Inspiration comes from the damnedest places

I had started a big posting about how all of a sudden I can play stuff I couldn't 2 weeks ago - Knocking on Heaven's door, some Bob Marley (without butchering him), and make all this stuff sound good.  Then I made a discovery.  A shocking one.

I've had this vision in my head of wanting to go out on my fire escape, with an electric guitar, and play something...  haunting.  And beautiful  Something like, oh, I dunno - While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Then I saw this:



Now, I have a lot of opinions of popular music today.  Strong ones.  And while I would have said for years that a band made up entirely of felt puppets was packed with WAY more awesome-per-cubic-millimeter than a dozen Hanna Montana's, or Britteny Spears'...  To actually see this as part of my inspiration is a little shocking.  Especially since lots of my inspiration comes from Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, to see that much of the rest of my inspiration comes from these guys (below, courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com) is a little bit of a jolt.

Another thing that happened was that I finally re-strung my acoustic.  And I made a merry mess of it.  It's a passable job, for the most part, with the exception of the low-E string.  That one, I won't be surprised if it comes loose & tries to take my eye out.  It was the first one I tried, and, well, I got it on...  but barely.  It's only wound about 1 1/2 times around the tuner - apparently you want it to go around the tuning peg at least twice.  It's a crappy job, but it will do...  Hopefully.

So, aside from this weirdo revelation, and re-stringing the guitar, things are going quite well.  I had the afore-mentioned revelation that I can play a lot more songs than I thought I could - I just needed to give them a try.

That said, it's not like I'm some kind of virtuoso or anything - I just found a few songs I can do now that I couldn't a couple of weeks ago.

Oh - and back to acoustic - and back to mutating fingers.  The strings on the acoustic are much harder to push around, and are already hurting my fingers again.  Give it a week and they will look all scalie and gross again.  Also, I'm finding that it's an interesting switch from acoustic to electric & back - I believe I have a wider neck in the acoustic, so, now that I'm all used to using the electric, I'm missing strings trying to hit some of my chords.  But the transition isn't that bad, other than the horror show my fingers are soon to become.