Anthologies of Awesome

1.      Sometimes I love thick and lovely harmonic feedback.

Sometimes I love the glissando and hollow banded sound of a dobro.

Most Americana has some real high lonesome to it. It’s hard to describe what exactly that term means. I believe it bears familial resemblance to Celtic melodies. There’s a lot of non-rationalized semi tonalities and glided notes. The sound is hard to duplicate, but it’s so much a part of the American sonic pallete that most people, even those ignorant of technical music trivia, can note its absence.

2.      I wonder sometimes about music as a cultural language. Most popularly central Asian music follows a sort of 24 note semitonic scale. Southwest Asian music has a similar set.

Most American music falls into a mostly straight rational pentatonic scale with easily recognizable complications of the 9th. The 9th has no rational basis in scale. It isn’t even part of any seventh chords within the matrix of progressions Westerners recognize as music.

Maybe that’s why they call it high lonesome.

I have an old Global electric that belonged to my grandpa. He came from Texas with salt, pepper, and a rifle. He homesteaded thousand of acres around Lewis and Yellowjacket.

There was a time I went down to their old place with my Strat and a scandalous red motorcycle. My Grandpa picked up the Strat and pulled a couple notes out of it with busted up hands. He told me he used to have a Harley Davidson and a steel guitar. Played it with a slide.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about death, at least metaphorical possibilities of death.

3.     The Viking smiths used to beat on iron they mined from beat and heated to chase out the evil spirits that burned as embers on the future steel.

There are no evil iron spirits, but there are impurities that have to be beaten out of metal if you work it in less than a liquid state. They were wrong about the spirits, but the model was a working one.

And I wonder how much the ideas of a world after this one are true. I’m writing a story about a man who lost his wife to cancer. It is, of course, mostly about geology.

I remember a profound sadness watching my former wife try and try again to die.

My girlfriend has been hanging out lately with her old high school friends.

She isn’t much younger than me, but in her senior year, I was already on my second tour. That tour was part of Operation Enduring Freedom and the bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

I tell her, sometimes, about my dreams.