Hokum

It’s past 4 a.m. I can’t sleep. I feel almost like I did when I was 7 and it was Christmas Eve.

The moon is beautiful and almost full. I can see it from the window of my home office. When it reaches its full phase in a few days, I’ll be somewhere off the coast of Cuba, listening to dozens of my favorite musicians. Back soon.

My first memory of the Super Bowl is III, when the Jets beat the Colts in the Joe Namath “I guarantee it” game. I saw every Super Bowl between that one and XXV, when Scott Norwood missed that field goal. I didn’t see that game for complicated (albeit memorable) reasons — except for the last bit when he clanked what should have been the game-winner:

That was the last Super Bowl I missed — until now. Cayamo is going to mess with my Super Bowl viewing, although it’s hard to get excited about a Super Bowl featuring a team the Redskins beat twice and another team they almost beat. But again, just like 1991, it’ll probably be worth catching a snippet here and there.

Previously: A new guitar | Hokum home

I bought my last guitar in 1989. I’d sold my good guitar about six months before that — I had bills to pay and cash was short — but I needed something I could plink on from time to time.

Back then, I bought a used Yamaha dreadnought on the cheap. I knew it would sound good and would take a beating, and I didn’t need all of that filigreed crap that you saw on more expensive instruments. It did indeed sound good and subsequent unintentional tests did indeed prove it could take a beating. However, it had a neck like a log and action that was far too high for my crappy skills. In addition, because of its size, I felt more like I was playing around the guitar than actually playing guitar.

And thus, over time, I became less and less interested in playing the instrument. I’d occasionally pull it out and jam a bit with buddies, but that faded over time and I became a once-every-quarter guitarist. My skills, which were always poor, turned to rust. Meanwhile, my proficiency on the harp kept going up and I got regular work as a harmonica player. I’d found my instrument.

But the guitar called me from time to time. There’s no way around it: You play a song with a guitar, but you just play along to a song with a harp. There are times when you just want to play a tune and that’s when you need a guitar.

So last year, on a whim, I bought a Washburn Rover travel guitar. The neck wasn’t like a log; the action wasn’t so high that I kept burying my fret hand in the spaces between the strings; and I almost immediately enjoyed playing the guitar again.

I’ve gotten somewhat better since then, although I’ll make no major progress until/unless I get a lot more disciplined and probably take lessons. The Rover will get another workout when it heads with me to Cayamo in a little more than a week now, but it sounds more like a banjo than a guitar in many ways — an inevitability, given the size of the body. It’s basically good for exactly what it’s designed to do: Act as a guitar substitute for those times when you can’t haul around a bulky instrument.

But I wanted a decent ‘real’ guitar, and thus, the search began for a new box. I wanted something that sounded like a real guitar, although I was willing to give up the dreadnought’s bottom end in exchange for a smaller size, and I wanted something with lower action (which can hurt tone but vastly improves ease of play). Finally, it had to be relatively cheap for a quality guitar.

Eventually, I decided to acquire a parlor guitar — a once-common guitar size that faded in popularity over the years as big loud acoustics rose on the sales charts. But the parlors have come back in recent times as modern amplification made the size of the guitar a lot less important — and because the parlors are easier to play.

The Takamine New Yorker

I narrowed the search to a Seagull Coastline Grand and an Epiphone EL-00. The Epiphone gives you about 70 percent of the quality of a Gibson Blues King at 10 percent of the price, while pretty much any guitar with ‘Seagull’ in its title has a reputation for build quality and tone while not killing your pocketbook.

I ruled out the Washburn and Recording King parlor guitars as being a bit too precious (and expensive), and tossed out the Takamine New Yorker — an extremely well-reviewed guitar by one of the very best guitar brands — as being too pricey, given my skill set.

But I’ve also been doing a little eBay trolling. Some music stores are dumping post-Christmas stock that didn’t move, and sure enough, I found a music store in Indiana that was getting rid of the Takamine for about $200 less than you typically see it in other music stores. In addition, they were tossing in a (presumably crappy) gig bag.

So today I pulled the trigger on my first guitar purchase in 23 years. I think it’s beautiful. We’ll see if it can inspire me to a state of non-crappiness on the instrument. I like to think it’s never too late.

Previously: Another trip around the sun | Hokum home

So Birthday No. 52 came and went yesterday, meaning I can no longer sort of pretend I’m not 50 yet. My wife reminded me that I am technically in my 53rd year on this planet, and I offered the kind of response that such a comment deserves, but there’s no getting around it — at this time next year I might start to think about what it will be like to be (shudder) sixty.

I had license to do pretty much what I wanted, as everyone should have on his birthday — but I chose to simply go out for a little lunch, then watch football all day and kick back a few Boddingtons (there’s something odd about watching NFL games while drinking the Cream of Manchester — a brew associated with a completely different brand of football — but I like it). As birthdays go, it was just fine.

Previously: You wouldn’t understand | Hokum home

I watched the ‘Justified‘ season opener tonight. I’m not from the holler but I am from small-to-middlin’-town Missouri, right on the cusp of the Ozarks. There was a scene tonight where a criminal asked a marshal for a little favor, a few months after the marshal had been granted a little favor from the criminal. The marshal declined tonight’s request. A full-on brawl ensued. It ended in a way that both of them might have intended. I understood.

I’ve got these good friends. They’re twin brothers and they put my wife and me together. They knew I was too uptight and they knew she would extract my cork. They also knew she needed someone just like me.

The twins like to make this joke: A friend will help you move, but a good friend will help you move a body. I’ve known them for 21 years. They’re joking, I think. Either way, I understand.

Previously: New Hampshire, 1992 | Hokum home