The other piece of calamitous news that had me on pause for a while there was our basement flooding. There was a freak storm on June 24th, lasted about 90 minutes and only affected a very narrow band of the west side of town. Having no backup power supply for the sump pump, when the storm knocked the power out, we were defenseless. I got home at about 4:00, and the water was all over the basement, with depths between two and four inches. I lost one guitar — it might have been salvageable, but I never liked it that much anyway, and it already had severe neck problems. It wasn’t too painful to let it go. The bass and the electric got a tad wet at the bottom, but they came out undamaged.
We got power back that night, and we wet-vac’d and squeegee’d and sump-pumped it basically dry. But then the next couple days I worked light days, spending most of my time mopping the basement and putting it all back together. In case this kind of thing ever happens again, I have the guitars up on cinder blocks, and I’ve tried to elevate just about everything down there at least a few inches. To be honest, it was kind of cleansing.
But wait! It gets worse! All the junk we dumped into the utility sink from the wet vac caused it to back up. I had to take some pipes apart to get at the problem, and when I went to put it all back together, the shit was so old and corroded that it didn’t fit any more. This was Saturday morning. My way-home-improvement-savvy father-in-law steered me through the process of replacing all that rusty crap with PVC. This pretty much took all weekend, with five — count ‘em, FIVE — trips to the local Ace. It was just like “Dennehy” — back in the damn Buick, etc. Only it’s a VW, natch. But anyway…
My practice space and my practice time were all compromised, but I’m back in the swing of things now. For the last three or four days, I’ve been getting back into the electric guitar after two or three months of re-discovering the acoustic. If I’m going to play any proper gigs, I prefer the novelty — and the volume control — of plugging in, so I’d best get “tight” on that. The problem is I always forget how hard it is to go from acoustic to electric. You’d think the opposite is true — like playing acoustic guitar is like swinging a bat with metal donuts on it, right? The electric would seem easier after that, yes?
In terms of sheer finger toughness, this is true. But the electric guitar…is a gentle mistress. (!!!) What I mean is that a few days ago I picked up the electric and started wailing away, and it sounded terrible. I tried to soften my attack, but honestly, all that acoustic strumming had conditioned me. I couldn’t get out of it. I soldiered on, but for the next couple of days I was convinced I was out of tune, and it just sounded bad to me. Only today did I think I might finally have the delicate touch back. And I love it.
Of course, if I do exactly NO acoustic work for a few weeks, I’ll probably find it tough going when I pick THAT thing up. Got to do both all the time, then. Woe is me. But then the better I get, the more often my self-mandated practice balloons from a gloomy half hour to a joyous hour or more. In my newly dry and cozy basement. Yep!
