My Guitar

For some reason I feel, right at this moment, like writing about my guitar. Not about Charlie, not about the excellent long weekend I just spent at Calvin’s place back in Hawkes Bay drinking wine and swimming in the sun, not about anything I have been doing since I last blogged, but about my guitar. I don’t know why this is. At the moment I am halfway through a semi-biography about Silvia Plath (a poet who I don’t like, but the biography is halfway interesting) because soon I have to write an essay about it. Who knows why I have this sudden urge to write about my guitar, perhaps it is because of some difficulties one of my friends, lets call her Lilith, is going through, but an idea of my guitar keeps on popping into my head.
Anyway. The guitar I am writing about is not my old and faithful, beat up compainia semi accustic “Tuesday” which I play on in my band “the Crazy”. No, it is my electric, red bodied, heavy as hell guitar “Tomi” with the floating bridge that makes it a bastard and a half to tune. It is no longer in mint condition: the action on the fret board is a little high nearer the bridge and I haven’t played it for the longest time for it has been at my friends house, the one I am in the band with, for that is where my amp is, and my effects pedal is, and it is damn stupid to have an electric guitar hanging around with none of the equipment to make it sing. I suppose I am thinking about it because I am to be forming a new band, while continuing with “The Crazy” with two other friends, one who is Calvin, the reluctant drummer, called “My Spine.” As the name of this band suggests, it will have a different agenda than “The Crazy”. Really, our band names tend to be pretty transparent.
However, thinking about my electric guitar “Tomi” presents problems. Tomi was a half present (meaning someone paid for half of it) from my ex-girlfriend Satomi (this was the reason for the name of the guitar. And I still hold the right to name anyone who leaves my life with their true name). So you can see why Tomi might be a problematic subject for me. Satomi was a major part of my life for many years, and although not exactly a raw wound now, it is still a disquieting topic.
I guess it all comes down to photographs.
I only own one photograph. It is of me. I am wearing a sheet and a paper crown and holding a home-made sceptre in celebration of “Winter-een-mas” (the week long celebration of all things to do with video games that just happens to be this week). That’s all I have. Except perhaps, back home in Waipuk where I have a group photograph of my troupe at Outward Bound. As ardent readers of my blog will know, photographs have a very profound effect on me. They can jog memories just like this journal can and help this threadbare and holy mass that I call my brain feel slightly more whole and normal. Why the hell don’t I take more photographs? Of things other than myself? It distresses me that I can barely recall what Satomi looks like now (I used to have a photo of her eating a carrot but I threw it away) but I can call with perfect precision what my guitar looks like even though I haven’t seen that in months. Do this make me a bad man? I hope not.
Anyway, it’s now a quarter past midnight. I should really be reading this damn book. Or sleeping.

I have dark rings under my eyes. My candle was a ball, so I couldn’t burn it at both ends, but it certainly ain’t spherical now.