For all sane people in this country the morning after the election was heartbreaking and horrifying. I remember thinking that my week couldn’t get any worse.
I was wrong. The very next day at work, as I was trimming a small, odd-shaped piece of wood, I very nearly took the end off the middle finger of my left hand with a chop saw.
You may have reflexively winced at that—especially if you are a guitar player like me—or probably a better one. Can’t blame you. It was nasty. The eighth of an inch wide gash went half way around the final pad of my finger, about three quarters of an inch down from my fingertip, just missing the bone. I didn’t take pictures, and I’ll spare you further gruesome description. Suffice it to say in the moments immediately afterward I had to wonder if I had cut short my clumsy adventure in guitar playing then and there. I was relieved when I saw that my fingertip was still attached, but not wildly so. My finger was a mangled mess—and maybe permanently crippled.
Perhaps one or two of you have read some of my previous, irregular diaries about returning to guitar playing after not playing for thirty-some years. The first one (which is partly a ghost story) is here, and they cover such topics as fake nails for picking, a $20 guitar and amp combo my wife found at a yard sale, and infidelity to my beloved old guitar. One topic I keep returning to like a dog to a favorite pee-spot is my OCD-tinged discipline: in the nearly six years I’ve been relearning the guitar I have missed exactly one night of practice: the night the year before last I nearly croaked myself by not recognizing what was a serious case of analeptic shock after eating shrimp—I’ve been eating them sixty-some years, and had eaten them just a few days before the event. Not 100% sure yet, but I’m pretty convinced it was actually the sulfites the shrimp had been treated with that nearly got me.
I didn’t go to the doctor for that, and I didn’t hit the old ER for my mangled finger. I bandaged it up the best I could and, being me, tried to practice guitar that very evening.
It didn’t go particularly well. I’d hold my damaged finger—bundled up like a newborn taken to a hockey game, and now bigger around than my thumb—up and out of the way, trying to play chords that didn’t use that finger. But every time I spaced out and went for a D, or A minor or . . . Yeeeeow!
I gave up after a few short bouts, mostly because I kept having to mop blood off the strings and fingerboard.
Still, I was back practicing the next night and every night after, concentrating more on picking patterns than doing anything fancy with my left hand. Four days after my accident I’d perfected my bandaging to the point I could use that finger on some chords that didn’t involve the pad, though the stuff wrapped around my bad finger tended to mute the strings on either side. The wound was just low enough that my fingertip and the callus on it were undamaged. Ten days out I finally managed to curl that bandage-constrained finger enough to play a clumsy D chord. Hot damn! My finger would still bend! I really hadn’t been sure it would.
The finger is healed now, though there is a groove-scar around my finger that looks like I might just have an extra joint there. There is some residual damage. It’s prone to that weird numb/over-sensitive stuff that lingers in my left thumb—the one that had a run-in with a table-saw blade a few years back.
By early December I was mostly back to whatever passes for normal, practicing nightly by playing on and off from nine to a bit over midnight. And that leads to my conundrum.
My main guitar is an electro-acoustic Taylor I got a couple years ago—an interesting story. I have a small Fender electric guitar amp that I almost never use because I’ve have gotten weirder about making too much noise while playing, and I hate being tethered by a cable. But here’s the thing: I’ve reached a point where I really want to try looping, setting up a set of chord changes, and then playing with, under, and above them. Playing duets, even trios.
To do that means playing more with an amp, a notion I resist, and dealing with cables and a stomp box for the looper. If I do that it stops being just me and my guitar, slouched with the most horrible posture possible in my big old recliner and only sitting up straight to play when I have to.
But still . . .
Here’s where my accident comes into play: I just came painfully close to a forced retirement, and I turn 72 in a couple weeks. It’s kind of now or never to learn what else I might be able to do with a guitar. By the way, a Sweetwater gift card I was given a while back would cover the cost, so it’s only partly about the money.
So, any thoughts from any players out there in Kos land? Any loopers out there? Anti-loopers? Froot Loopers with opinions?
