Battle hymn.

Today. Today...
Today is the day of dragging out leads. Of dialling dials and spending sweat- inducing hours tweaking tweaks. Today is the day of FX sends and returns. It is the day of 18 feet cables. Today is the day of Epiphone SG and Les Paul knock-offs and Rickenbacker 381s and 620s, the day of the Warmoth and the Strat.
Today is the day of 12 strings and six; nylon and steel.
Today is a time filled with tubes and solid states.
Distortions, modulations, compressions, delays and reverberations will fill this day.
Today is the day of the whammy bar.
Today I will fail and I will succeed because I've no idea what I'm doing.
I've done it all before at least a million times, with bloodied and broken fingertips, and still I have absolutely no clue on how to fight.
But I am armed and I am armoured.
Let this war begin again.

When I was old.

This formidable moment.

She smiles apologetically from across the counter and says, "Sorry. We've only got a 4:30 slot left."
I tell her with a mask of serenity that it's okay. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow. But inside, a thing sinister and indescribable is screaming, "You're a fucking barber, not a cardiologist!"
It's alright though. I caught a midday movie up at the local cinema. Something about loving. A play on the protagonists' surname, the affliction they're beset by and the forces arrayed against them (which of course, are anything BUT loving).
I came out to a sky filled with dark clouds that threaten to break the hearts and bank balances of many. But to me, the coming storm appears now a friendly and welcoming deluge against the too-perfect heat and dazzle of early afternoon light.
So I drive around nearby neighbourhoods not recognising whole sections of streets and highways as the music of South Western Townships plays at a respectable volume.
I do not recognise this tax agent or that pastel billboard for a struggling bijou shop. I do not recognise close-cropped lawn after close-cropped lawn and the houses blurred behind them.
Sitting in the shopping centre, now. Even the yelps and angry cries of happy children, which normally tears something out of me, sounds like a pleasant melody as I monster down a burrito with crinkle cut chips, washed down with an orange soft drink - all of which has as much relationship to Mexico as Karl Marx has to Groucho.
Still on the movie and I think - as I have done many, many times - that the only thing more stupid and contemptible than love, is willfully making an effort to prevent love from blossoming.

Soweto

My only award.

The only award I've ever received in my long and often painfully ordinary existence. 1977 Pinball Champion of Top Ryde from the old Ryde Youth Center.  Oh, to be a fourteen year old street urchin again.
Years later a couple of mates and I still had a raging debate about which machine I'd actually won on. I maintained it was the old Ace High machine while the other guys swore it was the Kiss machine. I won twenty dollars cash in hand and Nick Ravenscroft, John Woods, and the Dwyer boys - Jesus, all the heavies from the four corners of Greater Ryde - bought a slab of beer and we went down to the Ryde primary school grounds and got hammered that night after the contest. Those guys were notorious for loving a good punch up and I feared they were just going to beat the shit out of me and bury the body somewhere under one of the school buildings because I'd whipped their arses on the only thing I was good at.
Oddly enough I'd only gone down there that night to watch Baa Baa Black Sheep on a colour telly because my Ma wouldn't end up getting one until maybe late 1978. Somehow I got roped into the contest because someone dropped out. Maybe in fear of their lives.

Look back in anger.

Wisdom.

Another golden mouldy Facebook status update from a couple of years ago.

I get hung up on words. I keep coming back to meditations upon wisdom. I meet people of late and unwittingly I think to myself, "Gosh, you're wise." It's not a word much used any more. Archaic and vague with a hint of stifled chuckle behind the hand. But I like wisdom. I miss it, if ever I've encountered it. I like the longevity - the way forward - it implies, in spite of a tacit and hazardous status quo that never really exists or existed. I like the historical neatness of it. I like the wry Aristotelian staunchness in the subtext of that one word and the stuffiness and immutability of its measure. I may yet use it in something, that word. A song, a scribble or scrawl, a blog rant. Who knows, I may become a late bloomer graffiti artist and use it as my tag.
But until then, I'll simply go on mulling it over and over.
Because this is what the unwise do.

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https://www.facebook.com/malcolm.connell.58

Mind