SGFE--Getting Started and Experimenting

Word. It has been a while since I talked to you.

I’ve been playing a lot more steel guitar. By now, since you may have started reading this blog because you are learning steel guitar, you may be wondering how to get started. That would really be funny, because anyone who was looking for such information here would probably have given up long ago. But here is some advice for starters.

I would buy a simple instrument to get started if I were you. I bought mine on Amazon for a mere $79, including shipping. It’s a Rogue EA-9. It has six strings and it’s a lovely deep metallic blue. But you will need a slide and fingerpicks too, the kind that you put onto your fingers. Metal ones are best—a steel guitar is an electrified instrument which depends on amplification and definite plucking. I have a plastic thumb pick, metal on my index and middle fingers, which do most of the plucking; and for some songs I have to put a plastic one on my ring finger.

You must have a slide, though you could use your fingernails instead of the finger (and thumb) picks, but again it’s back to the noise you need to produce and whether you could stand having long fingernails.

You’ll also need a small amplifier—a 12”x12” one can be had for as little as $20.

More on the would-be-subject of this book later.

The train is really full today. I can’t even get to my backpack in order to check my notes abt what to write. I gave the address of this blog only for the second time—I’m so nervous abt what would happen if Chas or Vie seen it.

The other day I wrote some things in ink on toilet paper then flushed it. Those things had to do with what I needed prayer for: relationships and my bizarre obsessive compulsive disorder impulses. I suppose my anxiety is flaring up due to my being away from Ricky. That is the one thing in my life that cannot be easily amended. The other day—I talk to r on Mondays and Fridays—he said to me, “I’m tired of being by myself, Daddy.” That’s his way of saying he misses me. That hurt. I regularly wonder if I should just change my December return ticket to Poland to tomorrow and just get on a plane.

Being away from r is like OCD. Throughout my day, I regularly remember that I’m not with my son. It is a continually alarming thought, which asks for action but doesn't specify one. Anxiety is that way because if you have a compulsion, say, to mentally keep your heart rate up in order to ensure that it don’t slow down ‘n’ stop, you regularly catch yourself as “not working on it” and panic abt it.

I can’t give my blog address out because there is swearing (most of my friends and family are Christians) and personal names are mentioned. So no one might ever read this. Also, too, I feel like I rely on gimmickry instead of just good writing. I did the same kind o’ writin’ on one cover letter I submitted for a post as a “creative” teacher. Hell, in this job market, no one is going to read your resume seriously unless it stands out from the din:

Subj.: Job-winning cover letter?
Please consider my smoking/ resume as a radical, some times goofy English teacher. I have had to prepare all my own lit. materials and go balls to the wall in teaching (no, I would never talk like that in class.). I often die in class and demand nothing less of my students. I done ( I listen to too much country music—but don’t teach THAT kind of English) gobs of ESL teaching. In proper ESL teaching the teacher must make the students the star of the show: the teacher don’t (Co. music) have the answers—the students do. The jump from teaching ESL grammar to native-speaker grammar is easily achieved. Thanks for reading this. May I direct your eyes below?

I didn’t get that job. Screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke. May I direct your eyes above?