Sunday morning’s
song practice was the first one in years when for the whole session I had to
tune my guitar with harmonics. I suppose it’s good practice for me but it’s way
too time consuming. Also, without a tuner it’s hard for me to know how to set
the tone of the low E string, which I use to tune the A string and so on. It
would be another four days before I could afford to buy a battery.
In the early afternoon, Nick Cushing
dropped in from Hamilton with two copies of the video he shot of my performance
on June 3rd. He gave me a smaller version as well just in case I
want to spend less time uploading it to YouTube.
He sat down at the kitchen table
with me and we each had a glass of the flat but cold beer that was left over
from the Heineken keg I’d opened.
He said he’s shot videos of over a
hundred bands over the years and he’s sick of it. He told me though that he
likes to shoot creative performances and I assumed that he thought that mine
met that criterion.
He declared as well that the thrill has gone out of his relationship
with driving, which is something that he used to enjoy very much.
After Nick left I took a siesta and when I got up I got ready to take a
bike ride. I stopped to use the washroom at the Court Jester. On my way to
Woodbine an SUV with Pennsylvania plates just stopped on the hill, holding me
and several others up. As I was going around him, a woman doing the same with
her SUV shouted out that he was, “A fucking moron!”
I continued to explore the area just north and east of St Clair and
O’Connor. Between St Clair and Tiago and Selwyn and Squires there is an oddly
shaped neighbourhood that seems to have been designed for isolation from the
rest. It’s almost spooky too because the houses are all fairly new little homes
but they are made to look like older houses that one might find in some small
Ontario towns. Riding around there is like being in an artificial time warp. It
turns out though that they are actually old houses but just proudly and very
well maintained. The neighbourhood is called Sunshine Valley and the houses
were built for returning soldiers from World War II. The community is very
worried about new developments that are out of character with the old houses
and so they are pushing hard for city hall to declare Sunshine Valley as a
heritage conservation district.
That night I had another flat beer with my dinner and watched an episode
of Maverick in which a murderer turned out to be a man in drag. For some reason
his punishment is to be set free without a horse and still wearing a dress.
Just before bedtime I looked for online guitar tuners. There are several
that just give the tones of the notes of the guitar strings but I can always do
that with harmonics. I found a chromatic tuner that wanted me to download an
email editor so I passed. Finally I found Tunerr.com, which seemed to work
fine, so I book marked it to use the next day.
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