Brain Fertilizer

So my laptop is not working, and that immediately wipes out about 4/5ths of my entertainment and "me-time" mood recovery activities: Jagged Alliance 2, Writing, Music (listening), and Music (composing/transcribing). That's contributed mightily to the general bad mood and crankiness that I hope I've prevented from affecting my posting too much...

I'm working on trying to get it fixed, but I've received no word yet.

That leaves me with my guitar.

An old Army buddy hooked me up with Jon Kammerer, an innovative guitar maker out of Keokuk, Iowa. He built me a Deployment Guitar, designing it to not collect or show dust and to be resistant to humidity/temperature changes. It is a sweet-sounding and -playing guitar, easily the finest guitar I've ever played. It's so fun to play I play longer and more often (which was the original idea behind Aim toothpaste, as I recall), which has had an immediate impact on my guitar skills.

I've been trying for years to learn how to play jazz guitar. It just hasn't sunk in. However, I stumbled across a book of jazz progressions that I brought with me, and am working on memorizing them. I run through approximately the same 60 progressions every few days, and am slowly getting the chord shapes established into muscle memory. I think (and am hoping) that my chord vocabulary should be good enough that by the time I return home I will be able to play through a number of standards. We'll see. But if so, then I will work on learning a dozen to a score of standards before I attempt the next huge leap of substitutions.

In return for lending me the guitar, I'm trying to help Jon out by letting people play on and fall in love with the guitar to raise interest in buying one for themselves. It's a great situation: a bunch of young, single guys getting hazardous duty pay and tax-free base pay who miss playing their guitar getting to try out a sweet electric guitar that sounds awesome and is cheaper than they would expect. So far I've only brought it out 4 times, and had 2 people decide to buy one, and a 3rd strongly considering it...

If anyone out there is interested at all, you can go to Jon's Site and look around. If your interest is piqued enough that you'd like to buy, contact me first, because I might be able to wrangle an extra 10% off for you...