rice and beans

now playing: joni mitchell, "let the wind carry me"



mondays sure do have a way of bringing you crashing back down to reality.


it's JFK day, by the way....41 years ago in dallas.

i was a total conspiracy theory freak when i was a kid...it was around the time of the 1979 re-opening of the case. i was all over that stuff, man.


what a geek.



had a great weekend, for the most part - spent yesterday at the philadelphia guitar show with my crew - keith amos, lil' ragu, dylan and wendy, and a fella named jerry who remembered me from singing with me at a private party i played at when jayda and dylan were babies.

slightly freaky, yes.


it was a great show, though...took pictures of luther perkins' 1956 tweed bassman amp...of dylan staring longingly at a replica of stevie ray vaughn's often-duplicated "number one" stratocaster, and of him standing beside a 1951 original fender precision bass. i came close to buying an imported f-style mandolin that sounded pretty amazing (if you can hear an instrument over the din of the inside of one of these shows, it has plenty of volume, believe me), and ended up passing it back and forth between myself and a fella named jeff roeckle, who played guitar next to me in the first band i was in after i moved to pennsylvania...the last time i saw him was at charlie degenharts' cd release party at the colonial theatre back in 2000. and that was the first time i'd seen him in at least six or seven years. i also bumped into bob stirner from living earth and steve wheelock...i didn't, however, bump into allen james, who i saw there last year.

amazing guitars everywhere...wendy ended up picking up a purple, heart-shaped daisy rock bass which was precisely her size - she fell in love with it. dylan went apeshit over the SRV guitar, too...but i happen to know someone who can build those, so i didn't feel too compelled to buy the one we saw.

let's see, what else? rich robinson's 1970's gretsch white falcon was there, and for sale...a dead-on replica of clarence white's famous tattered b-bender telecaster was there (and was manned by the guy who built it, who was no slouch as a player - ragu and i had to keep pushing our jaws back into place), and quite a few old strats, les pauls, and telecasters....and more paul reed smiths than i ever hope to see again.

i was looking all over for the '61 SG reissue that i've been looking for - the duane allman slide guitar. i saw a couple there, but i didn't see the one. i may end up buying one of the dillions and having keith "relic" it for me when it gets here. i'm keeping an eye on a set of seymour duncan antiquity pickups on eBay for it. i exchanged emails with my dillion source today, and he says they'll be in in january.

which is perfect, because it'll be post-christmas, and money shouldn't be the factor that it will before then.

and once i get that one, i'm going to collect all the dillions in one spot and take a picture of them, send them to john dillion and buck for an endorsement deal.

seriously.


well, maybe seriously.


anyway....


discussions have begun anew with regard to dylan moving in with me - he's continuing to have issues at school, and still seems to be far more comfortable with taking liberties with the truth than i'd prefer that he be...and until today, there was no way to verify that what he said he had for homework was, in fact, what he had. he's supposed to be writing his assignments in his "agenda book", but he can choose to write (or not to write) whatever he wants in this book, without anyone having checked it...

...until today.

from now on, his teachers have agreed to initial his agenda book on days when he has no homework. so now, if there's no initials in his book, then he has homework - whether he wrote it down or not.

so now it just remains to be seen whether or not he'll actually comply with this, and stay on top of things. he's got big plans academically for "after he moves in with me", in his words. there's a performing arts school that he has his eye on, but i can't see my way clear to doing anything to make that happen if he's not going to pull his weight and keep his grades up.

it's obvious that i need to make more of an effort to stay on top of him about his grades. as one of his teachers pointed out, he does quite well in the things he's interested in - it's the things that he doesn't feel compelled to stay on top of that suffer.


so i'm not doing nano this year (god knows how i'd make time for it this month...not that this month is that much different from other months, in a lot of ways), but i went on a tear looking for something i thought i wrote in my journal a while back, and what i thought i wrote here turned out to be a passage in the book i worked on last year...and reading back over it, i decided that - well, i decided it kinda sucked. but i did feel, based on what i saw, that i should probably give some thought to starting over on it sometime...i doubt it'll be this year yet, but when i'm in a reflective enough mood, i do want to dive back into that.

it's actually something of a shame that i don't have time to dive into it now...what with me being in a plenty reflective mood these days...


one more thing, then i gotta bolt...


jayda called me last week to ask what time i was coming home - that particular night, there were a number of problems that i was trying to get through - which were compounded at the last minute by a phone outage right after we lost power. she said that there wasn't anything to eat at her mom's that she wanted and wanted to eat at my house...i told her that if she could get her (unemployed and agendaless) mom to drop her off, she was welcome to eat at my house if she wanted.

when i finally got home, there were two settings on the table - one for her and one for me. she'd come over and cooked for us both. she made rice and beans, tostones, and chicken, and waited for me to get home before she ate.

parents of 14 year olds aren't often on the receiving end of such thoughtful gestures, to be certain.



being a parent isn't easy, by any stretch - but it has its rewards.