The Sensation of my Sinuses

Sick days are remarkably rejuvinatize for the soul. Yesterday I read an entire novel, discovered several new bands, uncovered the secret to a few of life's mysteries, and still had time to play my guitar. I'm trying to learn some hillbilly fingerpicking styles. They are hard. It requires your fingers to perform two very different functions at the same time. With your thumb you must stroke the bass notes that make up the rhythm portion of the song, and with your remaining fingers you must play the melody, which often requires careful syncopation. Explained this way it sounds easy enough, but the mind stumbles and repeatedly trips on one or the other, sometimes both. What's puzzling about it, to me, is that I don't understand why it's different than playing rhythm chords while singing a melody. In that case, your mind must separate out the rhythm and the melody and simultaneously synchronize it to produce the song. I guess what's different with fingerpicking is that the mind can direct two different functions to two different parts of the body - the vocal chords and fingers - but it is not so good at having the same body part perform two different motions at the same time.

Practice. Practice will get me there. The thing that's strange about practice is that it's just repetition. It turns Einstein's old advice on its head: you keep performing the exact same steps that led you to failure, over and over again, expecting to, at some point, achieve a different outcome. Until eventually, you do. It is madness. There is a kind of absurdity to it that almost borders on religious fervor. Without hope, or faith - that your efforts will be rewarded, that you will eventually produce the desired outcome - practice seems as silly as prayer. When we practice we are counting the beads of an invisible rosary clenched tightly in the desperate fist of our imagination. Practice is a prayer to the god of self transcendence.

Today is the Profuser's birthday. I think he told me he is 420 years old. There will be a party in the park. And tonight is The Jesus and Mary Chain. And tomorrow is a music festival in Sonoma. I wish I weren't sick. All of these would be much more enjoyable. Perhaps I can learn how to embrace the sensation of my sinuses and relish in the lightness of my hot air balloon head. I might enjoy that sweet, swelling, vacuous expansion of my nasal passage, the oozing mucus membrane, the sandpaper scratch of my cat tongue throat, that pleasant pressure pressing the inside of my head against the bend of my skull. I'm getting wet just thinking about it, really. Well, my nose is, I mean. I just need to find a nostril-sized cock and all will be well.

I wonder if the Profuser would let me borrow his, to use as a sort of Q-Tip; a snot pocket for his little red rocket.