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estebanana -> RE: *trigger warning* Guitar Making content rosette category (Nov. 19 2025 11:31:40)
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Sorry for not following up soon. I caught a cold and was too tired to work.
I had to stay in my guitar shop last night, which is separate from our house to isolate myself from an elderly family member to make sure I didn’t have influenza. I went to the hospital today and they told me I didn’t. So tonight I’ll go home.
Such a shame to have to spend the night here watching Poirot and eating the dinner they sent over to me in a thermal lined case. It was almost as if I were a single guy living in a cool apt ordering take out. I’ll be back soon 🔜 lol
I’m a Poirot fan, but for some reason I had never seen several of the episodes from the first season! Egads man, an oversight. The acting isn’t always the best but Suchet is such a pompous little mustard jar I get a kick out of it. Agatha Christie isn’t popular anymore, I suppose, but I enjoy it as a diversion. The Kenneth Branagh production of Death on the Nile is one of my favorites and of course the classic Murder on the Orient Express is rewatchable every few years. These are single guy things I watch when I’m sequestered to bed or simply loafing on a Saturday afternoon.
I’ve seen great many of the important ‘intellectual’ films you’re supposed to see, but lately I’ve not been interested as much as I am in mysteries. I also picked up an old paperback of Vol.1 Collected Stories of Somerset Maugham and chugged right into the first story ‘Rain’. Much of this stuff I read in the late 1980’s, but I’m going to read them again because I’ve forgotten them enough for them to feel newish. It’s a ‘bus man’s’ luxury I live, indulging myself in absolutely outdated short stories written by a British colonial dandy. I feel like the decadent main character in ‘A rebours‘, Jean des Esseintes, who ensconces himself in a lavish estate full of pleasures that he uses to manufacture the effect of traveling, but without leaving the house.
The funny thing is, both Poirot and Maugham are in my view, against the grain of their times. They go at culture from an oblique angle, neither giving it the okay passively nor totally condemning it. But definitely in criticism of the unfairness of it all. Should I read the latest novels in English that are underpinned with cadences and moral principles of our contemporary struggles for civil rights and social development? Or see if the same lessons are universally embedded in the writing of the past, even by authors who were privileged to wander through the British empire by rail, ship and later aircraft? I get the news on the internet with all its graphic twenty four hours of continuous exhausting plot twists, am I supposed to keep up with the literature that processes that into books for ‘informed citizen liberals’ to read and use as conversational materials at ‘hangs’ and dinner parties?
I’m too lazy for that is the short answer, and the reality is that my social life happens in a language I can barely speak! I’m content to be the kooky uncle aged guy who can turn a phrase in Japanese that gets a genuine giggle from the people the table. It’s a waste of time to try to hold a conversation about the nuance and complexity of geopolitics in Japanese. Not that I don’t study everyday, but it’s a big order. I feel colonial, really, in a not bad way. I’m not a tourist, I’m weirdly stuck between being an American and a something else. I’m sitting in an outpost in an underdeveloped region that’s eventually going to become trendy. And when they come, I’ll probably melt into the next aisle at the grocery store and leave them puzzled by the containers which confused me for five years over which katakana labeled package is tomato paste and which is chopped whole tomatoes. I won’t rush over like a do gooder missionary who tries to initiate the newcomer into feeling comforted that there are other white people in the area. I’ll just stoop, throw my hoodie over my head and saunter through the store with my hands held behind my back like an old Japanese man. I can act it. I’m as slick as Mifune.
I’m pleased with myself really because I’ve become the ‘pochie dog’ of my town. They refer to me as ‘our shokunin’ which means our ‘special craftsman’. The tables are reversed, I’m the token, and while it’s occasionally irritating, it’s mostly satisfying. As an American I always sensed we don’t value art, craft, music enough in our national identity. In Japan it’s still a thing to be celebrated, to be either crazy enough or committed enough to do a craft with full commitment. In America in my twenties I often heard people say pobrecito in a condescending way when I told them I was going to be an artist or some kind. They feel pity for you because you don’t worship the superstar sundisk of money. The American Aten, the honorable race to riches. Once I told an architect I wanted to be an architect. He said no you don’t, you should be an artist. He went in to explain that as an architect he had to ( based in Washington DC) create buildings that fit with a program of rigid city scape standards and it’s not an art. He told me in his basement he had a metal lathe and a welding shop in which he built custom motorcycle frames, and that the architecture career paid it. He treated it like being a sculptor.
That conversation was of course longer and touched on many kinds of architectural conquests, but he judged my character as too outside the box to use a cliche’, to be happy as an architect. I took him seriously because he was right.
That was a refreshing mini vacation, don’t tell anyone I enjoyed being a little sick. The runny nose and headache a small fee to pay for a modicum of me time.
Rain.
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