Happy Covid!

It's been roughly a year since I bothered with this blog, so I guess I'm retiring from it. Probably.

It used to be quite the refuge for me, a place to verbally process what was going on in my life. And visually, photographically, I guess, process it that way too.

Haven't done much with photography lately. Broke my leg, lost my job, learned things. Was driving Uber for about a month until the Corona Cooties took that. I enjoyed it, too small a sample size to see if it was really my next job, I think I spent nearly every penny I earned on gas and car repairs. I still have an active account, but when they closed the bars on St. Patrick's Day I got the hint. Plus I have roughly five underlying conditions that would make Covid-19 a mistake.

Been locked down for the most part since St. Patrick's, other than an ill advised trip to Wisconsin immediately after they closed the bars. I figured since I wouldn't be doing Uber, might as well go swap guitars with this guy. And drove straight into a zombie apocalypse with no Twinkies. I still drive a friend's kid to work on the weekends as a favor, the grandparents would be doing it otherwise and as compromised as I might be, I'm not in my 80s. I'm lucky enough to still have my similarly aged parents, so it seems a thing I can do a couple times a week.

Car broke down 500 miles from home, the harmonic balancer? Sounds like a musical instrument type thing but it's a $1000+ repair, and I think that Wisconsin shop did everything they could to not make it worse, the estimate had been $1300.

Anyway, my freelance graphic design work hasn't been super lucrative either, my anchor tenant is a quarterly magazine that promotes live local music. And there, uh, isn't any. So they're skipping an issue, understandably. The nature of that publication, it's a loaves and fishes miracle sometimes that they continue to publish even when they have advertisers. Not just for my own pocketbook, I hope it is just one issue and not the end of the road for that institution.

So I've been playing a lot of guitar. I'd hung my shingle out to teach lessons again after the turn of events with my day job, but a slow start on that front got slower when the Covid thing hit. I'd be open to teaching via Skype, but especially with beginner students, it's hard to substitute face to face, when you see their hand position or the way they're picking, there's a lot to a new player that's not obvious.

I've had other periods in my adult life when I've played a lot. This is the first time I've had my callouses flake and peel. I think maybe at 50 I have the focus to practice almost as much as I let people think I practiced in high school. I remember one day, and only one, where I managed eight hours of practice. I won't claim it was all focused, productive practice, I was aiming for a target on the clock as much as anything. I'd been putting off the summer job search at the time, and I remember my Mom saying something to the effect of, "You can't just sit here and play guitar for eight hours a day and pretend that's a job."

And I remember thinking, Why the hell not?

So I guess that's kinda now. Except I think the longest session I've managed was 6-1/2 hours, and my fingertips were sore and the callouses peeling, but I think in roughly a month I've more or less doubled my repertoire of things I can cover. And by cover, I mean be the lead guitarist in a middle-aged cover band. The problem with middle-aged cover bands like Velvet Pillow (on hiatus, and I'm not a fan of the name but Mike, the drummer, insists), is a problem of supply and demand. There's literally only supply, even when the bars were still open, not a single stool was occupied by someone hoping a bunch of geezers would come in and defile the memory of Pink Floyd, Journey, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath tunes.

Other than some depression I can attribute pretty directly to the isolation itself, I'm having fun. Like I said earlier, Uber might not have been remunerative enough, but I was enjoying it enough to keep trying and see if I could figure out the times/places to make it pay enough to support my guitar playing and eating every day habits. I could get a CDL, some trucking companies even provide the training for free, and the truck driving schools are as cheap as trade schools get. I see CDL jobs advertised even now with better pay than my last day job in a so-called union shop. But I don't think the driving was what I liked about Uber. Sure, my kids are grown, I can go over the road, and that's where entry level CDL jobs seem to be, but the thing I dug about Uber driving was the social aspects of it. I actually liked shuttling drunks home from bars, I liked taking out of town travelers to and from dinner, work functions, etc. I liked driving the guy from LA who was bitterly disappointed in Kansas City strip clubs on a Thursday night (sorry, brah, this ain't LA), as well as the dancer from a similar establishment the last night I went online with Uber. She was going home early because the Covid scare had cut the traffic to where she didn't think she'd make any money staying. I can dig it, driving Uber doesn't, I'm sure, offer nearly the opportunities to hear hateful things from customers, but Uber drivers and the dancers in those clubs both wake up every day without a paycheck and have to go scrounge one up.