The ES 135 experiment has ended. It turned out that the guitar’s low output P100 pickups HATE the Soul Food overdrive pedal. The first few chords sound OK but then it degrades. If I stomped on the BOSS DS-1 it got even worse. So I texted the Rocker that the ES 135 sounded like a girl in his high school class that sang in church quite often. Oh, he got that reference immediately and returned the Gibson SG.
I plugged the SG a couple nights ago and tried it with the Soul Food pedal. Sweet mercy, it sounded like it was 1973 and I was a British guitar god. Albeit a guitar god that could only play cowboy chords. But hey, it still felt godlike.
My hands are hurting from various abuse: assembling a piece of furniture, setting up Christmas trees, and a couple very long drives. But they will recover in another couple days. And then I’ll be locked in for the winter. We plan no long trips over the coming months, there’s no more assembly in my plans, and if it snows, I can recover from gripping the handles of the snowblower within a day. So my winter is going to feature a lot of guitar playing.
Quarantine should work well for us this winter. Carjo has a couple projects and some reading that SHOULD keep her busy. We have a big slate of holiday movies and baking shows to watch. I am going to bear down once again on the guitar work, I have a metric ton of books to read, and my writing is going down strange and compelling paths. I’m kind of excited to be a hermit.
Today it is sunny and in the 40s. This will not last. All indications from the local meteorologists are that we may be in for both heavy precipitation and below normal temperatures. This is a La Nina winter and with the polar vortex screwed up by climate change, we’re going to be sitting ducks.
2020 has been a real bitch but that’s not a surprise. I had a classmate who had a major stroke and then caught COVID in the hospital. He died yesterday. I know of others in my community that have died as well. We went through a hellscape of an election season and a sixty game baseball season did not sustain us. My beloved bride is an anxious person who is prone to panic shopping. We are sitting on three large packages of Costco bath tissue. Don’t tell anyone.
But the end of 2020 has me feeling a little optimistic. The teeny peeny orange Jello Mussolini is staggering off the national stage, bellowing lies as he fades into irrelevance. Vaccines are coming. We can handle a terrible winter because we’ve lived through them before. And between guitars, books, movies, and love we can make it through to the spring of 2021.
jeroljohnson 