106.  I then quit, and moved to a video poker machine, where I turned $20 into $26 over a period of about 45 minutes, which isn’t stellar, but is much better than turning $20 into $0 in four seconds.

In my quest to do anything except write to force myself to eventually write, I bought a new bass guitar at a pawn shop in Reno.  It is an Ibanez and it’s red and has P/J pickups and an incredibly thin and fast neck.  The pawn shops in general were slim pickings, a bunch of beaten Chinese Fender clones and the occasional Squier for $20 below list price.  But in a place with a giant wall of assault rifles, I found this single bass hanging, and once I felt the low action, needed to buy it.  I talked them down $50 on the price, and then it was mine.  I’ve probably played it ten hours since I’ve been back, and I’m very happy with it.  I’m still obsessed with this game Rocksmith, and started buying all of the songs in iTunes, because I’m not well-stocked in Pixies and Black Keys albums.  (This game is very heavy in bands beginning with “The”, including -White Stripes, -Strokes, -xx, -Horrors, and probably ten others I forget.)

When in the hotel, I had this incredibly detailed dream involving baked cookies, and then woke up and there were no cookies.  S took this as a cue to bake a batch of cookies yesterday, and I’ve eaten so many of them, I think I’m going to puke.  They’re good, and that’s the problem.  I have to go to the dentist later today, and I think instead of brushing my teeth just prior to my cleaning, I will eat as many cookies as possible, so I know I’m getting my money’s worth.

Although I have not been writing, I’m on the verge of publishing John Sheppard’s next book, and someone just asked to use one of my pictures from Germany for a book cover.  Coincidentally, my last book used a picture from the same trip.  And I had a similar dream experience in Berlin, although it did not involve cookies.  We’d landed in Berlin after a hellish day of flights across Europe, and got to the hotel well after dark.  We set up camp in this Hyatt, and I went to bed with the drapes closed.  My dreams involved a massive suite of a hotel room, with a wall of glass overlooking a terrace that stood at the top of this massive and modern city, like a scene from a movie.  When I woke up, I pulled back the drapes, expecting this incredible cityscape, and found our room actually looked out at a concrete Daimler office building that was only a few feet away.  The rest of the Berlin trip was great, but that single post-dream moment was a huge letdown.

I mentioned a big lake.  It was Pyramid Lake, and I was going to start talking about it, but then did a wikipedia check, and it turns out that every fact I was told about the lake by one of S’s relatives was half wrong.  Like, I was told it was a freshwater lake, but it’s not.  And that it was the filming location of T_he Ten Commandments_, but it was actually The Greatest Story Ever Told.  So, I guess I don’t have any stories to tell.  I took some pictures, but I’m finding I have far too many pictures of desert wasteland, probably as a result of owning 40 acres of it.

I am itching to get another book out, even though the next one is only half done.  Part of me wants to take a bunch of my choice photos, and put a bunch of my archived tweets on them in Helvetica, and release a hipster-esque book, but I know nobody would buy it.  Maybe I will anyway.

I have not been writing.  I’m sort of stuck between two places.  More on that in a bit.

I went into my usual writer’s block mantra of “I wish I did something other than write”, which motivated me to go to our storage locker and pull out my bass guitar and amp.  Before I put pen to paper, I used to play bass.  I sold my first bass when I left Bloomington, and in a strange act of serendipity, I saw a used bass exactly like my first one the week I left Seattle, and had to buy it.  I think I played it a total of five times before it went into storage forever, because I was too busy writing books and had all but forgotten how to play.

And I’ve dragged the thing across the country 19 times or whatever, and have not touched it since probably 1999.  But like I said, I had this urge to go buy a guitar or learn to paint or draw or do anything other than write, and I had this thing sitting in storage, so I brought it home, and thought if people who have strokes can re-teach themselves how to talk at the age of 80, I can re-teach myself how to play bass at 41.  Right?

I have this Cort headless bass. A cheap cousin to the Steinberger bass, it screams 1980s in a way big hair never could.  It’s got bad tone and a little fret buzz and the pickups need to be adjusted and I can’t get them right, because the E string is way louder than everything else.  But it’s still in once piece, and it works, and it was a number of Franklins cheaper than going to Guitar Center and buying a new one.

My original Cort was actually my second bass.  My first one I bought from the JC Penny catalog towards the end of my senior year of high school.  It was all plastic and China and stayed in tune for about seven minutes in a row, if you didn’t touch it.  My high school graduation present to myself was this Cort bass, which I saw used at a store in South Bend on a day I happened to have all of this graduation money in my pocket.  The electronics were stripped out of it, just the pickups and bare wires, no back cover and three holes where knobs were supposed to be.  I never really got the thing wired well, and always had problems with RF interference.  I got it refretted when I was a freshman in college, and traded that JC Penny bass for the fret job from a luthier student named Dorian.  (Never asked if he had brothers named Mixolydian, Locrian, etc.)

I’ve forgotten almost everything about music.  And my fingers are doing even worse.  I started trying to play scales and whatever little riffs I could remember, and my digits are nowhere near close to being in the right places.  Every other note is early or late or buzzing or uneven.  I wasn’t really sure how to proceed, so I started googling, and got information overload.

When I first learned to play the bass, it was 1989.  We did not have youtube.  I can now pull up instantly any number of instructional videos and pause and rewind and watch these guys explain and play and theorize and show off.  We had VHS back then, but that sucked.  I had a dub of a Stu Hamm instructional video, but one of my sisters recorded over it, and you couldn’t pause and rewind like you can now with DVDs.  I think our old VHS was one of those pieces of shit where hitting pause and then rewind took 19 seconds, and it made all of these clunking noises like a big block chevy running with no oil in the pan.  That’s all changed.

When I used to want some tab to learn new songs, I would have to walk to the music store (uphill, both ways) and get some shitty Mel Bay book that would have tab for “When The Saints Go Marching In” or whatever.  Now, there are a million web sites that have tab for days that you can download and print at home.  And there’s a site that plays the tab like a player piano, playing the guitar and drums so you can practice along with it.

The internet has also changed how you shop.  Nothing beats going to a guitar store and trying everything out, but when I was a kid, the music stores in Indiana were shit, and had the bare minimum of stock, all marked up to hell.  When I had to get strings for my headless bass — it takes strings with a ball on each end — I had to drive to Chicago, and pay something like $50 for them.  Now, Amazon, one click, done.  In and out for $25.  And ebay — jesus.  Put “Fender Jazz” into ebay and see where all of my time on the couch in front of the TV is going.

I can also plug my bass into my computer now, which is freaky.  It used to be you would save up a paycheck or two for one of these PortaStudios, which were really finicky about what kind of tapes you used and how often you cleaned them, and would lose quality after each generation of recording, and you still had to deal with a running tape and punching in at the right time and all of the hassles of analog.  Now, I fire up garage band, drop in some loops, and click to my non-linear heart’s content.  It’s very amazing.

Things are slowly coming back to me.  I’m obsessed with practice.  I’ve promised myself that for every hour I practice, I have a dollar to spend on a new bass.  I practiced five hours yesterday, and my left fingers are hamburger.  My technique has a long way to go, but I’m remembering theory, slowly.  It’s been a lot of fun.  It’s a lot more fun than banging my head against the wall because I can’t write.

About that, I guess I mentioned at the beginning of the post that I would talk about that.  But I’m out of time and this is a thousand words already, so maybe next time.

I am TV-free. For a month. I sold the piece of shit today, and now there’s a gaping hole in the stack of equipment and cables next to my computer. My “entertainment center” is a coffee table, on which the TV, a speaker, two VCRs, a tape deck, a receiver, a CD player, about a hundred CDs, and a dozen or so VHS tapes live. Now it’s minus the TV, since it would cost me about $50 to ship, and that’s all it’s worth. And I sold it for $75. I’m already going into withdrawl though - I got home from work, plopped down on the bed, stared at the blank spot on the way, and… yelled FUCK! I now need to do something creative with my evening, for a change. So this is how I used to write 4000 words a day…

I have yet another stupid nostalgia-trip story. I was at the mall Saturday, and went into the mall music store, which is usually a good place to look at a couple of bad guitars and then leave. But on consignment, they had a white Cort headless bass, with Steinberger tuners. About ten years ago, I bought my first bass, which was identical to this one, except my old one wasn’t wired - the knobs were missing, along with the jack, back panel, wiring harness, and foil shielding. I bought my old one for about $100 or $150 and rewired it, but it sounded like shit and had horrendous buzzing problems. I also painted it all up and put stickers on it. This one was in great shape - the fingerboard and frets were decent, the paint was original and new, and the electronics were pristine. I had to hear how it sounded stock, so I asked the guy to plug in, and a minute later I was going through a nice Hartke amp.

Some background on me and the bass: I started playing in the last semester of high school, towards the very end of the school year. I bought this Cort bass as a graduation present to myself, and took lessons all summer from Jamie Magera, a local guitar prodigy. In Bloomington, I took classes through school, met a lot of other musicians, and never got to the point of being really good, but I did play in a Calypso band in front of a sold-out IU Auditorium, so I did okay. After I got into computers, bass fell by the wayside. I tried to pick it up again in 96 with a Fender Precision fretless, but it felt alien, and I didn’t do too well. I’ve always since wished I could play something, but I never had the time. Every time I see a band live, I want to be the one on stage. I wish I could record a 4-track demo and trade it with people. And when I got that bass in my hands on Saturday, it felt natural again. Steinberger-based basses feel very strange - the body is small, the scale is short, there’s no tuning pegs or headstock on the end, and some people can’t stand them. But since it was my first bass, it felt RIGHT.

A minute later, I whipped out my Visa card and said, “I’ll take it.” I also picked up a 20 watt Hartke amp, which kicks some serious ass - ampmakers have really gotten their shit together in the last ten years. I hauled all of the gear home, unsure of how I’d even start playing or learning. At home, I ran through scales and the riffs that I knew, and things slowly got back to me. And on Sunday, I got a strap, tuner, and one of those “Metallica Riff-By-Riff” books. It might not be a good start, but I used to know more of their stuff, and it’s got my fingers moving again. I think this will be the perfect new hobby to pick up, especially after I move.

Michael Stutz was here all weekend, and we hung out on Thursday and Saturday. I’d write more, but I just ate some really greasy pizza, and I think I’m damaging this computer.