Damn Yankee, George S Geisinger [my reading book txt] 📗

clearly both geniuses, and Beethoven was another absolute master to behold. His symphonies where some of the greatest musicianship I've ever witnessed, along with some of his piano work. Not to mention J S Bach and the young Mozart.
There were times when I was partying, back when I was young and stupid, that I'd hear a certain, disciplined sound, and at those times I knew I had a gift that I was squandering. I felt so guilty about letting my music slide the way I did for so long. I dove head-long into all kinds of substances, trying to bury my musicianship and my ailing memory in drugs, but I'd listen to other guys' music at parties, and couldn't escape understanding the language. I'd end up playing guitar in the middle of the night in the basement, keeping my aunt awake when she had to go to work the next day, when I felt compelled to labor at my own sound, and nothing else mattered, not even the hour of night.
I've been over at my buddy's apt here at the Brighton Dam Apartments a couple of times now, and we listen to his DVD of Stevie Ray's concerts, and the experience is just so awesome it demands expression here. I never could play that way, like Heart or Lover-boy or Joan Jet, all those guys. I could never make that sound, although it speaks to me so directly, so acutely. I hardly ever had the discipline to rehearse frequently enough to do that kind of accuracy on my own instrument with what I'm doing, musically, with a guitar in my hands, but that ole Stevie Ray Vaughn spoke the language fluently with his electric guitar. I do understand what he was saying.
He was a spokesman, a messenger. He understood what to say and how to say it to the world.
My sister was never into Hendrix, Alvin Lee, Dwayne Almond, guys who played the funk/blues guitar and mouth harp, but she never tripped, either. I did. I'm still tripping. I'm still into acid rock. Are you into that old sound? I don't even know if we ever even talked about all this, my friend? Do you understand what I'm saying? It's something of a mastery of an instrument and a style, of a conquering of a voice all it's own, that a mastery speaks to my in-bred, trained musicianship, in the flickering flame within the winds of time, inside of me, that was almost extinguished in my heart, after all the troubles I've been thru in my traumatic life, until I got my new Ibanez a little while ago, and have been trying to play again, sometimes.
I don't just take to a guitar like a duck to water anymore. It's something I have to struggle with, something I'm using all of my efforts to get myself to want to play it again, to want to work at my own sound again. It's all still there, and surfaces in my memory now and then, but most of it is still asleep my memory. My scores are not completely gathered together again, which means I have the responsibility to do some more creativity in the future, along with playing more regularly, whenever I can grow into doing it. It's not happening easily.
Some old guitarist I showed my scores to a while back kind of put down my style, and it kind of clipped my wings there for quite a while. He didn't like my parallelism. In fact, a lot o people have put down what I do and who I am, but that's them, and I'm writing like this here, to do some of the healing my heart needs to go thru, before I can fully feel the spirit of my own sound again, and naturally gravitate to my new instrument, regardless of the discomfort of my hip when I play. I'm trying to redevelop my ailing instinct.
It's a whole new awareness of the responsibility I've been entrusted with, to make my own sound, like so many other musicians have done. I'm talking about the art that was entrusted to my soul by my Maker, that almost got destroyed in all the things I went thru over my so unfortunately overwhelming lifetime. I'm trying very hard to resurrect that personal sound, that personal language that all responsible musicians speak with their instruments. I have a sound all my own, and it is coming back to me, slowly, but oh, so slowly. I'm struggling to overcome my underlying disenchantment.
I've tried a thousand times to have another love affair with guitar, like I had earlier in life, and I'm having a lot of trouble tearing down all the elaborate the walls that keep me away from playing on a daily basis. My sprained hand has almost fully recovered after these four years since I fell that time, and I'm all but a stone's throw away from playing as well as ever, but I'm having difficulty being comfortable when I sit and play. My hip replacement bothers me, before I've been playing very long, and my memory of my songs lets me down a lot of times, too. I just get so deflated, when I can't remember the way something goes.
I'll be playing, and the bubble gets popped, and all I can do is put the instrument down and limp away from the rehearsal session, to take refuge in a more comfortable seat, and do something else entirely. I doubt I'll ever get the funding to record, but maybe I'll end up with a recording contract with a producer again, some day, like the funk/rock folks have done. I almost had a recording contract once. Maybe it'll happen again.
Those guys've got their sound, and I've got mine, and I ain't dead yet. I owe it to God to make my own sound come alive again, to flesh it out some more, so it doesn't just flicker and go out, like it nearly did after I sprained my hand, when I nearly gave up on my talent.
I haven't sung a note in 30 yrs.
When I lost my instrument and my will to play, it was a very low time in my life. I was extremely depressed and troubled, because I wasn't being true to my gift. All this writing is just another attempt at healing my broken heart. I can't tell you how broken my heart has become through the years.
I'm working at my perspectives and my attitudes, and fitting in a few jam sessions now and then, and there is always the Brighton Dam lobby beckoning to have me sit and offer my sound to the other residents' here, whenever I get the amp. I have my own ready-made audience.
My quest for inspiration has a lot of pit-falls and troubles to work thru, and I'm awake late at night, wanting to write about playing, instead of wanting to do the playing itself. Ah's me... I'll find a way to get around all these walls I've but up between myself and my playing. Somehow, I'm certain I'm going to be able to pull this whole thing together, if my Maker will just help me with it. It's not easy, but what is there in life that's worth doing that really is all that easy?
I was supposed to be the next teacher of music, the successor of the old man, when I went away to his Alma Mater, but the more I got into it, the more I did not want to pursue it. It went against my grain. I was an active alcoholic, and became an active drug addict, telling on myself to department heads, and the like, undermining my success every which way I turned. A lot of it was done without intent, too. I was subconsciously undermining my success, because I was headed in the wrong direction. I had no business trying to become a teacher. I was an abused child. Those things don't mix.
Then there came the acute toxic psychosis and the schizophrenia, with obsessive delusions that almost lasted forever, and there went my musicianship for a lot of years, and my relationship with my music mentor went right down the tubes. I still had the talent, but I didn't have the healthier thoughts I'd had when I was younger, to go along with it.
I boxed myself in with thoughts that are too vulgar to write down, too repulsive to claim as my own, though thousands of people have listen to me talk about all that, over the phone of all things, as well as face to face, and my mentor was affronted every which way I turned on him. I lost my comfort with the idea of sharing anything with the man, musical or otherwise.
It wasn't rational, but it was real.
I ended up rejecting him altogether.
I was trying to live his dream when I went to his school, and I couldn't do it. He was a nice guy and excellent musician, he taught me a lot about music, but I could not fill his shoes, because that's not who I am. I think it was presumptuous of him to expect me to follow in his footsteps in the first place.
I ended up being creative, developing my own voice, writing my own guitar music, and some piano music, too. It was my own sound and my own language, and that man never did understand half of what I tried to do. He said so in so many words.
He started blaming himself for my alcoholism, at the onset of my lifetime of disaster, and ended up drinking himself to death, destroying himself, believing he'd destroyed me, while I went on with developing a sober, creative life. I couldn't save him. It was hard enough to get help from God to save myself, with all the company of Heaven behind me.

Chapter 4

There were all kinds of things I wanted to leave behind in Pennsylvania, when we left the North behind, but some things, like my musical talent, could not be escaped from, as I've already recounted.
I eventually learned that I could not escape the abuses of my youth by simply blocking them out of my memory with substances. That tactic got me addicted to drugs and alcohol, considering the effects those things always had on my memory. Even so, I could not escape the truth of what had happened to me in PA, and eventually got to the point where I had to face my own memories, or die altogether. But I was well into adulthood before I had to face all that.
When we first arrived in Maryland, there was a family decision to be made about where we'd go to church, and I set my mind on staying away from my aunt's church, because her singing voice drove me nuts. She was a terrible warbler, and thought so much of her singing herself, she used to sing solos in that church of hers all the time, sing in the choral society, and all that, and I didn't want to hear it. She was Presbyterian, and we'd been raised Methodist, so I camouflaged the issue by just insisting that I was a Methodist and wanted to go to the Methodist Church, and that was that.
I achieved a majority vote in the family on the issue with that statement, and my aunt continued to go alone to her church, while my siblings, my mom and I all went to the Methodist