The Obvious

            I like listening to Alan Watts. I’m thankful somebody had the foresight to record his lectures. He speaks the genuine. There is limited snake oil to his discourse. I’ll check myself against him from time to time. He says things that I feel, but have difficulty communicating. Comedians do the same thing. They say things that I do or think about. It makes me laugh when someone else presents it to me during a performance. Much of genius is merely stating the obvious, or recognizing the obvious. The obvious is often difficult to ascertain. That’s way it’s genius when it’s discovered. There’s smart and  there’s genius and the difference is obvious. 

Piano Chops

            I was in the studio yesterday. The Liberace part didn’t go as planned. I made a couple of attempts but my piano chops weren’t up to snuff. I was all over the place. There is no substitute for practice. I knew I was licked, so I passed the baton. 

            “Hey Tim, do you want to try play something?” I asked.

            Tim’s the Producer and Engineer. He gave me the who me look, and then shyly sat down at the piano. I assumed the role of engineer. I pressed record and Tim immediately fell into the song. He was hitting all the right chords. It was amazing. I listened to the song last night, and the piano is almost there. We still need to fix some parts here and there, but I think between my bad chops and his good ones we'll find a part. 

Liberace Part

            I need to come up with a piano part for Things Have Gone and Changed. I dug out my keyboard from storage, but of course it doesn’t work anymore. It’s been years since I last used it.

            I found myself at Saint Vincent DePaul’s yesterday. They have a bunch of old pianos for sale. I was timidly and without drawing to much attention to myself trying to work out a part. I’d put some time in and then walk around and look at shirts and shoes only to go back to the piano to work on the part. I can hear the part in my head, but I wasn’t able to transfer it to the piano under the circumstances. It’s a mild Liberace part in E minor.

            I came back to my studio and found a website called pianochord.com. I opened up the chords that I needed and played them against the song on my computer on the fly. I’d press the play chord button on the website in real time against the song. I still don’t have the Liberace part, but I have the rest of it figured pretty well. 

Poor and Generous

I went to the Dodger game with Jessie Sweet last night. Jessie had four tickets that his dog-walking boss gave to him at the last minute. He couldn’t find anybody else to go with, so it was just he and I. I did the driving. We drove over in my convertible. I paid for parking. We sold the other two tickets. We sold one of the tickets to an older gentleman named Dick. Dick was very nice and knowledgeable about the game. The seats were great. Twenty rows back from the first base dugout. The night was perfect, but the Dodgers lost. Jessie bought me a beer. After the game Jessie bought us burritos with the money we made from selling the tickets. Jessie Sweet is generous. Poor and generous, there’s nothing better than poor and generous. 

Cowboy Kenn

            I played two gigs this weekend, one at the cowboy bar, and one at the steady in Venice. The Venice gig started off ominously. The keyboard player went to turn on his rig, and nothing happened. There was some kind of digital confusion. There were strange looking lights, but that’s it.  We tried to bang on it to get it going, the usual stuff, but it was not cooperating.

            The keyboard player went out to the parking lot to make some phone calls, when Tree Man happened to walk in. We explained the situation to him. He left. The players in the band weren’t overly concerned about not having a keyboard player. "It could be a mixed blessing," somebody said. 

            Then out of nowhere, as if it were a dream, a confusing dream that could be interpreted in the positive or the negative, the keyboard player walked in with a keyboard stripped around his shoulder. 

            “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

            “I was standing in the parking lot when a guy with a cowboy hat walked by with it. I said hey, can I rent your keyboard?”

            “How much?”

            “Twenty-five dollars!”

            “You got it.”

            Only in Venice. And that’s how the keyboard player got his keyboard. A couple minutes later, Tree Man walked in. He had a keyboard under his arm. 

Zipper Man

            I saw Bill the smog guru. He told me all about his experience in the hospital. He was there for twenty-five days. It hardly seemed pleasant. At one point he talked to a Chaplin. He thought it was over for him. He asked the Chaplin for an evocation of some sort.

            The doctors had no idea what was wrong with him until he vomited blood. Oh, so that’s where the blood we’ve been giving you is going? They put him under the knife and butter-flied him. They patched him up after cutting three feet of bad intestine and working on his stomach. He has a zipper now. He said it took him a few days to figure out that you had to ask for pain medication. He said it was posted on a sign and written in fine print. He named off the medication that he’s on, none of which I remember. One makes him drowsy, and one thins his blood.  I don’t know if the medication is a good thing, but at least he’s still alive.  

The Snake Won

            Yesterday was rot with plumbing problems. The mainline was backed up and it wasn’t pretty. A plumber showed up, but he didn’t have any luck unclogging it. He was quick to assume that the pipes were filled with roots and that they needed to be replaced. He said it would be expensive to fix unless I did the digging to save money. He was a problem solver and I appreciated that. The plumber had another call. He took off, but he said he’d come back later in the day. He gave me the plan of attack, which I quickly forgot.

            I started digging, but after an hour of digging, I realized that I didn’t want to be the digger, so I stopped and hashed out an idea that made more sense to me. I figured before we went crazy replacing pipes we should try once more to snake the pipes from a different access point. That’s what we did and after numerous attempts at snaking the pipes, the snake won.