There is no telling how long I can claim to live a normal live when it hurts so bad to wipe my ass I have to take a shower to clean up. I'm becoming like the James Whitmore careactor in the movie, The Shankshaw Redemption. "Just another old man with bad hands."
A while back I wrote that playing my djembe drum had stopped my hands and wrists from hurting, and that lasted a pretty good while. Then, one night while i was undressing for bed the arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome struck again, and no amount of playing my drum has helped. The ibuprofen does help some. I am managing to get through playing the major and minor scales on my digital piano each day and type my blog entry, but it's the muscles now that hurt terribly, and I suspect it's just gonna get worse. The muscle pain may not be arthritis.
I wrote about my life here in my journal. I don't like whining, but on the other hand, it is what takes up a lot of my day. There may be one positive aspect of taking all this ibuprofen. Some research project appeared to show that men who took a regimen of ibuprofen seem to have less of a problem with Alzheimer's and other dementia problems. This way, instead of getting senile and forgetting that I experience a lotta pain, I can remember every iota of it. Yippee?
#015 PopShuffle 1
Dennis is a guy I've spent a considerable amount of time talking to during breakfast at the cafe. He's had crippling rheumatoid arthritis for around twenty years now. Some days it's painful to watch him arrive at the cafe, struggle to get out of his car, and come inside. I guess I've gotten a preview of how things are gonna go if I continue to live. I've supposed that if the pain got too bad I'd just kill myself and get it over with, but Dennis is much, much worse off than the piddling variety of arthritis I appear to suffer from, and he hasn't done the deed yet.
I'm participating on the Thomas list again. I don't know exactly why. There are not many writers now. I suspect some of the old members will return as the gasoline prices force more people to stay at home to save money. I am staying at home to save money too, but I've been staying home more and more anyway. I'm lucky to go to the cafe to eat once a week now.
I've never had many visitors to come to my house. Its not something I encourage. My friend Ben has been my most frequent visitor, but he went to Kentucky to work on a house he thinks he's gonna move to. I'll be shocked if that happens. He's an Aquarian though, and eccentricity is the keyword that applies to his unpredictable behavior.
What I really like about having this drum machine available is that it's just the percussion sounds over and over, ad infinitum. This PopShuffle beat is one of my favorites. A big part of it is played on the cymbals. I don't guess I've really considered the cymbal patterns much ere now. But, just sitting here writing and having the drum beat playing continuously in the background allows me to focus on them to hear exactly what the cymbals contribute to the whole deal.
If I pick out a part of the drum beat and play it on my djembe drum, then I can listen more specifically to the other parts the drum beat is composed of. Since it's computerized and plays exactly the same stuff the zeros and ones indicate, then the drum beat is perfectly predictable. Not many things in life are. Shit happens. Things change.
I seem to concentrate more on how the scales of the major keys fit with their relative minor chords to help me memorize them mo' bettah. I started noticing how this works while playing the Bb Major scale. In the past when I've piddled around on whatever piano was available to me, I always played in C Major, because it only uses the white keys. Even now, if I swivel my chair around and play some little ditty to amuse myself, it's most likely be played in C Major.
I'm trying to change that a little. I deliberately play the ditty in Bb major. Recently, I've been playing My Old Kentucky Home in Bb Major with my left hand. I attempt to use the same fingers I play the major scale of Bb with to sound out My Old Kentucky Home one note at a time,
It fascinates me to finger the notes this way. It's not easy for me, and seems counter-intuitive. At least for now, but that's the whole point of doing it. I intend to practice playing that song I memorized as a child in Bb until it becomes intuitive. I have very simple ambitions for teaching myself to play the piano. I'm coming to accept that I don't really know what my ambitions are in this regard.
A little something here, a little something there. If I seem satisfied to explore the feeling I get from playing My Old Kentucky Home in Bb with my left hand one note at the time, for the next ten years in a row, if I want to, then it ain't nobody's business but my own. Nobody knows.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
